I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XII quite a bit lately trying to relax. I had to restart the game almost, from about ten hours in, which is rough as I was over a hundred hours in.

Hubbie is recovering fairly well. He’s still in a lot of pain, but he’s recovering well, and is able to eat solid food.

Another thing that I’ve been doing is writing quite a bit. I started a new FanFiction.net account: at this place so that I can re-write and edit my work without as much issue as I was having, and that’s going well. I’ve already re-submitted several pieces and they’re getting some hits, and I’ve been receiving some encouragement from reviewers, which is nice.

I had a flat tire over the weekend but was able to get it patched yesterday and didn’t have to replace the whole tire. My mechanic told me that in another 2000 miles they’ll rotate my tires again and then I should have another 10000 or so before I have to replace them, so that’s good to know as that’s going to be about $300-$350 to replace all the tires.

Today I have therapy, we’re doing weekly appointments now. I have to drive to a different office this week, but it’s only about fifteen minutes from my friend who is babysitting’s house, so that’s going to work out fairly well.

For the longest time I’ve made it a habit to avoid certain things, especially the celebrity gossip magazines and shows, but since I’ve been going to therapy regularly I’ve been catching bits of gossip via the magazines that they have in the waiting area, and also I tend to find that I catch TMZ in the evenings when my husband is at work given it comes on right before “The Simpsons” and “American Idol” (which is something else I never thought I’d be watching).

I’m turning into such a house wife.

I mean what do I care who is in drug rehab? Who is divorcing who? Who slept with who? Who waves at the camera and who flicks it off…but apparently I do.

Augh! Save me from myself!

I’ve been seeing the CommentLuv plugin on several of my friend’s blogs for a while now, but finally got around to installing it on my own. So, from now on when you comment on a post, provided you’re not an evil spammer type person you’ll get two linky-love for the price of one, as the plugin will find your last blog post and link it to the entry when it’s approved.

Thanks for commenting!

This was taken this morning but I keep forgetting to post things. If I look tired it’s because I was still recovering from the munchkin’s party. It’s part of Self Portrait Sunday meme. See what everyone else is doing this week by checking out the Self Portrait Sunday entry of the day. I had a pretty relaxing day though which I needed after the hectic week. The munchkin had fun running around the yard naked and bouncing in his paddling pool, and actually had a nap today because of that which was good too.

I’ve been editing and reworking some fanfiction that I wrote a while ago, and can hopefully now finish some things up. I can’t post anything until Tuesday though because the new fanfiction.net account is frozen for two days to prevent spam.

I think it’s safe to say the munchkin had a good birthday. He’s flaked out willingly and gone to bed. He wound up not having a nap. He got a lot of nice gifts, and we all ate a lot of good food, and he got to play with our friend’s children. We had a mini-incident, where he pushed my friend’s daughter because he wasn’t getting his way about something and had to be put in time-out but overall everyone got along well.

He was spoiled rotten really. I’ll post some pictures tomorrow of the amazing cake that my friend made. She made him the dragon last year, and this year she did a cake with several characters on it seeing as we couldn’t decide, so it had Sarah from “Land Before Time” on it, Clifford, Curious George and Elmo all sitting around presents and a little birthday cake. It was amazing. She’s apparently made a Smurf house before too. I’d love to see pictures of that one.

The munchkin himself got a nice list of gifts.
From my Mum he got two sets of pajamas, 101 Dalmations pictures for his room, a Thomas the Tank Engine interactive DVD/book, two plushie Cars from CARS.
From our friends he got sidewalk chalk, a ball, a training bicycle, $40, pillows, bed sheets, a toy chainsaw, and some clothes.
From us he got the party, Curious George in a police car, several board books (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the Very Busy Spider, Cookie Dance) and a t-shirt that says “Reasons why I’m in Trouble: 1. Won’t Share 2. Won’t Give Mum a Break 3. Refuse to Nap 4. Keep Breaking Stuff”
My Gran sent him a cute pants/t-shirt set that says “Cheeky Monkey” on it, and a Paddington Bear book and a teach/turn book which is neat, I haven’t seen anything like it before, it shows you how to tell time and count by turning dials on different pages to match the story.

Last Sunday we had a mini-party at my FILs and they got him a neat phone which you can record messages on so that you can talk to the child through the phone and a dump truck to play in the yard with, and a couple of outfits, a plushie basketball and a bubble wand.

One of our friends showed up early to clear out brush from the back yard so that we had more kindling for the fire pit. It kept a nice fire going for most of the afternoon so we were able to randomly make smores, and toast marshmallows, and then we also made hot dogs and burgers and turkey burgers, and our friends brought meatballs, black bottom pie, tiramisu and the one set brought the birthday cake.

We have tons of leftover food so we should be going for a few days. So, that’s nice. I’m tired after all the prep work over the past few days and definitely don’t want to be cooking or anything like that.

I think I’m going to go have myself a piece of birthday cake given I didn’t get any really today. I had a bit of the black bottom pie and the tiramisu though. It was so funny, the munchkin was so excited when I lit the candles that he didn’t wait until the end of “Happy Birthday” to blow them out. I wound up having to relight the right as the song was getting to the end so that he could blow them out again.

I think he had a fun time though. There was one hilarious point where a friend of ours was spinning the laser pointer around the living room floor and the kids were all going nuts chasing it. The grown ups had some fun tag-teaming each other in “Super Smash Brothers” which we got for the Wii last week. That was my game treat seeing as hubbie has “Grand Theft Auto IV” on pre-order.

I downloaded a clearance game to my cell phone last night because I was excited that every time you get to a certain score they donate money to Breast Cancer research. Check out Bliss Donations to Breast Cancer.
The game itself is really addictive, and each time you get to a landmark score something like 1000, 10′000 and so on from what I can tell you get a code which you can input on their website and they donate money to the cancer research foundation. I just got my third ribbon and they’re going to send me a bracelet.

Check it out. Boycott your boredom and donate to charity at the same time. That’s great. More games should do that.

It’s so easy in today’s society to get impatient. We’re so conditioned into thinking that there should be “instant fixes” for everything that we don’t want to wait. It’s so tempting to figure that you can pop some weight loss pills instead of actually rectifying problems with your diet and way of life. Why should I make the effort? I can just press this button and all the problems will go away.

The thing is that it’s not that easy and doing things in that fashion is a hollow victory, and really setting yourself up for relapse and failure because you’re not fixing the problem. You’re just masking the problem. Victory’s are best when hard won.

We’re rectifying issues within our household and diet over the past few weeks and continuing on. It is hard going but it’s worthwhile. I’ve cut back on the soda. I know I won’t be able to wean off it entirely, but I just have one can a day as a treat, and already I’m noticing some positive changes with my attitude and diet. I’m cutting back on portion sizes. That’s good too. For example, often I’ll combine leftover meat with egg and potatoes and make a breakfast concoction on the weekends, and would then sit there making sandwiches with the food. So, today I got myself two tortillas and filled them with some concoction and left the rest on the stove for other family members to eat. I’ve been fine with what I ate.

Small portions are the best bet. We have fruit for snack food now: grapes, bananas, melon pieces, rather than chocolate raisins and potato chips.

If I go for walks early in the morning it’s not so hot, and we can run around our yard which is very shady during the day and not get too overheated. Once our tax return comes in I’m going to look into membership to our local YMCA gym which is near my therapist’s office. That would be a good way to exercise and be in air conditioning, and my husband would like that too. He could work out while I take the munchkin swimming or something like that.

Anyone with a cat can relate very well to this song and video that were made by Corey “Mr. Safety” Williams.

This is one of those youtube gems that always makes me smile. I had to subscribe to smpfilms after watching this. I love some of the other Mean Kitty episodes, particularly the one where he tries to get a “Witch Doctor” to help stop Sparta biting.

I was reading an article on Bloggers for Dollars about How to Engage your Readers and it mentions making a special page for people to comment to you so they don’t feel like they’re commenting “off-topic” about things, and I thought that’s a neat idea! I know I’m always a little apprehensive about commenting on things on other people’s blogs in case I’m commenting ‘in the wrong spot’ so it’s not unforseen that people are feeling the same way.

I’m going to tag this into my ‘About’ section so that it’ll be easily accessible.

So, here, drop me a line! Say you stopped by! Wave! Tag me for a meme!
I’d love to get to know some of my visitors better. I see some of you at least popping up on ‘MyBlogLog’

The munchkin wanted in on the Self Portrait Sunday this week, and decided he wanted to show off. It’s hard to believe in just under two weeks he’ll be TWO. My baby’s disappearing into a strange little child.

To see how everyone else is fairing this week check out this week’s self portrait sunday post, which isn’t up yet. I’ll be checking back to see if I guessed the link correctly.

Anyway, now the munchkin is napping I’m going to see if I can’t get going on the new layout I want to do for this blog and another one that I have. I got a great commission from DuskFalls, my friend who did the wonderful lady for my tarot site so I want to make sure I can find a framework which will do it justice.