So, I am still sick. Apparently I have angered the health gods and am thusly being punished.

In more interesting news, this site is getting a makeover! My friend Tawni, who is uber talented, is overhauling the look of the site. I love her work and she does such an amazing job. She designed the layout for my book blog, and I ♥ it so much I wish I could hug it.

We discussed colors earlier tonight and I got a sneaky peek at what it is going to look like. I can’t wait for it to be implemented!

If you need web design work done, I *highly* recommend Tawni. You may have to wait a little bit for her to have some availability, but she is totally worth it!

This post is going to be way less than interesting. I appear to have the flu. Fever, stuffy nose, the whole shebang. It rules that I work from home when I am sick. I don’t have to get out of my PJs. I can just keep working and have all the comforts of home right there. It sucks, though, that there’s no one here to take care of me. My sister is usually at work so I must fend for myself. Boooo!

Yeah, so that’s Day 7. Hopefully Day 8 will be more exciting.

I am so super ecstatic! The musical Wicked is currently doing a run in Cincinnati. The series has been sold out since 5 seconds after the tickets went on sale. But today, I was perusing Ticketmaster and found center of the house, orchestra level seats!!! Three of them! My sister, our cousin, and I will be attended the Thanksgiving evening performance!

*Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!*

My sister and I have seen Wicked once before. Wicked came to Cincinnati in January of 2008. Same sold out situation, but I am the queen of Ticketmaster and procured us orchestra level seats for one of the shows. It was amazing and we enjoyed it so much! Our cousin has never seen Wicked, so this is going to be EPIC. I know she’s going to LOVE IT.

Plus, this just makes Thanksgiving full of so much goodness! There will be the Thanksgiving paper, which contains all the Black Friday secrets, the Macy’s parade, Thanksgiving dinner with family, and then Wicked! It’s like some sort of Thanksgiving miracle!!!

I completed the GRE today. I have to say, I am pretty happy with my verbal score. I scored several hundred points higher than the average score. GO ME! My quantitative (read MATH) was embarrassing but not wholly unexpected. The whole math-specific learning disability usually tanks those kinds of scores. Hopefully, since my mathematical abilities (or lack thereof) aren’t really relevant to the program of study, the low score shouldn’t effect admission.

I’ll be anxious until I know for certain, but optimistic!

I’m taking the GRE tomorrow. I took it once before, back in 2004, when I was applying to grad school. It’s been so long, I don’t even remember what my score was at the time. Apparently it was good enough to get into grad school, because I did, and received a Master’s degree.

My dream has always been to work with books somehow. I thought maybe editing was my path, but that has turned out to be a rather hard field to break into. Additionally, I have a love affair with libraries. I adore them. I also find how libraries are using technology to be fascinating.

So, I was poking around online and I found a Master’s program in Library Science that is conducted 100% online. If I am accepted, I won’t ever have to set foot on campus.

Thus, I am taking the GRE tomorrow in the hopes of being admitted to the program. Everyone cross their fingers!

The torturous business trip has ended and I am safely back home. As I suspected all along, I didn’t need to be present. It was a huge waste of time.

Adding to the suckage was some events of late that necessitated the business trip. A few weeks ago I received a phone call from my boss. I work from my home on a permanent basis. I am a full-time, regular employee for a company that had some pretty flexible standards about not needing its people to actually work out of the company headquarters. This is the part of my job that rules. So, my boss calls and proceeds to tell me this big long story about how she’s received a promotion, she’s going to be doing X, Y, and Z, as a result. One of the things she won’t be doing as a result of this promotion is be my boss anymore.

The natural next question was, “OK, who’s going to be replacing you in the boss capacity?” I was not totally prepared for the answer. The answer I received was that a co-worker who does the same job I do was being promoted to the manager position. This co-worker, who seems like a lovely person, has been with the company half as long as I have. She also has less job experience and a lower level of education than I do. To say that I was surprised by the choice would be an understatement.

Not that I am saying I am better than her or anything like that, but I am just really stunned that I was apparently never in the running for the position. No one ever broached the topic of why I wasn’t approached for the position, allowed to toss my hat in the ring for it, nothing.

I was pissed and hurt when this happened but I decided to let it go. The business trip that I was on this week was to the company headquarters to discuss the transition from old boss to new boss. Wednesday morning, the new boss proceeds to make several statements to me that just bring all the anger over the promotion situation back up. She tells me how the raise she was given was super tiny and, therefore, she wasn’t going to be all that concerned about her performance because she wasn’t being paid enough to really care.

WTF? First, that just speaks volumes about her work ethic. But secondly, I would have loved to have had the position! I would have been thrilled with whatever raise I was given! And I would have totally kicked ass in the role. The passing over coupled with new boss’s flippant statements were just too much.

I’m super confused and disappointed. Mix in my presence in the office being completely unnecessary, and that was a multilayered suck fest.

I hate business trips. HATE. I like to sleep in my own bed, and be surrounded by my own stuff.  The business trip may be all fine and well, but when it takes me away from home, I am a sad girl.

This particular business trip, based on today’s events, is kind of pointless. I asked myself repeatedly, “Uh, why am I here?” It was annoying on a stellar level.

Thankfully, tomorrow (Thursday) my trip ends and I get to go home!! I cannot wait!

Now if the horrible line of storms that is moving into the area and my home area don’t cause too much havoc…

I am sadly not nestled into my lovely, beautiful, girly apartment. I am in the boring metropolis of Ft. Wayne, IN, on a business trip. See, I am fortunate and blessed in the fact that I work remotely full-time. Working from home full-time is a bliss previously unknown in my working life. But occasionally, I have to drive to the home office. Thus, I am in a Holiday Inn Express, missing my home.

It’s OK and I shouldn’t complain, I just really like my apartment and really hate hotels (see bedbugs). Plus, this a relatively short trip. I’ll be home on Thursday evening.

In other news, I have had the weirdest cravings all day long. First, french fries. Then, chili cheese fries. Then, regular coke. I’d think I’m pregnant but that’s just laughable at best.

This is the first year I have decided to participate in NaNoBloPo. I usually always sign up for NaNoWriMo, and ultimately fail. I decided to take some of the pressure off and go with NaNoBloPo. Plus, blogging on a personal level is something that is truly important to me. I need that outlet. But over the last couple years, I’ve shamefully broken my blogging practices and I am hoping that this 30 days of blogging will give me the much needed fuel to get back into the regular habit of blogging.

My baby sister turned 28 this week. Which is mind-boggling to me. I remember the night she was born. I remember what it was like when she was the new baby in the house. I also remember being really excited that I had a sister, but then kinda bummed that she didn’t really do anything. That sounds mean, but there is a 6.5 year age gap between us. It was a very long time before I could enjoy her as my younger sister and not just the annoyance that touched all my stuff, ate my make-up, and copied everything that I did.

But we’re older now and thankfully, good friends and roommates. So as her birthday was approaching I started to ask her what she wanted for gifts or what her big birthday plans were. My sister is very laid-back, total sweetheart who is happy with everything. You’d think this would make coming up with gifts and plans for her easy, but it’s actually harder. I am never quite sure if she wants what I suggest or if she is just going with the flow.

I decided to make no suggestions and let her totally decide, with no prodding (OK, minimal prodding) as to what she wanted or what she wanted to do. First she decided to take a 3 day weekend off from work. She works in retail and never gets a single weekend day off, so a 3 day weekend is a pretty huge deal.

Next, she picked Chick Flick Night. We scooted over to Blockbuster (I can’t believe there’s one still open!) and rented Bridesmaids. Then, we headed to the home of the third member of our goddess trio: our fantabulous cousin Amy (who should really be titled cousin/BFF/party cheerleader. She was ALL about the birthday shenanigans). We hung out at Amy’s apartment, ate junk food, played with the most beautiful baby boy in the world (Amy’s baby), watched 2 episodes of BH 90210 (the original, not that stupid new generation crap), and then Bridemaids.

Bridemaids was fucking hysterical. It was raunchy, it was funny in so many wrong ways, it was sweet…it was on another level good. I love, love, love Maya Rudolph, Kristin Wiig, and Melissa McCarthy. It was the perfect movie pick for our girls evening.

For today, The Sister had originally picked for us to go to our local Renaissance Faire. The season for it is almost over and she was super excited about going. However, Mother Nature had other plans. It was rainy and cold this morning, though the sun did eventually peek through. We didn’t want to risk the weather, so the three of us got all cute and headed to The Cool Mall. There’s a few malls around here, but only one of them is The Cool Mall. The aforementioned beautiful baby stayed home to play with his daddy, so we 3 girls had the mall and the afternoon as ours.

We went in all the cool stores (Anthropologie, Vera Bradley, Nordstrom), some stores from our youth that used to be cool (Spencers – seriously what happened to you? You’re just a sexy toy store now. They should just called you The Little Hustler Store), ate sinfully delicious chocolates in Godiva, smelled all the candles in Yankee Candles and Bath & Body Works, bought ornaments in Hallmark, and generally just had a ball. We wandered into any store we wanted, we strolled about leisurely…it was a lot of fun.

Then, we ventured to Don Pablos, a Mexican restaurant that has great food and a nice atmosphere, and had dinner, which was filled with lots of laughs, silly inside jokes, and a healthy dash of snark.

It was a really, really fun day! I got to spend time with my two most favorite girls in the world. I am really thankful to live so close to Amy and her family. Moving back home (a future post about that experience) has been amazing if for no other reason that I get to spend time with people that I am truly thankfully to call both friends and family.

To sum up,  Sister’s birthday weekend = EPIC FUN!

When I was twelve years old, I went to my mom one day and said, “Mom, I want a diary.” It was a fairly standard request for a girl my age and I am sure it came as no surprise to my mom. Writing was something I loved to do. My favorite rainy day activity from the time I could write was to write stories. I would write and illustrate, with my profound artist talent that all children have, fantastical tales of princesses and castles; creepy monsters and haunted houses; mysteries of the Nancy Drew ilk; and wishful tales of daddies who loved their daughters unconditionally. The leap from fiction to recording my own thoughts was just natural.

My mom simply replied with “OK” to my request. A few days later my mom returned home from a shopping trip and she called me into the bedroom where she had piled a mountain of bags on her bed. One of those bags was from Hallmark. She said, “I have something for you,” and pulled a small box, about the size and shape of a Walkman (remember those??) from the bag. Inside the box was my first diary. It was red with tiny white polka dots. And it had a lock. Not a key lock, but a miniature combination lock. She also handed me a set of ink pens she had picked out just for my diary writing. It was a set of gel pens in beautiful, girly colors. There was a sky blue pen, a teal pen, a lavender pen, and a bubble gum pink pen.

I was thrilled. I flipped through all of those blank pages and couldn’t wait to fill them with all of my thoughts. Not stories that I made up, but my own thoughts and feelings. And I did fill those pages. I wrote every single day and I loved it. As a side note, I still have that first diary. I pull it out from time-to-time and read it.

As I grew into a teenager, journals became a kind of obsession for me. I was always on the look-out for the next beautiful book to record my thoughts and feelings. Glossy covers with beautiful maidens in repose, a particularly meaning poem on the front, or a journal covered in velvet. They called to me.

But then I was introduced to the Internet in my late teens and a funny idea started to take shape. Long before I ever heard the word “blog” I began toying with the idea of putting my thoughts out there for the world to see. Though, I didn’t really expect many people to read whatever I had to ramble about. So, I set up a journal site which was powered by only my HTML skills. And then I heard of a little website called Blogger, which did essentially what I was already doing for myself, but with some nice automated features. I slowly transitioned away from the paper journals that had been my thought repositories for years and years and became a blogger.

In 2003, I purchased my own domain name and the focus of that site was my blog. And I have to say that I loved it every bit as much as I loved all of those paper journals. Maybe even a little bit more because my thoughts became interactive. People read what I said. They would leave me comments. Some of those people I count amongst my very good friends to this day.

But over the course of time, an ugly thing happened. I allowed someone else, through their judgment and belittling of what that site meant to me, to ruin it. My blogging became less and less frequent. Not because I had run out of things to say or my love affair with journaling and blogging were over, but because the space had become tainted. I couldn’t express myself there anymore without the baggage that had become attached.

And I missed it. Gods, how I missed what that place was to me. Maybe I was spilling my heartbreak and fears, or simply providing snarky observations. it didn’t matter, though, because it was MINE. I am still very angry at the person I allowed to taint that site for me. I am more angry at myself for allowing it, though. And no matter how hard I tried to get back to the love I once had for my blog, I just couldn’t.

So, I decided to let that place go. After 8 years of blogging there it was very hard to do. But I believe everything in life serves a purpose and sometimes, no matter how much we love something, we have to recognize when that thing is no longer working for us and just let it go. And I did.

And that, is how I ended up here. If you are an old reader of my blog, I respectfully ask that you not mention the former blog’s name in comments and such. I do not want to attract the negativity to this new place. I am undecided as to what to do with those archives. I guess I’ll figure that out when I need to.

Right now, I am just going to enjoy the fact that I can blog again. That I can put down my thoughts without someone putting me down for doing so.