Sort of.

Things are very rough IRL right now in a number of ways. I don't really want to go into specific detail right now. I'm sorry for being away. I hope things will settle soon, but I won't count on that right now.

I apologize.

Ahem.

My mother has offered to spring for half the exam prep with Gleim.

And I think my boss is going to cover the other half. Or at least part of it, which will cut my out-of-pocket cost down to something I can actually afford.

Well, sort of. The down side was that, of course, I had to work today. I am starting to hate Saturdays, and that's not very natural.

The up side was that somebody pointed me to a free three-book trial of Audible. I have no intention of continuing it, but I've also been pointed to something that will convert Audible to MP3, which will allow me to split the files, so I am going to be downloading The Listener's Bible (NIV) along with two other things. Not sure what yet. I do wish these places would figure out that gigantic files are not always convenient, though. The whole Bible in only ten files? Each file 8+ hours long? I mean, it'd be nice if my player handled audiobooks better, but it doesn't. I guess this is at least not too hard a fix, although I hate having so much extra crap installed on my machine.

I am amazed by how big the kitten is getting, although her growth seems to be slowing now. I suspect she'll always be the smaller one; her mother was tiny. Which is good, we were kind of afraid that she might grow into her tail someday, and she would have been giant if that happened! I love my aunt's cat Jackson, but he had a tail like that and ended up *enormous*.

I am ridiculously tired for 8:30 on a Saturday night. I like that we're making enough money to live on now, I can't complain about that, but it feels like even when I'm well, my life is totally absorbed by this, there's no time for anything else. And that's just... sad.

The emergency fund is funded. I just put in the other $500 transfer this morning, so as soon as that goes through our ING account will have a balance of $1065.96.

I slept for more than ten hours last night. Went to bed at 9pm. And yet this morning I'm still feeling really... groggy. I don't know why. Probably due to lack of sleep on every other night this week, yet. And I keep waking up coughing, still, even though I'm usually fine for most of the day.

Bet you won't hear that one very much. Well, just filed, and thanks to my job troubles of earlier in the year, I got one more year of EIC out of our beloved government. So, while I made a grand total of ~$5000 last year, I'm getting $700-some back from them, and I paid less than $300 in.

The down side, of course, is that my "rebate" will be the smaller variety even though I expect to actually be paying income taxes next year, but I can live with that. I'm hoping that Carl may also qualify for EIC, but I'm not sure he will. I'm very pleased with the fact that both states had freely available online filing... I'm not sure why the federal government can't do that.

So, about $850 right now, with another $300 coming hopefully by summer. Can't complain about that, it will go a long way towards our debt and leave a little bit to cover some nice Valentine's Day and anniversary celebrations. :)

I'm a little behind, but I expect to be caught up by tonight on my OT reading.

One of the things that strikes me as I go through this is stuff I didn't really remember from going over it before. All the slavery and the fact that this is considered perfectly okay. I came across that the other day, too, when after hearing about this "Titus 2" business I went and just sat down and read Titus. (It's short, after all.) And Titus 2, true to form, does tell women to submit to their husbands... and oh, by the way, slaves should also submit to their masters without complaint.

Which made me wonder. Why do we, as Christians, so often just *ignore* sections of the Bible? I don't mean studying things and concluding that they no longer apply to us for some theological reason... I mean just ignoring. In some quick Googling, I came across many, many websites which used Titus 2 as the model for what a good Christian woman should be... but from the descriptions in those places, you'd think the chapter says nothing except to women. I often hear Leviticus quoted on homosexuality, but never on shellfish except by the people trying to point out how ridiculous it is to quote Leviticus on homosexuality.

In Sunday school, they tell you the story of Abraham and Sarah. You *may* get to hear the part where Abraham lies on several occasions and says that Sarah is his sister because he believes that saying she's his wife could be dangerous. I remember that part of the story getting mentioned once. The one time I remember hearing this story, the part where it turns out he wasn't actually lying was most certainly not included.

Not everything in the Bible is pretty. And I'm not saying that we're supposed to keep slaves and marry our half-siblings now just because it happened in the Bible, because of course I'm not a literalist that way. But if you're going to use the Bible as a reason to insist that people ought to behave a particular way (rather than just behaving that way yourself), then it's probably a bad idea to pick and choose what you pay attention to. Let he or she who does not wear cotton/polyester blends cast the first stone, or something.

So, I have a cold, thus necessitating a day off work (so as not to scare the clients into thinking I'm going to give them pneumonic plague) and postponing my ortho appointment.

But I'm having a decent day regardless. Finally set up a sort of reading plan for the Old Testament, so we'll see how that goes. I've been looking forever for a decent reading plan online, but the primary problem with that is that I don't *want* to take a year to read the Bible. I certainly want to do an in-depth study later which will probably take that long or longer, but right now I just want to go over everything. So, I'm going to try to plug through the Old Testament in a month or so. This shouldn't be too hard, since I've found a way to read the NRSV online, so I can do part of it in the morning, part at lunch, and part in the evening before bed.

In related news: Evidently I am now a Muslim, to go from the number of times I've heard mentioned recently that Barack Obama must be. I don't know how I missed before that he's a UCC member. Makes me dreadfully miss my old church, now. There's no UCC in this area, so I'm going to a Church of Christ right now, largely due to proximity. I like the a capella singing, and it's interesting to be exposed to a different tradition. It helped that the pastor here was definitely an academic sort, but unfortunately he's since moved on. The guy filling in seems to be similar, at least, so the sermons are in-depth studies of things, not so much spewing hellfire about pop culture. (I don't care how satisfying a Ten-Minute Hate might be, I'm not going to participate in it.)

But I miss my old church. I'm starting to really hope that we do move back to Ohio, so I can go back again. I'm *pretty* sure that they haven't become Muslims in my absence.

Orthodontist appointment made for the 29th. I don't think they're going to rebracket at that appointment, so there will likely be another shortly thereafter. They've got my models now so they can see where I'm coming from... now I get to really find out if my old orthodontist screwed me up, or if it just looks that way because I'm in the middle of things. Hopefully now it'll be about two years before I'm done. For those keeping score at home, that will be about five years after I started.

I can't say I'm happy to be continuing with it this long, but I'll be happy when it's done. And in the meantime, come Tuesday I'll get to check something else off my 101 list!

Okay, let's start with this: It's not that I don't like Heath Ledger.

But, let's be serious here for a moment. Celebrities, like all human beings, are not immortal. They die. Sometimes from natural causes and sometimes not. Sometimes young and sometimes old. But the one universal thing is that it's going to happen to all of us.

This is not, I repeat *not*, a good enough reason to force all other news coverage to the back burner just to tell us about how much people loved the guy, or how much his autopsy *didn't* reveal. We're sitting on the verge of a recession, we're in the middle of an interminable "war", we have a presidential primary campaign going on. All of these things affect your life and my life and the lives of everybody we know far more than Heath Ledger.

The fact that people are interested in this is beside the point, honestly. A news organization has the responsibility to report what people *need* to hear most, not what they *want* to hear most. I'm sorry for the loss of his family and friends, but there's the key... the number of people in, say, CNN's audience who are in either of those categories is infinitesimal. The rest of us really need to move on.

Oh, that would probably be the booze.

Lest anybody get worried, I've had about *half* of a Mike's Hard Berry, so I think it's less the alcohol than "mmm, Mike's Hard Berry."  I love these things.

So what happened today?  I woke up this morning and promptly spilled juice on the carpet.  Red juice.  The kind that stains.  I have successfully used laundry detergent before to clean carpet, so I got that out and set to work, and then remember that we've started buying ultra-ultra concentrated laundry detergent lately, and I haven't taken that into account in how much I'm using.  So I spend the next half hour trying to squeegee out the detergent from the carpet.  It was, at least, the Tide Free no-perfumes no-dyes kind, so all we've got now is the potential for future bubbles.  I am now late and must wake up Carl to drive me in, which I hate doing, because he looks so cute when he's asleep.

Then, off to work, to spend almost nine hours solid just doing glorified data entry. The up side is that I get paid a very decent hourly wage for this.  The down side is that no amount of money can keep you from wanting to bash your head into the wall at hour 7 when you discover that this company has stopped even making the pretense at recording the withholding for all these paychecks, and you basically have to make educated guesses about how much the federal withholding was, especially as it seems to bear no resemblance to what federal withholding should have been.  I just about cried when it was all over.  I wonder how people can manage to do this sort of work their whole lives.

I walked home and talked to my mom most of the way, since it's been awhile since I called her.  She never says a whole lot when I call, but whatever.  I try to fill her in on everything that's going on in my life, she makes me feel guilty for moving and asks for the umpteenth time if we have a wedding date yet... the usual.  (Her: "Nobody knows what's going on!"  Me:  "Well, neither do we, so they're in good company!")  So now I feel justified in taking this time to relax and recharge.  I finished the first half of Writing Alone and with Others, so now I'm starting the "with Others" part, which I hope will be of some use with the Cruces folks.

I have a new bike, hurrah.  Took a ride on it today, and... well, it kicked my ass.  Which is funny, because I can do fairly well on my stationary bike, but I got out into the somewhat-chilly very-dry Las Cruces air this afternoon and very shortly in (like maybe ten minutes) I was wheezing so hard I had to stop and head, much more slowly, back home.

So now I have to figure out the time and money to go to the doctor.  I've had breathing problems before--for yonks, I don't remember a time when colds didn't knock me down--but never "Oh my, I'm going to pass out," kind of moments, especially not while doing something that wasn't particularly strenuous.  I wasn't *tired* at all, just so out of breath that I was literally wheezing.

It'll be awhile before I can bike to work, but at least this is progress.

I still chide myself for missing it, because that's how my childhood was.  We weren't poor, no.  Those children on the television with the ribs showing and the great big eyes, they were poor.  Never mind the reduced lunch, never mind the home-made clothes and the hand-me-downs, we weren't poor. And in the same way, I was not allowed to miss praise.  Some children were horribly abused, how dare I feel unsatisfied for the lack of a "good job"?  Such a small thing.  Such a very small thing.  I could live without.

( Or maybe not. )

Or, well, I know one thing.

Or, well, I know a lot of stuff, if you want to get technical, because one doesn't tend to receive a Master's degree without proving that one knows at *least* three or four completely distinct things, but I now know one thing that I hadn't really been sure of before.

This job track is really, really, really not for me.

Which isn't to say that I'm not surviving, it's more a question of where I go from here, now. And whether I have to revamp my 101 list at that point to remove a couple of the very career-track-specific items and replace them with new things. Hmm.

We've been talking lately about the possibility of going back to Ohio, which raises more questions about getting married.  I'd rather do it sooner than later.  Well, I would have done it the week after we met, but that's beside the point. ;)  But there is something inherently ludicrous about living with this guy who you adore, who you are going to marry and have known that for ages, and who you could not possibly be more committed to, and still be calling him your "fiance" two years into the relationship.

Also, the engagement ring is driving me crazy.  I'm ditching it when we get married--it gets caught on everything.  I want a plain gold band, something that I'm not going to have to worry about taking off before I do dishes (lest it puncture the cheapo rubber gloves).

But I also don't want to have my one-and-only Wedding (caps required!) with none of my family here, and my family members have been... questionable on the subject of coming out here for our wedding.  Airfare is expensive, I realize that.  So are weddings.  So, if we're moving back to Ohio, we could do it then, and all would be much better.  I could get married in the church I grew up in.  That would be a dream come true on all counts. The only fundamental problem with this is that it's two and a half years from now, at the earliest.  That would also be about the same point where we could afford to do one here (or elsewhere) if it came down to it, though.

Ideally, of course, I wouldn't be *cough* dollars in debt and could afford to have a nice wedding with no parental help, and just tell everybody that their presence is their gift and help those who can't afford it.  But I can't do that.  And I can't bring myself to go further into debt to fund this.  Nor can I bring myself to just take off work and run to the courthouse some afternoon... I'd never forgive myself, and I don't think my grandparents would ever forgive me, either.  Which leaves waiting.  But I try to remind myself that this will definitely be something worth waiting for.

And complicated.  This is why people drive to work, honestly.

You don't just need a bike, anymore.  Although obviously you do need a bike.  And a helmet.  And a lock.  And, if you intend to commute and your office is not inclined to let you out at 4:30pm in the winter, lights.  And, if I want to be carrying my purse and my lunch and such back and forth, something in the way of a rack to secure things to.

Not to mention that I haven't been on a bike since middle school and was most certainly never allowed to ride in the street at that point, so this will be a brand new adventure.

But, hopefully soon.  If not this next paycheck then maybe just the bike and helmet then and everything else after that, have a couple weekends to just do some leisure riding to get used to it again.

In other news:  Woke up this morning to see both cats cuddled up at the foot of the bed.  Neither chewing on my feet.  Yay!  And the dream journal has finally yielded something which might make an interesting short story.

Probably.  Suffice it to say that it isn't getting better, which makes me tetchy.

I am doing amazingly good at keeping stuff out of my pockets.  I'm not counting it as a fail if it's just one thing for a short period, obviously, because that's what pockets are for--quarters when I'm running out to the laundry room, my MP3 player while I'm listening to it, etc.  But they are no longer serving as long-term storage.  My purse is now even more of a mess than before, but that will be step 2 of that project.

It probably doesn't help that when I try to sleep in on weekends, the kitten wakes me up by trying to devour my feet.  I get the impression that she thinks breakfast ought to come a little earlier than 9am.  We can't leave food out for her because our once-bone-thin adult cat will eat them, and she doesn't need any more kitten crunchies than she's already sneaking.  She's getting pretty hefty, but they're getting along beautifully now.

I have laundry in drawers now.  The cat isn't terribly pleased with this... she preferred it in baskets.  There's definitely a lot left that needs doing at any given time (especially given that the dryers in the laundry room gave out the other day, I hope they're fixed now since I'm going to work on it tomorrow) but I think this is good progress.  The apartment in general is already a lot tidier than it was at the end of December, so I'm very proud.  Carl's been helping a lot, hopefully he'll be able to keep that up, since his classes start again Wednesday.  Hopefully, the second semester of teaching will go better than the first for him.

Work for me is still, well, work.  This may be my last full weekend off for awhile, but I'm looking forward to the extra hours.  I want to get a bike with this next paycheck.

I'm working on trying to establish routines for myself. This has been really difficult for me. I spent five years in college. I was, as recently as August, a graduate student. I never knew what time I'd go to bed at night or when I'd get up in the morning, and it didn't matter. But now it matters, obviously, and I spend far too much time having to think about things. Do I need to wash my hair today? Do I have clean clothes? I don't have a set schedule for when these things happen because I always just did them "as necessary," but now I don't have the time for that.

With a routine, there's no thinking, you just do it. I think it'll be wonderful once I reach that point, but in the meantime, trying to figure out just what needs to be done when after so many years of being a free spirit is more complicated than I thought it would be.

I'm going to try to find a notebook to keep beside my bed tonight. The dreams are getting... trippy. I wish I could lucid dream, really, because at least then I could enjoy it instead of being totally confused when I wake up. They're very long, elaborate, storylines that make total sense when I'm asleep, and when I wake briefly but go back to sleep they start right back up again. This has to be hormonal or something. But I can never seem to retain anything about them when I wake up, and as a writer this disappoints me because I'm sure they'd be a gold mine.

The cat and the kitten are getting along really well now, and I'm so pleased. They're playing now on a regular basis. The cat still doesn't really want to cuddle if the kitten is around, but this might have something to do with the fact that the kitten thinks that the cat's tail is the best toy ever.

I'm working on goal #73 tonight. I think I've got a real crack at it. Carl's off with friends and I'm listening to audiobooks while I work on it. I'm on load #3 right now. The dishwasher is still on hold, and dishes are just a nightmare in this apartment. No garbage disposal. The sink is on the far left side of the counter, so there's no space to stack things on that side. Our counter space in general is almost nonexistent, basically with only enough space for a rather small dish drainer. And since it's so miserable trying to navigate where to put everything, we put it off. We have no kitchen table, but today I'm using a card table, which is helping. (Usually the card table in question is Carl's desk. Versatile piece of furniture, that.)

The car is now running great. Just the battery, no other problems, and it turned out to not even cost that much to fix.

I'm making good goal progress so far, better than I thought. The online tracking program helps a lot. I've managed to get everything out of my pants pockets already for the past two days, although I've still had things in my coat. One step at a time, I figure.

Slept better last night than usual, though still not great. I'm having a lot of very vivid dreams--some of them nightmares, but not always--and I wake up in the morning feeling somehow less rested for it. Hopefully this will pass soon, because I'm starting to spend my days in a sort of giddy exhaustion that doesn't lead to my doing very good work, and I'm increasingly forgetful.