I'm making a holiday card list. This list will not be for this year-- I'll be lucky if I can keep myself fed, bathed, and dressed the rest of the month, much less find the time to make out cards-- but I will, I swear, use it next year. Anyway, now seemed like a good time to get correct addresses.

So! If you a) actually know me in person (I know, I'm lame, I'm sorry!), and b) plan on being at the same address next year that you are at this year, you should leave me a comment with your address-- I'll be screening comments, so they won't actually appear below. I promise to reward your effort with, um, a card. Eventually.

Thanks!

"Outsourcing and other funky developments in soldiering and spying brought to us by the War on Terror."

After Marauding for the Cure tomorrow morning as a very pink pirate, I'm off to Brazil for the rest of the month with the boyfriend. See y'all in November. :)

Current Mood: chipper enough to say "ya'll"

pig eulogy

Link to an explanation of my job :)

Guinea pig died last night.

It's possible made this phenomenon up; I have this vague recollection of someone telling me about it, possibly even Mom, but that seems unlikely. But I've always, in a very tongue-in-cheek fashion, referred to the two weeks before my birthday as, well, kind of crappy.

Usually I'd use the word "funk" to describe it-- it's usually manifested itself as a kind of inexplicable low mood-- but this year I appear to have just become scatterbrained. Like, really really scatterbrained. I'm totally overwhelmed by things I'd usually have a handle on work-wise, both of the manuscripts I turned in last week were missing photos or had out-of-whack TOCs, and usually my manuscripts are clean enough to eat off of. It's not necessarily bad, it's just . . . bizarre. (And I'm breaking out-- and I almost never really break out-- which doesn't help.) I've become oddly, as Beth put it last week-ish, "ADD" all of sudden as well: easily distractable, prone to very interesting shifts in conversation and incapable of finishing a task without forgetting what I was supposed to be doing.

So here I am, on the downslope of my bizarre funk/fleh. And it occurred to me to be curious, since I usually only consider this phenomenon in my own head: this sound familiar to anybody else?

(Is it lame that I want to be wearing a Thor hat right now?)

So I've been budgeting, lately. And okay, yes, I've always budgeted, because apparently I skipped proper irresponsible teenage- and young-adulthood entirely in favor of acting like I'm forty. I think 10 pm is a kick-ass bedtime. I have always considered drinking to get drunk to be the stupidest thing imaginable. And I fell out of college right into a detailed line item budget delineating exactly how much I could spend on what each week in order to still sock away a couple hundred bucks into my savings at the end of the month (which was handy when, for instance, my car decided its last transmission just wasn't good enough for it).

But this year I decided I was going to travel. "If I put away $500 a month," I thought to myself, "I can both afford to go to Japan and Brazil, and still manage to save enough to also reach a slightly lowered end-of-year savings goal!" (I had obviously gotten inexplicably cocky, about both my will power and my ability to avoid unexpected expenses like car repairs, the previous largest unexpected-expense culprit, which I have so far avoided this year by driving as little as possible and just not taking the damn thing in.)

( Already this optimistic hypothesis has proven incorrect )

dealingwith is so going to be jealous he didn't find this particular cat picture first.

the cat is a stud

Turpitude and I discussed our Christmas lists this morning, and she has decided that she would like the following:

1) a bird on a stick (tm Dad)
2) a good kitten-grooming brush
3) a wooden or rope scratching post with a carpeted platform high enough that she can sit on it and watch the guinea pig

She finds these to be reasonable demands, but she has obviously not recently priced decent scratching posts. :)