now more haloform than ever

My birthday is in one week from today!  Wooo. 

I'm having a big Virgo birthday bash tomorrow at my house with two other friends. Anyone near Athens/Atlanta is invited!! Starts at 5pm and we're gonna grill and drink and get crunk and listen to awesome music and then probably go downtown later. Lemme know if you need directions or more info.

I've been updating my Amazon wishlist in birthday antici........pation. LOL.

Apparently, around this time every day, I hit my insanely sleepy period. I'm having trouble keeping my eyes open.  It doesn't help that I am trying to download all the files for the previous version of a website we just redesigned, so that there's a backup of all the old files before we upload the new stuff.  It's taking forEVER.  Like watching paint dry.

This past Saturday, Chris and I went to Ikea to get new bedroom furniture.  Ikea was a total madhouse and they were also sold out of the bed and the dressers we had chosen.  Boo!  We went ahead and bought the TV stand and the bedside tables that attach to the headboard while we were there, with the plan for Chris to go back this week and get the remaining furniture.  So today, he, Joel, and Misty had an Ikea excursion to pick up the rest of the stuff.  So now we are about to have a completely new bedroom! I am very very excited. We already cleaned the room really well in anticipation of our new furniture.

So it looks like tonight is going to be some furniture building madness.  That's my least favorite aspect of Ikea.  I get all excited about the new furniture but then you have to spend all this time building the stuff, only to realize partway through that, oops, you screwed the wrong piece onto this other piece, and then you have to dismantle and rebuild.  But anyway, we should have some snazzy new bedroom furniture all built and in use very soon.  And of course I'll have to take some pictures.  And show off our new bedroom to our friends... because like, for serious, no one has ever seen our bedroom because it's been so messy/awful for so long!

Apparently, along with furniture building excitement, we're also going to grill some yummy meat and eat it with Joel and Misty and maybe play some games.  Sounds like a good way to spend my last evening of the summer before classes resume for me tomorrow.

What magazines do you subscribe to, and why?

I think my subscription to MacWorld just ended. So I guess I subscribe to nothing, now. In the past, I've had subscriptions to Ready Made, Bust, Mac Addict... something for my semi-feminist-y side, my wannabe-crafty side, my geeky, nerdly side. I might subscribe to Bust and Ready Made again, I liked getting those and I have found that I still buy them every month at the store.

Soda? Cola? Pop? What do you say? Any other regional words that set you apart?
Question submitted by Gladys.

I guess I say soda.  Definitely not pop or cola.  Although I don't even drink soda/pop/cola very often.  My southernness slips out when I say 'y'all', which happens multiple times a day.

What was the highlight of this past weekend?

I got a really awesome haircut!  Along with scoring a brand-new, $90 dress from the thrift store for $7.50.  I also caught up on sleep, took Cricket with me to Atlanta and introduced her to both my parents and my favorite restaurant. 

But you know, I think the thing that was most exciting to me about this weekend was having my mother give me a cookbook that my grandmother wrote in the 1940's while working for Alabama Power.  The cookbook is geared towards new brides and working homemakers... and it's organized with a week's worth of planned meals divided by season. I recognized some of the foods as things my grandmother cooked for me as a kid... I felt like she was with me again a little bit.  And something about reading a cookbook that she entirely wrote made me feel very proud of her.  And it made me miss her, a lot.

Tell us a little something about your first girlfriend/boyfriend.

I don't think I'd call him 'The one that got away', because we really weren't very well-suited to each other... But anyway, I met my first boyfriend on AOL.  That's horribly embarrassing to admit.  Let's pretend I just didn't say that.  I was 16, he was 18, I think.  He lived in Knoxville, TN, which wasn't terribly far from Atlanta... not other-side-of-the-country distance, anyway... but might as well have been since I didn't drive and he never had money.  I spent lots of money on phone cards to call him. This was back in the days before cell phones were a ubiquitous thing that everyone just has. On my 17th birthday, my parents drove me to Knoxville to meet him.  He gave me a book (Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury), some Pez dispensers, and a skateboard he broke while skating and drew all over.  We had our first kiss while his friend was sitting right next to us, which was pretty un-romantic and awkward.

We 'dated' for another month or so and then I broke up with him.  He called me a few months later wanting to get back together, which I didn't want.  I spoke to him once a few years later, and then lost all contact.  Recently I tried to find him online without any luck.  I wonder how he's doing.

I think I've gotten rid of most of my awful CDs, but one that has managed to stick around is the Wipeout: XL soundtrack. A remnant from my gigantic jeans raver phase.

I am here.