Saturday, March 28, 2015

No Way! Yahweh.

I don't know how I forgot to mention this but let it be known that I gave church up for Lent. The Baby Jesus brought me too much stress, so I had to let him go. I am thankfully no longer the president of the board at church. I wasn't made to have a church. I'm not even sure I was made to go to church. It is with profound relief that I can let him go for Lent.

Out of respect to the soon-to-be-risen Master, I continue on as queen of the newsletter, keeper of the website and substitute in the sound room. I'm also the vice president but unless the president is assassinated, I'm good to go.

Perhaps the Baby Jesus has been dismayed with my change of leadership and my newly found Jesus-free freedom, so he's tricked me to Christian Radio when flipping stations and I've forgotten to put CDs in the car. I usually end up listening to this positivity-laced-Jesus-is-coming-look-happy music when there are commercials on my usual stations. Jesus has a good gig going on because (1) his station doesn't play any commercials and (2) it's happy, mindless adult contemporary easy listening of which is nice when traveling to and from work. The wife, who has a "smart car" with iPod bluetooth and satellite radio and knows nothing of commercials, is probably flummoxed by this. Hey, I say love the one you're with.

Well, love the one you're with until it's money-raising time....someone's gotta pay for that commercial free approach. When it's "tithing time," the music seems rather scant. Just begging for your money. That's when I turn the channel and listen to the commercials. It's like going to Catholic mass while on the road.

I really like Easter but it's all about the chocolate, not the main event. (No offense to the most holiest of days--Move! That! Stone!) I can still remember how sick I felt after eating 40 Cadbury chocolate eggs back in the college era. That had to be four bazillion calories and an almost terminal level of sugar. I''m still recovering from that madness. Let it be known that I don't waste my time on any of those waxy, cheap chocolate bunnies. I want the expensive, tasty real chocolate bunnies. Skip the Peeps. Those things freak me out.

What the hell IS a Peep, anyway?

Before I forget, I want to mention Kleenex with Vicks built into them. I know--weird, non-existent segue from Jesus and Peeps to Kleenex. I'm trying to decide if it's genius or madness to have such a product. I used a box of them over the past week and the verdict is still out. I really like them and the smell of Vicks always brings back happy memories of childhood. (Wait--that's kind of weird. When you smell Vicks as a kid, it means you were sick. How is that happy?) So, each time I used one of those chemically-laden tissues, it made me happy. But then, my brain kicked in and was like, "holy shit, you are breathing in a vat of chemicals using these things." If you haven't snorted one of these things, you should try it. Just don't blame me for all the brain cells probably being killed while huffing one of those thing.


As you can probably tell, I woke up in a rather irreverent mood today. No reason of which I can determine. It's a nice feeling to wake up irreverent. Perhaps it's from sniffing one too many Vicks-Kleenex or hearing one too many Christian rock songs. Had I slept longer, I might not be this way. Unfortunately, today's alarm clock--earlier than usual and of course on a weekend--was Freckles puking on the rug. Why she always throws up on a day we could sleep in is more genius than those Kleenex.


Speaking of her lumpy majesty, the dog continues to plug along. Yahweh, she's still she keeps sprouting disgusting-cauliflower-puffs of skin growths and has more boogers in her eyes than in a room of kindergartners during cold and flu season, but she never misses a meal and she has stopped the barking madness. I look at her and shake my head, chuckling. I thought we'd be dogless by now, with the vet's prophecy coming true--that being Freckles would only last a few months after the passing of Lucy. (Oh, how we still miss Lucy.) Perhaps in the spirit of Easter, the Baby Jesus swooped down upon her and said, "Let there be Life" and he extended her expiration date, not only in human years but in dog years.
Damn dog is going to live to be 20.


I think I shall remain irreverent all day. Pray to Jesus for the wife. She's gonna need some prayer today if I'm gonna be a smarty pants all day.....

.....Wait--perhaps you should pray for me. The wife is so not going to be entertained after a few hours of my irrevent-cy. Or, maybe it's irrelevancy. Whatever, someone is gonna need prayer. Just remember: Prayers, not peeps. Amen.


















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Wednesday, March 18, 2015

The Training Furballs

Follow up from last blog's report....the Book de la Face experiment definitely backfired, as illustrated by the wife's taunting: "Well, that didn't work. You wasted more time not having facebook and then re-creating facebook than all the time you wasted when you had facebook." Not only that, people are now finding me, which means I'm adding friends to the friends I recently unfriended. Sigh.

I should've come up with a stage name.

Follow up on the left-handed mouse experiment: As people were unable to use my computer at work due to my left handed mouse (I have to share my computer at times and the left handed mouse REALLY freaked people out), I changed it back to right-handed. That said, I've left my home computer as left-handed...so, I'm left handed at home and right handed at work. Seems balanced enough. So far, so good.

In the "well, I didn't see that coming" department, I've run into an issue of which I didn't even seem possible. For the past six months, I have been working as the "trainer" for my company. My job is to babble all day at people and whip them into shape so they are trained to do their jobs correctly...and, to "onboard" the newbies. (What a weird word--onboarding. Alas, that is what they tell me I do, so all aboard!) Onboarding the newbies has been an ordeal, as we've had many a hire during my short tenure as the trainer. All that training has led to a problem......

.....I've developed furballs.

In case you are not familiar with human furballs, they are most definitely different than cat hairballs, so erase that image out of your mind. What happens is all that talking leaves me froggy and phlegmy. (Froggy, furballs, you'll get the picture.) Who knew that talking all day would bother me? I talk all the time. I'm always yipping about something.

Previously, my job was to shut up and listen. After all, who wants a counselor who does all the talking? Counseling is a relatively quiet job. Oh sure, there's all that skill teaching, cheerleading and encouragement, but it's quiet and tends not to involve use of a loud voice--one's job is to sound soothing, not terrifying.

(Side note: I daresay a few of my clients find me terrifying, but that's a subject for their counseling and has nothing to do with my voice...well, not that I know of...)

My training job has challenged my yipping ability. By the time I get home, I'm making all these god-awful throat clearing noises to move the furballs and phlegm and scratchiness out of the way. Laying down to go to sleep is the worst. The poor wife. It takes me 15 minutes to just stop clearing my throat enough to sleep. God knows she's not going to sleep until I knock it off. Even the deaf dog is bothered by my noises.

It's obnoxious. I don't want to do it. I try not to do it. But, that little froggy, phlegmy irritation leaves me powerless. I can't not do it.

In an effort to save my sanity and my marriage, I've taken to all sorts of rituals and life-altering changes. Hot lemon tea with a dollop of honey....throat drops of various sorts (medicated, non-medicated, zinc laced, ...no dairy after dinner (dairy makes the problem a billion times worse), taking my allergy pills earlier in the evening (not that this is an allergy problem, but what the heck), drinking more water during the day, not talking once I'm done working, gargling with salt water, taking a decongestant (although I'm not technically congested), trying not to clear my throat unless it's absolutely, furbally necessary, yadda yadda yadda (or, not yadda yadda yadda in my case--I'm trying not to talk so much). I already take an obscene amount of Vitamin C every day, so I won't be adding more to that. An on-line search educated me on the availability of products designed to help singers and teachers. Lemon tea with honey is a top suggestion, so at least I'm on the mark with that one. (I do not like hot tea with honey. I don't like honey. Go figure. Who the hell doesn't like honey? What's not to love about hot tea?) I have yet to try licorice root, slippery elm or apple cider vinegar, so I have a few options left to try before taking a vow of silence...perhaps I'll have to learn how to talk from my diaphragm. The wife thinks it's funny, as she's a teacher and she talks all day long, just as all our teacher friends do. How they do it and still sound and feel normal, I do not know.

I will be trying the apple cider vinegar next, so stay tuned. I really don't want to give up ice cream and chocolate, so I'm willing to take on the vinegar. It has so many positive qualities that it deserves to be the next test subject. Since I am not consuming dairy after dinner, I'll have to start having ice cream for breakfast.

It's a sacrifice, but one must do what one must do. 

Visitors to the Addiverse: feel free to laugh at my furballs. Teachers: feel free to snicker. Trainees: be quiet and respect thy trainer. Self: try to talk at a quieter volume during training. Embrace the apple cider vinegar. Say no to the after dinner chocolate. Say yes to ice cream for breakfast. Furballs: I'm sorry but you must go. It is either you or me. The wife isn't gonna tolerate the two of us, so I chose you to hit the road....

...and, Unfriended friends of Facebook: You are required to make suggestions for my training issues or I won't accept your friend request. I have standards to maintain and furballs to lose. No suggestion = no friend of mine.

I'd say more but I'm embracing "silence is golden" when not at work. Besides, I never talk when I'm eating ice cream and it is breakfast time, so here's to my bowl of breakfast and golden silence.....

Pass the honey. It's golden. Maybe I'll like honey better if it's dribbled all over my ice cream....

Sunday, March 08, 2015

Pinning the Two-headed FB Monster

Great news! Freckles has stopped her morning barking. She has finished training us and thus no longer needs to bark. She seems to have stopped her search for Lucy, too so all is a bit less stressful in the addiverse.

Photo....A bit of sacrilege in honor of the approaching Easter holiday. I'd say I'm sorry but I'm not. I'm still laughing about this meme.

My plan to save myself from book de la face doom didn't exactly go as planned. The goal was to deactivate my account for an unspecified length of time and get my freedom back. Too much time had been wasted perusing the feed. So, I sent out an email to those who I thought might need to know I was walking away from the time-sucking entity, deactivated my account and walked away. I knew that I could re-activate it without issue when the time came.

As soon as I got to the kitchen table, I realized I needed the book of face for church. I'm an administrator of our group page and it's one way the church communicates. We're so forward thinking, aren't we? Anyway, I thought about this and decided that having a "church facebook profile" would suffice. I figured it would be easy enough to set up a new account and limit it to church people.

Oh, what a fool I am. Oh, all the time I did waste.  

It took hours to get things right. Hours. So much for saving time.

Because I had de-activated my original profile before making a new church profile, I couldn't make myself the administrator for the church group, which meant I couldn't do what I needed to do. Duh. It took a lot of brain power to figure that out. I then had to make a profile, complete with name which would let church people know it was me but make it hard for the world to figure out it was me. After all, if I started gathering non-church people, it would defeat the purpose of the new church being that I was about to become. Then, I noticed all the photos I had posted via my original FB profile were now gone but my name was not. So, people could still "see" me but not the photos, which was a bit disconcerting to me. Try as I might, I couldn't get my name to go away. I thought about blocking myself from myself but realized that wouldn't work because everyone else would still see me. Even removing myself from the group didn't work. All in all, it was a much bigger ordeal than I had imagined. Worse, I accidentally deleted myself as administrator right after I had made myself an administrator.
Side note: Thank God Madge was okay during her tumble at the Brits. As I am in the same age group as Madonna, I shall not make jokes about broken hips or anything age-related like that. Respect your elders, people! Side side note: Madonna is going on tour this fall. There is no doubt I will be there. Time to be saving pennies.  Back to the topic at hand.

It took a week of nonsense before I finally gave up and re-activated my original account, sans 500 people. By lightening my load by 500, it made my profile much more manageable. The only problem? Now, I have TWO Facebook accounts. Two. Twice the fun? No, twice the pain in the ass.

I changed my name on the original profile, thinking this would keep people from finding me once I unfriended them and that this would solve my church page dilemma. I didn't want to change it too much, though, lest those I wanted as friends think it wasn't me. I figured changing the name would make my stuff "disappear" off the church page, which would be a huge bonus. Of course not. All it did was change the name on the church page. So much for that idea.

I am embarrassed to admit how much time I've wasted on updating that reactivated page. Talk about brain cells being consumed, never to be seen again. It's almost as bad as the Apple cult. Getting out is a lot harder than one would imagine. In fact, I'm still working on this endeavor. I accidentally un-administered myself AGAIN from the church group while trying to delete my original profile from the church (God knows I don't need two profiles in one group). Dang, I deleted the wrong one, leaving me unable to add myself OR delete the wrong profile.

The result of my endeavors? Instead of making my life less complicated and saving myself lots of time, I created a two-headed monster.

The good news is that it is MUCH easier to navigate my "real" profile and it's nice to have all the church stuff in a church place. The bad news is that I'm always signing in and out of the two accounts. I flip-flopped sign-in stuff (emails and passwords) so this ends up being quite the entertaining task. It may be easy to teach oneself to use a mouse with the left hand but it is not easy to have a 50-something brain flip-flop passwords. I could flip-flop them back, but that hurts my head even more.

The worst part of the endeavor? I found myself wasting time on Pinterest. Lots of time. Obscene amounts of time. The time freed without Facebook was filled with time seeking pins on Doctor Who and other nerdy things. Funny animals. Sassy comments. Inappropriate memes.

Think there is a pin that says, "I'm addicted to the Internet and my life is definitely unmanageable?"  I'd go take a gander but I've got to go check both my Facebook accounts.
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