Looks like there will be six of us for the shindig tomorrow (though a few more might come – and mom will be late – she has to work and she has to pick up her cousin-in-law from the hospital). Mom surprised me by ordering a cake for the party and dad will pick it up on his way to the Lake. I got the food tonight – with double-checking by dad to make sure I didn’t forget crucial things like buns. Burgers and hot dogs on the grill – maybe with rain, maybe without. Either way, the place is ready for either indoor or outdoor fun. Bailey’s Irish Cream Ice Cream – made last night. And music – Beatles, Monkees, Bonzo Dog Band – fun stuff from my LPs. If the others remember to bring some LPs, we’ll play those too.

It’s amazing how different I feel today from yesterday. Yesterday was a fluke, that’s for sure. judiang and I figure it’s cuz I don’t cry enough. It all built up like a pressure cooker and whammo, it was released in a big burst last night. So I’m happy to be back to normal. 🙂 And tomorrow, no matter how many show, is going to be great.

Phew, after my pity party from earlier, I am returning back to my normal state of things. Thanks to all of you who’ve posted kind comments to that previous post. You’re great folks. 🙂

As for the continuation of the evening, I read some from Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde, then went out for some Comfort Food (in this case, pork lo mein) which I brought back home, then I started watching The Fighting Temptations, which has been fun so far (still need to finish it). Midway through the movie, dad called to say they were back from the Lake and I broke down during the call, which only embarrassed me more. After I’d composed myself, I went next door for some dad-comfort. We talked, I laughed, I cried, I bitched and dad listened. When Friends was over, mom came down to join in the laughing and crying and bitching. 🙂 (She’d’ve been down earlier, but you see, it’s the next to last episode of Friends.) And once again to stress that I really have no reason to feel sorry for myself, one of my relatives called – my folks are taking him to the hospital tomorrow for a 4-6 hour heart check up. And his wife is practically an invalid. Yeah, I’ve got it good. Good friends, both in real life and online. Wonderful family. Fun work place. Stupid-ass chemicals/hormones that decide that I should spend my evening crying. Gah!

For those of you out there who deal with this shit every day of your lives, I *really* feel for you. I can barely stand to spend an evening like it. *hugs* to those of you who need ’em a whole lot more than I do.

Anyway, I’m off to finish watching The Fighting Temptations. Thanks again for the comments. I really needed ’em and appreciate them.

Apologies first – I don’t have any real reason to feel sorry for myself. I have a great life, a great family, great friends, a great cat, and yet, here I am almost crying. Gah – I get angry with myself when I get in this state. Thankfully, I don’t often get in this state. But here I am now, and I’m hoping maybe writing about it will help get it out of my system and maybe I can get on with my day.

Dad always said that I didn’t have to do what the voices in my head tell me to do. But I wish this once I’d listened to that small, still voice back when I thought “I’ll have a party to celebrate my 33 1/3 birthday, and this time I’ll invite my co-workers!.” The still, small voice said “But nobody will come, so why bother?” Well, the party is this Saturday. And so far, I have one couple confirmed as coming, two maybes, loads of “sorry, have something else scheduled” and even loads more of apathy (ie, no reply to the invite). Bleh, not what I need for my self esteem. But, you see, this is the way it goes with my birthday parties.

I’m a New Year’s Baby. Yes, the most wonderful time to have a birthday – when everyone’s off recovering from their New Year’s Eve festivities. On my 16th birthday, I thought it would be fun to do a New Year’s Eve bowling party and invited all of my friends (which, sadly, wasn’t a whole lot, but that’s another pity party from another era). One showed. Thanks to some extended family coming, it wasn’t a pathetic little group that showed at the bowling alley. Little, yeah, but not pathetically little. I didn’t invite extended family to this gathering however… Dad will be able to come, but mom works and Amy & Rachel are in Minnesota.

Gah, the waterworks are starting again. Why am I focusing on the negative? Hell, for my thirtieth birthday, judiang flew all the way from Chicago to visit and elsaf drove through a snow storm to meet up with us for one afternoon (poor dear worked NYE and NY). Now that’s devoted friends! And my co-workers are good people too. I had a blast at the Louisiana Boil. But just comparing the numbers that showed there to the ones supposedly coming on Saturday makes me feel even more pathetic.

Ah my kitty is so sweet. He’s just come over to hang out. And since the party’s at mom and dad’s cottage at the Lake, he’s not invited. Poor kitty. 🙁

There’s the still, small voice in my head telling me I should just go ahead and cancel the thing. I’ll talk some with the folks tonight and have them be a voice of reason. I think I’ll bring chocolate.

Once again, sorry to be a wet blanket (literally) today. Tomorrow, I’m hoping for the usual happy trina to be back.

Today was my twice-yearly dentist appointment. I’ve been going to the same guy for nearly 30 years. He made a bundle of money from my parent’s teeth¹, but has been pissed off that he hasn’t been able to do the same with my sister and me². After the dental hygienist finished x-raying and cleaning my teeth, he popped in to give me the $28 “adult exam.”³ That’s 5 seconds of poking about in the mouth, 5 seconds of moving my tongue around, and some sage advice. To improve the quality of my teeth, I’m to start drinking 6 Mt. Dews a day and eat lots of caramel. 😉

The caramel bit is tempting, but goes against my Portion Control Project. Mt. Dew, OTOH – blech! I can’t believe I used to drink that. I’ll stick with water from now on.

I can always tell when April is here – my work calendar is filled to the brim, the seniors have turned their brains off, the weather is alternating gorgeous and icky, and I don’t sleep well… Actually, that last one seems to be true most of the year. 😉

Anyway, I’m glad April’s almost over, but then there’s May. And in some ways, May is even worse than April. I’ve already figured out the physics lesson plans from now until the end of their stay (they get out WAY too early, if you ask me!) What I do is start with the last actual day that I’ll see them (May 24th in this case) and work backwards. Final exam on the 24th, the Dreaded Beaker Test the 3-4 lab periods before then, squishing magnetism & nuclear physics to 3 days, max, etc. etc. They had a test last Monday (which I’m almost done grading) and they’ll have a test this coming Friday. There’s only one more test of them after that (on electronic circuits – an easy-peasy test, actually). The Dreaded Beaker Test will then be the last actual test grade. And my final exam is fun – it’s all Wile E Coyote questions. “The Coyote pushes a boulder off of a cliff that’s XXX m high, but he falls instead. How fast is he going right before he hits?” and things like that. Sure, it’s short answer, but since my last day with them is the 24th but they don’t actually graduate until Memorial Day, I have a bit of time to get them graded.

In the “Woohoo” side of things, I got my very first grant awarded today! It’s the first one I’ve written and, as grants go, it was pretty easy to write. I worked with the business/computer teacher (hereby known as MBA) and we wrote one to get Macromedia MX 2004 for our school. It’s $2500 for a 500 computer license and as we’ve only got 270 computers in the school, that’s practically a site license. 🙂 MBA and I will set up a Technology Club or somesuch and train HS kids in how to train the elementary kids how to use the programs. I can just see the little kids flipping when they realize they can make their own animation with Flash. And the HS kids are thrilled we’re getting something other than FrontPage XP which has been a pain in the ass on our network. (I could go into a fine rant about that program, but since we’re replacing it, I won’t have to – ha! Take that, Micro$oft!)

So, back to the busy grind tomorrow. If I seem sporadic in updating my LJ, at least you’ll have an inkling why. 🙂

I’ve mentioned before about my cool co-workers. Well, tonight was the Louisiana Boil that was held at the home of the Fishers. My former first grade teacher and my former industrial arts teacher. I call ’em Marsha and Gary now. 🙂 Their daughter and son-in-law and several other teachers and spouses were present.

It started around 6:30 and I came in with my home-made Bailey’s Irish Cream Ice Cream. One of the ladies (wife of our former principal) brought some heavenly bread and some oils & spreads and we munched on those. I tried some Zinfindel and then some Riesling, but decided that, though they wanted to taste like sour dough, they just didn’t. Guess wine just isn’t for me. (Raw sour dough, OTOH – yum!) Eventually, everyone was present and the rice was ready, so we started with Gumbo. I sat with three ladies and we talked about careers and computers and travel and stuff. The gumbo was very good eats.

Meanwhile, Gary was out putting the various things into the Louisiana Boil. He had a huge metal pot that was on a propane burner and he had things timed for when each ingredient was to be added. In the Boil were mussels, shrimp, crab legs, crawdads (crayfish, crawfish, whatever you want to call ’em), corn on the cob, taters, and something green (beans, I think – I didn’t eat anything green tonight). He added spices as well, but I don’t know what. All I can tell you was that everything was great. Marsha had melted butter which she portioned out for everyone. Emily, Megan and Tammy were my eating mates this time. Emily (Gary’s daughter) taught us how to eat the crawdaddies. They were OK, but I much prefer lobster. Lot more meat for the same amount of work. The crablegs were good enough that butter wasn’t needed. The shrimp and mussels were good too. I dipped the corn in the butter most of all. 🙂

After the seafood, it was brownie & ice cream time. I got to show off Elsa’s wonderful Bailey’s Irish Cream ice cream recipe. Everyone loved it. And they ate it all. Woohoo! And all throughout the eating there were many conversations. To cap the evening off, Gary & Marsha danced a Cajun waltz and then a Cajun jig. They were really impressive. (They’ve been taking ballroom dancing, and it shows.)

It was nearing 10:30 when I decided to head out. The party was still going, so they’re probably still at it. Poor Emily and Chris have to drive back to Columbus tonight – that’s an hour and a half at least. Bleh! Glad I lived just 15 minutes away. Time for me to veg the rest of the night. 🙂

I could write about the week (one of *those* weeks) or the nice night out at BW3’s to celebrate the end of one of *those* weeks. Or about Leo. But I’m in a bleh mood. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to write about the Louisiana Boil and the garage sales that I’ll be going to tomorrow.

Gah! I can somewhat understand a Doctor Who/Buffyverse crossover as those are two series that I watch often and would sort of work together. But last night I had a Remington Steele/Black Books crossover! (WTF???) I don’t remember a whole lot of details (thankfully) other than by the end of the Holt & Steele bit, they were in the desert with a scantily dressed African native who looked like James Brown on a bad hair day. He was showing them how to find water from the desert sands by using what looked like a giant wire hair pick (a bit bigger than a rake) which was pushed into the sand and drawn forward. Any water in the sand was then brought up near the surface. Poor Bernard Black, OTOH, was the focus of some woman’s revenge and by the end she’d burned his flesh off and he was a walking, smoking (cigarette, that is) skeleton who explained to her that she must have been wrong about him or else he’d be dead by now. As intrigued as I was to find out if Bernard gets his flesh back when he’s vindicated and if Steele & Holt were going to escape the desert, I did have to pee (for real). So I looked at the display on the DVD player (gee, this was a movie?) and had only watched an hour and 12 minutes thus far but still had an hour and 32 minutes to go. So I stopped the movie and woke up.

Gah – my brain! My brain!

(Actually, the one thing this dream has done was made me want to see some Remington Steele!)

I think last night’s dream takes the cake as far as strange TV-related dreams go. I’m reading Usenet about the upcoming Doctor Who series. (That, in itself, is odd since I haven’t been on Usenet in ages.) I hear tell that the companion has been cast, but it’s still a secret. And the person playing the companion is currently in hospital for something or other. So people online are working on figuring out which hospital and which celeb it must be. The term for this person is “Patient One.”

So, switch to the producer of the show (who looks a bit like a cross between Adam West and Anthony Zerbe) as he discusses stuff with someone else (Russell T Davies, maybe?) They decide to use a stealth mode to tell the person that they’ve got the part. So switch views to a hotel room. Knock on the door and it’s two call girls and two men dressed as the TV Batman & Robin (though thankfully the Robin character vanishes quickly when my brain realizes there’s no reason for him to be there). So the future companion of Doctor Who steps back and I can finally see who it is. It’s James Marsters (still looking remarkably Spike-ish).

One of the call girls (who’re both dressed as French maids – I told you this one takes the cake) explains that the person dressed as Batman (actually the producer) will pie Marsters in the face if he doesn’t give Batman $20. Well, the thing is, Batman has pies in both hands (and no, not cream pies, cherry pies), so Marsters has to put the $20 in Batman’s mouth. And then he gets pied anyway… I then stop the video that I’ve been watching on my computer and move back to Usenet, surprised that they aren’t talking about the new companion. Only they are, actually. I just needed to refresh.

So, as I’m waking up from this dream, I try to puzzle out Marsters as the companion of Eccleston’s Doctor. And realize that both of them look rather emaciated and so would be an odd-looking pair. Then I finally came to my senses and realized, thankfully, that it was all just a dream. I mean, James Marsters as Rose???? 😉

One picture is worth a thousand “ughs”!

Trina’s morning task – bleh!

Anyhoo, I’m done moving bracken and branches and mowing the lawn and cleaning out the litter boxes and only have 2 more hours of laundry to do, so I’m off to have a late lunch/early supper.