Because a rhetorical question asked idly on a given afternoon…
Can produce the same joke answer from two people hundreds of miles away from each other:
Nice to know that my Twitter followers share my juvenile sense of humor. Maybe it's a sign I should get this t-shirt after all.
It's a beautiful, sunny day out and I feel better than I have in weeks. Let the weekend begin!
I'd say it really began last night. Before I left work, my husband told me that one of our friends wanted to meet us for dinner at our favorite Americanized Chinese restaurant. My husband and I split a gigantic appetizer platter, complete with an open flame for warming our beef-on-a-stick and then split an entree. I was stuffed when we left.
After that, we watched a DVD of The Expendables, which was just crying out to be given the Rifftrax treatment. As I watched it, I kept finding myself saying things like, "The political system on that island is so compromised, it seems unfair to be killing off their entire military." So much for suspension of disbelief.
I wrapped up the evening by finishing The Magicians: A Novel by Lev Grossman. It was my pick for one of my book clubs this month and I chose it based on several positive online reviews I'd read. I found the book interesting and engrossing, but never quite warmed up to the protagonist. However, that doesn't mean I won't read the sequel when it comes out. I'm looking forward to hearing what my fellow book clubbers thought.
Today I'll be participating in a pre-St. Patrick's Day parade with The Animal Rescue Alliance (T.A.R.A.). I don't know if I'll be walking a dog, passing out flyers, etc., but I guess I'll find out. This evening, my husband and I have decided we're going to hang out at home, have burritos for dinner and catch up on our TV watching from last week.
Tomorrow I'm doing my regular volunteer shift taking care of the adoptable cats at Petco, then going to my aunt's birthday brunch with my sister and nephew.
That doesn't even count the housework, work work and other activities I'll be interspersing among the fun stuff.
Have a great weekend! I'll post any good photos I take on Monday.
I'm all signed up to do the March for Babies walk again. This year I'm on the Social Media Club of Kansas City team and we're hoping to raise a total of $5,000 to help ensure that all babies are born healthy.
To inspire you to donate, I've posted an adorable photo of my niece as a baby. She will soon be turning 11 and was robustly healthy from the beginning, but many babies aren't so fortunate.
I've set a personal fundraising goal of $300. I raised that amount easily a couple of years ago and you guys did most of the donating, so here's your chance to help out once again. I know money is tight, but even $5 would be much appreciated.
If you're in the Kansas City area and you'd like to walk with my team, we'd love to have you. Just click the link in the first paragraph and register.
Thanks in advance for your support!
This morning I spoke on a radio show panel for Central Standard, a show at Kansas City NPR-affiliate KCUR. Host Jabulani Leffall interviewed a group of bloggers that included Tony Botello of Tony's Kansas City, Jeff Haught (Bull E. Vard) of KC Beer Blog, Brent Toellner of Toeller Tells It and KC Dog Blog, May Evans of May's Machete and me.
Tony's interview took up the first half hour and the rest of us took turns speaking for the second half hour. You can listen to a podcast of the show here.
We talked about why we blog, what we blog about and what we thought about our own blogs' future. I have very little idea what I said, but it seemed acceptable at the time.
It was really quite a relaxed experience, particularly in light of the fact that I already knew all of my fellow panelists. (This was the first time I'd met Tony Botello, but his intervew was separate from ours.)
On our way out, it was hinted that they were considering making blogger panels a regular show feature, so we'll see where that leads.
Photo credit: Michael Sauers
As I've mentioned many times before, I'm a big hard rock and metal fan. For years I've kept my radio on music stations or blasted nü-metal CDs on my way to and from work and everywhere else I've gone.
I don't know if it's the gloomy weather or all of the other things that are making me struggle to keep a positive outlook on life right now, but I've suddenly lost my tolerance for grim, minor-key ranting during my commute.
Fortunately, one of my local radio stations has recently changed to an all-comedy format, so now I have a much less road-rage-inducing form of in-car entertainment.
The station mainly plays little snippets of stand-up acts with a few SNL shorts and other satire bits interspersed. They don't limit themselves to the past couple of decades either; I've even heard some of Bob Newhart's classic one-sided phone conversation routines. Of course, not everything they play fits my sense of humor, but the material is curated pretty well.
It took about a week before I heard a repeat, which I thought was a pretty good sign. My only criticism is that the station's signal is weak and breaks up at random locations and under overpasses.
It feels almost therapeutic to laugh most of the time I'm in the car. Right now I need all the happy energy I can get.
Photo credit: Pete
I started feeling poorly on Friday afternoon and ended up leaving work early and taking my misery home. It turned out I was suffering from my all-time favorite ailment, food poisoning. You can tell it's my favorite because I get it ALL THE TIME.*
This was a particularly nasty case** and it laid me out for the rest of the day and night and well into the next day. I managed to emerge with a face full of broken capillaries and the inability to drag myself out of bed or form a coherent thought for nearly two days.
The first night was so bad that I considered going to the emergency room for an IV. However, a friend suggested I get a bottle of Pedialyte to drink and it ended up helping enough that I managed to take an ibuprofen for all of the head-to-toe pain I was in and actually get to sleep.
On Saturday morning I started out with dry toast and Pedialyte and managed to graduate to half a sub sandwich and some Sprite by evening. Even though I felt better, I was still so tired and lacking in motivation that I never actually accomplished anything all day long. Needless to say, I canceled all of my social plans.
I spent Sunday catching up on all of the work I'd missed the previous two days. So now it's Monday again and, for the second week in a row, I feel as though I haven't really had a weekend.
I'll bet you had a lot more fun this weekend than I did. What did you do?
*Actually, I probably do get it more often than most people. One of the many delightful side-effects of taking acid reflux medication is an increased susceptibility to food poisoning.
**No, I'm not sure where I got it. I'd had a lot of restaurant meals over the previous 24 hours and it could have been any of them.
By now you've probably seen the story about the dog that survived an attempt to euthanize him. This kind of thing is not completely unheard of — a similar story made the rounds in 2006.
In both instances, people came out of the woodwork wanting to adopt the "miracle dog."
Well I have some news for those people: you can accomplish the very same "miracle" any day of the week just by visiting an animal shelter and taking your pick.
Sure, it's amazing when an animal defies the odds and manages to escape certain death. But what about the other 3,999,999 dogs and cats that are euthanized every year in the United States? Is an uncanny resistance to poison your only criterion for choosing a pet? It shouldn't be.
If you want a dog or cat and can provide it a good home, don't wait around for something extraordinary to happen. Go to your local shelter and meet the animals. If you feel strongly about adopting from a no-kill organization, that's great: you'll be freeing up space for them to pull animals from local kill shelters.
It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where every homeless pet got the kind of news coverage that would prompt hundreds of people to want to take them home. In the real world, we have no choice but to go looking for each special pet on our own.
I have now been fruitlessly job hunting for four full months. I've been extraordinarily fortunate to have had my tenure with my current company extended through the end of March, but I'm starting to come to grips with the idea that I will not be moving seamlessly from one job to another.
However, I keep stumbling across opportunities to do social media consulting of various kinds on a contract basis. So although I swore I was never going to freelance or start my own business again, that may very well be what ends up happening.
The last time I went out on my own, I learned a few things about myself as a sole proprietor. One is that I am terrible about keeping my books and paying my quarterly income tax. This time around, I would have to make a special point of enlisting my accountant from the get-go so she can help me do my recordkeeping and tell me how big a check to write every three months.
Another business owner flaw I encountered the last time around was a lack of focus in my offerings. However, social media didn't even exist at the time and I've been doing a lot more specializing since then, so I think I can put together a logical and concise package of services to market myself.
Step one of that marketing plan will be a new blog that I'll use to discuss some of the things I've learned about social media marketing over the past four years. I'll share the link once the first post goes up.
My biggest worry about having two self-employed people in our household is that we won't be able to afford the health insurance we need. My husband and I both have pre-existing conditions galore, treated with a smörgåsbord of prescription medications. Even now, our out-of-pocket medical costs are so high that I contributed the maximum to last year's FSA.
On the other hand, I know that if I work hard and follow up on every lead, I could actually come out ahead. It's scary, but it can be done.
I cannot say enough good things about everyone who has been giving me job leads, references, LinkedIn recommendations and freelance offers. I thank you from the bottom of my heart and appreciate every effort you've made to give me a hand.
Although I'm not completely sure what the future will hold, I'm headed toward something new one way or another. I might as well decide now that it's going to be awesome.
Photo credit: Paul Joseph
When I'm not feeling well, I'm a big proponent of the "suck it up and soldier on" approach, but this weekend it occurred to me that I've been canceling more and more activities because I'm literally under the weather.
The weather has been very strange this winter, with lots of big storms and wild temperature fluctuations. Unfortunately for me, it seems that my head has turned into a living barometer. When the atmospheric pressure is high, I get headaches that don't respond to any OTC medication and cause me to curtail most of my plans in favor of sleeping or just lying around saying, "ow."
It took me more than a month to figure out what was happening and accept there's really nothing that can be done about it. This past weekend was two days of misery that finally relented when a big thunderstorm came through.
So if I've seemed like a party pooper lately, I apologize. It's just hard to concentrate when your head is a huge ball of pain. I'm sure that's also why my blog posting has been light. Here's hoping that spring is a little easier to bear.
Photo credit: Jon Swanson
I went into the vacant house to clean out the last of the items left behind, never suspecting that they would include two young kittens and an iguana, all of which were running around loose.
Fortunately, there were some animal carriers in one of the rooms, so I put the kittens in one of them. It was much harder to catch the iguana and it bit my hand as I was wrangling it into another pet carrier, but it only left indentations and didn't break the skin.
I took the kittens to my vet's office, which was very crowded. I knew I needed to get them combo tested before I could take them to my house and let my cats be exposed to them. My brain was racing trying to think of names for them and wondering how much it would cost to get them spayed and neutered. I was hoping that The Animal Rescue Alliance would help me find homes for them, but either way I knew I'd have to keep them at my house for a bit.
Once I got home, the iguana escaped from its carrier and hid somewhere in my house. Fearing another bite, I put on work gloves and began moving furniture to try to find it.
…and then I woke up.
When I realized I had been dreaming, I can't tell you how incredibly relieved I was that I wasn't really going to be responsible for finding new homes for two cats and a lizard.
I can guess where most of the dream came from. I do a lot of volunteering with the aforementioned rescue group and it's in my thoughts most of the time. I've also been getting a bit over-committed to various other volunteer projects, so my life and schedule are hectic right now. Finally, I recently watched "Sunshine Cleaning," which includes a scene where a woman cleaning out the house of someone who died finds a kitten.
So I take the dream as a sign that I need to slow down a bit. But at least I don't need to spend any part of my day calling around trying to find someone who wants an iguana.
Photo credit: RachelEllen