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Sunday, March 14, 2004

this will help you get your zzz's

I had just popped open a diet Coke in anticipation of sitting and reading for an hour but I CAN'T FIND MY BOOK. (The Two Towers, and I'm liking it OK). And now since I have this nice beverage o' bliss to keep me company, I can't just go to bed, now can I, so here I am typing an entry. I remember in junior high, notes written when bored were always the most boring ones. So, if you are prone to insomnia, perhaps you should save this entry to read in the middle of the night -- and in any case, make sure not to operate any heavy machinery after reading. OK?

I've been spending a lot of time away from the computer being, well, productive. In fact, this weekend overall has been a good one with lots of things getting accomplished that have been a long time coming. Ooh, a LIST!

• On Friday I finished a sewing project for the first time since last May: a denim blanket intended for picnics.
  • Time spent collecting old jeans and letting them lie around in an old military laundry bag, figuring that "someday" I would make a quilt out of them: Ten years.
  • Total days elapsed from starting cutting to finishing the project: about 15
  • Total hours involved: Maybe 35? 40?
  • Other miscellaneous costs: much frustration with my sewing machine, until we reached a truce and worked things out between us; one cassette in a 25-cassette book on tape owned by my local library, "eaten" by my extremely inexpensive generic cassette player (Light a Penny Candle by Maeve Binchy, and I was so engrossed in it that I had to check out the book at the same time as I confessed the depravity and misadventures of my cassette player to the librarian who's known me since I was a baby, and stay up till all hours reading instead of sewing to find out what happened), replacement $8.
• Saturday T put the engine in his truck. This is a big, big deal. I won't go into the mechanic-y greasy details, nor will I tell you how long the truck's been sitting in our driveway waiting for said engine (partly because I can't remember, it seems like it's always been there), but trust me, a big big deal. Yay hubby. :)
• Also Saturday I started a new sewing project (I am liking this books on tape thing, and sewing is a good excuse), this one being a dress for my daughter. I have had this very very expensive fabric stored for eight years -- since I bought more than I needed to for a maternity dress -- and have planned since then that I would eventually make a dress for my daughter (mind you, this was before I HAD a daughter) from it. I bought the pattern for the dress last spring. So after eight years of waiting and two and a half days (about eight or ten hours) of work, here it is:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• On Friday, LT had the shining moment of his life to date (or close enough anyway) when he took his savings to Target and bought THE LEGO AT-AT. He'd been coveting one for a year or so, and saving his recycling money for months. And now through the miracle of modern technology (including my new-to-me, functional digital camera! woo hoo!), you, yes, YOU, diaryland reader, can be witness to the creation of a Star Wars legend. (can you tell it's late?)
  
  
  Early in the project, Friday night...
  
  
  Daddy of course had to get in on this (talk about bonding! ;-)
  
  
  After just a few hours' sleep, I don't think I have to tell you about the first thing he looked at when he got out of bed on Saturday...
  
  
  The finished product, Saturday morning.
  It was a little smaller than I expected for $100 -choke- but the owner is extremely well-pleased.

And with that, if you're not already asleep, you should be. It certainly worked for me -- even Diet Coke can't keep me awake now. :D (now watch, according to the hsing-mom Rules of Frustrating and Maddening Events, I'll find my paperback of The Two Towers between here and my bed...)

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Wednesday, March 03, 2004

random thoughts, ebay addiction, weight loss

A few thoughts that have rattled around in my head over the last few days:

• Do the makers of those flashy, jiggly ads designed to look like Windows error messages (comics.com usually has at least one going) honestly think we're going to fall for their scheme? I have more faith in my fellow man than to believe that ANYONE would be clueless enough to go around clicking on those, especially more than once. All they do is give me a headache.
• If you happen to watch the original 70's version of "The Love Bug", and you are for one second fooled by the scrub-brush laden location (with a very cheezy cardboard mock-up of the corner of the Ahwahnee Hotel in one scene; this is boggling, since anyone who knows what that hotel looks like would presumably also know what its setting looks like) which was used to stand in as "Yosemite Valley", you need to take a four-day weekend and take a vacation to Yosemite RIGHT NOW, that is an order.
• This is a genuine question. What's up with everyone disguising the names of places and businesses in their diaries/journals/weblogs? (KM@rt, TuIsa, etc) Is this to avoid having search engines find those terms? Why? I'm not being facetious here; I'm genuinely curious.

There were more but I can't think of them right now.

My seven-year-old son has discovered eBay. It must be a genetic thing, since his father is clinically addicted to that site and can sit there for hours looking at Dodge Charger stuff, most of which he will never buy, "just to see what they're going for." However, it's not MoPar parts that draw my son; it's Legos. And Star Wars stuff. And generally anything else he thinks up that would be fun. ("Hey, Mommy, let's see if doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou dot ebay dot com has any light sabers.") And women are supposed to be the ones who love to shop! T was setting up a computer for a friend of his; when he was testing it in our garage, our son saw it and asked if THAT computer has an eBay in it.

This is the first time since mid-January that our seven-day forecast doesn't have rain in it. We celebrated yesterday by going for not one but TWO walks around town. Today the kids will ride bikes and I will break out my inline skates. Stay tuned for reports of tomorrow's celebration; I'm sure it will be equally riveting. ;-) Seriously, though, we've enjoyed the rain, but we're really glad to be able to see the sun for a few days. I don't know how larger families do it -- it's hard enough cooping up just my two kids inside all day.

I sang in a chorus concert on Saturday. This was the first one I've done since last spring, so it was also the first one I've done since losing weight. It certainly was nice not having that extra thirty pounds pressing down on my feet for an hour and a half. It didn't help with singing "Stomp Your Foot" (WHY did Aaron Copland write that song? And WHY do chorus directors insist on including it in programs season after season? aargh!!), but a girl can't have everything. I still have fifteen pounds to go (and may decide to lose more once I get there -- I'm not sure fifteen pounds will be enough to solve some of my more problematic problem areas) but it is a nice feeling of accomplishment to be where I am. When I was weighing our luggage for our trip to Florida, I stood on the scale with a huge duffel bag packed full of my kids' clothes, and the number on the scale was the same as it was last summer, only that had been without the duffel bag. It was a mental image that will stay before my eyes every time I feel like slacking on my diet, that's for sure. Ack.

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Thursday, February 19, 2004

not the most scintillating entry you'll ever read

I just got an email survey of a different kind, and it's one, for once, that I'm NOT going to fill out (I am a sucker for all kinds of surveys... except this one). Remember slam books? There were different varieties of them when I was in school -- one type involved writing a person's name on each page and then passing the book around to everyone and each person would write a comment about each other person. The idea was that you would be honest and nobody was supposed to get offended. Except, come on, nobody thinks anyone's PERFECT, and as soon as teenage girl A found out that teenage girl B thought that she had a funny-looking nose, there went their friendship. And this would happen a dozen times over every time the slam book made the rounds. (for a great literary treatment of this concept read Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great). Nobody turned out to be as thick-skinned as they thought. This email I got was of a similar nature -- the recipient is supposed to answer a lot of questions about the sender: Do you think I'm pretty/crazy/kind/clever... and on down the line. Now this isn't saying anything about the person who sent the email to ME. Frankly, I like her, but I haven't spent enough time around her in the past ten years to be able to answer a lot of questions about her. But there is no way I'm sending that on to anyone. Just uh-uh. I am sensitive enough without doing something stupid like that.

**boring weight loss paragraphs follow**
Speaking of sensitive, I'm feeling a good deal better today, overall, but I am kicking myself seriously about my diet. I've spent the last two days in the following pattern:
6 am - 3 pm: eat very conscientiously, count all my calories, virtuously drink a ton of water and avoid all temptation.
3 pm - bedtime: to heck with it, one serving of ice cream won't hurt me. Well, now that I've had ice cream I may as well finish the job and have some chips. Mmm, salt. More chips. Yum. Well, I've totally blown it for today already, I'll have some cookies. Oh, and dinner too.
bedtime: guilt guilt guilt guilt.

To try (unsuccessfully) to motivate myself to be good today, I took a progress picture and sat and looked for a while at the progress I've made so far. This is supposed to help me feel a sense of accomplishment and drive which will buoy me past temptations and make me enjoy dieting. Except today, it didn't. But for your edification, here are the pictures. (dang, I hate that before picture. I really really HATE it.)

last summer ~~~ today




So now, I'm going to try a different tack. I'm going to tape a Fatter Me picture on the fridge with the caption, "Do you want to go back here? Do you REALLY?" And if that doesn't work I'll have to get really extreme and actually --horrors-- exercise. I have been so not interested in exercising lately.

**end boring weight loss paragraphs**


My next entry will be my 200th and I am planning an extravaGANza to celebrate. (you have to say that word like George Carlin to understand). I've been keeping this diary for about 190 days. This means that even with all the days I skipped, I still did enough multiples-in-one-day to bring my average above one entry per day. That is just. sick. ack.

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Wednesday, February 18, 2004

pity party

One disadvantage of having a (generally accurate) reputation for being a level-headed logical person, whatever my multitudinous other faults may be, is that when I have a slump and seem more "typically" feminine as far as emotions go, I get a definite sense of letting people down. When I get hormonal or otherwise illogically emotional, T, who has often congratulated himself on finding such a straightforward wife who "thinks like a man" (his words) and doesn't generally even get real PMS, gets this "this isn't what I signed up for" kind of edge to his voice -- in the nicest possible way. My parents look at me like I'm a changeling and my kids don't know how to take this person who has taken over their mother's body. Today is one of those days. My impulse no matter what I'm doing is to find a surface to fold my arms on, and to lay my head down in them and either cry or sleep. Or maybe both. I'll look around at my life and mentally kick myself, because damn, my life is good. It really, really is. But today for some unknown reason it seems like I'm looking at my wonderful life through glass and I can't really get into it or live it. There's no reason for me to feel this way, and plenty of reasons for me NOT to feel this way, and yet there it is. ack. I hope tomorrow will be better.

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Monday, February 09, 2004

recap of our vacation

Ways In Which My Fabulous Vacation in Florida Totally Ruined My Life:

1. My house sucks now. My best friend (with whom we stayed in FL) has, well, the most awesome house I think I have ever been in personally. Or at least, the most awesome house I've ever been in where I wasn't being paid to wait tables and clean up for an enormous Christmas party where the hostess nearly had fisticuffs with her two daughters-in-law over which of their four exhorbitantly elegant and expensive sets of family Christmas silver they should use. So, the most awesome house of any normal human being I've ever known, how's that? And it's not that Susan is wealthy, it's just that her house is laid out exactly like the ones in all those dream-house blueprints I invent, and it's all bright and airy and clutter-free and just plain wonderful. Anyway. I came home from that house, where my entire family of four was made to feel perfectly comfortable and at home and just generally all happy in many ways, to my now-hovel. Mind you, I didn't mind my house terribly before we left. I kind of liked it, except for the 1970's dungeon atmosphere brought about by the dark knotty pine walls and cruddy wall lighting. But now my house is depressing and I hate it, because I Have Seen Perfection.
2. I am a total slob. This is somewhat related to item 1. Too much stuff and nowhere to put it, combined with a severe case of slothfulness, combine to make my house a virtual eyesore. As a family, we have now begun the process of un-hoveling ourselves, but it's a slow road. My housecleaning mantra is now, "What would Susan do?" And aside from the instances where I realize that Susan would put the item in question neatly away in one of her five-zillion-more-than-I-have cupboards, it really does help. So this at least we're working on.
3. My long-standing love of winter is in jeopardy. Now, I fully realize that, having lived in California since birth, I've never actually experienced winter, but I have always enjoyed our paltry 45-degree-high-for-the-day semblance of that season. Not anymore. The weather in Florida, well, it just excelled. It started out at about 68 degrees on Sunday and went up throughout the week until it was a brilliantly sunny eighty-degree day on the last day we were there. It never got cold at night; we could be outside at midnight in t-shirts, which won't happen until sometime in May here. We got off the plane in sixty-degree Sacramento, drove an hour and a half, got out to eat, and almost died, because the sun had gone down and the temperature had plummeted to all of 48 degrees. It was all I could do not to get directly back in the car and return to the airport. I'm acclimating to it again now but it's not easy.
4. I have minivan envy. We rented one for the week and I was fully smitten. Now I drool watching them go down the road, thinking of all that open space, of the way-back seat, of the capability to carry two small families at once. I'll get over it, but that's not easy, either.

That said, there was one annoying thing about Florida. Can you say, "tolls"? My goodness, it was like driving back and forth over the Golden Gate Bridge for seven days. And I just know that all the locals, who knew which back roads were quick and which ones would add two hours to your travel time (and that's if you didn't get lost) and could thus travel unimpeded by the dreaded "exact change" sign (what happens if you don't have exact change? Do you go to jail? Do you face a firing squad? I shudder to think), laughed raucously in their cars watching the hapless tourists pay for their highway system for them.


Also, I magically managed to gain five pounds over the course of the week. This came as a total shock to me, because I thought I was eating really reasonably, considering that I was on vacation. Can I just blame all that on Chick-fil-A right now? Actually we only ate there twice, so maybe the weight gain was water. (yeah, that sounds good). Or maybe it had something to do with the nightly bowl of ice cream, and the Olive Garden trip and the stop for fries at Denny's (which was a harrowing experience, really, from a personal safety standpoint, for this bucolic rube; that Denny's was not in the best of neighborhoods) after watching Phantom of the Opera, and so on... no, it couldn't be that, I like the water idea much better.


Things I did for the first time on this trip:

1. Placed a call on a cell phone, alone and unaided. Yes, you read that right.
   
2. Valet parked.
   
3. Had a real honest-to-God girls' night out with my best friend while our hubbies watched the kids (and the Super Bowl); we went to the aforementioned production of Phantom and had The Best Time.
   
4. Saw the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
   
5. Traveled east of the state of Kansas.
   
6. Flew in an airplane.
   
7. Watched VH1 Classic. (this really belongs in the list at the top of the page, because I now have to daily talk myself out of calling and ordering digital cable RIGHT NOW).
   
8. Rented a car.
   
9. Bought something at an outlet mall. (not as exciting as it is made out to be, in my opinion, but whatever makes you happy...)
   
10. Saw a swamp. Several small patches of swamp as a matter of fact.
    
11. Experienced eighty-degree temperatures during a rainstorm.
    
12. Ate at Chick-fil-A. I love their kids' meal goodies.
    

I know there are more things for that list, but it's hard to think of them right now what with having to croak (I am so congested and sniffly and sinusy right now, it's not even funny) passionately along with Christine on my Phantom CD, and with my son asking me every three seconds if he can play Starfighter yet (a week without it wasn't a problem but he'd love to be able to make up for lost time). I give up, the computer is his for now. ;-)

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Monday, January 19, 2004

paintball and procrastination

My New Experience For The Month was playing paintball on Saturday. I've only been watching/hearing about/spending money on my husband's paintball habit (well, it's money HE earns; I don't complain) since 1994; totally reasonable that it would be ten years before I joined him, right? It was... interesting. (which means, I sucked, but perhaps not as badly as I thought I would). As I kept repeating in the days leading up to Saturday (starting about Tuesday when T simply announced that It Was Time and that I would be trying paintball that weekend, no excuses), I do not sneak well. I am, well, like a galumphing ox or something -- I'm bulky enough that I can just dominate anything in my path (except for the corner posts on beds; they always win in their frequent confrontations with my thighs), so sneaking has never been an issue. The result of this lack of skill was that in the first FOUR of the six games played on Saturday, I did not fire a single shot before I got hit and went out of the game. Pathetic, no? By the fourth game I was sneaking a bit better, and even making and executing some bare-bones strategic plans (about as skilled as those I make and execute while playing chess, which is to say, a maximum of two turns ahead, and not very subtle), but stupid things kept getting me out before I shot at anyone. Even in the last two games, I never did take anyone out or capture the flag or otherwise cover myself in glory, but I did have a decent time. The area where we played is basically a hanging valley on the side of a steep hill, and I did enough hill-walking to make my legs very, very angry with me the next day. I admitted to T that I was glad he'd convinced (coerced!) me to do it, which of course meant that today he had to go buy me a paintball gun. Hmm. At least it's a used one.

And today, aside from a shopping trip to the valley, I filed papers. I hate filing, I really really do. This is how badly I hate it: Anytime I encounter a piece of paper which should be filed away (credit card or bank statements, phone bills, doctor bills, insurance paperwork, stuff like that) I toss it into a drawer in our filing cabinet. When the heap of paper is so enormous that the drawer can't shut properly, I file the papers neatly and in order in their proper folders in the other drawers of the cabinet. As I work down through the stack, it's like an archaeological dig: I'll encounter stuff from this month, then last month, and so on, until at the bottom I finally find out how long it's been since my last filing-drudgery day (in this case, it was apparently sometime in October 2002). And always as I'm going to all this work, I wonder, what are the possibilities that I will EVER need, oh, say, more than 2% of this paperwork? But you know if I threw any of it out, I'd find out very quickly just exactly how necessary it was to keep it all, in some very unpleasant way.


And now there's school stuff added into the mix. I use the same tried-and-true system with completed schoolwork as I do with other filing: pile it in a heap. A big, big heap, full of paragraphs written with many backward letters on newsprint paper with absurdly wide lines, and rough drafts of the Star Wars Episode VII script, and pages of addition facts and subtraction facts and multiplication facts, and preschool papers where the groups with more are circled and the groups with less are crossed out, and artwork of varying degrees of skill but universally unparallelled adorableness, and all manner of other early elementary educational stuff. I have the best intentions of filing this away consecutively by student, subject, and date, but the best I usually end up with is four folders for each school year: [LT] Art, [LT] Academic, [C] Art, and [C] Academic. And generally, there is, again, one big filing day per semester or so. blecch. Procrastination, thy name is Rachel.
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Wednesday, January 07, 2004

a headache

I have, as previously mentioned, a some-say goofy aversion to taking analgesics for headaches. Well, perhaps aversion is too strong a word -- more like a shrugging don't-see-why-I-really-should attitude. Anyway. Today I have a headache which started last night as a little tickle behind my left eyebrow as I was finishing reading Possession (when I have the mental energy I will review that), then progressed to an outright pain behind my left eyebrow, the kind of pain that always makes me wonder in the back of my mind if it's some kind of aneurysm, but I think it's really related to my sinuses. Anyway. Today the headache is a bona-fide full-out headache, and I've exhausted my options. I've drunk plenty of water, eaten a good meal, practiced relaxation, taken a shower, and massaged my scalp. That works. The only problem is, when I stop massaging, the pain comes back. So either I need to sit and massage my head till my arms cease functioning (at which point the headache will come back anyway, and it is difficult to get anything done this way), or else I suppose it's time to actually take some Advil, in spite of the problem of wanting to know when whatever is causing the headache goes away. Barring, of course, the possibility of hiring or coercing someone to follow me around all day rubbing my head while I fold laundry, clean the house, cook supper, etc. Now that has appeal -- although it's wildly impractical, I suppose.

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Saturday, January 03, 2004

quiet blah kind of day

We finally had weather dry enough for me to try out the inline skates which I bought the day after Christmas. T was working outdoors and said (with his voice dripping amusement) that he felt like he should be videotaping my efforts. I said something to the effect of, "only if you have a death wish." I did manage to get the hang of it, with only one fall (in which the elbow pads paid for themselves by sparing me an ER visit for a cracked humerus, I think). Seems like it could be a decent way to get in better shape if I don't kill myself at it.


I had a sort of unsatisfying day overall. I wanted to GO, wanted to go to the book store and then drive across the valley to the coast, and really enjoy the beautiful clear weather, but T wanted to spend most of the day at home. To me, nice weather after a long wet spell means recreation and going somewhere (since I have, of course, just been spending the entire spell of wet weather indoors by the fire). To him, nice weather means that he finally has time to work on his automotive projects. Bummer.

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Friday, January 02, 2004

Is it worth putting on outdoor clothes?

We got a new keyboard from ebay today. It turned out that the guy had sent us a European keyboard by mistake -- which was interesting, but not very practical. And herein lies the all-time speed record in our household for destruction by a child: by the time I went to put the old keyboard back on the computer, C (that's C, I was getting tired of saying C, so just know from now on that C=C) had used her kid scissors to not only bend every pin in the old keyboard's connector, but also to break off the little doohickey in the middle of it that tells you which way to plug it into the port. Asked why, she said that she "wanted to make the sticks along the sides, not be on the sides anymore." Well, it worked. So for the time being I'm using an old keyboard, a good comfortable ergonomic one which had, at least when used with our old system, the unfortunate habit of simply ceasing to communicate with the computer at intervals, generally in the middle of a really sensitive or fun instant-messaging conversation.


I'm trying to decide if I want to travel alone to the Valley tonight, to browse and relax in Barnes and Noble, and make use of my gift cards, as well as doing some necessary shopping (like, for instance, for a new keyboard, since the whole "shift produces capital letters" concept seems to have just begun eluding this one completely; have to use caps lock). Part of me wants solitude and quiet and BOOKS (OK, it's just the b and the n that shift won't work with, that is truly bizarre), and part of me wants to sit at home with my agreeable family and my heating pad and A.S. Byatt's Possession instead of driving through the dark and the rain for 50 minutes each way. Not to mention that I'd have to change out of my pajamas to go to the bookstore. hmm. decisions, decisions.


the question mark doesn't work either. This settles it. best buy, here I come...

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Thursday, January 01, 2004

I DO NOT MAKE RESOLUTIONS

This was one of those days when inanimate objects conspired against me. As soon as I leave a room they all huddle and whisper about what they're going to do next. Everything from my daughter's candy jar to the carburetor on my husband's truck, not to mention the BLENDER, I think blenders are the leaders of the universal inanimate objects' plot to take over the cosmos conspiracy -- they've all snickered and suppressed giggles till their little inanimate faces turned puce, watching me deal with their freak-outs in rapid succession today. I NEED A PADDED CELL. thank you.


Other than that, well, one can't really think in terms of "other than that", can one, when one's entire existence has been consumed with this huge comedy of errors, but really, in spite of that, I am surviving and actually not, well, angry, or cranky, or even afflicted with that awful ears-about-to-whistle-like-twin-teakettle-spouts stressed-out kind of feeling. Perhaps someone slipped some Prozac into my diet Coke. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that I have had more sex in the past thirty days than in any other thirty days in my life to date, except possibly during the first month of my marriage, which really shouldn't count because for crying out loud, we had NO idea what we were doing, so those three times a day were all just practice runs. Anyway. I even did not have PMS this month AT ALL. ONCE, for one teeny MINUTE. I have a theory that all the oxytocin from all the, well, you know, that that all coursed through my system enough to put me on kind of a natural high. Or at least a natural tranquilizer/analgesic kind of thing. So, if I were going to make New Year's resolutions, which I'm not, I always resist the urge to do that just like I resisted that whole NaNoWriMo peer pressure thing -- IF I were going to make New Year's resolutions, I would resolve to keep this up. I think it has also definitely had a positive effect on T -- what else explains the fact that he disassembled and reassembled a carburetor in the pouring-down rain, in the dark, and even had one of those frightening things happen where the gas that's in the carburetor exploded while he was leaning over it, and it seared off part of his beard -- that even happened, and not once did he snap at me or somehow manage to imply that this whole thing had to be my fault just as certainly as if I had been the person on the assembly line making the fuel filter which had disintegrated and caused his truck to, well, to make us stand in the pouring-down rain in the dark while he disassembled the carburetor. And, as any mechanic's wife knows, part of the job description under "mechanic's wife" (this is for the wife of a professional or a recreational mechanic, mind you) reads: "will serve as the repository for release of any and all stress inflicted on mechanic by failure of vehicles to function as required." It's in there, just look. So, if I managed to waive that by encouraging us to exercise our marital privilege a bit more frequently than is perhaps normal, hey, this is a definite plus.


Or it could be that my husband is just the kind of man who keeps getting better and better with age (in TEMPERAMENT, I mean, get your mind out of the gutter...), and by the time he's 50 he'll be so perfect in every way that supermodels will hire hit men to take me out so that they can have a crack at him. It could be that.


Ooh, the rain started again. I was afraid it had gone away. Still hoping for snow, but I'm not counting on it.


My mom and I were looking at some of her old diaries today and it got me thinking about diaries. Not like diaryland diaries, but REAL diaries. It's a shame, there's such a paradox about them: Nobody reads them, so you can totally let yourself go in one and write whatever you want. But nobody reads them, so the motivation to write in one with any regularity is virtually nil. I think everyone knows that an online diary/journal/weblog is not really a real diary. A very few people actually do use them as such, and their journals are generally either so blushingly personal or so mind-numbingly dull that I can't stand it. No, for most people, this medium is a method of noting, in a public way, things we think are interesting or funny or clever or irritating or worth discussing, but definitely in a PUBLIC way. There are a lot of areas that I don't even touch on in here, and this would be the case even if nobody I knew read these entries at all; some things I just like to keep to myself. I might like to keep a record of them, but I don't have the discipline to sit and write about them every day. I think the reason that this diary has lasted so much longer than I predicted that it would in my first entry is that, at that time, I had envisioned using it as a real diary, but I quickly learned that I was not going to do that. A real diary takes more discipline, and more of a far-seeing attitude -- you're not writing this stuff down to vent, necessarily; you're not writing it to make anyone laugh or update anyone on what's going on; you're writing it so that years later you can have a record of your thoughts, your feelings, and the mundane events in your day-to-day life that you'd completely forget otherwise, but which might be worth remembering. But I, for one, simply lack the tenacity and the foresight and the discipline to keep a real diary, even though in ten years I may wish I had.

I almost, ALMOST gave in. I DO NOT MAKE RESOLUTIONS. But I do have a blank book sitting around here somewhere, and January 1st does seem like as good a day as any to start using it...

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