Inside the Fishbowl

Memorial Day 2008

I hardly want to write about my Memorial Day.  Our plans for the day were rained out, and my plans at night, going to the Death Cab for Cutie concert at Thanksgiving Point, turned out so below my expectations, that I am hesitant to write more for fear that I will come off too bitter and too old.  Let's just say that if you're going to make attendees wait for 2 and a half hours for the concert to start, the sound engineering better be so spectacular that every word comes out crystal clear, not like that garbled mess that we heard last night!

HGTV Makes Me So Mad

I'm still on the mend. I've had the flu all week. It's been torture. Jeremy's leaving to go to Florida on Monday morning, and I'm almost glad. The time alone at night will give me time to get caught up.

(NOTE: Feel free not to comment, or make some sort of very tongue in cheek response--tell me what's annoying to you lately. Whatever. This is mostly in jest, though somewhat a poor me post. Neither of which should be taken seriously whatsoever!)

Since I've spent the better part of this week laying on the couch, I've watched a lot of children's programming and a lot of HGTV. Ususally I love HGTV. But lately I can hardly stand to watch. I think it's because my house is completely undecorated. I'm watching reDesign with Kenneth Brown. Is anyone familiar with this show? I love it. I love Kenneth's designs. They are absoloutely gorgeous! I want him to come design my house--or at least be able to buy all of my furniture from Lofgren's in Salt Lake City, neither of which are very likely to happen in the near future. Waaaaaahhhh! I know, poor me. I just need to vent. It's a by-product of the mind numbing nature of HGTV's "reality" programming where reality actually check out, not to be found anywhere. Have you ever noticed that there's never any talk of budget? It's like they want to make it seem like these people have unlimited resources, and almost nobody has unlimited resources! Also, what's the deal with all of these childless couples, and is it wrong that I can't wait until they have a baby and it spits up all over their beautiful custom sofa? OK. Enough. Did I mention that I have a temperature of 101? Is that enough to induce delirium?

I didn't think UPS could make it any worse, but they did!

Yes. They managed to make things worse, but in a good way, sort of. I had some money left over this month so I decided to order myself a Mini Binder from russell+hazel. Of course I needed the filler paper to go inside, but russel+hazel was out, so I ordered it from See Jane Work. Today I got the shipment from See Jane Work. So what's the problem? I ordered my paper this weekend. The package left on Monday morning and I received it today. I didn't have to pay extra to get my package so quickly. UPS just did it's job, and I got what I ordered, when I expected it. But, to make matters worse, the UPS man did not even knock on my door. If he had I might have been able to find out if my other package was on his truck. But no. Now I'll probably get my binder tomorrow, and still no package from Paper Source. I'm beyond frustrated.

But, I fear that I'm really starting to sound bitter, so I thought I'd post some things that really make me happy. Sometimes I just need a reminder.

First, I have to ask, why can't all apples come this way? If they did I would never forget to eat an apple a day! Thanks Amie. It was such a nice surprise to open my door and find this delicious treat!

Second, Kaitlin's famous bedhead has been nearly absent for several months. Don't get me wrong, her hair is usually still a mess in the morning or after a nap, but not spectacularly so. I think it's getting to long for that. A few mornings ago, though, it was like old times. Some things are just so comforting! ;)

Third, Alex fell asleep in his swing this morning. It was unexpected because he'd only been up for about an hour and 20 minutes. When I noticed him his arm was straight up in the air. He may look a little awake in this picture. I swear this kid has paper thin eyelids. The flash always wakes him up. We don't have any great pictures of him sleeping.

Finally, I've received some good mail that I've not posted yet. Jenny sent me this chocolate bar, which I, again, did not take pictures of before I started eating it, and this cute pink and brown photo album. Thanks, Jenny! Jill sent me some good mail labels, which are currently downstairs in the notebook I use to keep track of my life. For some reason Jill was under the impression that I didn't want to participate in the whoel good mail thing. She says I said something about it. I honestly don't remember (not surprising!) but if I did I must have been out of my head at the time. Good mail is great!

Just some thoughts

I have three things to say. The first two are about Typepad.

One more thing I love about Typepad: It allows you to write several posts at once and then tell it when to publish those posts. All of my posts last week were written on the same day, but published one day apart. Is it cheating? Maybe, but one of my sturggles with blogging on Blogger (and this, by the way, is not a complaint against Blogger) was that I would have days where I had several posts in my mind. I always felt like I had to chose one so I didn't flood my blog. Then, since I'm totally unorganized, I wouldn't write down my other ideas for future use. Now, I can just dash off a few entries at once and that's it. I don't even have to save them as drafts and remember to go back and publish them.

One thing I'm not liking about Typepad so much is that there is no way, as far as I can tell, to pull images directly off the Internet and publish them to a blog. It was so nice with Blogger to be able to upload an image from, say, Google images adn have it appear on my blog. Now I have to save the image to my desktop and post that way. It's a small inconvenience, but since I'm mostly using Jeremy's laptop for posting, and I would like to keep all of my blog images on my computer (it's one of my many type-A quirks) I find that I post less becasue of the self imposed pressure to always have a picture with my posts. You can see I got over it with this one, but only after a lot of blood, sweat and tears!

The third thing is a rant aginast UPS. I am seriously about to lose it. If I don't get my package today I'm going to blow my top. I ordered the last things I needed to finish up my Pink Christmas stuff on Thursday night last week. I paid extra for 2nd Day Air delivery. A lot extra. The delivery was supposed to be made Monday. And here it is Wednesday and I still don't have my package. What's worse is that I can't get UPS to help me over the phone, so I emailed their customer support. I can't get Paper Source to respond to me. They say they're having technical difficulties with their phone and to please address all cutsomer service issues through email. So I'm stuck here fuming and checking my email obsessively to see if anyone has responded. After my Visiting Teacher leaves I'm going to call UPS again and pull a Jana-I'm going to elevate the situation about the simple phone reps head and start demanding to speak to a manager. I want my package. I mean to get it!