Weird

I got a Facebook friend request today from D., which I accepted. I harbor no ill will toward him, though I regret having lost my virginity to him. Not sure who I would have wanted it to be instead, but I suppose that's of no consequence.

The thing is that, D. was a bit of a man-whore back in high school. I didn't realize this until after we'd done the deed, of course, but it's true. But even with that, even he is happily married with two children now.

Somethings are just not fair.

A Thanksgiving Weekend Meme

Okay, so I've been on the road the last two days and I'm wiped out. So I leave you with a meme.

1. If your doctor told you TODAY that you were pregnant, what would you say?
I’m not sure how that happened, but it’s pretty cool!

2. Do you trust all of your friends?
Yes, although some of them like to gossip.

3. Would you move to another state or country to be with the one you love?
Absolutely.

4. Do you believe that everything happens for a reason?
I like to think so.

5. Can you make a dollar in change right now?
Oh, probably.

6. Which one of your friends do you think would make the best doctor?
Heather, because she likes that science stuff.

7. Are you afraid of falling in love?
No, but I am afraid of falling in love with someone who doesn’t love me.

8. Is there someone who pops into your mind at random times?
Yes, but that’s a topic for another time.

9. What’s your most favorite scar?
The one on my lip from playing catch with sharp objects when I was three.

10. When was the last time you flew in a plane?
Coming home from Hawaii on August 1st.

11. What did the last text message you sent say?
Lol. Yes I see that. Mom and I were both looking for him. She was excited to see his name in the credits. lol

12. What features do you find most attractive in the preferred sex?
A funny boy with pretty eyes.

13. Fill in the blank. I love:
Being able to sleep as late as I want.

14. What is a goal you would like to accomplish in the near future?
Paying off my credit cards.

15. If you were to wake up from being in a coma for an extended time who would you call?
Depends on who's there with me.

16. How many kids do you want to have?
At least one, preferably two.

17. Would you make a good parent?
I like to think so. I see the mistakes that others make at work every day.

18. Honestly, whats on your mind right now?
A cute boy I like.

19. If you could go back in time and change something, what would it be?
Trusting someone from many years ago.

20. Who was or will be the maid of honor/ best man in your wedding?
Amber was supposed to be, and now that we are closer again, I think I still would ask her to be.

21. What are you wearing right now?
Jeans, t-shirt, and a hoodie.

22. Righty or Lefty?
Righty.

23. Best place to eat?
Bennigans.

24. Favorite jeans?
Levi’s 545.

25. Favorite animal?
Dolphin.

26. Favorite juice?
Grape.

27. Have you had the chicken pox?
Yes, back in first grade.

28. Have you had a sore throat?
Yes, and I do currently, too.

29. Ever had a bar fight?
Nope, I fear pain.

30. Who knows you the best?
Heather or Amber.

31. Shoe size?
8.

32. Do you wear contact lenses or glasses?
Both, but mainly contacts.

33. Ever been in a fight with your pet?
Only when she chews me out for leaving her at home alone.

34. Been to Mexico?
Nope, but I’d like to one day.

35. Did you buy something today?
Just gas for the Jeep.

36. Did you get sick today?
Nope.

37. Do you miss someone today?
I’m not sure if miss is the correct term since I’m not really around him that much, but sure.

38. Did you get in a fight with someone today?
No.

39. When is the last time you had a massage?
About three years ago, I think.

40. Last person to lay in your bed?
Me.

41. Last person to see you cry?
No idea, I really don’t remember the last time I cried.

42. Who made you cry?
See #41 above.

43. What was the last TV show you watched?
Dirty Sexy Money (Amber’s brother was in it!).

44. What are your plans for the weekend?
Sleep in, go to the gym, catch up with house-cleaning and schoolwork.

45.Who do you think will repost this?
Anyone who wants to.

46. Who was the last person you hung out with?
Sue.

47. If your significant other asked you to marry them TODAY what would you say?
Who are you? Don’t you think we should date first?

The Kid-In-Me Survey

In reality, yesterday offered me a good three days of blog fodder, but do you think I have the energy to type any of it up? Of course not. So instead, a survey...

Mark the things that you have:
[x] A mom
[x] A dad
[ ] Stepmom
[ ] Stepdad
[ ] A younger brother
[ ] A younger sister
[ ] An older brother
[x] An older sister
[x] Grandfather (but they are no longer living)
[x] Grandmother (see above)
[x] Cousins
[ ] Half-brother
[x] Half-sister
[ ] Stepbrother
[ ] Stepsister
[x] Brother-in-law
[ ] Sister-in-law
[x] Niece (and grand-nieces)
[x] Nephew (see above, substitute with nephew)

1. Are you a child of the 70s, 80s, or 90s?
I was born in the ‘70s, but I actually grew up in the ‘80s.

2. Where were you born?
Pennock Hospital

3. What city did you grow up in?
I didn’t… it was out in the sticks!

4.Did you enjoy your childhood?
For the most part, but I’ve never made friends easily, so it was sometimes lonely.

5. When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A doctor, a teacher, a Broadway actress/singer, a jazz singer, an architect, a teacher (again).

6. What do you want to be now?
Independently wealthy.

8. What was your first best friend’s name?
Shannon

10. Can you name all the schools you ever attended?
Woodland Elementary and Jr. High, Lakewood High, Central Michigan University, Michigan State University, Mott Community College, Saginaw Valley State University, Wayne State University.

11. Were you closer to your mom or dad as a kid?
Probably my mom.

12. What was the first record, tape or CD you remember buying?
“Weird Al” Yankovic, “Even Worse.” Man that’s embarrassing.

13. How old were you when you first heard of Chuck Norris on GoofyAuctions.com?
Apparently 33, as it was just now.

14. Are you scared of anything?
Not being able to have a baby.

15. How old were you when you wanted to get your ears pierced for the 2nd time?
Nineteen.

16. Did you buy school lunch or bring your own?
Usually bought it. It really wasn’t bad most of the time and a lot easier than scrounging something up myself!

17. Broken any bones or had any freaky accidents as a kid?
No broken bones, but I have a scar on my lip from playing catch with a sharp object and having to get stitches. I was three.

18. Were you a mean kid?
I was the chubby girl that others were mean to.

19. Favorite board game of all of time?
Monopoly.

20. Did you play house or pretend to be a super hero?
I did both, but probably house a bit more.

21. What was your favorite class in elementary school?
Reading… I have always loved to read.

22. Seriously, are you still just a kid at heart?
I’m more of an immature, awkward teenager. I usually have the sense of humor of a twelve year old.

Start With a Bang

I thought about it on the drive home from work today, but promptly forgot. Then I spent an hour and a half on the computer paying bills and budgeting for the next month and just remembered again... it's the start of NaBloPoMo. Crap!

So I know that today's post is incredibly lame, but at least it's here, right?

Oh, during that hour and a half I also chatted with Drew for a while. He's currently in New Mexico training for his deployment and will be there for quite some time still. He's incredibly tired, but at least I know he's not in danger yet. He's supposed to be home for a couple days over Thanksgiving, so I'm hoping I'll get to see him then. I can't believe he's been gone for a month and a half already.

Okay, I'm going to eat dinner. Hopefully I'll be more entertaining tomorrow, or else it's going to be a long month!

From the Files of "What the Hell Was I Thinking?"

Two thoughts:

• Like the masochist that I am, I again enrolled in NaBloPoMo. I made it through last year, even in my last term of graduate school, so I should be able to do so again this year. Of course, I will admit (now that it's after the fact) to a wee bit of back-dating on days when I didn't quite make it in by midnight. So I'm going to try not to do that this year.
• I agreed to participate in the costume contest at work tomorrow. Staff members are dressing up as movie characters and there is a contest among the advisory classes to see which class can guess the most. There is also a prize for the costume that stumps the most classes. I'd tell you who I'm dressing up as, but then I'd have to kill you. Plus, my costume isn't quite finished yet. I put in about two hours on it last night and I might have another hour tonight, but I don't think a single kid will guess it. The only way will be if some English teacher helps their class cheat.

That's all for now. Have to save all my thoughts for Thursday and beyond.

Numbskulls, Fat Beagles, Running Away, and Internet Piracy

First, the Numbskulls:

A little over a month ago, I received a notice that repayment would begin on the student loan I took out to pay for graduate school on March 7. I logged onto the loan company's website and registered for automatic payments, and was told that it would take 30 days to process my request and the first automatic payment would not take place until the April 7 payment date. A few days later I got a letter in the mail thanking me for enrolling in their automatic payment program and stating again that the first payment would take place on April 7. I knew that I needed to send a check for the March 7 payment.

Fast forward to March 9 when I cruised through the ATM at my credit union to make a quick cash withdrawal. Except I was told that there were insufficient funds for the withdrawal. Huh, I thought, I could have sworn I had well over $100 in that account, but maybe I paid a bill that I forgot about. When I got home I checked my checkbook only to find that, indeed, I should have had $138 in my account, definitely enough for my measly $50 withdrawal. So I logged onto my account to discover the problem. Not only had my check to the loan company cleared, but they had also taken out the automatic payment!

I didn't think they could do anything about it, but I wanted to make clear to the loan company that I was pretty annoyed that they had overdrawn my checking account, so I called them. They swore up and down that it always takes 30 days to process the automatic payments, but I was living proof that, this time, it only took about a week. In the end, the loan company offered to redeposit one of the payments back into my checking account, but it would take 10 days so they could be sure my check cleared (uh, did I not mention that I KNOW my check cleared already... hence the problem?). But anyway, I checked my bank balance every couple of days to see if my money was back, but was always disappointed. I logged back onto the loan company's site last week to discover that I was no longer credited with the extra payment, but still no deposit to my account... where the heck was my money?

Finally, yesterday, there was a check in my mailbox. Oh well, I thought, must be they couldn't do it automatically. And then I opened the envelope. They refunded BOTH payments to me. And yet they are still crediting me with one of them. Is it any wonder that these companies go bankrupt?

Next, the fat beagle.

For the last few months, whenever anyone has come to the house, it seems they have commented on my little girl's chubbiness. I knew she had put a few pounds on over the winter, but didn't think it was any big deal. Spring is here and we'll be going on more walks and running around the backyard a lot more soon.

And then we went to the vet for her heartworm test yesterday. She walked on the scale and I gasped... 41.4 pounds! On a dog that should max out about 35! She has put on seven pounds since she was there in September. So I guess the denial is over. She's not just a little chubby and it's time to go on a diet. I guess it just runs in the family, but I feel so mean when I deny her the extra treats.

Next, running away.

I was worried late last week when I hadn't been to the gym in nearly two weeks that I had lost all the ground I had gained in becoming a runner. The day before I got sick I had run nearly two miles and was quite proud of myself. Luckily, my illness and absence from the gym didn't hurt me all that much. When I ventured back on Sunday I was still able to run a mile in quarter-mile increments. Then, yesterday, I couldn't get to the gym due to Copper's appointment (I refuse to go after dinner... it's far too busy and I can't get on any of the machines), but it was a fantastic day (76 degrees), so I went running outside. Knowing that it is more difficult to run outside than on a treadmill, I would have been happy with a half or three-quarters of a mile, but I still managed to get in the full mile! Then, today I was back at the gym and I did 1.25 miles (plus three-quarters of a mile of walking) before getting on the elliptical machine. Oh, and I finally got my heart rate monitor fixed so I can keep track of calories burned again, too. Turns out it really was just a dead battery, so the lady at Walmart who told me the battery was fine was wrong. Plus I didn't know there was a little reset switch to hold down after changing the battery, so thanks to the nice guy at Timex who helped me when I called.

And finally, Internet Piracy.

That was where this post was supposed to end, but when I turned on my laptop, it failed to connect to my wireless network. I looked at the available networks to discover that my own network has somehow become a secured network since I used my laptop all of two days ago, and I have no idea what the key is to log onto it. Guess I've got some investigation to do. In the meantime, it's a good thing that one of my neighbors also has an unsecured network that I was able to connect to. What's a little sharing among friends? I'm sure more than one neighbor has used mine at some point.

Intrigued

Found this over at Leesepea's site and thought I'd give it a whirl. What's sad is the number of books on this list that I have wanted to read for years and never have. And the number of those book that I actually own already!

Look at the list of books below.

• Bold the ones you’ve read.
• Italicize the ones you want to
• Don't do anything to the ones that you aren’t interested in.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible (well, parts anyway)
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMavrier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Everybody's Doing It

You can thank Girlfiend and Pigs for this one. Just call it a little snow day celebration (finally!).

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Oh, and it's absolutely accurate... so weird.