Bulleted

Mood: sleepy
Hair: probably a mess due to the two-hour nap in the recliner
Eyes: tried, dry and not fun
Listening to: Football (Eagles @ Vikings)

Since I have few coherent, lengthy thoughts, I'm throwing what I do have at the blog. Cuz I can. Y'know?

• Beast ran the sound and light at church today, so he had to be present at both services. He called after he arrived for first service to warn us (me) that the roads were dangerously icy, especially in our subdivision. They were insanely bad, but we all made it there and back safe and sound. About half an hour ago--5 p.m. or thereabouts--the road crew came around and salted our streets for the first time today. Nice. Thanks, guys, for being right on top of that.



• Worship this morning was the first time I've been 'at church' on Sunday since...uh...Thanksgiving? And I would manage to pick today: the first week of every month is Communion Sunday, so that lengthens the service, plus today was a baptism, which means more time. I don't begrudge the time usually, but I was awfully antsy today. And then, suddenly, as the pastor held the baby and swept water onto her head, I couldn't stop crying. I didn't leave, but I really wanted to for a minute or two. Nathanael would be two now. (And no, the mom did not breastfeed in public this morning: the baby slept through the entire service.)



• None of the teams I want to see in the Super Bowl are winning this year. Our big three main teams--Packers, Browns, Broncos--are out of the running already because they didn't make the playoffs. (Denver fired Mike Shanahan--WTF?) This weekend's games were either two teams we cared nothing about or the 'wrong' team won, not that we care that much. The one that is going on now isn't boding well for the team we sort of want to win. Next week doesn't look a lot better. The Super Bowl could be a giant Who Cares? on February 1. I may end up cheering like a girl: for the best-looking team/quarterback/coach. Oh, well, thank God for the ads!!



• I haven't decided what my 2009 Word of the Year should be. That's why it hasn't been changed in the sidebar. Maybe I'll pick one tomorrow, once the holidays are really over and school has restarted. Stay tuned.



• BIG HUGE THANKS to Betsy for passing the word on Jango!!!! I frickin' LOVE it!! And it's free. Why was I spending money on Launchcast?? 'Course, now that LC is going, Jango will probably start charging too.



• Speaking of technology, Meebo--the IM consolidator I use--recently added Facebook to the IM sites it supports. MySpace, too, if anyone cares. I can now log in to Meebo and chat with anyone who is logged into Yahoo!, Gmail, or Facebook, or looking at any of my blogs. It's not perfect, but when it works, Meebo is one of my favorite things evah.



• We had Greek burgers last night, courtesy of DinnerByDesign. They were excellent. I need to start eating better, and less, and get back on a regular scheduled meal schedule instead of snacking on junk all day every day. Then there is the whole exercise thing. Ugh. I can't tell you how much I hate pointless tasks with no immediate payoff.... Apparently, there are no WiiFit games to be had, so I'm stuck with Sports for now.



• Anybody got a good lead on a job for Sparky? Yeah, this is the perfect time of year to be looking, right? And the perfect time in the economic cycle, too.



• Speaking of which, I'm already 100% ready to eliminate the word "economy" from the language. I'm tired of hearing it, saying it, discussing it, blaming it, worrying about it, prognosticating about it. It's only going to become more omnipresent, I know, so it's not a good sign that I'm so fed up with the subject.



• We were going to take the tree down today and put away all of our Christmas stuff...but changed our (my) mind when we remembered that it's still 'officially' Christmas until January 6, Warren's birthday. So I'm not sure when we'll pack it up. Sometime this week, I guess, maybe in pieces.



• Everyone gets back to our regular schedules tomorrow: it's a full work and school week for all of us. Yuck.

I think that's enough. I should probably get myself sorted out for dinner and maybe work on the Christmas card filing.

---

Urban Word:

Presponse: To respond to a question before it is finished, often confusing the asker.

The whole concept of presponses confuses Beast. He'd rather finish one thought and spoken sentence before moving on to the next thought and speaker.

Checking in

Mood: Blergh
Hair: Cleanish
Eyes: Tired
Listening to: The Broncos/Jets game

It's snowing. All kinds of weather warnings today. But, really, not all that awful. Not enough for a snow day tomorrow for Sparky (and the rest of the district), unfortunately.

It is sort of unfortunate since he spent yesterday feeling totally lousy--throwing up and sleeping with the "just in case" bowl a foot or less from his face. Today he seems almost normal, except for the coughing. Meanwhile, both Beast and I are still feeling the lingering effects of this bug: we are drop-dead tired.

The Packers lost (and they did deserve to lose, despite a kick-ass 3rd quarter), the Browns lost, and the Broncos are currently ahead of Brett Far ..., er, the Jets, but I'm not holding my breath.

The highlight of today, it seems, will be The Amazing Race tonight, directly after which I think I'm going to bed. I really have to be at least functional enough tomorrow to go to the grocery store and run a couple of other errands, and call the supplier from whom we order our greens for youth group. They messed up our order in a big way, which we didn't realize until we started delivering things yesterday. Along with that, one person called to ask why she got a cross instead of the tree she ordered. ...Uh, cuz you ordered a cross not a tree--wow, duh, fill out forms much?

So, no one here is in a very good mood, and I can't actually wait for the end of winter in spite of the fact that it just started today got sll intents. And purposes.

---

Urban Word:

goat rope: A situation or activity that has become completely fucked up, or, an exercise in futility. The phrase comes from the image of a goat, tied down with a rope, humping the rope but not getting anywhere. Similar to goat fuck.

The health in this household is currently nothing but goat rope.

Even-ing

Mood: OK
Hair: Not my crowning glory today, I'm afraid
Eyes: Really, officer, it's just allergies!
Listening to: The Chicagoland Speedway NASCAR race; would someone PLEASE take Kyle Busch OUT OF THE RACE?!?!?!

So I got our bathroom thoroughly cleaned today, as well as all the ceiling fan-blades in the house. Sparky & I went and ran some errands; he drove most of the way. I've spent several hours cleaning up Bloglines feeds and going through old posts on this blog. I probably deleted about 10 that had completely dead links and/or stupid stuff, and I rewrote several. Hey, it's my blog: I make the rules. ;-) I rediscovered a thing I used to do called "Snappy Comebacks" that I may resurrect once in awhile.

I'm really tired, but determined not to go to bed until later than usual so perhaps I'll sleep all night long finally. I stopped drinking caffeinated pop at about 5. Normally I can drink Dr. Pepper until I crawl into bed. My plan was to watch as much of SNL as I could stomach tonight, until the comedy just totally disappeared. However, then I discovered that Mariah Carey is on, so I will watch until she appears, and then go to bed and read or something.

Oh. And I loathe Kyle Busch. In case you didn't get that up above.

Also, Brett shouldn't come out of retirement. He's thinking with something other than his brain. Stop that, dude!

---

Word Spy:

microboredom: n. Boredom caused by having nothing to do over a short period of time.

I think right now I'm experiencing a bit of microboredom in anticipation of work tomorrow.

Cheaters Never Prosper

...and neither do sore losers. I am, by the way, speaking primarily of the coach, though I do hope that Mr. Brady now has a couple of free minutes to spend with his child. The rest of the team...well, I do feel sorry for them. A little. About this much.

Go Giants!
Yay, Eli!
AWESOME game!
And, way to prove all the experts wrong. I always like when that happens!!

Bummer

Mood: Pretty good, surprisingly
Hair: I combed it this morning
Listening to: The Patriot-Charger game

I don't feel good today: headache (which actually kicked in yesterday) and an unpleasant stomach. I was awake for three hours last night waiting to throw up, which (thankfully) never happened...but it got down to -10 outside and my feet were still freezing cold at 8 when the alarm went off. Beast got up and went to church with Sparky. I was still in bed when they got home, finally dragging myself downstairs at about 11. As soon as I save this, I'm going back up and curling up in bed some more. I want to watch the Pack--shocking, eh??--tonight, but I'm not sure I can stay up to see it all if I don't take a nap.

And yes, I do know how old that makes me sound!

Tomorrow, I'll drive 3 hours up to Dean's with a stop at an outlet mall for clothes for Sparky and me (and Packer sweatshirts for everyone including Dean if they win), also some new school folders for Sparky for second semester. Then it'll be 3 hours back home, hopefully before Beast leaves for Ohio.

His mom is having a chat with her oncologist tomorrow, requested by the doc. Her other son will be there. I don't think Dad won't be at the meeting; he was admitted to the hospital Friday morning. Beast has to be the area for a customer visit this week anyway, so he's just going to arrive early so he can stay with his parents for at least a day.

(And, WHY, why...10 minutes into the game, are the New England fans BOOING their team?? Wow, them are some sucky fans; y'all should be ashamed of yourselves!)

Au revior.

I was going to write a post about the Pack

...but I just logged into Meebo and found a message which said what I was going to, only more succintly:

[22:56] Stalker [ ]: Brett Favre may be the coolest QB to walk on 2 legs. 82 yards? Are you f*cking kidding me?!

I would only add that the combined total yardage for both TD passes last night was over 160 yards. "Both." Two passes. Got it?
I love dat man! Does he not look about 10 years old in this photo?

Sports of varying types

Go PACK! I mean really: I never expected the Packers to be 4-0 at this point in this year's season. It's like a "pinch-me" season so far, a bonus added to the records Favre is setting.

Plus, the Browns won. AND the Bears lost.

If the Broncos could have gotten their act together, that would have been a 100% perfect football day for us. On the other hand, I just found out--ironically, from my British nephew's Facebook posting--that the Rockies have made it to the MLB playoffs.

This was a good intro to a busy week kicked off by a nuts day tomorrow: I have a ton of stuff to prep, last-minute, for a scrapbooking program I'm doing at the library in the evening, and I need to get the Session minutes all caught up so I can take them to a meeting and have them examined this month. Oh, and a mailing has to be made to go out this week to the youth group members.

I'd rather watch football games. Or sleep.

However, the afternoon wasn't a dead loss: I finally cleaned out ALL of my saved Bloglines posts. Instead of having something like 80 of them saved, I'm down to about 25, 16 of which are memes. The rest are personal-interest things to examine more closely. Soon.

My list of favorite authors is current through books published up to 2007.

And, in case you hadn't noticed, my eyes are no longer giving me giant nightmares. They aren't perfect, but they are functional and way more manageable. To celebrate, yesterday I went out and bought a heated mattress pad for our bed, a blanket for Sparky's bed, HUGE bath towels for Beast and me (with bamboo...why?), and very very cute shoes.They're called "Poptart" in brown houndstooth. I will giggle whenever I think of that!

Foo-ball! Uhhh!

Hey, yo. The Pack won, beating the Eagles 16-13.

Don't sound so fuckin' surprised, all you "Favre is washed-up, over-the-hill" pundits. Hah.

The man has tied up John Elway, and will be passing him in the wins category next. And that is simply going to Make My Week when it happens. (I loathed Elway for the duration of his tenure in Denver; it was a long dry spell for me to go without cheering on the Broncos, and I blame the jerk for Dan Reeves' departure, the best coach the team had ever had up to that point...)

But I digress: the Broncos won yesterday as well. And the Bears LOST!! As Bob Costa said last night (I paraphrase): "The Bears defense was strong and did a good job. Unfortunately, the Bears offense also got off the bus for the game." I really, really, really love Bob Costas. As a matter of fact....the Bears have moved into the slot in which I hope they stay ALL SEASON: absolute bottom of the NFC North.

Two downers for the day, one relatively minor and the other a major tragedy: the Brownies lost (hugely), and Kevin Everett (Buffalo Bills) was badly injured, damaging his spine in a helmet-to-helmet tackle he made on the second half kickoff. What a terrible thing.

And that was the first week. Bring on week 2.

Woe, Temperature and Internet

We've been fighting both battles this weekend. It was -20 at the end of the Super Bowl last night; this morning, according to the local news we stood at -9 with a wind chill of -31!

To make life more fun, all weekend it has taken me 10 tries ("refresh" "refresh" "refresh"...) to get ANYthing to come up on Explorer. Yes, I know, but I think it was our ISP having issues with the cold, not Microsoft having issues with reality. Everything seems fine now. {shrug} Who knows.

Spent the day with Katherine today. At lunchtime, I got a call on my cell phone from the school: Sparky was at the nurse's office. So a mad scramble to call someone here to pick him up while I dealt with what I needed to do with Katherine. Sparky came home and slept for two hours, and I just got home about 45 minutes ago. He seems fine; I think he's suffering from Too Much Chili and Not Enough Sleep Syndrome and will be perfectly fine tomorrow. I hope.

Beast is on his way to Orlando for a conference/trade show. My heart bleeds for him! Actually, I do feel sort of bad since his original flight was cancelled, and he spent about 5 hours sitting in the airport getting the plan reorganized and being bored. He's concerned that his suitcase may be on its way to Spain or Albuquerque or someplace.

Other stuff happened this weekend, too, but I'm tired (4 hours of sleep last night) and not feeling all that great (cats...feh!). I've got 90 feeds to catch up in Bloglines....

Yay COLTS!!

Weekend wrap

Boo, Bears.
Yay, Colts!!
About damn time we see something other than old white men coaching championship teams.

Yesterday was a good day, except for the results of the first game, although I'm happy for the coach, whom I kind of grudgingly like. But, really, his quarterback is awful!

OK, enough of that. I'm off to Katherine's today to sort and pack (and return?) baby stuff. Her folks left Saturday, and I guess they didn't get much done in the nursery. This will be interesting. Four cats, a real likelihood of crying, five hours...I will be a mess driving home! I have to take her to dialysis at 3, so I'm not leaving here until 9, to avoid rush hour AND to decrease the amount of time around the cats.

We watched Die Hard 2 last night after the games. What an execrable movie!