Dear Internet,
I wished the other day for a burger cooked in pork fat, Friday I got my wish. Work husband #3 and I have a monthly standing lunch date which was happening that week and he suggested we meet at Reserve. The menu was a message from the gods since a large number of the plates were Lisa-friendly AND then there were the aforementioned burgers and fries cooked in pork fat; I was starry eyed on my walk down to the restaurant.
The burger and two helping of fries and lots of good conversation later, I felt full. Uncomfortably full. To work off some of the deliciousness, work husband #3 suggested we walk over to Vault of Midnight, the GR arm of the famous Ann Arbor comic book store, to check out the latest comics. After that, we grabbed coffees at Madcap before heading back to our separate work destinations.
Protip: Making an audible comment in an artisanal coffee shop that pour over coffee is nothing more than fancy drip, earns you dirty looks in said coffee shop.
But they do make a damn fine mocha.
A good Friday was had, but I could not shake the feeling of over fullness – which isn’t surprising given I had not had any meat or animal products the entire week. The uncomfortable feeling turned into queasiness and didn’t go away. There is no dinner for me Friday night and no breakfast on Saturday.
TheHusband and I went to a birthday party Saturday night, which was held at a local bar that served food. After barely eating since lunch on Friday, my eyes were as big as dinner plates and I ordered too much heavy food on a stomach that was already not feeling awesome. This was going to become a potential pattern of solid plant diet during the week and meat lovers delight on the weekends. The lesson learned is even when being mindful when eating something you’ve been depriving your body for a while, the sensitiveness of your stomach will kick into overdrive.
[And no, I am not going to go vegan. The momentary sensitivity after eating a tasty, delicious bacon burger is totally worth the price of admission.]
It was a quiet social weekend but a busy domestic one. TheHusband and I decided to turn our solarium, which I tried to capture as my writing office, into a meditative space for him (and for me), which meant spending quality time at a local garden shop figuring out plants. He wants to go back to one of the very original ideas we had upon our move in by turning the room into a meditative space with mainly plants of various flavors and sizes to create the desired tranquil environment. I do currently use the room for my own yoga and meditative practices, so when TheHusband suggested we turn it into a global meditative space, I couldn’t really object. We’re attempting to utilize as much of the space we have as possible, but we know at some point with the next few years, this house as lovely as it is, is going up for sale.
This summer after putting the writing space together, and a few haphazard attempts at using it, I then spent the rest of the summer at the cabin. School started in August, time was unprioritized but not entirely unfruitful, but I still wasn’t using the room as I had intended. And right now I’m splitting my writing time between my proper office and our bedroom since my flat ass doesn’t take kindly to the chair I have in the curated space. Ideally, I’d like to move the writing work outside the house to a co-workspace or something along those lines sometime in the future.
We’re noticing WednesdayThePug has started shedding large amounts of hair and it is not just her summer into winter coat. But instead of regaining replacement hair, she’s going bald in random parts of her body. I noticed it during the summer, but the bald spots didn’t seem get bigger or multiply until recently. Her attitude, food, and bathroom habits haven’t changed, but as she seems to continue to lose more hair at a faster rate than in the summer, I’m going to book her in with the vet this week to check on that and to get her shots up to date. Fingers crossed it could be as simple as age or the effect of her daily 1/2 dose of prednisone is finally catching up with her. She is 13.5 years old, which is bordering on extraordinary for a pug whose median age is 11.
I’m not very confident she’ll make it through the winter due to her existing arthritis, hip dysplasia, and other health issues even though she’s constantly in good spirits, will slit your throat for a pizza crust, and waits every day at the door for me to come home from work. She’s had a few close calls with death in the last few years, of which all she’s rebounded quite majestically from, but she’s torn my heart out enough with her illnesses that I feel as though I have grieved already for her many times over. I’m not attempting to be cruel or cold, but more matter of fact as I also know that once she’s gone, whether naturally or because we had to put her down due to health reasons, I will be an emotional wreck. I’ve had her for 1/3 of my life and she’s been my most constant companion and my best friend during all of that time, even if her farts can clear a room.
Well that forked path was cheery.
It’s quite late now and I’ve made the mistake an hour ago of checking the weather forecast and discovered it is going to snow sometime between now and sunrise. As much as I complain, as much as I hate driving or dealing with it, snow is quite beautiful to watch. From afar. Preferably in a house or other locale. I’m kind of sad I’ll miss tonights flurries, no matter how brief. But I will say I am looking forward to winter break in December where I’ll have nearly a whole month to watch flurries all to my little heart’s content.
x0x0,
Lisa
Category: diary
thank you for reading
Courtesy of The Vatican Secret Archives, Vdh Books
Dear Internet
The other day I was checking my stats and noticed that a lonely/stalking/creepy/admiring soul had decided to go through my entire archive and read every single thing I had written. They went through 500+ pages ranging back to 1995 — and that is just what’s up online. If you go through the archive, you realise there are large swathes of time missing: months in some years, years in some decades.
I was both pleased as punch and alternately creeped out.
Conversation has been happening on Facebook about the steady stream of writing that has been coming from me as of late, and I responded to a friends comment with the following:
It IS true I get more commentary/page views when the shit is deep, but it’s mentally and emotionally exhausting to keep digging that ditch every day. I’m not sitting in a corner thinking deep thoughts all day erry day, and most people aren’t either.
Modern wisdom seems to be to have a singular mission with your site and keep on with that mission. So if you’re on about dairy free cooking, bee keeping, or whatever – that is all you’re going to (mainly) talk about. That’s how most of the big name bloggers tend to operate and it works for them. But frankly, that’s not how I operate and once I gave myself the permission to write about whatever I damn well please, writing has become a helluva lot easier.
Up until I published Live Action Sexual Harassment, EPbaB had a couple of of goals, the main being to aggressively document my mental and physical health, which so far has been fairly successful. Secondly was to document the little things and not so little things that happen in my life. Like many who keep their journals online with an eye to a public view, I also came up with a few different series’ that seem to be appreciated by the public such as my weekly wrap-up of my interests at Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes, The Packing Lists series which always gets a lot of comments and views, and my erratically updated So, You Want To Be A Librarian/Archivist series which remains fairly popular. A few other series include Le Mi Passioni which documents the things that I love and Kalendae Januariae about the small and not so small changes I want to make to my life.
So while I’ve been writing online for a very long time (my 16th anniversary is next year!), I am no where near readership that I once was or could be. I know this is for a lot of reasons: Domain name changes, blog name changes, lost of interest by the readers, I stopped writing for a few years, and probably a few more other reasons to add to this list. In the year since I’ve started becoming more assertive in writing more regularly, my readership grows at small, but steady, clip. I was, and still am, pleased with the content I’m writing. I was, and still am, thrilled when people say they are inspired, touched, or moved by what I write.
None of that has changed and will never change.
But sometimes you feel, as you do, what is the point of all this, really? When I started doing this online writing thing in the late ’90s, it was a novel act that no one would ever imagine in becoming a way of life. Defining a “blog” now tends to come to mean a product or a brand, less about content, even less about writing, and more about selling and page views.
I don’t see myself as a brand. Or a product. But I supposed you could style what I do as any of those things when people email me to thank on the advice for being dairy free, or they found something else useful on my site. The service you could present I am selling is me and my experiences, which is not necessarily a bad thing since those experiences are freely available.
Then Live Action Sexual Harassment happened.
I wrote Live Action Sexual Harassment right after I came home from the pub, in Evernote on my iPad because my laptop was almost dead. I did not care if it was polished, grammatically correct, or even coherent. I had something to say and I needed to get out. Then. Now.
My charging brick had been dead once I got to Monterey a few days before and my laptop was nearly half out of juice when I discovered the dead brick. If I could squeak out five minutes out of the damn battery, maybe even less, to get the entry into WordPress and get it formatted and published, I would have been thrilled. Several of the WP management apps for the iPad are bonkers, and I had already lost some previous work when trying to get previous offerings up. But I had to get it written and if I could not get into my site while in California, I would do it when I came home.
I woke up Wednesday morning, booted up my laptop for the last time that trip, and was able to get the entry in, formatted, and published. I had few spare battery moments to create a few tweets to be pushed out later in the day and also enough time to double check for spelling and grammar errors before the final publishing. Once I was satisfied everything was to my expectations, I closed down my laptop and started getting ready for the day.
The entry posted mid-morning on Wednesday and within hours, my site had already eclipsed its previous record for day page views. By the end of the calendar day, the entry, and my site, would have earned 10x the traffic it would normally would have seen. In addition to the site traffic, the original tweet was RT several dozen times and variations of of that tweet pointing to the work was close to double that number.
Within a couple of hours of posting, and I was on the conference floor, I became known as “the girl who wrote that post.” Strangers I had never met approached me and talked about being brave, raw, and honest. I got emails, tweets, and comments from friends and strangers about similar things happening to them.
Having experiencing some notoriety in the late ’90s for exposing a hacker fraud, a similar chain of events had happened: I was found first, then I wrote something, I went viral, page and reader views skyrocketed, then levelled out for awhile, my life went insane, readership slowed down and then petered out.
To answer my previous question of, “What is this all for, really?” – the answer remains, and will always remain, to express myself in the only way possible. Some days it is going to be fluff, and other days it’s going to be depressing, and some others a combination of both or something entirely different. There is no theme here – unless you count the theme as me. There is no agenda – unless you count self-expression as an agenda. Some days, like today, the content is going to flow. Other days it will be halting and broken. Pitch perfect grammar, flow, and spelling and then broken words, missed commas, and lost trains of thought.
But that is how life works – nothing is always properly formatted, coherent, or sometimes even sustainable. If you are looking for a confessional, conversational tone, and often deeply revealing look into one person’s life, with occasional foray into the silly: I’m your girl.
And thank you for reading.
x0x0,
Lisa
P.S. Someone once asked me how long it takes to write an entry so I thought I’d eyeball the time for this one: From conception (a comment I posted on FB that sparked the post), to finding the image, writing, editing, re-editing, more editing, polishing, and formatting took me under two hours. The chunk of it was consecutive, but the last hour was broken up over several hour gaps while I was doing something. Total word count: 1300. On average, I can write clean 750 words an hour.
This day in Lisa-Universe in:
Don’t Stop Believin’
(I’m on the far left, in orange pants)
Dear Internet,
It is true, apparently, if you give me a few Guinness, I will do just about anything. Including singing karaoke.
Tomorrow (Friday) marks a few milestones this week I’m pretty proud of. The first being this is the eighth day in a row I’ve been successful in getting something on the journal. My unspoken, until now, goal, has been to write something everyday and get it posted, no matter how minute or insignificant I may think it may be. The hardest part has been the balance between raw and fluff, which has been pretty tricky. My point is to write, even if there is nothing of major news to report, to capture moments of my day or week as I can best remember.
The second milestone is TheHusband and I have revamped our eating plan, again, and we’ve made it through the first tough first week. I also realized with the exception of some tiny chicken pieces floating in a steamed rice bowl I had for lunch earlier this week, our diet has been entirely unintentionally vegan.
I have never shat so much as I have this week.
We have local, organic delivery of vegetables every other week, coupled with our regular shopping, means we eat a lot of veg and fruit. But with our current meal plan, the fruit and veg has been amped up significantly. To help alleviate how strict the calorie counting we’re (I’m) doing in the week, the weekends will be slightly more relaxed. Hopefully with meat in the form of burgers cooked in bacon fat.
The struggle with my weight has long been documented across all incarnations of my journal. Yet here, on this incarnation I’ve been not as brave talking about this topic. I’ve got a blog post started, yet still sitting in draft format for nearly a year, on my body plans for the year. But those plans, as we know, changed drastically. The last several weeks has been well documented on how my world has been changing in fairly significant ways and part of that significance is when faced with task or a goal, I’m not shying away from it as I have before in the past.
Over my shrink appointment this week with Dr. P., I recounted everything that had happened from the sexual harassment to dealing with my mother and all the gooey bits in between. He has also noticed something has changed with me, something within. The corner I knew I needed to turn has finally come my way and as long as I can keep the wolves at bay, then all is right with the world.
x0x0,
Lisa
scary house with the wild front yard
(Batty Langley Lodge, Ireland via Janke Kloss on Flickr)
Dear Internet,
Today I taught two classes back to back, which meant I was on my feet for about five hours straight with no breaks. As soon as I could cut out of work, I came home, got ready for the following day. By 5:30PM, I was reclining with my foot propped up with an ice pack on it, hot cocoa on the table, ThePug at my left hip, and my stories on the TV screen. My goals tonight were well, none. My original plans were to finish up prep work for work projects buuut those got canceled when the due dates got pushed or canceled.
Sometimes it’s hard to dial back to learning how to relax, how to disconnect from the world. I was able to catch up on DVR’d shows, catch up on personal email, and just live in the moment.
Because sometimes all you just need is hot cocoa, your dog by your side, and your stories on the TV screen.
x0x0,
Lisa
This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2012, 2008
My Top 3 Future Husbands
Dear Internet,
Things are getting a little deep around here, so it’s time to lighten things up, even just for a moment. If you have ever spent any amount of time in my company, you may be aware that I keep a rotating list of my future husbands, which while they may seem to come and go with the times, is actually pretty steady. But before I go forward on that list, I should pay homage to the man who started it all:
I don’t remember when I first gazed my youthful eyes his way, but I do remember making massive bargains in my youth with my mother to skip the Sunday night church services to watch The Hardy Boys Mysteries. Thank the gods Catholics are obsessed with multiple weekend services or else I would have never met the man of my five-year old dreams. I also remember that same holiday season, I got a 6′ poster of my beloved which was pinned to the back of my bedroom door for years. I was also a heavy collector of his work, and while I have lost my original copy of his seminal album, Shaun Cassidy, I was able to replace it later on.
Runners up: Rick(y) Schroeder and River Phoenix pretty much defined my post Shaun Cassidy teen years.
Before I begin, I need to clarify the difference between a “future husband” and a crush. A crush is someone like Travis Fimmel who plays Ragnar Lothbrook in the History Channel’s Vikings, someone I am partially familiar with and not currently building a shrine in their honor.
A “future husband” is someone whom I probably follow their career to some extent, probably keep tabs on their love life to file away for a later date, and some whom I’d probably would leave my husband for, no questions asked. (Just kidding. Maybe.)
James McAvoy
When Benedict Cumberbatch wants to tap that ass, you know it’s legit.
I first came across McAvoy in a 2004 film, Rory O’Shea Was Here. The film wasn’t distributed in the US, but showed up in my Netflix recommendations sometime around 2005. While I’ve seen McAvoy in his earlier works, THIS would be the film that set the course for my one true love.
What I adore about him is in interviews, he’s goofy. Smart. Witty. In his work, he plays such a wide range and breadth of characters, time periods, and stories that it sometimes takes my breath away. I have yet to see McAvoy as a terrible actor in anything he does. The films may be shit, but McAvoy always gives it his all. I also love that he has no pretensions of himself, he can go from brooding heart throb to psycho maniac in the blink of an eye.
My little Scottish imp also has a thing for the old broads – his wife is the same age as me.
Interesting fact: McAvoy and Benedict Cumberbatch were in Starter for 10 together, which also turned out to be my first exposure to Cumberbatch. Who knew!
Henry Rollins
This one should not be a huge surprise – Henry ticks off all the major boxes for me. He’s wicked smart, he’s complex, he’s got tattoos, and he’s heavily ambitious. Rollins lives the kind of life that I always try to aspire to live: balls to the wall, try anything once, no holds barred, let us go!
I got into Rollins after Black Flag broke up, so I’m not terribly sure where he kind of fell into my lap. I do know that I catch his speaking tours any chance I get, watch his stand up, and check out a book or two of his when I can. Rollins is dangerous not because he’s a bad boy and knows it kind of way, but in the he’s just such the complete package coupled with the damned charm, turning him down for anything would be the biggest mistake of my life.
Alexander Skarsgård
When your own husband tells you he’d leave you for this man, then you know it’s true love.
Like most of America, I got introduced to Skarsgård via True Blood and like most of America, was getting into pissing contests with their BFFs over who was the hottest vamp or shifter we’d not kick out of bed for eating crackers.
(For my birthday, a girlfriend made me a wallpaper for my iPad of this image with “Happy Birthday Lisa” on it. Done and done.)
Ridiculously tall, especially after the shortness of Rollins and McAvoy, Skarsgård just oozes sex even when he’s playing a doofus. In addition to the amazing body that makes my ovaries kick into overtime, he’s got a biting and dirty sense of humour that plays well with my intellectual side. Every interview I caught him in, I think I’ve squealed a million times over because his mouth and mind are so damn filthy. At this point in True Blood, he is the only thing that is keeps me watching. If he gets killed off for the next season, I am done.
Runners up: Richard Armitage, Michael Fassbender, Guy Garvey, Monica Belluci, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cillian Murphy
It’s interesting because when a Benedict Cumberbatch thing happens, or Tom Hiddleston thing happens or someone of that ilk, people send it my way thinking they too are on part of my oeuvre. While these men are fine actors and pleasing to the eye, there is nothing about them that calls to my soul like the above three.
Over the years I’ve kept a similar list rotating in and out of my head, and while some tastes have changed, what hasn’t changed is what I look for in a man. I need the brain and the beauty, having a lovely piece of fluff is not going to do it for me. I also, apparently, get hives around nice men. When I found out Ian Somerhalder, who plays Damone Salvatore on The Vampire Diaries, was the complete opposite of his conniving, manipulating ways on the show, I lost interest.
xoxo,
Lisa
what jail is like
Dear Internet,
As the kids say, I’m full of all sorts of feels today.
In addition to the sexual harassment shenanigans going on, I received an invite from my mother this weekend to dinner at her place for Thanksgiving with the words, “It is time to forgive and forget. Sincerely apologize” scribbled on the card. There is a metric fuck ton on that topic I need to write in regards to our estrangement, but not today.
No, today we’re going to skip talking about my pussy and boobs and my mother issues and talk about my brain.
Tonight I had a fairly final appointment with my medicating shrink, Dr. H. I’ve been Lithium free, bipolar and ADHD drug free actually, for nearly a month and feeling pretty damn good about the whole thing. In a lot of ways, I feel like I moved over the hurdle of the mess that had become my life, sought help and while the drugs did not work, found some kind of manageable world that I can exist in the moment and not think of what could/may/potentially happen in the future.
Being bipolar is a fucked up diagnosis. You’re either vilified as being a fucking lunatic and you’re expected, thanks to the media, to accept the condition they present to the masses or treated as the ultimate muse who can spin spiderwebs of creativity at the drop of a hat.
I’ve stopped watching Homeland because I got tired of them treating Carrie’s bipolar as this alternate superhero trait and presenting that anyone with bipolar can go on a sexy times bender, complete with smooth jazz, which warrants a good reason for her demise. Another particularly interesting insight they like to allude to is at ANY TIME Carrie can go bat shit insane! And poof! She’s carted off to the psych ward and given ECT. Against her will.
(I have made TheHusband promise, no matter how bad it ever gets in the future, he will not allow them to give me ECT. Not in a fucking million years. No.)
Life doesn’t work that way, especially when you’re chemically imbalanced. Not by a long shot. When my mother tried to commit suicide a decade ago, getting her checked in to a psych ward was fucking paper work galore – because isn’t it always? The endless amounts of paperwork when your mother has OD’d on insulin is kind of astounding and makes concrete two things I hope to do in life: Not go to jail or get checked into a psych ward.
(They also had Carrie eating Lithium like its candy and IT WILL REACT THIS VERY SECOND. Lithium takes weeks to get to a medicating level and then you have to take into account the blood work involved and the cannots that could dampen the drugs effectiveness. Lithium, when it works, is a miracle drug if you’re willing to give up alcohol, pain relievers, your sex drive, and are prepared for the amped anxiety and ADHD like symptoms to name a few lovely sideeffects.)
I also get twitchy reading these stories about people who do major things in their life — lose a million pounds, conquered a major disease, overcame their illnesses. We’re only given these tiny snapshots of their insular world in these pieces and golden road after golden road on how much better their life now is! Which is fine, but it’s so hard to relate to someone when they gloss over the details and give up this facade of a mirror under the guise of “I get you.” No, you don’t get me. This is why being crazy is well crazy. Every diagnosis may have a blanket term, but how individually we are under that diagnosis varies as widely as the color spectrum.
TheHusband will tell you living with me while going on and off the drugs, was a goddamned nightmare. What Lisa was he going to end up today? Was I going to put clothes on and go to work or would I call in sick because the thought of getting out of bed was too much to fucking bear? Would I refuse to eat for random reasons or cry for hours because of images of baby elephants triggered that particular spell on that particular day? And I haven’t gotten into the mania yet which transfers, sometimes for me, into excessive shopping and long periods of not sleeping. I’m talking days of going on a few hours of sleep and lots of caffeine.
Sometimes, both at the same time.
Being crazy is ugly. You lose friends who can’t handle the mood swings; you lose jobs, lovers, your sense of self-worth, your dignity, your grace. One minute you’re high on the world and the next, you want to burn it all to the ground and salt the earth. Sometimes the highs last for a really good long period, when the world seems that much sharper, in focus and BOOM! Without warning, it flips and you’re huddled in week old clothing why you can’t bother to get up to shower. You can track my entire adult career in education, jobs, and relationships on where exactly on the spectrum I was for my mania or depression.
Being crazy is lonely. People turn away from you, friends wander off, lovers break up with you, you have no real outlet to say, “This is me. This is who I am. There are going to be some really amazing days and some really awful days, but if you hang on, it’ll be okay.” Because you have, in a sense, said this before at the last break-up, the last phone call, the last email to someone. They’ve heard this story before — just get some help, they will tell you. Get some help, put your world back together. But what if, like in my case, the help that is supposed to set you free actually imprisons you? I cannot physically take the drugs for my disease. I have tried numerous times and each drug cocktail has shaved off days, weeks, months, sometimes years of time that I will never get back from all the lost time of experimentation. Now what? There is no handbook for this sort of thing, how am I supposed to put my world together if my world is so fragile, the smallest of changes can send it shattering into a million pieces?
Being crazy is exhausting. Whether from the drugs or the pure, raw sheer strength of keeping yourself together during the hour, day, or even the minute. The constant on guard of your feelings, emotions to make sure they don’t explode over everyone you meet.
Today I am neither ugly, lonely, or exhausted. Today has been a good day, as was yesterday and as I hope tomorrow is. Being free is knowing I have done everything under my control to keep this disease in check, to as prepared as much as I can for when the next wave hits, and hope that it will all be over soon.
I end this with a quote from one of my favorite philosophers:
There’s no point to any of this. It’s all just a… a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. So I take pleasure in the details. You know… a Quarter-Pounder with cheese, those are good, the sky about ten minutes before it starts to rain, the moment where your laughter become a cackle… and I, I sit back and I smoke my Camel Straights and I ride my own melt. Troy Dyer
x0x0,
Lisa
This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2011
MRY: The Packing List
Dear Internet,
I hopscotched my way from Monterey back to Grand Rapids more smoothly than a baby’s bottom, which surprised and delighted me as my past experiences with United have been awful. They have totally picked up their customer service, planning, and execution of getting people on their way which now puts them back in the front for airlines when I go looking for flights.
After TheHusband picked me up late Thursday afternoon, we had an early dinner and then went right home. Not long after I had unpacked and gotten settled from the trip, I slept for nearly 14 hour straight with no breaks even to pee. I was that fucking tired. Some of the people I met at IL were coming down with various and sundry colds and sniffles, so I’m hoping I shook enough of that nastiness out while sleeping, drinking Vitamin C to help (and also helps with potential cases of scurvy), and congratulating myself for having the foresight to take the day after I came home off from work.
For this trip, I was smart enough to grab pictures of my bags once I got to the hotel, before unpacking, and what the bomb explosion looked like after I had unzipped. Exhibits below:
Tom Bihn bag:
|
(Not seen.) Rickshaw bag:
|
And I’m sure after all is said and done, I’m missing a few items.
There is a couple of key things when packing minimally: Roll everything, bring items that can be worn multiple times, pack as many solid toiletries as possible, and bring as much neutrals as you can stomach.
I was in Monterey for 6 days/5 nights, but ended up with enough clothes for over a week AND I had at least two clean outfits left when I came home. There were a couple of things I didn’t think about when I packed, such as while wearing my dress boots to Monterey, there may be a chance I didn’t want to wear them coming home, which ate into my luggage space. Packing a leather jacket, a jean jacket, a hoodie, and several cardigans seems like overkill, and also eats space, which could be consolidated by getting one neutral jacket that will work for just about all weather types. I also packed more layers with the outwear because not one weather site was consistent with the constant changes of weather happening while I was going to be there.
Could I have done better? Always can do better. The brilliancy of bringing solid shampoos, body lotions, and body soaps opened up ton of space in my quart bag. Plus I wasn’t feeling cheated out of my toiletries. My clothing choices could have been streamlined more by quite a bit and if I didn’t have this burning desire to dress like a Lifesavers roll every day, it would be a lot easier.
But considering a similar trip taken 18 months ago to a similar place with similar weather had me lugging around a 50lb+ checked bag with all of MUST HAVES, this is bloody brilliant.
xoxo,
Lisa
Kalendae Januariae: November Update
Dear Internet,
When I started writing the Kalendae Januariae, I didn’t really have a plan in mind on when to update other than I should do it often. Scarily, I find myself now almost an entire year gone since the first entry; since the first of the month is about renewals, it was seemed like a good time to see how I’m progressing.
Buy Nothing in 2013
In 2012, I placed 114 orders from Amazon. This did not include digital files, or orders placed with other vendors which would push that number even higher. As of November 1, 2013, I’ve placed only 29 orders via Amazon and I’ve hardly bought any t-shirts this year! A dramatic drop in spending compared to the year before and obviously I’m beyond thrilled that I could cut my spending so drastically. Am I reaping any benefits from the lack of shopping? Sadly, no. My income drops dramatically in the summer and I’ve had to pay for work conferences galore. Thus all cash saved from not spending it on me, went right into travel, lodging, and conference fees. It’s frustrating.
I do find myself being more conscientious on making instant spending decisions. The question of, “Do I need another pair of chucks?”, almost always has the answer of, “Probably not.” My biggest problem is, and has been, going out to eat since I do so many work related meetings around lunch or meeting up with friends for drinks after work. So while I’m not spending money on frivolous things galore, I am still spending a lot of money on entertainment and food.
I decided to hook up You Need A Budget (YNAB) and start implementing the practice as soon as possible. TheHusband has said if I want to do any big trips next year, like Europe, I’ll have to come up with half the cash for the trip and he’ll match it. Right now I’ve saved approximately $92.32, which will pay for the cab to the airport. I started on/off on keeping track of what I am spending and I’d like to boost that up again to actually better track how my disposable income is being spent.
2013 will be the year of creativity (even if it kills me)
2013 has been a crazy year, emotionally, mentally, and physically.
But you know what? That’s okay.
I did not get the opportunity to do the projects I had set out to do this year for this task, but I’m not giving up hope. They are still things that interest me and still things that need to be done. Now that I’m off of Lithium again, and my moods have evened out, I’m feeling a lot better to tackle these projects.
Year of the written word
Read all the books/comics I own before buying more For the most part, this has been kept true. My book/comic buying have been reduced dramatically, but my reading for the year is still as haphazard as before. I still do not think finishing a book a week is out of the question, but again, this year has been a crazy year of emotional, mental, and physical ups and downs. While I may not be reading as many books, I AM reading our delivered newspapers and magazines regularly, so there is some comfort in that.
In January, I said I wanted to
- Write 10 hours a week (Does not include blogging)
- Write 250 word blog entries 5x a week (Get proficient enough to knock it out in 1/2 hour).
- Keep notes on everything
- Write a short story a month.
- Write a poem a month.
- Get something published by my birthday in June
While I have not followed these steps exactly, again I don’t think these goals are not unreasonable, I am pretty proud of the output I did this year. According to a word stat counter, since January 1, I:
- Wrote 82, 261 words over
- 108 posts (average 11 posts a month) and 17 pages
This does not include any notes, work done on paper, editing of pre-2013 posts, and so forth. Add another a rather conservative estimate of 25K words for over 100,000 words this year alone and for that, I’m really proud. Sure, I didn’t get a poem or prose published, but that’s also okay. I’ve got a better sense of what I want to do and what I want to write, and I know I can always do better. Produce more. Leave a mark on the world. Keep pushing forward.
Strangely the thing I’m most proud of is I have not skipped a week of Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes. I set a goal to do something every week and I did it. It’s small, but as this is the first time I’ve ever actively worked on something to the end.
teh interwebs
Unsubscribe from unnecessary mailing lists Always ongoing, I’ve been unsubscribing left and right with the intent of getting my mail in order. But, and there is always a but, my mail is still a bloody mess. One thing I have discovered is my filters were part of the problem, so I removed filters from all incoming mail which has worked tremendously. But my mail is still a mess, but a more manageable mess.
Delete unused social media accounts Always ongoing. Like the mailing list conundrum, I’d get a random email from some company I had signed up with years ago to find out they are now active/selling their business/something and I have to go in and scrape my data. Or I discovered I am not actually using the site all that much anymore. In becoming ever vigilant in being able to control my data
Stop following people/services/accounts/blogs that no longer hold my interest/are not engaging The mass culling is constant still. I’ve either moved companies/people/brands to separate feeds or stopped following them altogether. I found, however, that I don’t actually follow or read the separate feeds and you know, I don’t miss it. I’m also being more aggressive in getting stuff out of my RSS feeds by reading them in a more timely basis / cleaning up uninteresting things. I stopped apologizing to myself for unfollowing people who aren’t my cup of tea anymore.
Get the archives back up YES! I have been doing this! Anyone following the Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes knows without fail I’ve been diligent almost every week getting some of the archives up. It’s slow work, a lot slower than I had anticipated, but it is going on.
Stop buying domains No new domains were purchased in 2013. Huzzah!
Stop obsessively checking social media accounts Not as much as a problem as it was earlier in the year, but still a problem. I’m finding myself more and more with having time on my hands, checking FB/Twitter and the like, and then having nothing else to do despite the fact I have over a 100 apps on my phone. Because this is where it becomes problematic is when I’m out and about and not always in the position of carrying a book, magazine, or something
Overall, not a bad start. Next year is going to be even better.
x0x0,
Lisa
Of broken bricks and forgotten combs
Dear Internet,
Despite all the scrupulous packing (and re-packing) and organizing, I discovered upon my arrival in Monterrey I had forgotten a comb. Now granted my hair is short and doesn’t really need a good brushing, but as the gods willed, if you forget something that may not have been that big of deal now it becomes a massive big deal later. Thankfully I was able to make my way to Walgreens before my world collapsed from 3″ strands of hair not being properly sorted out, which could have proved disasterous.
I’m in Monterrey, sitting in a Starbucks around the corner from my hotel on my one day off this week. Tomorrow kicks off the conference in full gear, and I wanted this day to be one of me time and relaxation as I knew as the week wore on, the conference would wear me down. While my energy levels have reappeared since I came off the lithium, I’m more conscious of personal space and needing to escape into my own world for awhile before any major social interactions are going to occur, even more importantly when there are large groups of people I do not know.
I arrived in Monterey after a very full day of traveling, which started at 8AM EDT and ended at 5PM PDT, which mainly included my hopscotching my way around the US. As I was checking in and getting sorted, I ran into one the panelists who will be presenting with me, and his partner, both whom graciously invited me out to dinner. After the hopscotching around various airports, I was delighted to get a chance to get a bit of a stretch around the area before heading to bed. We had dinner on the wharf and I was so determined to have my bit of vodka and Guinness, which I made happen, before anything else occurred. By the time the evening wore down, combined with jet lag, travel lag, and other wordly lags, I was hoping to fall asleep when I got back to the hotel and make it a fairly early night.
But nothing is ever really that easy as the fates again decided I had not sacrificed the correct amount of virgins to satiate them as not only was I not able to fall asleep at a reasonable hour, I was wide eye awake starting at 7AM local time despite the alcohol consumed the night before and coupled with jet lag meant I was running on 5-6 hours of sleep.
I laid in bed most of the morning, pondering what I was going to do for the day while watching terrible reality television that I seem to only care about when I’m not at home. I caught an episode of SECRET PRINCES, which turned out to be the pilot of the second season. Later, I gleefully regaled my breakfast companions the background stories of four unlucky in love royals who came to America, Austin specifically, to find love while undercover from their true identities. The whole show is a bit daft, of course, but there is some kind of glee about these bumbling fish out of water experiences that I can view like Margaret Mead, except all virtual and not with binoculars in the grass.
The rest of the day has been lazy, walking around the downtown core and grabbing coffee to keep the energy going. The weather, and as one must always talk about the weather when travelling, turned for the worse, I ended up back in the hotel earlier than anticipated because sitting in a coffee shop with my back against the drafty window is neither noble or smart and the outcast seemed to huddle on rain for the rest of the day. It was like I had never left home.
I decided to use the rest of my time to work on personal and work projects, only to discover my charging brick for my MacBook Air is dead, which explained why some of my other devices were not charged this morning when I grabbed them on the go. Here I thought the problem was with the room outlets but that is turned out to not be the case. Even with next day shipping, I missed the window to get a new brick to me via Amazon tomorrow as it won’t show up until Tuesday and I’m leaving ungodly early (4:30AM) Thrusday morning fot the airport. Thankfully I brought along my iPad, so the laptop will only get used in extreme emergancies while I mainlined everything else elsewhere.
I had some cause of worry for this trip, not of the conference or the people I was going to see, but the worry of my own behavior the further I get from my last dose of lithium. The same week I was first drug free, I was hit with PMS enough to cripple me and the mood swings enough to remind of all the 100s of reasons I wanted to be on mood stablizing drugs. Once that was over, and my inner world was smooth again, I’m finding myself feeling much more of myself than ever before.
I am desperate to not let this be a manic episode stemming from coming off the drugs, but it’s difficult when I’m only sleeping on 4-6 hours a night, I don’t get catch up sleep when I can sleep in, and I seem to exist on zoom the entire day with very little caffeine. The crash will come, there is almost always the certainy with that, but I’m praying to whatever will listen to not let it be so terrible that it is crippling and more importantly, I can have the forsight to be self-aware of it as it happens. It seems like a lot to ask, but if the drugs are not helping then I need something to guide me through the uncharted spaces to get me back on track again.
x0x0,
Lisa
Indy, Chicago, Chicago, and Chicago: The Packing Lists
Dear Internet,
I’ve been remiss in keeping up with my packing lists for various travels this summer and for that, I apologize. As I’m flying to a conference in California this week, it seemed like a good idea to get you updated on how my minimalist packing project is going. I’m pretty pleased on my accomplishment so far as I can make it work for a weeks worth of clothes solo in the Tom Bihn Aeronaut. The goal is to get it to two weeks.
In April, I went to Indianapolis by car and Chicago by train, both for conferences. In June I was back in Chicago for another conference (travel by train) and earlier this month, TheHusband and I went away for a long weekend to Chicago (also by train). Whether alone or packing for two, my Tom Bihn Aeronaut has been a damned champ! While we had splurged for the extra duty cross body strap, I found that I really liked the backpack straps when I’m flying about stations and terminals. I keep the cross body strap inside the bag just in case.
The one change I did make was swapping out the Tom Bihn Imago with a Rickshaw Medium Zero messenger bag. I needed something slightly bigger and with inside pockets. Luckily for me, Rickshaw had a 50% off flash sale on the Zero so I splurged on getting the coveted bag along with two modular zipper pockets. I was also able to get, at no extra cost, a longer cross body strap (I need something roughly 50″ or longer due to my tallness; most cross body bags run between 42-46″). I love this bag to pieces!
When TheHusband and I went to Chicago a few weeks ago, we were gone for four days/three nights. I packed the Aeronaut for both of us, and I also brought my Rickshaw bag to hold electronics, books, etc as well as a purse for me.
Here’s what I was able to get into the Aeronaut (this does not include what we we were wearing on our person):
- Three pairs of jeans (two for me, one for TheHusband)
- Cardigan (me)
- Two hoodies (one for me, one for TheHusband)
- Four pairs of underwear each
- 2 pairs of socks (me)
- Bra (me)
- One pair of shoes (me)
- Pajama bottoms (me)
- Skirt (me)
- Button down (me)
- Eight t-shirts (roughly half for each)
- Toiletries
When all was said and done, we had enough clothes between the two of us to mix/match for five or six days and with toiletries to boot. Back when I had long hair, the number of actual toiletries to bring was significantly less than what I carry with me now, which of course makes packing problematic when flying. For my trip to California, I bought solid shampoo, body soap, and lotion to open up some space in my quart bag. It never dawned on me to go solids for a lot of my beauty care, which is actually pretty brilliant since they do not count towards the 3-1-1 rule.
My biggest problem with toiletries is getting the right bottles/jars for the job as sometimes the products marked for travel are too bulky. For example, my regular sized bottle of make-up remover is 2 liquid oz while not technically travel sized is under the 3 oz rule, but I’ll use maybe 1/4 of an oz during the course of one week, so why drag the entire, ill shaped bottle with me? Same with body lotions and other goops. As we don’t have a Container Store in my vicinity, I searched through dollar stores, Target, and other like stores for purchasing various sized travel bottles and jars in small quantity for my trips. As I couldn’t find anything under 3 liquid ozs or at least a variety of sizes under 3 ozs, I went to the internets and found this: a travel bottle and jar set. As I require a lot of goops, creams, and potions to maintain the lifestyle I’m currently living, getting this set will allow me to get more bang out of my space. Experiments with using only one type of lotion for everything or going without something has proven I don’t do well when missing beloved items.
In the accouterments area, I took my Air and my iPad on my most recent trip to Chicago, along with my 3DS, phone, journal, pen case, and a paper book. I also carried a purse with me which proved to be more hindrance than useful, and resorted to using a favorite clutch everywhere we went. The Air was overkill as I had thought I would be getting some work done at the hotel or on the train, but circumstances were not in my favor that weekend. While as a to-go machine, my iPad (along with its leather keyboard case) is pretty durable for doing some work but there are some things that do not translate well and that mainly has to do with how a lot of cloud services and websites handle rendering for a mobile device, even if it has a 10″ screen. But again, as I’ve done for other trips, I tend to over pack in this area with the thought I’ll do X,Y,Z and either do not make time for it or forget to do it or something else.
I’ll be doing a run through pack before my trip on Saturday, and I’ll report back on how that goes.
x0x0,
Lisa
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