More About My Satanic Phone and Also a Reflection on Last Years Resolutions

Well it is about 4:00 AM on a Wednesday and there is no reason in the world that I should be up right now except that my cell phone has decided that I should be... so here I am trying to do something productive with the hour and a half between when my cell phone startles me into consciousness due to some apparent mechanical error and the time when I asked it to wake me up, which is 5:00 AM... I tried to just go back to sleep after my rude 3:33 am awakening... but as usual my phone chirping about a text message that doesn’t exist startled the begeezus out of me to the point where I think my heart nearly exploded.I tried pulling the battery out of my phone and restarting it last night... and it still apparently wants me up at 3:33, so I have decided to make this a positive thing... I had been toying with the idea of pushing my wake up time back from 5:00 am to 4:30 am so that I could try to write or do something creative with my productive morning time hours, so here I am doing just that. SCORE!

Maybe my phone is not trying to be evil after all maybe its just trying to help me... nah actually today I think it's more evil than ever because when I signed into google the "optical illusion" application on my google home page was this picture of a turn of the century lady wearing a big hat in a train station that was paired with a mirror image of the same woman in the same train station or something and somehow that image paired with its mirror image looked exactly like Satan’s face... so I know its a stretch and it has nothing to do with my phone, but I am still going to take that as evidence that my cell phone is in fact the devil... oh and also i copied that picture and was trying to paste it into this blog, but couldn't... so I am going to go ahead and also blame my lack of technological picture pasting know-how on my phone as well... oh and also a lovely red message just appeared at the bottom of this page that said " could not contact blogger you may not be able to accurately publish or save your entry"... fuck you phone why do you have to go and mess with blogger like that... anyway, enough about the stupid phone...

Yesterday in my ample ample... AMPLE free time at work I decided to write a story... well that story ended up being a long rant about how I hate Home Automated Living (aka HAL), the system which controls the lights in our house and welcomes me home and is in general like a scary robot watching over Tony and I at every moment we are in this house and also how I hate my cell phone. Anyway, I decided that my rant was somehow really clever and entertaining so I posted it onto blogger... and then I decided to re-read the other blog posts I had done previously... Not to toot my own horn, but I really liked the one about you tube and the one about paint chips, but most of the others weren't that great... Anyway, even though it wasn't a beautiful collection of lovely flowing pros I did find the entry about new years resolutions to be interesting to me personally, so I figure i might as well record my progress on my resolution check list for posterity... or at least for me to look at next time I am bored at work and remember that I have a blog…

I did lose more weight… I now weigh about 137 lbs... didn’t get to 125…I weighed 130 for a while and hung strong at 135 for a while, but I gained a few pounds over the holidays and I have lost 1 or 2 of those pounds again, so I think I’ll be back to 135 at some point, but I just love food too damn much to really expect myself to keep my weight at 125 for any length of time. I suppose if I really wanted to have a shitty month or two I could lose 10 or 12 pounds just to say that I did, but once I hit that mark I think I'd just jump right the hell off of it again and bounce back to 135ish again... so I think I'll just skip that step... In short I'm going to give myself a big fat check mark for the weight loss (haha I didn't even intend that pun at first... I guess I just can't help but be clever.)

I did save some money… most of it went towards purchasing a house and none of it went into my IRA, but given the current economic crisis that we are in I’d say I’m very pleased with those things. So I am checking the saving money off of my list.

I did not finish a story last year… upon rewatching part of City of Angels over Christmas break I was shocked to learn that somehow my story about “Kara and the shadow guy” was pretty much City of Angels, but with a “shadow” instead of an angel… and I think that plagiarism is vial and I didn’t realize that I had been doing that, so I pretty much am not going to finish that story … I still love to think that I’ve got a novel in me somewhere, but stories were never really my thing. Blogging is actually much more my style… I wish now that I had perused journalism more in school… its definitely a competitive field to work in, but if I had the proper education I might have been able to compete… its just the idea of interviewing people was always too intimidating… I wish I had been on a school paper at least once though to see if I might actually end up getting over it… oh wait I just remembered I did write a story and I threw a really half assed ending on it just so i could say i finished it… I hated it, but the concept was good… it was the story of my first “Black Friday”… I think black Friday is a holiday that has a lot of potential for good story writing so I will try to work on that and make it better... so to sum up... I'm going to have to say that I did not really accomplish the story writing thing... these things take time though.

…. I don’t think I learned much Spanish, but I did put a “Spanish word of the day” on my google home page… oh and Jose is always saying “saw-le” like every time he talks to one of the guys on the phone and he said that is the Spanish equivalent of saying “right on” so I learned that… and every once in a while a google spanish word sticks… no examples come to mind, but I'm sure that I must have learned something from that word of the day thing...

Might have updated my resume and looked at jobs… but then the economy started to tank and I decided I’ll just be happy where I am for the time being, but be open to anything that decides to plop itself in my lap… the current plan is to fix this house up some sell it (for a huge profit hopefully ) and then move to Arizona… when I’m in Arizona I want to either have my own business or just have Tony provide for me... we'll see how that goes... anyway, finding a new career takes time, so I think I'll need more than a year for that... knowing what the hell I might want to do that someone would pay me for is a good starting point... so I'll keep looking out for that one …

I didn’t take any classes… I suck…. And I really should take something... Anything to keep the learning happening.

I didn’t go dancing with Tony anywhere nice, but I did get to wear my prom dress to a nice restaurant and eat fondu in it… so that is pretty much the same thing as dancing I think.

I don’t think I was particularly productive with my free time at work this year, but I did feel like I had slightly less free time at work and that is good and also I seem to be getting better at entertaining myself and not feeling bored, so that’s also good

…I did a total of 3 daily writing exercises I think… and then it got boring, but once again I did put an application on my google home page called “daily writing tips” and I read that about twice a week and sometimes there is good advice in there (which I never follow)but at least I am taking some steps.

I did not go camping in big sur, but I went camping in a couple other fantastic places so that is just as good.

I did win a poker game and took home about $150.00… that rocked... I'd like to do that again... only next time I would like to win more money.

I think I have made a new friend…I have hung out with Emily like 3 times outside of work stuff, so I think that I can safely call her a friend and I figure if I make 1 new friend every year and try not to lose any of the old ones then I am going to have a fuck load of friends by the time I die… on that note I do think I should try to reconcile with Carly… so I’ll work on that

…well my alarm to tell me to wake up is going to go off in about 2 minutes so I am going to wrap this meandering whatever up… blogging is cathartic though hopefully I’ll do it more…

Evil Robots

“The outside temperature is 35 degrees” our house’s loud electronic voice announced to me this morning as I shuffled into the kitchen. I groaned.

“H.A.L.”,our home automation system is my boyfriend’s favorite hobby, but personally, I have never cared for the idea of having my house talk to me and track my movement around our home. I’ve seen enough movies to know that this is the sort of thing that always lead to robots enslaving mankind… The great computer robot take over is probably still a few years away though… for now I just find it especially annoying that H.A.L.’s bad news about the current temperature or rain is the first thing I hear in the morning… I admit it is helpful information when it comes to determining if I am going to wear my red hoody or my yellow rain jacket, but still I like to at least have some breakfast in my tummy before I have to think about how miserable my bike ride to work will be. (It felt like I had been smacked in the face with a frozen aluminum baseball bat when I walked outside this morning by the way... 35 is like frozen hell!!!)

I think HAL has been conspiring against me with my cell phone lately too ...because my cell decided about a week ago that it would be really funny at exactly 3:33 AM every morning to chirp like it does when I received a new text message, yet when I look at my phone there are no new text messages… I have to keep checking my phone every morning though just in case it’s not crying wolf… The only reason that someone would text you at 3:33 AM is if they were dying… and I don’t want to be the woman you see on the news saying how she wished she would have just checked her phone because if she had she would have been able to save so and so from their terrible fate… no one was dying this morning though… no one had used their last bit of strength to reach out to me with a panicked SOS and tell me that their computer had gone mad and was violently choking the life out of them…. Nope… its just my damn crazy phone making a noise that is so startiling that it takes me at least half an hour to get my heart rate down enough to fall asleep again… unfortunately though, my actual alarm goes off at 5:00 AM… so I am just barely getting into my REM cycle when I’m startled awake again… when it’s the real alarm going off I have no trouble accidentally falling back asleep right away though.

The first couple times I only slept for about 10 minutes after my alarm went off, so that wasn’t a big deal, but today I slept for half an hour, which meant I had to skip my shower… I guess there are worse things in the world than not showering for a day especially since I don’t particularly enjoy showering anyway…. I mean at least no one was choked to death by evil computer robots in the middle of the night while trying to text me to come save them…

Technology really seems to be ruining my mornings though… I usually love mornings. I love the silence and the crispness and the possibilities that the day holds… but now stupid HAL and stupid Cell phone are just being noisy brats and robbing me of my sweet solicitude... evil robots!