I have been off the ball. I’ve been tagged, no less than three times, for the seven-things meme, or something similar. Ally tagged me for eight and Josh tagged me for a seven-things meme last week, and Mek tagged me before the hard drive crash for a ten-things meme that I was working on and didn’t have the heart to go back to.
So, I will attempt ten things that I haven’t shared with people on the blog. Which, as the years roll on become increasingly harder.
- My favorite holiday is not Christmas, but the Fourth of July. And not because I’m patriotic, but because I love fireworks. If I could get fireworks on my birthday, then my birthday would be my favorite holiday. As it is, my birthday gets second spot.
- I poke people if I’m bored and want to talk to them but don’t have anything in particular to say. Poke on Facebook, poke over IM, poke over text message. I’ll even poke if they’re sitting next to me on the couch and we’re not doing anything.
- My secret dream is to live in a library. We’re working slowly on it. The walls in the living room are nearly covered in shelves. But there is still room for more.
- Each of my friends has a specific genre of Harlequin Presents they love to read. Mine is the British Billionaire. I am such a sucker for that accent. And that cold distance they are so good at. No wonder I find myself attracted to coldly distant guys these days.
- Matthew McFaden has totally taken Colin Firth’s roll in my heart. As Colin Firth ages, he gets more “father” rolls to girls who are my age, which makes him harder to see as a heartthrob. My other British heartthrob? Jonas Armstrong (Robin on the BBC’s Robin). Hawt. That’s all I can say.
- I love my dog because she reminds me of me. She’s so depressingly emo, and gives looks that seem to say “piss me off and I’ll just lay here in your way giving you dirty looks. Don’t think I won’t.”
- I can’t buy an item if at any time I have the thought “I could totally make that.” Granted, I probably won’t make it, but if I think I can, I can no longer buy it. That’s why I can never buy the awesome bags I want at Etsy. Sigh.
- When I can’t sleep late at night, I compose monologues in my head to people I need to talk to but for some reason can’t. Often directed toward You or whoever I most recently had issues with. These monologues never make it out of my head or into a conversation, but they make me feel better and help me fall asleep.
- I don’t have a TV in my room. I could have one, I did have one, but when I moved, I decided against it. I nearly never watched it in my room when it was there, and I can watch stuff on my laptop now, so I left that TV at my parents when I moved to Chico.
- If I could pick the way I’d die, I’d choose death by black hole. For starters, I’d get to go into space, and secondly, I’ve just always wanted to see it. I dunno. Makes me weird. However, if that new atom-smasher is more powerful than they think and makes a black hole on Earth, turns out I may get my wish after all.
So, there’s ten things you probably didn’t know about me. And most likely never wanted to know to begin with. And this isn’t the only time I’ve done this meme:
- Meme: Eight Random Facts
- Video Meme: Five Things
- Well, There’s a Song on the Radio that Says… (Five reasons why you blog)
- Five Things that (maybe) You Don’t Know About Me.
I’ve tagged everyone at least once before, so I’m not tagging anyone at all. But if I could tag anyone I want? I’d pick Jane Austen, Chuck Palahniuk, my dog, and You. It’s been awhile since I’ve got a secret out of him.
Being home for the summer leaves me a lot of time for thinking, and for starting random projects.
One thing that is often on my mind is this website here. I worry about it falling stagnate, that I’m not really creating the awesome that it could be. Poor Josh bears the brunt of it, as I’m often emailing him with ideas, bombarding him in im’s with random webpages that illustrate what I am dreaming of.
Last week I came up with a fantastic idea for my links page: instead of the prerequisite blog roll page with links to all of my online friends and being afraid that I’d missed someone, what if it was a link page to all of the different profile pages of me online. Pretty much, links to where else you could potentially find me in the internets.
However, it is never as easy as that. I opened up Numbers, and made a pretty basic spreadsheet, with the site, the profile address, my login name and password. I came up with fifteen sites off the top of my head. But I knew there were more. This is web 2.0, after all. Every site you visit seems to want you to sign up and be social these days.
And so I thought, to the gmail archive! I had archived every single email I had ever received since I opened the account, and thus would have the emails for every web service I had signed up for since March of 2006.
However, never content with the easy way of doing things, I added more work. I realized that I had stopped labeling my emails when I had gotten my macbook and started using desktop mail again. Instead, everything just got shoved into the archive and forgotten about. It was a mess. And to make matters worse, none of the labels made any sense. So I thought, if I was going to go through the emails anyways to find my web profiles, I might as well label and weed as I went.
I started with 5742 emails in my archive. And deleted all except three labels and started again. It took me about five days, doing it for as long as I could stand each day. I ended up with 1974 emails and 18 labels. And I switched from POP to IMAP—which is definitely taking some getting used to—so that I could label emails as I remove them from my in box.
So, in going through these emails, how many web services am I signed up for? 45. Forty-five sites that, if I was a good little web drone, would check into every day.
The oddest thing, though, are the repeats. Not multiple sign-ups for the same site, but the sign-ups for similar services that do the same thing. Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia. YouTube and Viddler. LibraryThing and GoodReads. Myspace and Facebook and Virb and Ziki.
I am apparently not monogamous with my online apps, and can come up with justifications for why each one is necessary. Or, for some, that I wanted to be sure to get my username before someone else, just in case a service hit big and all of my friends began to use it.
I was overwhelmed when I was done creating the list. It’s so long that I have to scroll it all. So varied that I had to add a column to mark what the service is used for. Looking at the list makes me wonder why I thought I needed all of these services to live my life, when I check only a handful of them daily.
Part of me wants to go and delete the accounts that I don’t use. But then I look at the list, and think, will I never use that again? And the answer is rarely yes. I did remove some forums from the list, because they’ve either moved systems and I’m no longer there (so long K2 Forums, it was nice while it lasted), or they were support forums for something that I no longer need support for (good bye Podpress Forums).
You might think that if I’m writing about it that the link page is done. But you’d be wrong, as nothing has happened on that front. Josh and I are still trying to work out how to display all of the links on the link page without it being a gigantic information overload. That might take another five days of thinking about the problem randomly throughout the day as I create other random projects to fill my time with.
I’m open to any suggestions, as the design part of my mind apparently went on vacation while I’m on vacation, and I can’t being to picture anything other than the blank white page that is already there.
The semester has been over for almost two and a half weeks.
This means, of course, that I am running out of ways to entertain myself. Right now, I read about a book a day, take the dog out multiple times, and am spring cleaning to my heart’s content.
So far, I’ve cleaned out my dresser and my closet, and under my bed. I’ve got three boxes/bags to take to a thrift store, and another box of books for the Sigma Tau book sale we’re putting together for next semester.
The only thing left to clean in my room is the chest of drawers that hold all my crafting supplies.
In one of my more inspired purchases when I moved out last year, I picked up an Aneboda 3-drawer chest (the larger one) from Ikea to hold all of my yarn and stuff, since I wasn’t feeling the wire shelves I had before.
I have a love/hate relationship with this chest. I love how big it is. I love how it fits perfectly where I put it, I love that the drawer fronts are opaque but you can still sorta see what’s inside. I love that all of my yarn and fabric and other random craft things fit inside. I hate that I can’t remove the drawers, and hate that the bottom is solid—if only because I had a knitting pattern floating around the top of the drawer, and it slipped back and to the bottom, and took me forever to get back out.
I will probably tackle this chest sometime in the next week. It’s the only thing I have left to clean, and is a random mess. I keep shoving things in it, and not pulling things out. I am hoarding yarn I’m never going to use, and need to actually organize better what I have in there. I would love to be able to put my green sewing box1 in there, along with the purple Caboodles2 box that hold all of my circular knitting needles.
I’m also feeling crafty, which means I’ll probably start sewing things up when I clean out the chest. I need a case for my sunglasses, a case for my laptop, maybe another skirt, and a tote bag to take to the farmer’s market on Saturday mornings.
I don’t know what I’ll do when the chest is cleaned up. My book pile is steadily dwindling—only 15 left, which is the smallest it’s ever been—and I walked out of the bookstore last night without buying anything. I guess it means I’m not really in a reading mood.
- It seems to be a rule somewhere that everyone’s grandma had a green sewing box to hand down. All of my friends who sew have a green box filled with old notions and threads that their grandma lovingly collected. [back]
- I’ve had this box forever, and keep repurposing it for stuff. Originally used to hold my makeup in middle school, and then hair ornaments, and now knitting notions. And who knew Caboodles was still in business, making boxes? [back]
Last week, while I was visiting my parent’s on my “vacation,” I had plenty of time to do nothing. Which in my world translates to reading.
In some strange turn of events, not only did I only only pack three books to take home with me—E saw the pile of books before they made it into the bag, and it was much larger then—I didn’t even finish them all.
Granted, I did read Chuck Palahniuk’s Snuff, a book that I could not pack because I did not own it, but I still had the last third of Austen’s Emma to read when ME showed up to begin our trek back up to Chico.
Which means that I finished Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters, which I’ve already talked about, in conjunction with Snuff, but also Machiavelli’s The Prince.
Quite an odd selection of reading for a week, to be sure. Tossing in a treaties on how principalities are acquired and kept, and how to keep from losing them, doesn’t seem to combine well with a pre-victorian novel about the life of English gentility, or a modern American transgressional novel about the search for self.
However, reading The Prince has me prepared for ruling principality, whether one is handed to me, or I take one by force.
It also has me wanting to read more about the renaissance, and the Medici family. Anna recommended The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall by Christopher Hibbert, and luckily enough both libraries in town have a copy so that I’m not tempted to buy it (I am a starving college student this summer, after all).
I’ll probably pick it up this afternoon, seeing as how I have to return a few books to the campus library for Mrs. Jesus. I can’t say that I’ll read it right away, but I’m definitely looking forward to it. It’s been awhile since I read a non-fiction book that wasn’t assigned to me.
My book pile is steadily dwindling. There is a good chance that I’ll finally read through all the books in my room that have been waiting for months—or years— to be read. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all of that shelf space that will be free.
