Year: 2004

this will be coming to you in the mail shortly:

(today is my little sister’s 24th birthday.)

I’m getting better at making lists, but only a little better at following them.

I still feel like an empty shell around which this life has accreted.

and, wow, does that sound pretentious.

posting by email with WordPress is not a piece of cake, not even remotely. (and that’s not even dealing with the really obnoxious problem: whether I’d be able to set up a dummy email account at all at work.)

I’ve deleted all my test posts, just because they’re fabulously ugly.

the problem is, I’m looking to combine two Blogger blogs from work into a single WP blog, adding another feature as part of the new thing, and the main user of one of the existing blogs does 99.9% of her posting by email, because it works with the rest of her workflow.

and the whole point of doing all this is to make it easier for her….

so.

1) it has to work with rich text from Outlook.
2) it has to work with images.
3) it has to look like a normal email, no quirky formatting (she sends these emails to real human beings, too).
4) it has to be utterly transparent.

whew. we’ll see if it can be done.

This morning, as we (the vanpool) were driving up the Steilacoom-DuPont Road, we saw the army guys out on the shooting range, with a big group of them sitting in a circle…

it looked like they were playing “duck duck goose.”

a small bathroom, all white wood and tile, a little worn, as if the bathroom in the Grey Gables had mated with the bathroom in the Washington St. apartment. standing in front of the closed door, next to a white porcelain pedestal sink, a silvered mirror over it, framed in white wood.

two girls, somewhere between 16 and 20, getting ready for a party or a night on the town. another woman, older than they are, maybe a little younger than I am; dark hair but pale skin, reminding me vaguely of an old roommate from the hell house, whose name always escapes me.

the girls (one in the short tub, the other sitting on the toilet) invite us out…I think I say something self-deprecating about being too old. they ask us how old, I say 30, she says 62, with a hard look in her eye.

you’re joking, I say, you can’t be any older than 26, and it doesn’t really matter anyway. she frowns, and leaves — or disappears, in the way of dreams.

what’s the deal with the age thing, asks the girl in the tub. I shrug.

it’s displacement, I say, displacement from the fear of death onto trivial number games. (or something like that.)

and as that revelation swarms across my entire brain, some noise: C coughing, or a cat turning over in its sleep, or the breeze outside, pulls me out of sleep just enough to disperse the dream. not so much to forget it, though.

I was hit with bursts of inspiration this weekend, and ended up making half a dozen earrings, plus the most complicated necklace I’ve yet tried.

actually, Sunday was a really nice day…our friend J came over to paint D&D miniatures with C (we played most of Saturday afternoon & evening!), and while they were doing that, I worked on jewelry. it was much the same this afternoon, only just C & me, with him drawing possible dungeons.

y’know what? it’s been just a really nice weekend. didn’t get near as much done as I wanted to, but I think I’m *set up* to get stuff done. made lists, bought materials to organize the utility closet, made my sister’s birthday present (!)….

and just plain relaxed with C, enjoying some time before the press of September sets in on us. not hiding out in the back den vegetating with movies, but being creative, basking in the cool almost-fall sun.

speaking of which…

I’m getting a second burst of growth in the garden. C went at my vegetable patch on Friday, yanking out weeks, and we discovered that:

# the eggplant hadn’t died, after all
# the spinach and arugula are reseeding
# the carrots are still kicking

so, yay. I’m going to pick a bouquet of cosmos tomorrow morning to take to work, so I have something pretty from my garden to look at this coming week.

I hesitate to say it (I have a long history of craptacular birthdays), but I think I might have a really nice 30th birthday.

I’ve been thinking about what I’ve been doing with this site, and I think I’m going to start another weblog.

no, seriously.

I was reading Keith’s post on re-branding Asterisk, and Shelley’s on her “apolitical self”….

and then I went to look at my home page. what am I doing here, exactly? which is also something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I have thoughts about web design/development, but I don’t write about them very often. I like taking pictures, but I don’t post them very often. (yeah, my last album is from April.) someday, I’d like to have a space for my fiction, poetry, and/or jewelry.

it may take me a while, but I think I’m going to do some work separating and at the same time re-combining.

# add a new weblog for technology writing (I want to talk to my boss about this before I start, since I’d like to write about work-related problems)
# move the photo albums off of the main page?
# maybe a little redesign (just tweak, I think, since in the main I’m happy with the look. I may, OTOH, see if I can get it working in IE. it is pretty abominable there!)
# figure out how to combine the feeds for anybody interested in the mega-Elaine feed
# figure out how to separate out the snapping link feeds by category.

what are my goals in all this? to express myself more fully. to make a name for myself in my chosen profession. to not get bored. 🙂

of course, none of this will happen right away…I have other, more important, things to deal with first.

I went back to work today, briefly, then went home with a cold (!) when C went to get his dad to help with some work on the kitchen. I’ll admit, I helped a little, inbetween sniffles. I learned some stuff, too, and dad was certainly a civilizing influence on the process.

it was lovely to look through the rough opening they put in the livingroom wall. there’ll be so much more light in there….

I think we can survive this project, and maybe by surviving the project we can survive each other.

I’m in a little different space than when I wrote a couple of days ago, I’m not sure if it’s better, but it’s different, anyway.

divorce is on hold for the time being…maybe if we can get the kitchen a lot further along this week, then it may go on hold indefinitely. I think that’s what I want.

bad stuff on Friday…I’m grateful to Kat for being an excellent friend and giving me the space I needed when I needed it. (we watched Gigantic, which I recommend to anyone who likes TMBG.) this is all turning out to be a test, incidentally, of whether I keep to what I’ve written in this space, now that I’m an older and wiser blogger. I think I will, but at this stage I guarantee nothing.

I’m checking the various electronic sources from the library…because of stupid filtered internet access, I can’t get into gmail, though. (stupid “family” cards.) or at least I’m assuming it’s the filtering.

on an entirely random note, the new Seattle library was cool, but I’d like to do a photoessay on its beautiful failures, which are now starting to be obvious, even to a first-time visitor.

so, yeah.

I didn’t want to be writing this…I still don’t want to be writing this, and I may not publish it.

I feel numb and sick…today we had the fight (short but loud) that really ended it. we drove out to the family court in stony silence and picked up paperwork. I’m at the library downtown because I don’t want to be at home. I don’t know how long it’ll be home or if I want it to be home.

I wish we didn’t have all this stuff…the car on which we (tho it’s in my name, WA is after all a community property state) owe as much again as what it’s worth, the house which needs more work now than when we moved in, 3 cats. at least no kids. he said that today…at least no kids.

I don’t know…I’ve been tired and angry and frustrated, sick of fighting. I’ve been in a bad way, he’s been in a bad way, and we reinforce each other’s awfulness.

but I don’t want it to be over. but it is. no way around that.