Posted by Ami-chan on July 3, 2009
I realized while I was at work that I’ve missed the anniversary of my first full year as an American citizen. I got my citizenship on April 24th last year. Last year was my first 4th of July as an American, but we really didn’t do very much as my husband was working.
This year we actually get to go to a big celebration that our friends put on every year. They’re going to have a cook out and they have a pool party and can set off fireworks because they have a large property right by a lake and all the neighbors come out on their docks and watch the displays.
We’ve gone there several times in years past and had a blast, even when the munchkin was much smaller.
I could really tell there was a holiday coming up with how busy it was at work today. Normally Friday’s are fairly constant but this was just non-stop. I got in at ten and we had a slightly slow period about 11:30 so I ran over and made myself a sub for lunch and I got about halfway through it (it was a six inch) before I had to stop and wait on customers and then I didn’t get to eat any more for about 45 minutes. I got two bites thanks to a customer seeing that I was halfway through lunch and telling me to eat a bit because they weren’t in a rush, and then I wound up having to throw the rest away because it sat out way too long to be safe any more.
It didn’t slow down again until after three when thunder broke and we had a huge rainstorm. Then I was barely able to count down the second register before we were swarmed again. The register locks up any time you’re $75 over $75 and makes you drop money, between 3:30 and 4 p.m. I had to drop SEVEN times that’s how busy we were!
Anyway, I hope that everyone state-side has a safe and happy 4th of July!
Posted by Ami-chan on June 29, 2009
I was putting blue nail polish on my nails the other night and was suddenly struck by the advances that have gone on in my life time. The things that the munchkin will never have to experience and may even think that I’m making up when I tell him how things used to be.
While he probably won’t ever care that it used to take about twenty minutes for nail polish to dry on your fingers instead of barely thirty seconds I imagine that he will be incredulous of the fact that phones used to be chained to not only the house but the walls and had rotary dials rather than push screens or the ability to call someone just because you ask them too.
I imagine also that he will not understand about records. In this age of ipods and phones that play mp3s it’s going to be really hard for him to imagine a large disc the size of your head with grooves that ran on a needle and not lasers, or that when his mother was a child they didn’t even have walkmans until she was almost eight and they used cassette tapes not digital information.
I see the way he asks to immediately see the pictures on the digital camera when we take them so the idea of film completely alien. I remember when we used to have to wait FOUR days to see the pictures we had taken and be so SO very careful with the camera so that the film wasn’t exposed otherwise the pictures were GONE. He found some negatives the other day that had wound up in a box in his room and, of course, there was no hope of explaining what they were and why he shouldn’t touch them or eat them.
I remember also my first computer. It was just a monitor, and not a flat screen monitor, a BIG HULKING monstrosity of a monitor that my mother and I could barely lift, and it had a keyboard, but no tower or hard drive box. The keyboard was almost two inches thick because the computer’s memory system was inside it and it also had to have space to hold the cassette tapes which ran the games. The games would take about ten minutes to load and were all in 64-bit pixels. There was no Windows on the computer not even 3.1 it had no GUI at all when it booted up the screen was just blue and yellow and all the commands ran in DOS. I used to sit for hours typing in strings of commands to make the computer play guessing games with me like “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral” or make it run fireworks shows on it’s screen. Now those sort of screen savers are common place if not tame.
Posted by Ami-chan on
My son is three years old and was trying to be helpful this morning. He was fetching and carrying various items of clothing out of the laundry room with me and then started piling up other clothes in the hopes of us putting those away too, not realizing that those were from the “dirty laundry pile”.
As I left the bedroom I asked him to come back out too. He’s not allowed to stay in our bedroom by himself for a variety of reasons. I’m crossing the dining room when I hear the door slam shut but not the distinctive clomp-clomp of him following after me.
I turn back around and open the door. I find a wall plaque of an eagle that is my husbands is on the bed, and the wing on the left side is broken.
“What happened to this?” I ask.
“I don know,” he answers.
“Did you do this?”
“Emmitt did it,” he says pointing to Kore’s cat who is curled up on one of the file boxes in our room looking rather sleepy and perplexed.
“Emmitt did this?” I hold up the broken eagle.
“Yes, and Nim did it,” he says, meaning my cat who has been upstairs all morning, “and BF too,” Kore’s other cat who is outside.
“Hm,” I say, “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me the truth?”
“Nim did it and BF did it,” he nods and folds his arms.
“I think you need to go to your room until you’re ready to tell me the truth.”
“No, I think not.”
Guess who won?
Posted by Ami-chan on June 24, 2009
I’m striving to re-work my online presence so that things are more streamlined and I an work more easily and without being or feeling so overwhelmed.
I’ve been having quite a few issues lately with motivation. However a lot of that comes from the fact that I’ve been having a depressed episode. I dislike writing that because it feels so…contrived, but it’s the truth. I have to acknowledge that I have depression. In fact I apparently have a depressive disorder — according to my medical diagnosis sheet, which really shouldn’t be surprising there are a lot of people with depression in my family, and have been for several generations.
However, up until recently I was not taking medication. I weaned myself off meds last August when I ran out of insurance covered psychiatric visits figuring that I was doing better and therefore didn’t need medication any more. However slowly but surely it’s been whittling away at me and I haven’t realized. Depression is sneaky, especially when you have other things going on both physically and mentally. It’s easy to figure that it’s all in your head because it IS all in your head, but if it’s chemical — well, then it’s difficult to psych yourself out of it. I’ve been trying but it can only go so far, especially when the balance is out of whack.
It saps creativity, energy, drive, desire to do ANYTHING, and generally makes you a bear to live with and there’s nothing that can be done, except actually take pills. Which I have been doing, although admittedly sporadically, it’s hard to get things into routine, especially when the meds have to be taken with food and I have a tendency to forget to eat in the mornings.
I’ve been prescribed Celexa. It’s the first time I’ve been on that medication. Previously I’ve been on Lexapro, Trazodone and Wellbutrin.
We’ll see how things go. So far I can feel that my mood is getting better, but it’s slow. However I’ve definitely been getting more energy gradual as it may be, which is a good thing.
Posted by Ami-chan on June 20, 2009
My cat has a problem keeping hold of collars. She’s gone through three in the space of a year, if not more because occasionally we find them again and get them back on her only to have them disappear.
I keep saying I’m not going to replace the collar this time when she loses it, but then I find myself going through the pet supplies at our local store getting her a new collar and a replacement tag.
Maybe I’m the one who has a problem, but we do a lot for our kitty family members, I think it’s just the nature of me. It’s important to me that she has the collar so that if she gets separated from us there’s a chance someone will be able to return her, and animal control certainly should be able to.
I don’t know what I’d do if she ever got hurt. I’d be devastated that’s for sure, but I try to remind myself that I would be practical and if it was the case I would look at what was fiscally feasible let alone what would be best for her. However I know that if push came to shove I’d try everything I could to save her, despite claiming that she’s “just a cat”, because deep down she’s more than just a cat.
I also feel for friends when their pets are not doing well. Two friends of mine, one of their kitty-baby’s swallowed a sewing needle and has had to have surgery. They’re asking if anyone is so inclined that they give donations to help them cover the costs of this surgery: you can read more about it here. I’ve never met their cats, but I know the couple very well and they’ve always helped us out when they can, so I pass along the information if there are other cat loves out there who are able to help it would be appreciated.
Posted by Ami-chan on
A friend alerted me to this story out of Bozeman, Montana: Town Requires Job Seekers to Reveal Social Media Passwords.
As part of the background check process the town officials require their job applicants to list any websites, email and social media sites they are members of, including MySpace and Facebook and give their passwords. Their reasoning appears to be that because they have people applying for jobs with police, fire and various other things that it’s important to see the integrity of these people and that would be a way to do it.
Although to give out passwords is a violation of personal safety and in some cases site policy (as in the case of Facebook).
When I see this article though it reminds me of the case a few years ago where a police officer in Lexington, Kentucky was fired over the content of his MySpace page. There have been other similar cases involving other police officers, school teachers and public officials.
I’m also reminded of the fact that my husband, who is a police officer, made it a point to not create a MySpace page, or a Facebook profile. His online presence is very minimal. Any of his social activity occurs in the non-virtual plane, because he considers his job and social status more important than having an online profile. He often tells me that the internet should just be for looking up movie times and reading news, and if he ever wants to play a game he just uses his XBox or the Wii.
When he first explained this to me I was confused. I’m very active online, while I no longer really update MySpace I do have Facebook. I have livejournal. I have dreamwidth. I’m on MyBlogLog and yahoo. I have IM and skype (though I don’t use it very much). Though I do not give out a lot of personal information online and I keep hubbie very anonymous, at his request, I am still pretty “out there”. It’s another example of how opposite we are. Except that I’m careful what I put up on the sites. It’s not anything and everything. It’s just things that are either fluff or updates for relatives on how the munchkin is doing or things that are going on with our household.
I could understand a job wanting to know how many of these sites a person participated in because it might be an indicator of how much time they would spend at the job trying to use the internet for personal things which should be kept outside the workspace, but asking for passwords is a clear violation of privacy, and I hope that the legal recourse sides against the town in this.
Posted by Ami-chan on June 18, 2009
Today the builder came and fixed up the air conditioning cabinet so that it’s more stable. He charged us $50. So, there’s a bit of good luck. I was afraid it was going to be several hundred to get everything sorted out — if not more, because we would have to get someone to take the entire air conditioner out and replace the board and put the air conditioner back in, but we can get away with just shoring up the existing board and sealing it with protective waterproof paint.
That gives us a bit of a break for the time being. Plus this week I spent under $100 at the grocery store and next week we have our first pick up with Angel Food which should last us for about three weeks except for the uber-perishables like milk and bread which we have to buy every week.
So, here’s hoping I can spring for my bridesmaid’s dress within the next week or so to give me time to get it altered if I have to and find shoes before the wedding in August.
Posted by Ami-chan on June 10, 2009
I’ve been playing a new game on Facebook called Restaurant City which is another of those “addicting fun” games.
You play a restaurant owner, and can hire yourself and friends to work in your restaurant as chefs, waiters and cleaners, and other people from facebook have sprites that come into your restaurant. When you get to a high enough level you have to add bathrooms to your restaurant so that your clientele are happy and you can win and trade ingredients to make different dishes. While they’re expanding the game in various ways I don’t know that they’ll ever offer diet supplements to the patrons. That’s probably something reserved for the new version of The Sims.
Posted by Ami-chan on
Things are both up and down at the house right now. On the upside the air conditioner is all but fixed. We were only without AC for a few hours on Monday but it felt like forever.
We have a builder coming to give us an estimate on replacing the board that the unit is sitting on, that’s the biggest headache, how we’re going to come up with the money for him to do that — but we need to do it so the unit doesn’t get more damaged. I’m not sure how long we’ll be without AC will he fixes that either, but I keep reminding myself this will be worth it in the long run, and at least it’s not the height of summer, even if it is pretty warm right now.
The trees have become secondary to everything else. We’re looking into shopping for extra tiles at Habitat for Humanity which is a place that my therapist suggested. Other than that we’re going to see about getting broken boxes from the local hardware store, but that’s going to come after we find out how much it’s going to be to replace the chipboard. We can survive with bare concrete for a while, not losing the AC unit is the main issue.
Posted by Ami-chan on
My husband and I were talking the other day about the various jobs that people take and languish in, and about how a lot of people in our own generation even some people we know aren’t really sure what they want to do with their life and sort of meander around.
I told him that I know what I want to do with my life but it’s just not really feasible. He asked what that was and I reminded him about my wish to open a store and do hypnotherapy at the store and operate out of it. I said if push came to shove I wouldn’t mind going back to school to learn about computers more and then do an IT job search but we really can’t afford for me to go back to school. Hubbie suggested I might be able to see if there are some tech companies who would be willing to pay me for my education, which is a thought.
I’m just not sure how feasible it is either. Can’t hurt to look I suppose. If I could pull of something like that without freaking out or winding up having a fibromyalgia overload perhaps I could stop the disability process.
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Happy 4th
