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Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like Colin Firth way better than Jeff Bridges. Sorry, Jeff, Colin was Mr. (& Mark!) Darcy, you weren't.
4 days ago |
I have a post in the making, but since it involves tech and another person (i.e., is out of my control entirely), I don’t want to post it and run the rish of jinxing the whole thing. Instead, I will sing the praises of my new favorite show “Who Do You Think You Are,” which is on NBC, I think Friday nights. (Due to the “set it and forget it” nature of DVRs, I no longer have to remember what night anything is on, and often don’t. The DVR is doing for TV what a contact list has done for phones. Soon I won’t have to remember anything.) At any rate, this show takes a different celebrity every week and tracks down their ancestry. Since most of us couldn’t tell you who the hell our great-great grandfather was, we can get vicarious thrills through their discoveries. (Okay, I get a vicarious thrill, your mileage may vary.) For instance, last week, Sarah Jessica Parker tracked down relatives that participated in the gold rush and others who were arrested for witchcraft in Salem in 1692. I got chills. Chills, I tell you. She had no idea her relatives were so rooted in such historical moments, which sort of makes you think (okay, it made me think, again, YMMV) “Hey! My relatives could have been involved in important things in this country’s history!” When the semester’s over, I’m seriously considering paying money to ancestry.com to figure out if they were. My favorite part of the whole show, though, was that they use historians to tell the celebrity about the parts of history in which their ancestors were involved. My jaw literally dropped when I saw who was explaining the Salem witch trials: Mary Beth Norton. Her name might not mean anything to you, but I’ve had to read a number of her works over my academic career, so to see her on TV lent the project an extra air of legitimacy for me. I was prepared to be a hater when I TiVo’d this show, or at the very least a meh-er, but I came away loving it. Can’t wait to see what comes next! Rick and I are in the car, listening to the radio, when a diet program ad comes on. It is a diet program I have never heard of, and they seem to be marketing to a particular demographic because the woman is talking like this (I cannot even begin to type the accent, but I think you’ll get the picture):
Somehow I missed your sixth birthday. Okay, not somehow, really, I knew it was coming up, I just neglected to commemorate it. I neglected to blog for two months. If there was a blog protective services, they would have taken you away long ago, because I am a bad blogger. I can blame it on many things: Facebook. Twitter. Ravelry. Classes. Work. Laziness. But in the end I think I wasn’t sure I was a blogger anymore. The urge to blog just hasn’t been as overpowering as it was in the early days. In fact, I have had only one urge to blog in the past two months, and that was a post on why Ice Dancing and Curling are not sports and should not be in the Olympics. But instead I just bitched it out on Twitter. Blog, on my second attempt at snowboarding I managed to bruise my tailbone. Instead of coming here with this comedic gold, I went to Twitter and Facebook and told thousands of people that I had bruised my ass. Which was awesome, but it could have been a great post. I let you down, blog. Some of my two months of radio silence was trying to decide if I wanted to keep blogging. If I don’t blog as often, is it worth paying for the domain name and the hosting? On Monday, I decided to re-up for another two years, and my goal is to blog more so I am putting that $190 to good use. Little Blog, I resolve to not leave you in the corner gathering dust. So let’s get started with a stupid story! Yesterday, my second visit to the doctor in two weeks (the first, where she diagnosed me with a bruised butt by putting on latex gloves and sticking her finger down my ass-crack to tell me that yes, my tailbone was “protruding more than usual,” apparently left an impression on her–can we blame her?–because she asked if my thumb injury was also due to snowboarding) resulted in a diagnosis of tenosynovitis in my thumb. (Side note: Why, hello, Google Health, and where have you been all my life?) She prescribed a gel NSAID for it. This gel shall now be known as $30 Copay Gel, because that’s what it cost with my copay, which makes me shudder to think of how much it costs without insurance. Anyway, $30 Copay Gel is apparently often used for arthritis according to the Rite-Aid instructions that came with it. “Awesome,” I thought, “so I’m putting Ben-Gay on my snowboarding injury.” I read further. In order to accurately measure the dosage of the gel before you put it on, you need to squirt it onto a dosing card. The instructions clearly say “Put the card down on a flat surface so you can read it.” I relayed this info to Rick and said “It’s really for old people! Because their hands shake when they’re holding it so they can’t read it!” (Yes, I realize this is an extremely age-ist comment, but that’s okay, because Rick, an older person, laid the smackdown on me two seconds later.) “No, it’s telling you to do that so you can read it. You know, as opposed to putting the card down upside-down so the writing is backwards and you can’t read it.” Apparently $30 Copay Gel is for idiots like me in addition to old people. Happy belated 6th birthday, Blog! Your writer is an age-ist moron! 2009 was a blur for me, mostly because I wasn’t blogging. Without the blog to tell me what I was doing when, I’m clueless as to how a whole year managed to slip by me. I mean, I must’ve done some stuff, right? Let’s see if I can remember any of it. Putting it behind a break because there are pictures. Sometimes I’m afraid to do that with Word Press for fear of freaky shit happening and never being able to blog again. Because I blog so regularly these days. But if the opportunity wasn’t there, just in case I wanted to blog, I’d be pissed, I know I would. At any rate, the upgrade doesn’t seem to have borked anything, so that’s good. I’m working on my final paper for my final class (final paper for pre-modern China class was turned in on Thursday). I think I’m going to be okay, since the prof says we should consider everything we’ve done so far in class as a draft, which I take to mean as “fair game, go ahead and put this in your paper verbatim if I didn’t say anything was wrong with it.” Now, I’m adding another four sources and looking for topics that can be researched further, but I still feel okay about it. I really want to ace it, though, because if I do, I could be looking at an A+ on my report card, something that has not happened since…well, I don’t know that it’s ever happened. I’ve gotten plenty of As, even in grad school, but an A+ on anything that wasn’t a quiz that had extra credit questions? No. And if I can get one on this, on the basis of three really good papers on Benjamin Franklin, I feel like I’ll have served him in much better stead than I did as an undergrad when I got a B on my senior thesis about him. Sorry, Ben. Trying to make it up to you… I’m going to get back to that. It’s snowing and gross out anyway, so nothing better to do for the next several hours until the new Doctor Who special comes on anyway. Wish me luck! If I get this to work, it will be one more praise to the glory of Droid. The nice Fed Ex man brought me a Droid on Wednesday, and there is so, so much to tell about how I love it. But now is not the time for that. Now is the time to gross you out. I have always been a procrastinator. I have tried to break that cycle with this history degree that I’m pursuing, but old habits die hard. I still have the tendency to think that all writing must come out perfect the first time, and while I struggle to get that sentence exactly right the first time, hey, look, someone just tweeted, I should go check that out. I am working on overcoming this and even have a handy app on my Droid (so much for not talking about it) that has a timer so I know exactly how much time I’ve spent on task. This app is a miracle worker, because it kept my nose to the grindstone a lot yesterday. But today, even though I only have two more articles to critique and a conclusion to write and am so close to the finish line I can taste it, I still feel the need to procrastinate. I played a game on my Droid for a while. Then I remembered that I took the ring out of my rook piercing out on Wednesday while I was waiting for the Fed Ex guy and never put it back in. And so I just did. And basically had to re-pierce the damn thing because it had been out for a few days. It did not bleed, but oh my god, my ear hurts right now. I took Advil and am waiting for the pain to die down a little so I can concentrate again. I guess it serves me right for procrastinating, doesn’t it? How’s it going, guys? Anyone still out there? I’m at home today, awaiting a very important package from Fed Ex (there will be a separate post about it when I get it), and supposedly working on a paper for my Historiography class. Except my Macbook Pro battery is borked, so I started backing up files for that in prep for my Genius Bar appointment on Sunday morning and that took longer than I thought it would. But I felt so good about cleaning up stuff on my laptop that I thought, hmm, perhaps I should do the same thing for the blog. So I installed plugin updates and Wordpress updates. And that was great, but it didn’t clear up the most annoying thing in the world, one of the reasons I have not blogged in so long because it just annoyed the crap out of me: my WYSIWYG toolbar was missing when I tried to post. You have no idea how annoying that is. Yeah, turns out the fix was so easy I could kick myself. I went through a big long list of things it could be and looked for the easiest one, because Murphy’s Law is always in effect around me. And yes, it was a variation of that easiest one. I went into my Wordpress profile, clicked the “Disable Visual Editor” button, saved it, went right back in and re-enabled it, and damned if my WYSIWYG isn’t back. *facepalm* I should have done that months ago, but didn’t have the patience. My tech fu, it comes and goes in cycles. My writing lately has been either tweeting or one page critiques or papers, and it shows in this post. It’s like I have no idea how to blog anymore. With the WYSIWYG toolbar back, I’m going to try to fix that. I pay enough for this blog Well, actually, I don’t, my hosting company is really cheap, but I do pay for it, so I should start using it again. But in the meantime, I should get back to writing this paper about Ben Franklin. So I’m going to do that. Hey, you know what’s an awesome
Well, that explains a lot about why this damned article summary is like pulling teeth. I was starting to worry that my brain just wasn’t used to academic writing anymore. It could be that, but I have a feeling it has more to do with Mercury… |
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