LiveJournal is serious bizness

Okay, so what happened to the endlessly loading friends feed? I liked that change! Ah, well.

It snowed. It's all pretty and stuff outside. But cold. I did a little bit with the shovel and now Rick is out with the snow blower. Our dog loves the snow.

We leave tomorrow for our big Christmas road trip. I still need to do laundry and pack. We're taking the dog with us and I think she's going to have a lot more fun than she would at the kennel.

I've fallen behind on Christmas shopping. There are two packages I meant to get in the mail this week that I still haven't done. They're just going to be post-Christmas gifts, I guess. I did finally get my cards out.

Mostly I've been very relaxed for the holidays. Maybe way too relaxed. :o) But that's not a bad place to be.

I don't want to open a support request if this is somehow a "feature" that I overlooked or if there's an easy way to do this. I haven't been on LJ in a while, so I wanted to go back and read all the stuff that I missed. I got back to skip=140 and I only got the "Next" option at the bottom of the page. I couldn't get any further back than that. I tried removing a spammy comm from my default filter, to see if maybe 140 is just the limit now, but after that change I could only get to skip=80. So maybe it's a certain date that it's not letting me go past? Generally I keep going back until I run across an entry I know that I've read, and then move forward in time from that point so I get entries in chronological order.

Help?

We are having another happy Thanksgiving. Just hanging out, waiting for food to be ready. It always seems like Thanksgiving is just one long day of waiting to eat, then eating, then being too full and lolling around on couches--it's a good day. I suppose YMMV. And there was football watching, which is practically required as well. And there will be turkey and potatoes and stuffing and gravy and green bean casserole and cranberries and rolls and pumpkin pie. I am kind of a Thanksgiving food traditionalist, so this makes me very happy. I don't mind if you throw in a few extra non-standard items (sweet potatoes, squash casserole, cornbread....mmm...so many delicious foods), but you have to have the staples.

Anyway, I hope that wherever this post finds you, you are having a lovely day.

I am thankful for so much. I feel like I'm at a really good place in my life right now, and I'm really happy with me. At least most of the time. And I know that I'm lucky in so many ways, and so I'm grateful. I didn't do anything to earn a lot of what I have.

As another holiday season kicks off and another year draws to a close, the time to evaluate 2011 is coming soon. I always think back at the end of the year. What did I learn? What did I enjoy? What do I regret? What would I do differently if given the chance? And, when everything is weighed in the balance, this year has been pretty good to me so far. It had its ups and downs and maybe I'm just relaxed and happy right now and more prone to viewing things in a positive light. But right now is all anyone ever has, and things are pretty okay right now. And for that, I am thankful.

I cannot believe that it's already November. Where did 2011 go? I feel like it slipped through my fingers.

I'm doing NaNoWriMo. My goal is to do 2,000 words a day so that I can take a few days off. I've done 1,871 so far today and I'm pretty sure I'll top 2,000 before I head to bed. I meant to set more time aside today--to really power through it while I was fresh. And then....distractions. I think some of it is just the sitting--I get a little antsy and I feel like I need to get up and move around. I spend so much time on the couch. Today I went on a pretty long walk with the dog, which is the first time in a long time that I've done that. I should probably make it part of my daily routine. And, of course, Facebook is the ultimate distraction. I did decide to just close it out twice for 30 minutes in the middle of the day, and I think that strategy is helpful. 30 minutes is not so long that I can't catch up with what happened while I was gone, and it's not long enough to make me feel a little twitchy. I think I'll take 4 Facebook breaks tomorrow. Progress!

I should probably be writing there instead of here.

Anyway, things are going fine. Halloween was really good--we went to the aforementioned party out in the country. There were lots of good people there, lots of good costumes, and lots of jello shots. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Sunday was a day of quiet and unwinding. And nothing special happened Monday or today. Life is pretty slow and quiet and that is thoroughly okay with me. Except that while the days go slow, the months are moving really, really fast. I hear that only gets worse as you get older.

This is not a real entry. Feel free to move along.

So, it's time to update my List. Randomly. Because I feel like it. And, my, how my tastes have changed since 2005. Not that I wouldn't still do most of those guys, but, you know--time passes. New hot guys emerge. Plusalso I'm kind of into nerds these days.

The original meme says: Pick ten people that you could conceivably 'do' right now, and post sexy pictures of them under a cut. No invented people, no dead people, no 'were attractive in their prime but not now' people. If they're on your list and you meet them tomorrow, you can do whatever dirty deeds you want with them and whoever you're with isn't allowed to get mad.

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Okay, I'm done. I didn't have much trouble coming up with 10 this time.

I am awake.

I am writing.

I am (mostly) happy.

I'm not sure I can ask for much more than that.

I'm in kind of a bad mood today. My impulse is just to do nothing. I want to watch about 8 episodes of The Bachelorette and finish reading Naamah's Blessing. I kind of want to just go back to bed. But I need to get dressed and go to yoga and do something productive. I didn't get much done yesterday--just a little laundry and a little work on stained glass. I've been kind of distracted. It happened a lot like this.

I did go current walking (where you walk either with or against the current in a lazy river) yesterday and it was surprisingly difficult. My legs felt really sore while I was doing it--I could really feel my calves working, but they're not sore at all this morning, so it's hard to tell if it was a good workout.

Wednesday we leave for Las Vegas and I am excited, although I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do with myself while everyone else is off at the conference (probably watch The Bachelorette and read). It will be nice and relaxing, at least.

I should go ahead and make a schedule for myself for the day. Joking aside, Hugh Grant's method of dividing the day up into units of time is actually a helpful way to do it. Hm....maybe I should watch "About a Boy" today...

Here's hoping everything is resolved and LJ gets left alone for a while.

I need to mow the lawn--I've needed to do it for a couple of days now, but it's been so hot and wet that I've been avoiding it. I think today may be the day, though. I also have a haircut scheduled for 10:45 this morning. I was thinking about just chopping all of my hair off (it's pretty long), but now I'm having second thoughts, and I'll probably just get about 3" cut off, which will still leave it below my shoulders. Rick likes my hair shorter, but I've never been happy with any of the short haircuts I've had. It doesn't take super long to grow out, but I don't want to be unhappy with my hair for a year or more.

I went out with my friend Libby last night and spent way too much money. So much that I should probably cancel my hair appointment at an actual salon and just go to Great Clips instead. But I won't--I don't get my hair cut very often, so I can splurge a little bit. And it shouldn't be super expensive since I'm not getting a dramatic cut.

I'm feeling sort of restless today and I'd like to keep busy. I got some cleaning done yesterday--I did some dusting and window cleaning. I should probably work downstairs some, but it's almost the kind of restless where I think I will have a hard time staying on task. I have a few errands to run, and maybe I can find something productive to do while watching a movie or something. If I can come up with 10 small things to do, I bet I can get them all accomplished as long as none of them is too arduous.

My stomach has been all jacked up for a few days now. I don't know if it was something I ate or a bug that I picked up, but it's been swinging back and forth from perfectly normal to gaaaaaaaah! It's getting a little frustrating. Feel better, stomach!

That is all.

I want to update my LJ more. I need to make it a priority. Here is some totally random information, in bullet point (represented by -s) form:

-I am planning to have a very productive week! I ordered some supplies and stuff online today. My goal is to have 5 things in my Etsy story by the end of the week, and have a short story entered in Glimmer Train's contest. Do I expect to win a writing competition? Absolutely 100% no. But I need to get comfortable with finishing things, polishing them, and submitting them. This seems like a good place to start for that.

-House cleaning has sort of stalled. The upstairs looks pretty good--in fact, almost every room upstairs is almost clean. I've made some progress downstairs, but not as much as I'd like.

-It looks like June is going to be a big travel month for me, and I'm excited about this possibility. First we have Vegas at the end of May/beginning of June. Awesomesauce. Then I have been invited to attend the Gay Pride Festival in Houston the weekend of June 18th. Also my mom and a few of her sisters (and at least one of my cousins) will be going to New York from 6/24 - 6/29 and she's invited me to join them. I think this will be pretty fun, although my aunts are kind of bossy. I'm not sure yet if I can actually swing the trip to Houston--I've got limited money these days, and for some reason airfare to Houston is crazy expensive. So I'm probably going to have to drive to either Minneapolis or Kansas City to get a decent fare. Lame. I'm still excited, though.

-I know that there is big national news tonight, but most of my feelings about that can be summed up like this: "Yay!"

-Rick is re-doing our deck. He took all the old floor boards and railings off (leaving the structure underneath) and he's replacing them with new ones. It's looking great, but he's been working on it for two weekends now, and it's not even close to done. I know he's super tired. I should probably go offer to rub his back.

Anyway, that's what's up with us!