Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

Blog

  • Wagging Tales

    Things have been a little coney around here.

    First, Watson got neutered. He was sentenced to a cone for two weeks.

    One week later, it was time for Mindy to get spayed, and she was sentenced to a cone for two weeks.

    Watson was released from his cone, for less than a week, when he injured his foot, and got reconed.

    Mindy got deconed and had to wait for Watson to be free.

    They finally got to play together again.

    Then, Mindy hurt her side, and had to be reconed.

    So, they are back to not being allowed to play with each other again. This is especially sad for us humans, because their playdates really help to burn puppy energy. The energy they instead use to destroy things, like, cones for instance.

    Rather than tell you more boring things about my life, I shall instead link you to some of my favorite dog related stories.

    Mostly, I am gathering them together so it is easier for me to find them again in the future, but hey, maybe you’ll enjoy them too.

    Yeast Rolls

    Sweet Potatoes

    IQ Test

    Dogs in Elk (retold in carvings)

    Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts

  • About Face

    I like routine and it is easy for me to fall into the habit of doing something because it is what I do, long beyond the point of that thing being important. If I do not do it, I will feel anxious, because a thing which I am “supposed” to do, is not being done.

    I disabled my facebook account a week ago. I don’t expect to remain off of facebook forever (at least not yet), but it wasn’t working well for me (from a personal, not a technical standpoint). I was spending far to much time on facebook, even though I wasn’t enjoying that time. I was also spending too much time trying to figure out how I was going to make it work better for me, so I decided to remove that from my thoughts for the moment and just go cold turkey.

    Now, with a little perspective, I’m coming closer to deciding how to relaunch my use, and manage it in a way that is less time and energy consuming, and hopefully provides more positive than negative.

    I joined facebook (and Myspace) because my daughter was interested in being able to hang out with her friends online, and I wanted to look at the sites so I could make an informed decision. She was not yet old enough to join according to their TOS, so it was not yet an option, but I knew she’d like to have an account on her 13th birthday, so I started doing my homework ahead of time. I hated myspace, but facebook was fun for me. I had a manageable number of friends and it was nice to have a window into their lives, and for them into mine.

    Four years later I have, less than, but far too close to, 200 “friends” which is absolutely ludicrous. There are not 200 people on this planet who give a shit whether I am alive or dead, much less how my day is going or what the past ten photos of my pets look like. Hell, most of my actual friends don’t really give much of a shit how my day is going, because, face it, most of my days are going the same as previous ones.

    The thing is, I basically added everyone who ever added me, as long as I sort of knew them. I have no idea why they added me to start with. Do they just like the friend number to look big? Did they give facebook access to their email address book? I know one added me so I could play facebook games with her. I added less than a dozen people first. But, I figured if I was going to add them, then I should pay attention to them. I made friend groups so that I could post to only specific people, but didn’t use them for reading. If they were on my friend list, I read their updates. All of them. This could take a very long time if I hadn’t looked recently. Yes. I know. You don’t need to say it, and neither do I.

    Some of them are really fucking annoying too.

    Plus, I didn’t block any apps or games, so I got all that spam too. The whole point was to be there so that I could check it out for my kid, and keep an eye on her and how she used it. If she started spamming people with app shit, I needed to know it. No way to guide her along if I had blocked them all. Now, she is older and I am totally confident in the care she exercises as far as facebook apps go (and really, she can go ages without even logging in to facebook, because she is busy being addicted to tumblr instead, where half the time I want to throw up over stuff I see, but hey, she is older now, so whatever).

    So, I was overwhelmed with all this stuff to read, and the first choice was to narrow down my “friend” list. It turned out that was easier said than done, because while many had no real connection to my life, they were at least the friend of a friend (or friend of a business associate), and I worried about offending somebody, or some such nonsense. While I mostly feel it is nonsense, I don’t actually want to hurt somebody’s feelings if I can easily avoid it.

    So, I believe over the course of my week break, I’ve come to accept that I’ll just need to create reading groups on facebook, and really only look at those people regularly. Plus, try to just see what I see when I happen to login, and not go back to check on everything they’ve posted about since I last checked.

    I still find it a shitty way to communicate at any level that actually matters to me. Not to say that there are not some people that I manage to have meaningful communication on there with, but for most people, even those I care about a great deal, it just isn’t a good place for that. It is a place of small talk, and I don’t enjoy small talk. It feels like a waste of time and energy.

    I’d always prefer to have a one on one conversation, or just sit home and read a book, to attending any kind of group event. Living your online life as a group event is what facebook is all about. It is a group event that invades my home every single day. I need to manage the door much better.

    Fifteen years ago, the internet was more than a great resource to me, it was a refuge from the way general society interacted everyday. That is no longer the case. There is no way I can stop the internet cold turkey. I’ve stored my brain in the cloud. Dependence aside, it is clearly time for me to make a lot of changes.

  • Squawk

    If I was granted 10 wishes, I’d wish to be a nicer person.

    Fuck you. No I wouldn’t. I was totally lying. You didn’t believe that horseshit, did you?

    I would wish to be less obsessed with getting it perfect, and a lot more satisfied with getting it done.

    I’d also wish for world peace, via having a large number of people (think REALLY LARGE) shift to an alternate reality that they were not sharing with me. I don’t care about an end to war, I just need more peace for me, personally.

    I don’t have the top 10 all mapped out, but somewhere in there, I’d want to be able to consistently peel a boiled egg perfectly.

    I’ve read hundreds of web tips, watched videos, explored techniques and looked at gadgets. I still peel a mutated fucked up dented, chipped, and gouged egg as often as I peel a perfectly smooth egg shaped egg.

    I fucking hate slop in the kitchen.

    I have a boiled egg almost every day, unless I am eating breakfast out, have run out of eggs, or… I don’t know, am too busy puking my guts out or something (see the 2nd week of July), so it isn’t as if I don’t have a lot of practice peeling eggs.

    I like deviled eggs. I LOVE good deviled eggs. I make a damn good deviled egg, but I never do it because the process of trying to peel that many eggs drives me fucking mad. I haven’t made a batch since before my kid was born, and she is old enough to get her driver’s license now.

    The last time I made them it was because I asked people I love what I should bring to their house for a party, and they replied “Your deviled eggs!” I made eggs for the party. There was a lot of screaming and swearing and a little crying (and a lot of rejected eggs) and people at the party loved them. I never asked those friends what I should bring to their house again. I just told them what I could bring.

    Yes, I know, some people would make deviled eggs with slightly fucked up, or even very fucked up eggs, but I am not that person.

    Wait, scratch the egg peeling skills wish. If I am wishing, let’s just wish big. I want ultimate egg skillz, yo. No fishing egg shells out of mixing bowls. No breaking the yolk on over easy eggs. No fucking up an omelet while trying to flip or fold it. No curdling while making a custard. No accidentally having one roll off the counter and break on the floor while I am busy grabbing some other ingredient. You get the idea.

    Clucking chickens and their little packages of kitchen stress.

    Yes, I know. If you are paying attention and are the kind of asshole who likes to point shit out, you might be itching to type something about how if I was less obsessed with getting it perfect and more obsessed with getting it done, I’d just bring ugly tasty deviled eggs to parties, and I’d be a lot more likable. Fuck you. I don’t want to be likable. I just want to quickly peel eggs without having chunks of white stick to the shell, and I want to do with without resorting to raising my own chickens in an effort to feed them perfectly and have the eggs be as fresh as possible.

    If there were less people I wouldn’t need as many eggs to serve deviled eggs at a party.

    My morning breakfast peeled perfectly this morning. It won’t tomorrow. I don’t even know which is worse.

  • Disconnected

    I’m finding it difficult to find any enthusiasm within me for G+, despite being a borderline Google fangirl. For a long time I was very anxious for a viable facebook alternative.

    The thing is, I don’t think I even want an alternative to facebook anymore. I just feel so incredibly done with social networking as a THING.

    I don’t need a “social networking” site. I need a “hermit occasionally bump into other people and maybe share a jug of moonshine” site.

    But, let’s pretend that I am open to using something vaguely social still.

    I would need G+ to integrate with Google Reader in a smooth and significant way.

    I would need to be able to EASILY mark things as read. The current Mute is too many steps. Plus, I’d like to be able to mark as Read, but show me again if new content is added.

    I’d need some way of labeling or tagging content, both purposeful tagging by the author based on topics, and autotagging by G+ based on type (a link post versus a photo post versus a shared post) so that I could filter reading lists based on both circles and content type. Some people I am very interested in their original content, but really don’t want to see the 100s of goofy links they post per day.

    Mostly though, I am tired. I am old. I’ve been living a very rich and dear to me online life since before the web existed. Quite frankly, the more sites rise up to connect us to people, the less I feel truly connected to the people who actually matter most to me.

    My month long dumb phone experiment has stretched into a month and a half with me hardly blinking. Rather than chomping at the bit to hurry and get a new smart phone, I feel half tempted to give up my laptop instead.

  • Yeah, Yeah, Yeah – Experiment Update

    Multiple friends have pointed out to me that the month of June is over. I went an entire month without a smart phone, and am now more than a week into July, and I still don’t have one.

    WTF?

    I honestly thought it was going to be REALLY difficult for me. As it turns out, I’ve rarely missed my smart phone, and more than that, I am totally disinterested in my dumb phone. I’ve gone a couple of days in a row with it set on silent, without noticing that I was missing all calls and texts. I forget to charge it, and it is dead half the time. I forget to take it with me. I have become my mother.

    I check email significantly less now. I used to check it like a rat pushing a button for a pellet. Sometimes I’d find a good email in my inbox. Push. Push. Push. Push. There have been days in June when I only checked my email once. Other than while on a couple of cruises, that is less than I have checked my email since 1993, when I needed to use dial-up.

    I’m done. I’m not really, but I could be. I could let go of being connected for a long time.

    However, I’ve had multiple people whom I actual care about lodge official complaints about this experiment. They hate me being so unavailable. So, somehow, I must get back to having a smart phone again.

    But, I can’t find the right phone, which is really how I got here to start with.

    I am looking for a 5 row QWERTY Android Phone, with a high build quality, a reasonable price, and available with an unlimited data plan. I don’t want to sign a contract.

    The Android Sidekick 4G has the best keyboard of everything I looked at, because they sort of tried to keep the old form factor, and the Sidekick 2 keyboard was close to perfect for me (the 3 sucked, but the LX 2009 was okay). Unfortunately I think the build quality feels cheap in comparison to other phones and the way the phone opens is not nearly as good as the Sidekick they broke. Of course, T-Mobile isn’t exactly my best friend these days. Meh.

    The G2 felt better and seemed like a better choice, but only had 4 rows. In the past month, T-Mobile replaced it with a G2X which doesn’t have a keyboard at all, meaning I’d have to make an extra effort to find one.

    The Droid 3 has the 5th row, but is with Verizon, which means more expensive and they are tossing out the unlimited data plan, so that makes it even MORE expensive.

    The Xperia Pro looks interesting, but isn’t out yet, and previously they said it would be out 2nd quarter 2011, and now they are saying 3rd quarter. Also, it is likely not going to be released in the US at all, so I’d have to get an unlocked international one. It doesn’t have the 5th row either, which makes jumping through hoops for it less appealing.

    At this point, I guess I am leaning toward the Samsung Intercept which doesn’t have the 5th row, and looks to have even lower build quality than the new Sidekick, but it is significantly cheaper, and maybe Virgin Mobile will annoy me less than T-Mobile. They prepaid plan pricing is definitely better, and more suited to how I use a phone.

    So, at some point I’ll get another phone, just to please a few key people. I don’t feel in a hurry, but I know they are. I make no promises as to the speed at which I manage this. Probably sometime post birthday week, since I have too much to do before then to actually decide which phone that I don’t want will be the one I go ahead and get.

  • Fresh Air

    When I wrote about being in Vegas, I forgot to mention something that was really interesting to me about The Cosmopolitan.

    I hate smoking. It drives me totally crazy. Well, I don’t mind the idea of smoking. Go do whatever the fuck you want. I just hate the smell of it. I hate the smell of stale smoke leftover on smokers, or on myself if I’ve been in a smoky place, and I really am made utterly miserable when I am where I can smell somebody actively smoking.

    There was a time when it didn’t bother me. I became sensitive while I was pregnant. I became sensitive to damn near everything while I was pregnant, and I vomited for 8.5 months. It was gross and miserable. Smoke was one of the major triggers (as was the smell of mint). More than 16 years later, the reaction has eased, but it never went away.

    So, I hate being near smoking, and find it very difficult to be actively social with smokers, because even if they are very courteous about not ever smoking near me, they always stink to me.

    I am not actually in favor of laws banning smoking in establishments, as I believe that should be up to the business owner, but I do enjoy the benefit of those laws, and have lived for a very long time now in places where I am not asked whether I want to sit in the smoking or non-smoking section when I enter a restaurant. The culture shock of being back in Nevada always catches me a little off guard. I drive into Vegas and think, and often say, “Why don’t we come here more often?” but 10 minutes in a casino and I remember exactly why I don’t go there more often.

    Which brings me to the point of the post (thought I’d never get there, right?).

    Something about the air system at The Cosmopolitan was amazing. The smokers there didn’t bother me at all. Yes, I could smell smoke if I stood immediately next to a person with a lit cigarette, but at a few feet away, the smoke was not reaching me. I don’t know how they do it, but I wish every place was doing it.

  • Still Dumb

    I am 3 weeks into my dumb phone experiment. I’ve lost all interest in my phone. I often have no idea where it is. I don’t bother to charge it at night. I have practiced the texting and gotten much better at it, although I still think it is very annoying. For instance, it thinks that pressing the sequence 278624 is more likely to be because I want to say “brtobi” than “brunch”. I do occasionally really miss the smart phone, for useful reasons, like being able to look up something which is actually pressing or important, or having access to the occasional important and time sensitive email. I had myself rather convinced that much more of my email was important and time sensitive. It turns out that only applies to maybe 1 or 2 emails per week.

    Mostly I am discovering that my addiction to my smart phone was just that, an addiction. It wasn’t vastly improving my life. It wasn’t making my life easier. I just “liked” it, and I kind of didn’t even like it, I just felt like I needed it, and felt anxious when I didn’t have it, which I chose to interpret as liking loving it, but it turns out it was just a cliché unhealthy relationship. How embarrassing.

    I’m also feeling slightly more motivated to see people in person, it is particularly odd because these are people I don’t normally interact with via text or social media, and yet by tuning that noise down, it is those people I am thinking of more often than the missing static in the cloud. By slightly more motivated, I mean the idea has crossed my mind on more than one occasion, I’m still not actually inspired to making that face to face social interaction happen, and it is unlikely I will be spurred to action any time soon, what with it being SUMMER and all.

  • Life With Dogs

    Leather Option on my friend’s car seats – $3000
    Water/Mud proof cover for the backseat to protect it from two Border Collies – $50
    Adoption fee for my adorable new puppy – $225

    Moment when Border Collies grrr-umph about puppy getting into THEIR car and puppy submissively urinates all over the uncovered front seat – Priceless

  • Kindergarten Education

    When I was 5 years old, I had a friend who lived one street over, but our houses lined up so that we shared a backyard fence.

    This sounds like the ultimate in coolness and convenience, but my mother decreed that I was not allowed to climb the fence to go visit her. If I was invited over, I was to walk around in a civilized fashion and appear at their front door.

    I was also not allowed to walk over to her house by myself, no matter how I complained and cajoled. We lived in a decent neighborhood, but not the kind where everyone knew everyone and kept an eye out on the neighborhood kids. Also, the way around was fairly long, and people tended to drive on her street pretty quickly, plus there wasn’t a real sidewalk.

    Eventually, one day my mother relented. I could walk around by myself, and call her as soon as I arrived at my friend’s house.

    I set off on my little adventure. I made it about half way to my friend’s house when I came upon a group of big boys. To then me, they were huge. To now me, I think they were in the 5th to 7th grade range. I continued on my route, without hesitation, for the last time in my life.

    The boys parted to let me walk into their midst, but then closed ranks behind me, and surrounded me. How many boys? All the boys in the world, as far as I was concerned, but I am guessing 5 or 6 of them.

    I tried to continue on my way, but they kept blocking me. Bumping me. Trapping me.

    “Where you going?”

    “To my friend’s.”

    “You want to hang with us?”

    “I have to go to my friend’s.”

    I kept trying to pass. They kept preventing me.

    “I have to go.”

    “Just give me a kiss, and we’ll let you go.”

    “Yeah, give us some kisses.”

    Adrenaline coursed through my body. I didn’t know that at the time, but I am well familiar with the signs and symptoms now. Fear and rage and regret and so much flight or fight, but with no understanding of how to do either one.

    Shaking I tried to pass them, and just kept saying I had to go.

    Then one boy said, “Wait a minute. I think I know her,” and they all paused.

    “Are you Jimmy’s little sister’s friend?”

    “Yes.”

    “Let her go guys.” Turning to me, “Don’t tell.”

    So, I made my way to my friend’s house, and I called my house to say I had made it there safely.

    I didn’t tell on the boys. I didn’t want to get in trouble. I was told I shouldn’t walk by myself, but I kept bugging them to let me walk by myself. I didn’t want them to know that I couldn’t even walk one street over by myself.

    Not that I intended to walk to her house by myself again.

    Hell, at least I made it to 5.

  • Comic Timing

     

     

    Why I love and hate having a smartphone – The Oatmeal.

    This seemed appropriate, especially considering I have switched to a Motorola Razr.