This year, with my federal tax refund, I was very responsible and I paid off my credit cards entirely. I was mostly out of debt anyway because of the unexpected bonus of student loan deferments since I’m a part-time student now, but it felt excellent to get rid of that last bit. And then I thought “Hmm, I still have some cash left over. I want a new toy.” I hopped on CNet and looked at toys, because we all know Julie likes the tech, and that’s the best place to find out what tech is awesome. About this time, my TV set started getting lines across it when we turned it on, so part one was solved. I would get a new TV set. A new flat panel Hi-Def LCD TV, because they are the wave of the future (the part that I could afford with said refund, at least–no 3D TVs for us). And then, clicking around CNet, I started thinking “Well, my DVD player is from the dawn of time, perhaps I should upgrade that too.” And I decided to get a Blu-Ray player, because they too are the wave of the future.

Rick took me to Best Buy in Pittsfield one weekend, and then he left while I asked the people there five million questions. To be fair, he had not done the CNet research, and he thought it was going to be an in and out shopping trip. But goddammit, I was going to get the best TV and Blu-Ray I could afford. And I did, because at Best Buy, they are amazingly reasonable and sometimes cut you deals when they’ve just sold the last TV in the model you want and you tell them you have a price ceiling. This is a sucktastic picture of our new setup:

It was taken with my Droid on one of the awful rainy days last weekend when I was supposedly writing papers but was instead rejoicing in the new Hi-Def hookup DirecTV had just given me (which in itself is a story for another day). I had no idea that electronics could all plug into the internet these days. I purposely bought a Blu-Ray player that could do that because I wanted to be able to watch my Netflix instant queue on the TV, but did I know the DirecTV and even the TV would be internet-friendly as well? I did not. Color me happily surprised.

I could go into raptures over this TV since I’ve had some time to become acquainted with it. Channels that aren’t HD are a little annoying, but those that are? I felt like I was in the room with Ugly Betty last night, people. The picture is that good. Just for all that is holy don’t ever watch Kathy Lee Gifford or Trump’s hair in Hi-Def. There should be a warning included in the TV manuals about that. Kathy Lee was the first thing I saw in HD and I literally screamed “GAH!” (Pyotr, the DirecTV guy, thought this was very funny.)

The awesome thing about this is that I am using the opportunity to get rid of a bunch of small electronics. VCR, DVD player, component stereo set, all are getting donated to Goodwill as soon as I can get Rick to drive me over there. I haven’t used most of it in a while, so it was a good chance to declutter. New tech and housecleaning in one, totally win-win.

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!

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!

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.

I would like to come up with something really great to write about, but frankly, all that behind-the-scenes work exhausted me, so I’m going to go drink a beer and play some Wii and maybe even eat some dinner now. Sorry. Maybe tomorrow.

Is it possible to be too connected to the ether? I wonder about this lately. In the past, I’ve had a habit of being very passionately interested in something on the internet, and then move on after a few months. IRC, Victor Garber (there was a website at one point…it is gone now), MySpace…the list could go on, but it would embarrass us both, so I’ll leave it. This blog is the one thing that has stood the test of time – it has been…holy crap, has it really been four years now? My blog is in pre-K? But of late I have let the blog lapse a little bit, because work has been too chaotic to come up with a single coherent thought, let alone blog about it, and the evenings…well, there are distractions in the evenings as well. My mind these days moves in short phrases, more suited to Facebook status messages than even Ravelry forum messages. Twitter would be good, but Twitter is often a little bitch and tells me I’m refreshing too much when clearly I am *not*. That annoys me. But Plurk, Plurk is cool. Plurk has a lot of knitters on it, so it resembles a cross between the beloved Facebook status message and IM, where we talk about socks and spinning a lot. That does it for me, I dunno about you.

And so I think in short bursts of third person thoughts, like “Evil Julie wants a jelly donut” and “Evil Julie is going on a ten-minute spin break, anyone in?”. Those do not make good blog posts, by the way, so my pre-K blog is probably being abused by the people running its daycare. My verbal skills are probably suffering, and looking back on that last sentence, it becomes quite obvious that my ability to come up with a decent metaphor has been compromised as well. And my attention span is not long enough to update Twitter (little bitch), Facebook, Ravelry, Plurk, and the blog. Sometimes, being this connected to the internets reminds me of the hive mind of the Borg…I haven’t lost the ability for independent thought, but I am always, always wondering “Has anyone written anything cool? What are these people up to? Have I blogged this week? No? Damn. Oooh, has anyone written anything in the past five seconds?” It is something I am going to have to work through. But I’m still taking my laptop with me when I hang out with Aimee and Sloth this weekend. So there.

(That last sentence totally caught your attention, didn’t it? Blog post when I get back. Promise.)

Those of you who are on Twitter or are addicted to Facebook status messages? I give you Plurk. Plurk is like a cross between Twitter and IM and chatrooms. You type in something you would like your friends to know, in 140 characters or less, and then they can comment on it. I’ve been Plurking with a bunch of knitters from Ravelry for two days and have been having a blast. Check it out. And if you do, look me up. I’m EvilJulie.

The Youngest, who is almost 13 got on the Wii Fit next. She is always seen as “the athletic one” in the family because she’s always involved in several sports and is likely to get up and do something active in her spare time because she can’t stand to sit still. By contrast, The Oldest and I would rather sit and read or knit or whatever, not run. So The Youngest gets on the balance board and doesn’t complete one of the tests and doesn’t do great on the second one. The cheeky Wii Fit asks her if she trips a lot when she walks, and then presents her with a Wii Fit Age of 22, a full ten years older than she actually is. The Oldest and I howl, and The Youngest pouts.

The Oldest takes the balance board, completes the tests, and is announced to have a Wii Fit Age of 15, which is her actual age. She and I high-five, as we, the non-athletic ones, have finally beaten the Youngest at something, even if it was an exercise video game. “At least my Wii Fit Age isn’t ten years older than me” is going to go down in family history as a comeback to anything.

The cold is manageable now, the fever is gone, and I am back at work. Wearing an Obama ’08 sticker. Because hey, how ’bout my boy Barack? There were times along the way where I had my doubts, but now he’s the presumptive nominee and I am a very happy girl, enjoying the day. Hillary’s speech pissed me off a little until Tim Russert’s commentary helped me understand it. My thought process last night went something like this: “Seriously, you’re not going to make a decision? Dude, you lost. Decision has been made. Start unifying the party by stepping down. Ohhh, wait. If she plays this very, very carefully, she might convince all of her supporters who were saying they were going to go over to McCain that Obama is okay, especially if she goes for the VP slot. We might have a united party the easy way. She is either Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius, or just someone who can’t admit that she’s lost. I am hoping for the Coyote route.”

And then I started to think about things from an historical perspective (there are a lot of ifs in this scenario, by the way). Let’s say Barack offers Hillary the VP slot, and the Dems take the White House in January. Let’s say Barack serves 8 years as President, and then Hillary is elected President in 2016 and she serves 8 years. If that happens, then Hillary Clinton will have been in the White House in one capacity or another for 24 years, if we count the Bill years. I am not sure whether this is very cool or very scary – we do have term limits for a reason, after all. But the idea of it is mind-blowing, isn’t it?