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In lieu of a real post, here’s a list of links that have caught my eye recently:

• MerriMail (found via Design*Sponge) – A quarterly decor and design publication, each issue of which comes with a little gift.
• The really fun official website for Tenacious D – The Pick of Destiny. Yes, I’ll be there on opening weekend!
• ExtremePumpkins.com – In case you’re tired of the same old triangle-eyed jack-o-lantern.
• Have you ever stayed at a DoubleTree Hotel and had their chocolate chip cookies? Me neither, but the recipe sounds pretty good.
• Bound For Glory: America in Color, 1939-1943. This Library of Congress online exhibition features color photography from an era that I’ve mainly seen through black and white photos. Fascinating.
• First International Center of Women’s Memories, Biographies and Testimonies is a project dedicated to gathering "real women’s stories." I’m planning to send them some of the family stories that my grandmother compiled.
• Leather Up is an online store with an amazing selection of leather gear. I’m definitely eyeing their boot selection for potential stagewear.

Wow, no wonder I have a hard time focusing – my interests zig-zag around like crazy.

By the way, I’m definitely going to Jamaica in November. Woohoo! Maybe a long weekend on a beach sans laptop will calm me down a little.

I’m having a heck of a time getting myself geared up to actually accomplish anything right now. I don’t know if it’s the gloomy weather, the short days, or insufficient caffeine intake, but something needs to change.

I wake up every morning with a to-do list clamoring inside my head. I have work, community service and band obligations that have all slipped behind on my schedule and it’s time I charged in and got them taken care of.

Yesterday would have been a great evening to get some things done around the house, but instead I vegged on the couch and watched "Veronica Mars" followed by "Blade: Trinity" (which featured a buff, shirtless Ryan Reynolds to distract me from the basic ridiculousness of the plot).

I think part of the problem is that I could use a little break. All of my travel this year has led to days of meetings and networking, with no real relaxation time built in.

I’m seriously considering taking a long weekend in early November to attend a friend’s wedding in Jamaica. My husband can’t go, but my sister volunteered in a heartbeat. I have six days of vacation time to burn through before the end of the year anyway, so it could happen.

I need to finish decorating my head and face before work, so I’ll wrap this up. If you have any suggestions for helping me jump-start myself back to action, let me know.

I spent the weekend in St. Louis at a meeting of my community service organization. We were supposed to be staying at the Sheraton West Port Tower, but when we arrived at about 9:30 p.m., we found that the three of us who rode together had been bumped to the Lakeside Chalet next door.

That meant a lot of walking back and forth during the conference, but fortunately there was a Starbucks in between.

I did not get to enjoy the "lakeside" aspect of my hotel room; when I opened my curtains I found that my view was all asphalt rooftop. That really didn’t make much difference as I only slept and showered in my room anyway.

The Sheraton complex was rather interesting.  In addition to the two hotels, there were numerous bars, restaurants, nightclubs, shops and offices. The mall area in the tower had a lot of empty storefronts surrounding a theater, a comedy club and an America’s Pub.  Outside, the village area between the hotels was packed with more restaurants and bars and seemed to be doing okay, although I would bet that most of the patrons were tourists.

We saw three or four wedding parties on Saturday night at both hotels combined, and I spotted a couple of roaming bachelorette groups that night as well.  I was lucky enough that none of the partiers were adjacent to my room.  Other club members were not so fortunate.

I got home by about 3:30 p.m. on Sunday and took a nap for a couple of hours to shake off the roadweariness and my giant Cracker Barrel lunch. I finished up the weekend with a minor amount of housework and an eary bedtime.

This week should be pretty busy at work, but fairly light on evening activities. As the weather gets colder and the days get shorter, I find myself wanting to stay in bed as much as I can. It’s probably time I invested in one of those sunlight simulating lamps!

Reason #5,438,256

Yesterday as we were on our way out to dinner, my husband darted over to his car to get something.  When he got into my car, he handed this to me:

It was the first perfect fall leaf he’d found this year and he thought I’d enjoy it. How sweet is that?! It seems the man who used to be puzzled about why I wasn’t more excited to get jewelry has me figured out after all.

I’ll have to think of a way to preserve it now that I’ve scanned it.  What do you think, should I iron it between sheets of waxed paper, seal it between two sheets of clear, sticky plastic or laminate it?

Related update:  BoingBoing had a link to this how-to about folding maple leaves into roses. Aren’t they pretty? I might have to try it.

Read: Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. It was a nice follow-up to American Gods. I finished it before I went to bed on Saturday and passed it along to my sister when we went to lunch on Sunday. Speaking of Neil Gaiman, I’m reminded that I have the DVD of MirrorMask, which I borrowed from my guitarist a few weeks ago. I should watch it tonight.

Bought (but haven’t read yet): Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie – recommended by Richard Tait from Cranium, who spoke at a symposium I attended last week.

Bought and listened to: Ta-Dah by the Scissor Sisters. As with the previous CD, I think it’s going to take a few listens to decide which songs I really like. Also, there is so much enormous "Don’t even think about copying this CD, you larcenous scumbag" verbiage on the disc and the packaging that it actually pissed me off. I bought the damned CD, get off my back! And to think that I bought the disc rather than downloading the album from iTunes because I thought I’d have more flexibility that way.

Completed: My latch hook pillow project. I’d put up the photos on Flickr, but I suspect that the world would care even less to see them than I do.

Baked: Bierocks. My favorite savory autumn treat.

Tasted: Chateau Ste. Michelle Columbia Valley Riesling, my favorite of the wines at Saturday’s Wino Book Club (although I agree with Cagey that I am over rieslings after tasting six of them).

That’s pretty much the whole list (except for Slept, Ate and Watched on TV, which aren’t really interesting enough to include). How was your weekend?

Yesterday I went to lunch with eight of my co-workers and when four of us got back to the car, we found that some asshole in a Mercedes SUV had double-parked and completely blocked us in. There was no way of knowing where the driver had gone or when he might be back, so we all ended up walking more than a mile back from lunch.

It wouldn’t have been such a big deal to get back on time, but we were attending a symposium and the next presenter was Ze Frank. I was NOT going to miss hearing any of his talk. We ended up getting there right on time – sweaty and winded but on time. Ze’s presentation was great and I even got to meet him later on. (Squee!)

That evening, I arrived home to find the new "Weird Al" CD/DVD in my mailbox. Thanks to Al’s online marketing efforts, I’d already heard "Don’t Download This Song" and "White and Nerdy," but I immediately put the disc in the DVD player (5.1 surround!) and played the videos and then the remaining songs I hadn’t heard.

The standout among the videos was the one done by Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi for the song "Close But No Cigar," (not to be confused with Thomas Dolby’s song of the same name). It’s really unexpected for "Weird Al" – more "adult" than anything he’s done previously. (Note: The video link in the blog post only leads to a small portion of the song and something seems to be wrong with the audio.)

My husband and I also watched the "behind the scenes" studio feature on the DVD. This may be the most highly orchestrated "Weird Al" CD to date – I can’t even imagine how many tracks each song had. The scene that captured my husband’s heart was of a ProTools crash in the middle of recording a track. Ha! It happens to everyone, not just us!

Of the remaining tracks, "I’ll Sue Ya," "Trapped in the Drive Thru" and "Do I Creep You Out" were probably my favorites. "Weasel Stomping Day" was amusing just because it was so odd. This album’s polka medley, "Polkarama," mainly just demonstrated to me how old I am – I didn’t recognize a lot of the songs. Heh.

So that was my day of total geekitude. If only every day could be so much fun! (I’d maybe skip the walk, though.)

Sorry my posting has been so light this week.  I’ve been spending all of my free time in the evenings latch hooking a pillow as a side project for work (it’s a long story).

I did finally watch the first two episodes of "Jericho" yesterday.  For a show that’s supposed to take place in the real world, there are an awful lot of nagging details that don’t feel right.  The hero, who is the town ne’er-do-well and the mayor’s black sheep son, has been away from home for five years and inexplicably mastered the post-apocalyptically handy skills of performing a tracheotomy, repairing machinery and placing dynamite for a controlled explosion better than an actual miner. And speaking of miners:  Miners? In rural Kansas? Huh?

I also caught the premiere of "Heroes," which seems quite a bit more promising.

Moving away from TV, here’s an interesting Halloween game from M&Ms Dark that’s been driving me and many of my co-workers crazy this week. So far I’ve gotten 38 out of 50, but I’m pretty much out of ideas.  Warning: Plays music.

That’s all I’ve got for you today. Enjoy your Thursday!

Remember the book club meeting I said I was attending on Saturday?  Well, it turns out it’s this coming Saturday. Thank goodness I called Cagey to see if she wanted to ride together. She quickly set me straight. Goofy Girl, I hope I didn’t lead you astray, too.

The bad thing about the two-week gap between my reading the book and our discussing it is that I’m definitely going to have forgotten most of the characters’ names by then. The wine tasting that comes before the discussion won’t help either. I may need to read the book again between now and then, just to make sure I can discuss it with confidence. In high school, I always ended up reading all of our literature selections two or three times by the time the class slowly lurched through the material.

It turns out there was a BookCrossing meetup on Saturday, but I guess I’d already convinced myself that I wasn’t available, so it was not on my mental list of alternate entertainment options. I ended up sitting at home and watching MythBusters while my husband was at his gig.

The rest of the weekend went fine. We had our theoretically annual furnace clean ‘n’ check for the first time in three or four years. The humidifier on our furnace was so choked with calcium deposits that it exploded with dust when the service guy opened it to check the filter.  He also informed us that our air filter was hideously clogged and needed to be changed immediately. If you recall our air conditioner repair saga from May, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that we hadn’t changed the filter since then. However, I bought an extra filter and I’m going to try really hard to remember to change it in December.

Curious about my progress on the to-do list I posted last week? I must admit that I haven’t done any of the things on the list yet.  I did get a great deal of laundry done this weekend, though. Does that count?

This week felt as though it simultaneously rushed by and dragged on endlessly.  Even though the weekend will be just as hectic, I’ll be happy for the chance to at least sleep in once or twice.

I took the morning off from work yesterday, primarily to go to the doctor about the fact that I still get heartburn all the time despite the acid reflux medicine I take every morning. I doubted there was much she could do for me and I was right. She’s going to try having me take two doses a day for a couple of months and see if that settles things down.

She also lectured me a bit about my diet and it looks like I’m going to have to be better about avoiding some of my faves: ketchup, food containing tomato sauce (but I can make stuff with fresh tomatoes), vinegar, etc. Of course, I’m also supposed to limit caffeine, but I only drink it in the morning anyway.

Before my doctor’s appointment, I had an appointment in the same part of town to get my eyebrows tidied up.  While I was there, I invested in some decent makeup for once: Jane Iredale PurePressed Base.  It took some experimentation to settle on the right shade, but I think I’m really going to like it.

For my vocal lesson yesterday evening, I decided it would be nice to work on my ballad singing skills so I downloaded the karaoke track for "My Immortal" by Evanescence. It’s going well so far.

I had the house to myself after my vocal lesson, so I had drive-thru Schlotzsky’s for dinner and watched "My Name is Earl" and "The Office" with the cats.  (They were really more sleeping than watching.)

This weekend my husband has a gig with a country band tonight and Saturday, but that’s okay because I have a happy hour tonight and a book club meeting on Saturday.  On Sunday, we have a recording session scheduled with our guitarist and bass player.

So there’s my non-exciting life in a nutshell.  How’s your weekend looking?