I’m too hard on myself. I have known this for a long time, it’s always been this way, but it does lead to problems. I stress out too much over things, I think about them too much, and then when things do go wrong I tend to worry that it’s my fault until I’m assured that it’s not. So honestly, with most mistakes what is the worst outcome? Is it worth stressing myself out over? I don’t work in a business where people’s lives are on the line with my choices and actions. I need to just learn to relax and detatch.

I guess what spurred this comment on was the fact that I’ve been in a lousy mood recently, not particularly receptive to anyone or anything, depressed and crankie, I keep getting into moods where I’ll make elitist comments about everything I see on televison, and those moods are usually rare. I’m still unsure if this is all because of a change in medication, or still coming down from those months living with Michael’s mother, or just little stresses that are in my life that come with having a job and owning a house that I just need to learn to deal with. I need to cheer up, not even chocolate has been helping, all I’ve wanted to do is sleep since Thursday.

I haven’t been online since thursday either, so part of my extreme want to sleep might be that reading all day gets to be a little boring. *sigh*

Oh, we “fixed” the oven. Turns out there is a pilot light in the bottom, accessible by removing the broiler pan at the bottom, that had gone out when the gas was shut off for repairs shortly before we moved in. Of course Michael had to pull out the stove and follow the gas lines to discover it %)

The sewage smell coming from the washer pipe has stopped. I think this sewage smell problem was something they had fixed, maybe that first load of laundry was just a fluke, maybe some nastiness still stuck in the pipes, I did three loads of laundry this weekend and there was no smell. Still, the hose is held in place with duct tape, and that’s not cool.

On friday I stayed home, partially because I wasn’t physically feeling good, but I know that was probably just due to being depressed. I did some more cleaning, and went through a few of my boxes of stuff. One box was particularly interesting, and I was so amused by it I decided to sit down and take some notes on what I found, from my notes…:

• A test I took back in 3rd grade that got me out of Special Ed. My school had been fairly agressive in it’s efforts to find children with learning disabilities and to remedy them, I’m a perfect example of one of their successes, I was able to get out of special ed and my learning disability hasn’t played a major part in my life.
• A bill for an emergency room visit when I was a senior in High School. I was sitting in English class one September morning and I had a grand maul seizure, this is the bad kind, and I was taken from the school in an ambulence. I don’t remember anything until I woke up in the hospital luckily, but it definately didn’t do much for my social life, such as it was. “Service date” was September 11, 1998, so it wasn’t even two weeks into the school year! And the total cost was $1,520.35 not covered by insurance because we didn’t have any, sometimes I wonder how my parents did it.
• A “Journal” published yearly by my High School “The Bartleby” this one for 1999, made of of artwork and writings typically submitted by the artist. I wouldn’t normally have bought this, and I didn’t submit my story to it, my English teacher Ms. Murphy did. So in a two page spread is my story “Cousins” you couldn’t imagine my surprise when I realized they had printed it, I had always assumed my writing was sub-standard (oh, right, this is me being hard on myself again)
• A “Student Of The Week” award from Mr. Casey’s class in 6th grade. We all gone one eventually, I’m not sure why this was kept, my crazy mother.
• A baby picture of me, I was 10 months old, blonde hair blue eyes, boy I was cute! I was holding a Cookie Monster stuffed toy. I should scan this when I get around to
  buying a new scanner.
• A printed 50 page javascript tutorial. I wanted to learn javascript once, and this was a good tutorial. Eventually I gave up, frustrated with how much things differed between IE and Netscape (this was circa 1999).
• A printed version of the mIRC 5.41 help file. As much as I don’t support mIRC these days, back then (and possibly now?) they had a damned good help file, you could learn to script anything from that, and it’s how I learned how to make the first R2D2 bot.
• A “System Resource Report” from basic old R2 back when he was a 450 mhz p3, in 1999. It’s funny how much of this makes sense now, back then I could barely get through the first page.
• A list of email addresses from people I knew when I first got online. Wow, I don’t even remember some of these people. Oh, and on the back is some of their old webpages, I wonder if any of these still work…
• The documentation for the first IRC server I ever ran, leia2.dyndns.org back in 1999. This server ran with wIRCD, a project which I believe is dead now, it was a simple to set up ircd for Windows, even gave you steps to go through to set up your first config file. Eventually I had a couple friends who ran servers too and we linked them up, had barely any population except for ourselves and a couple other friends, but it was fun! Too bad I don’t talk to any of those guys anymore, or know how to get into contact with them, those were good times.
• A “Break for moose, it could save your life” bumper sticker. These were given away by the N.H. Fish and Game department one summer, and was just too tempting to resist picking up, I should put this on my desk when I get one.
• A picture my youngest sister Annette drew for me when she was little, it’s a chinchilla and it says “Eve-y” this is so cute!
• “Maydra en una Adventura” and “Maydra y Pie Pequeno” a couple of childrens books I wrote for spanish class projects. This was a great little project, as much as I disliked Senor Crosby (high school spanish teacher) he did have good ideas from time to time. When I get a new scanner maybe I will scan these stories and put them up in some web viewable format.
• A bunch of old emails from back when I used to print out emails:
  • Some stupid forwards, one of an article published in a local paper about the kids in the school shootings (great article actually), a fwd from my sister Heather about internet addiction, this is from January 1999 sure didn’t take me long to get addicted, and here’s a fwd describing all the wonderful ways to use the word “fuck” I think my old buddy Tom_Servo sent me this.
  • An email from my friend Leslie in September of 1999 telling me about how Missouri sucks and she wished she was back in Maine *chuckles* how times change!
  • And email from Michael telling me how to set up my external dial up modem, this was 1999, the summer I was in Philadelphia for the first time living with my Aunt, I had never used dial up before. Michael was pretty funny in this email %) We were just friends at the time, dating other people, went on a double date that summer once even, very weird looking back now.
  • A few emails from my buddy Mark in Poland. I haven’t talked to him in a long time, I should email him sometime…
  • Emails from a friend of mine in India. Yeah I was all over the globe with my email buddies when I first got online, it was really amazing to me that I could really be communicating with someone a world away from me. Last I heard she had moved to California to study there, I should email her too…
  • Oh emails of bad teenage poetry! While going through my short bad poetry stage a few other former members of #13thHour were too, so we’d hold Poetry Readings. Yep, all those current members be glad you weren’t around then! *grin* After the readings some of the people would send me their poems and I’d post them to my website (then an angelfire site). It was actually a lot of fun, even if all our poetry was horrible.
  • All sorts of short
    emails from people I haven’t thought about in too long, Plas, Brian, Laran, Lela (er, well some things were meant to be buried).
  • Here are some of those stupid surveys you fill out that ask stupid questions. My guess is that I printed them out to read while I was offline. Crazy.
  • Scizor town newsletters. You see, as much as I tend to pass myself as well-adjusted I did do some odd things in my times of high school loneliness, like elect my stuffed animals to office for positions around my bedroom. Oh yes, we had a president, vice president, police chief, treasurers, all sorts of wonderful officials. I have a town meeting or two on cassette at home, I should burn them. Well there were also newsletters made up with articles about the town and current events that I cared about. In my defense, although I was in High School while doing all this it wasn’t alone! My sister Heather played with me, her stuffed animals were part of it too.

So why on earth do I have all this crap? Because I’m a packrat! And this stroll down memory lane was fun, so it did do some good!

I’m shopping for a desk. I decided that I hate desks that are specifically designed to be computer desks. I hate those little pull out keyboards, I hate those little “cabinets” that they make to put your computer in, and I hate that they generally don’t have much desk space for when I choose to do some writing or bill-paying. Most of all I hate that most of them I find are crappy and cheap, all “fake wood” that bubbles up after 6 months of (ab)use. So I’m thinking with going with just a basic desk, two drawers on each side, and a flat surface. I am going to head out to some stores this weekend to take a look at different brands so I’ll be better prepared while shopping online. So anyone have any pointers as to where I should shop online? Or should I just go to staples and pick up something there? I want a nice, basic desk that will last, and I want it to be under $300.

We have hard water. I’ve mentioned this before, but it is an issue. I’ll need to do some research about how to deal with it. Soap doesnt lather up like it should, and although I don’t give much thought to my hair, I have noticed that it’s not acting like it should, I’ve had a bad hair day for nearly a week. And I’ll need to know how to attack this from a cleaning prespective, when we moved in the sink in the bathroom was so coated with white mineral deposits that when we saw it chipping inside we thought it was the sink chipping! Nope, just deposits, and Michael was able to clean it up very nicely. So how to avoid this in the future? Keep up with frequent cleanings I guess, I have a feeling the previous owner of this house wasn’t exactly Mr. Clean… My biggest concern is the buildup around faucets, we’ll need to make sure they are cleaned periodically so that we don’t have another leak problem like in the kitchen. Hard water sucks.

I got an email from my Aunt Elaine tonight. Apparently my Aunt Mary Ellen is married again, for the 4th time! She’s marrying the guy she cheated on her last husband with. This guy is like 26 years old, she’s about 34… it’s just weird, I’m dating someone younger than her husband!

Hopefully we’ll be headed home soon. I’m not coming into work tomorrow because they don’t need me, and I hate getting out of bed and coming to work before the break of dawn if I don’t need to. Besides, I am starting a new project soon and I’ll have plenty of days where I only WISH I could stay home %)

That’s it I guess. *wanders off*