

Have I seriously not blogged in almost a week? That’s odd. I’d been doing so well. In my defense, my sleep schedule’s been really screwy, so I get tired at random hours and nobody wants to write when they’re tired. Most people don’t want to do much of anything when they’re tired, but blogging takes actual thinking, and thinking just sucks when your brain doesn’t want to focus.
And before anyone tries suggesting I’d be less tired if I took naps, naps don’t work for me for some reason. First of all, it always takes me around an hour just to fall asleep, I guess I never really learned how to self-soothe, my brain is always running a mile a minute and unfortunately I tend to get some interesting ideas right as I’m attempting to fall asleep. Then when I do finally manage to fall asleep, I can’t just take a quick nap and be done, I have to be asleep at least two hours and even then, I rarely actually wake up feeling refreshed. More often than not, I wake up actually feeling worse than I did before, just a total crankypants. I will forever be envious of my maternal grandmother’s ability to take a half hour nap and wake up feeling fully refreshed. So I just don’t do naps. I’m less irritating (and less irritable) if I just deal with being tired all day as opposed to attempting to take a nap.
This entry was actually going to be about something but I ended up on a tangent, so maybe I’ll save the original topic for tomorrow’s entry. Or the next day. Whenever. So today’s entry is “I’m sorry I haven’t written here in a week and these are the reasons I don’t take naps.”
Posted in general life
When I was a kid, the kind of sandwich I ordered at Subway was turkey on white bread with mustard. That’s it. Mom tells me there was one particular visit where I only wanted the bread. She refused because she wasn’t about to pay $5 for just a loaf of bread. (This was back before the prices went up, footlongs used to cost five dollars.) Luckily over the years, I became willing to try new things, so my sandwich is just a teensy bit worth the price considering I can just go buy all the fixings at the market and have enough to make like three sandwiches. Here’s what I always order:
Sometimes I’ll get lettuce, if I do then I ask for a little bit of spinach too. I used to get pickles but I stopped because that’s just a lot of sodium.
A couple times I changed it up and ordered the Subway Club instead of the turkey. The reason for this is because the place where I used to work is across the street from a Subway, so I got lunch there a LOT, especially on days I felt too lazy/pissed/sick to walk any further since everything else was at least two blocks away or required me to call ahead. After a while I started getting sick of turkey so I decided to try the Club, it’s okay I guess but turkey will always be my true love.
Posted in general life
This was one of my goals on my Day Zero project. It was fun, I might do it again.
March 11th: Been watching a lot of Homestar Runner cartoons lately. Dreamt that I found out Strong Mad died and I was the one who had to break it to Strong Bad. Walked around what looked like a convention center trying to find him, woke up before I did.
March 13th: I recently read the first three Bernie & Chet novels (and I can’t wait to buy the fourth one) which mention Slim Jims a lot, I ended up craving one. I dreamt that I went to the supermarket to buy a few, but they’d expired in 2002. I tried letting the cashier know and her reply was something about how the market had purchased them in the 90s and it’s okay because they don’t actually have a shelf life.
March 14th: I barely remember this one at this point. I was exploring a huge house and found myself in the backyard, met a couple who for some reason decided to take me with them, I guess they thought I was an abandoned child and didn’t realize they were kidnapping me. While we were driving, I found a container of cream in a grocery bag at my feet and discreetly poured it out the open window, because apparently in that particular Dream World, pouring cream out a car means “Help I’m being kidnapped.” I turned around to see an Asian young adult on a bicycle, he waved at me to let me know he got my message. That’s all I really remember, though I seem to recall I managed to jump out the car.
March 16th: Dreamt about my friend JJ, we’d gone to high school together and although we keep in touch on Facebook, we haven’t actually seen each other since high school (10 years ago). I can’t remember if we’d made plans to hang out or ran into each other, but we were at a restaurant catching up. This is about as much as I remember, though I told him (in the dream) that his friendship is one of the few good memories I have of high school, which is true.
March 18th: I’m always dreaming about going back to high school, I guess because it’s the only school I was at for so long. The majority of the schools I went to, I only spent one or two years there, but high school I was there all four years. This dream involved a recurring theme, I’ve restarted school and have just finished a class, and need to dig in my backpack to find my schedule to see where I need to go next. My next class was with a teacher I’ve actually gotten back in touch with on Facebook, which is just funny. I walk into the room which is just HUGE, and the layout’s more like a library than a classroom. I head toward the front of the room and have trouble finding a seat because most of them are taken, I end up sitting at a table full of people who obviously never liked me much. A nearby table has a few of my friends and I wanted to move there, but it looked like the other seats were taken because there was stuff like papers on the desk though nobody was sitting there. Then class started, and it was something about a “carnival dog” which is a breed of dog with all-white hair except for a few blue patches. Yes, blue. And the teacher had one to show us, it looked kinda like a Maltese. Then I woke up.
March 20th: My last job was at an art supplies store where I met all sorts of people, including artists like Retna. I was checking out some of his art online, so I guess he was stuck in my subconscious, I had a dream that he visited my house. Never did find out why, it was a short dream.
March 21st: I don’t want to go into details because I don’t really want to remember them, but this dream revolved around racism, and I couldn’t understand why everyone was acting that way.
March 23rd: Another dream involving my high school. I had a really horrible crick in my neck and was trying to find the nurse’s office for an aspirin or ice pack or something, but the layout had been changed and her office was at the other side of the building. I managed to get lost but finally found it, and practically half the school was in there. She gave me a handful of pills to take, most looked like the vitamins I take on a daily basis, then had me sit by the window to wait my turn. I woke up with a slight crick in my neck, which made me wonder if it’d been worse in my dream because I’d been sleeping in an odd angle or something.
March 25th: Another high school dream. I was trying to get a soda from one of the vending machines, but it wouldn’t take my money. I went over to another soda machine, the first sold cans and this other one sold the plastic bottles, they cost $7 and I walked away bitching about how expensive vending machines have gotten and how none of them would take my money anyway. While trying to find a working machine that sold cans (which didn’t cost $7), I went through a doorway that for some reason was the entrance to a parking garage. I got lost and ended up battling weird monsters who were trying to chase me out.
March 26th: Short and simple, I was trying to find something in my bedroom and realized it was really drafty, and looked up to notice someone had obviously broken in through this half-window at the corner of my room. (I have three regular-sized windows, and a half-sized window which I guess is for when you only want a slight breeze. I haven’t actually opened it in like 20 years.) The odd thing is the window (in my dream) wasn’t open in the sense that it’d been raised, it was pushed in like it was on hinges.
March 28th: I was at the top of a cliff with a huge group of people, no idea what was going on but I found a tennis ball and was trying to throw it over the cliff into the ocean below. But my throw was hilariously weak and instead of going into the ocean, the ball bounced off a fence surrounding the edge of the cliff and smacked me right in the forehead.
March 29th: I was lost on the side of a mountain, it started to rain. I found a cave to duck into and was sitting just at the mouth of the cave (something I learned to do as a kid in case a bear or something was living further inside the cave) when I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder. I turned to see a young man looking at me curiously, and motioning for me to follow him. I was scared but it was too cold to stay in front of the opening of the cave, so I trailed after him down a wide tunnel that made a sharp left into a larger cave, where a bunch of people were gathered around a fire. I couldn’t understand their language and nobody seemed to understand me, but their expressions and body language made it clear I was welcome to join them. The young man who originally found me came over and gestured that I should follow him again, we walked through another tunnel that opened into what looked like a gigantic cave covered in white cotton candy. It quickly dawned on me I was looking at spiderwebs and thought I was going to see a whole bunch, only to look up to see one gigantic spider who appeared to be fast asleep. I thought I was going to be the spider’s lunch and the young man could read the fear on my face, and dragged me to one of the far walls where he pointed at heiroglyphics carved into the wall. I realized the group considered the huge spider to be a deity and lived in the cave to help protect it. I wasn’t food for the spider, I was being given the honor of saying hello to it. In an effort to show I was appreciative, I took off a ring I was wearing and placed it on a small table full of small offerings. My ring stood out from everything else considering most of the rest were edible things the spider might want, but the young man smiled and bowed just the same.
April 2nd: It was raining really hard, and I came into this room to find it was flooded. Woke up to hear it was really raining, and half expected to find water on the floor in here, but everything’s fine. I dream about this room being flooded with rainwater rather often, I’m assuming it’s because there’s a few small water stains on the ceiling so my subconscious is worried they’ll get worse someday. I think they actually came from when we had issues with the central air a while ago, it rains often enough that the water stains have never gotten any bigger.
April 5th: I have dreams like this a lot. I was in a huge hotel with a ton of floors, and was trying to get to my floor but people kept getting on and the elevator would take them to the floor they needed without stopping at whichever floor I was trying to get to. The elevator went VERY fast, so fast it’d make my stomach jump into my throat like I was on a roller coaster. Eventually I gave up trying to get to my floor and instead would try to get a picture of the view outside the elevator, since I had a great view of the cityscape especially when the elevator was at the top. But every time I’d try to focus my camera, the elevator would start moving again.
April 8th: Last night I had a dream that I was out looking for a job, and walked into one place asking if they’re hiring. Apparently I was dressed in a dinosaur costume and had forgotten until they looked at me with an amused expression. I looked down at myself and said “Oh… Oh yeah. Well, you sure have a great story to tell at home tonight, don’t you? …ARE you hiring?”
April 11th: Dreamt I walked into my bedroom to find it filled with Red Vines. I’m thinking this is a good enough sign that I shouldn’t eat them right before bed, I guess the taste was still in my mouth even though I’d brushed my teeth.
Posted in Day Zero Project, general life
I have a list of ideas, but it doesn’t get much farther than that. I don’t brainstorm, I just start typing.

Assuming I didn’t lose steam or decide the idea sucks, I feel pretty good about myself.


At some point I start to second-guess myself and wonder if the topic is actually interesting. This is about the time I start rewording things and driving myself nuts.


After some editing, I’m forced to calm myself down.


Finally I’m satisfied with the blog entry, it’s taken me anywhere between 20 minutes to a couple hours.

I click Publish and wait for my brain to decompress. This is why most bloggers only write one entry a day.

Posted in general life

It rained this week, and the clouds were just amazing.

It's a sandwich bag with a happy sandwich inside!

My new elephant. I'd very much appreciate if you helped me name him.
Posted in general life
Update at the bottom.1
When I first joined Twitter, I stuck to updating from the website. Then I found out about clients you can run from your desktop so you can catch new tweets without having to constantly open the site, the client window is always open. I started with TweetDeck, then they made some changes I didn’t like (this might’ve been the time Twitter purchased the company, I honestly don’t remember) and I learned about Seesmic which had more features I liked, so I switched to that. The best feature in my opinion has been the ability to preview images directly in the tweet so I don’t have to click the image link if I don’t want to. I’ve tried a few other clients but never stuck with them for very long, I’ve mainly used TweetDeck and Seesmic. I don’t own a smartphone so everything’s had to be compatible with Windows, and unfortunately there’s really not a lot to choose from.
Lately I’ve been rather unhappy with Seesmic, it seems Windows users keep getting the shaft when something goes wrong and it stays broken for a while since I guess the iPhone/Android versions get primary attention. The most recent problem has been something kinda lame but it was still a huge convenience to have when it was working properly. When you click a person’s Twitter name in Seesmic, a new tab opens in the client that shows you the person’s profile. Or at least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. For at least a week now, when I click on an account whose profile I want to view, all I get is a blank tab with a nonstop “Hold on while I load this page” graphic. I have no idea what those things are actually called, but here’s a screenshot to show what I mean:

I’ve tried letting it sit, and that spinning ball just never stops. I don’t know what broke, but it seems Seesmic doesn’t care. I can just go to the Twitter homepage and look at the person’s profile from there, but I shouldn’t have to. It’s such a dumb thing to be irritated about, but it’s still irritating.
I figured I might as well see if there’s any other client I want to use, so I Googled “Twitter for Windows” and the first thing that popped up was this article by LifeHacker. The article is mainly about MetroTwit, and also mentions Seesmic and TweetDeck. From what I can tell, those are the best options for Windows unless I want absolutely no features.
Since I hadn’t yet tried MetroTwit, I installed it to check it out. One thing that intrigued me was the apparent ability to hide tweets with certain usernames, keywords, or hashtags. Hilariously enough, I didn’t even tweet from it before deciding I hate it, I didn’t even bother testing if I could really filter tweets. One big problem is I can’t customize the layout or background color. The only options are white-on-black or black-on-white, though you can customize the accent color by choosing from a dropdown. And the font is huge with no way of making it smaller. Another issue is although the columns can be resized, they won’t stay that way. I guess you can only momentarily resize them, then it snaps back to how it was so every column fits on the screen. I couldn’t get past the cosmetic issues I can’t change, so MetroTwit isn’t for me.
Then I tried re-installing TweetDeck because I couldn’t remember why exactly I stopped liking it — and I’ve done this once before which is why I’m writing this entry to begin with — and as soon as I installed it I remembered at least part of the reason. When Twitter bought the company, they completely reworked the client and made it so plain and boring that it’s almost painful to use. Again, there’s no customization, the color scheme is different shades of grey. Period. The LifeHacker article mentions you can install the older version of TweetDeck and gives a link, but I decided to see if I could find any blogs talking about the differences and I ended up finding this one which perfectly describes my issues with the new TweetDeck. That entry also offers a link to install the old version of TweetDeck, so I clicked on that to take a look and see if I’d like the old version at all.
I’d forgotten I’d set my color scheme to look like something a unicorn puked up, it’s shades of purple and pink. Very hilarious. Unfortunately, and I really can’t put my finger on why, I just don’t like TweetDeck. And honestly, the notification noise irritates me, old AND new version.
So as much as I’d like to be able to view people’s profiles in the client, it’s obvious I’m going to have to deal with that bug in Seesmic because it’s the best client for my needs. Everything else is either too plain, offers too many features I don’t need that can’t be turned off, or the friggin’ notification noise bugs me. Or a combination of those issues. This is like Goldilocks and her stupid porridge, but I still can’t find my perfect bowl of porridge so I’m just learning to deal with what’s available.
Eventually I’ll figure out how to create my own client and add everything I want, and I’ll be thrilled.
1Edit in October: Seesmic ended up completely getting rid of their desktop client, changing it to Ping which is completely different and then selling to HootSuite who charges you, which is ridiculous if you’re not interested in a lot of the features. HS offered a free trial upgrade to Pro so I tried it out and only used it long enough to catch up on one day’s Twitter feed — it’s just not worth using, much less paying for. So I was forced to stop using Seesmic because I’d bought a new computer and couldn’t reinstall Seesmic. I tried MetroTwit once more, and although some of the problems I’d first encountered aren’t an issue anymore (the ability to resize the columns works for me now, big whoop), the lack of customization and the advertisements really rub me the wrong way. Did I mention that above? MetroTwit has ads. It looks like a regular tweet and there’s no way to hide it, it has to stay in a column that’s visible on screen. Meaning you can’t hide it in a column you’d have to scroll over to see. That’s just ridiculous, if I wanted to be obligated to look at sponsored tweets I might as well stick to Twitter’s main site. So I installed the old TweetDeck using the link I posted above, and that’s what I’ve been using. It has the option to view images in the client instead of opening in a browser, so that’s nice. I’m not 100% happy with TweetDeck, but it really is more convenient for me to use a desktop client, so this is what I’m stuck with for now.
Posted in general life, rant
Tagged review

A few of my friends have asked and nagged and begged me to do a blog entry or video talking about my nail polish collection, and I’ve sorta given up on attempting videos involving nail polish so I’m finally blogging about it. In case you don’t already know, one of my hobbies is nail art, I’ve been doing it for two years. So far just on myself, feel free to check out my nail art blog. Over the past couple years I’ve collected a pretty decent amount of nail polish, nowhere near as many as a lot of other chicks who do nail art but I still have quite a few.
I just finished counting, and including everything like crackle polishes and pinstriping polishes, I have 245 bottles.
I bought the majority of them from this site, their prices are pretty great. I also bought my display tray there, you can find it on this page.
The photo above is all my creme polishes and shimmer polishes, the photo below is everything else, mostly glitters and pearlescent, but also stuff like matte and crackle polishes.

These shelves also hold all my supplies, like my Konad/Bundle Monster stuff, my orange wood sticks, and all the stuff you can glue on your nails like rhinestones and Fimo (which, honestly, I almost never use, my mom loves the Fimo stuff though). These are actually shelves for media, probably specifically CDs, but nail polish fits perfectly too. Most of the rows go three or four bottles back which is why it doesn’t look like too much from this angle.
In complete honesty, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand the people who have up to ten times the amount of nail polish as I do, I’ve come across bloggers who have at least a thousand bottles and there’s just absolutely no way you can have that many without having a bunch of dupes. “Dupes” is short for “duplicates” which of course means at least two bottles are the same thing, just by a different brand. This is fine if you do reviews and have dupes so you can say which one is better quality or better priced or whatever, but still, I don’t see the point. Maybe it’s because I don’t run a review blog, mine is strictly for nail art.
245 is still a ton of polish, but almost all of mine are different. I seem to have a real knack for being at a beauty supply store, seeing a cool nail polish, and bringing it home to realize I don’t have that color.
I’ve actually started writing down everything I have so I can check off everything I’ve used so far on my nail blog, so I can start using ones I haven’t used as much as others or haven’t used at all. I have quite a few that obviously haven’t been used in a while, you can tell because the liquids have started to separate which means I need to shake them. I hate shaking nail polish though, I always feel like I’m on the verge of giving myself tennis elbow if I have to shake more than one bottle.
I was going to post pictures of the individual brands I have, but I’ve organized my collection by color so I’d have to take it all apart to group everything by brand, and I’m just too anal to want to do that. I don’t want to have to reorganize everything again. So, sorry, but I’m not posting individual photos. If you want to know what brands I have, I’ve listed them in the sidebar of my nail blog since I tag all the posts there.
Posted in general life

My mom bought me this little chanchito statue a while ago. It’s a Chilean good luck charm which originated in the village Pomaire, known for their pottery. I noticed it in the gift shop at the Autry Museum and had to have it because its face cracked me up. Mom and I were at the museum the other day and she noticed they’re now selling tinier versions of this statue, with elongated tails wrapped into a loop so you can turn them into a necklace.

Again, I chose this one because its face cracks me up. All chanchitos are handmade, so all their faces are different and some of them aren’t perfect. I wasn’t looking for perfection, I was looking for character. I guess you could say I was looking for the Hatchet-Face of chanchitos.

I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do with the little one, I haven’t yet decided if I’ll turn it into a necklace or just let it chill on my desk with the big one. They can both stare at me with their crazy “HEY THERE HOW’S IT GOING” faces.

Posted in general life
Click the image to see more Fridaynosaur at Left-Handed Toons!
Posted in general life