I need to clean up my desk. The surface is covered with piles of papers. Some relate to the newsletter. Some relate to the ongoing rewriting of our game documents. The pile up there is for our taxes, which I need to begin work on this weekend. Lots of stuff and things to deal with!

Still need to take my car to have it estimated for the repairs. Rob and I discussed the possibility that it might be considered totaled, as it's a 1991 Subaru and there's three parts of it (fender, lights, driver door) that need fixing. Later today I'll go look up what the Blue Book is on my beloved little vehicle. Might be kind of fun :)

Good luck at the dentist's, Beth. ::hug::

So this is what I've been doing with my spare time lately: publishing a newsletter.

What do you think?

This game is kind of cute. Too bad it's not about sheep.

The days and weeks are flying by. It's almost February. Already.

Last night Rob and I went to Salty's to celebrate our third anniversary. Fortunately, I had emailed Rob earlier in the day to gently hint that if there weren't any dinner reservations, he would be out on the concrete slab hollering "Wiiiiiiilma!!!" all night. :) We had festive balloons on the table and a free slab of their most excellent white chocolate mousse cake (decorated with a little chocolate oval that said "Happy Anniversary" on it). Of course, Rob and I are big on dessert, so in addition to splitting the cake slice, we also had a devil's food cake and creme brulee.

Although, Rob notes that we're much better off at their Sunday brunch, when it's all he can eat crab legs and all I can eat desserts. One time when we were there, they'd run out of the little creme brulees and were putting out full-sized ramekins. I was in heaven!

Did I mention that I cut my hair? Sometime around Thanksgiving last year, I decided to get it shortened and styled, after having had long straight hair for most of the past six years or so. The thing with short hair is that it actually takes more time than long hair.

Long-haired Tracy could spring from bed and hustle around the place in the morning and go to work with her hair still damp. Short-haired Tracy gets out of the shower to blow dry, fill with styling products and fuss in the mirror. If not, parts of her hair stick up like someone on Yu-gi-oh! and she feels mortified.

But I like the shorter look. It looks neater and more modern. And according to the stylist, I can actually do a variety of things with it, depending on the amount of gel I use. Fortunately, my cherubs keep a bottle of styling gel in my bathroom, so I've been playing with it. I did find one new style the other morning, although I'm not sure I want to repeat it. After filling my hair with gel and some limp hair lifter (applied to the roots, as directed), I blew dry my hair and ended up looking somewhat like a mushroom, or perhaps a latter day John Lennon.

Have a happy Monday :) May it be a good hair day for all!

Broos had the nerve to have his birthday before I remembered to ask him when it is; so he got all smug-like when I did get around to asking him when in January is it. On the bright side, I have narrowed it down to the first 5 days or so.

Unless his birthday is in December, like Rob's, and I'm totally mixed up :)

My sinuses are draining into my throat and I have a deep and sexy voice, when I have a voice at all, which is marred by the fact that sometimes my voice will crack like a boy in puberty and suddenly I've got a wispy high-pitched whine going. I stayed home from work and lay (lie, lay, lounged) on the couch all day.

On some fronts, I'm filled with energy and have to try to calm my mind down to make coherent thoughts come out. Stuff like, gee, how come races don't impact anything in my game and I appear to be the last to know about it? And how to fix that? And I hired an assistant product manager today which makes me feel real happy; now I have to let the other applicants know I didn't pick them. That part's not so happy. :/ But just knowing that I have someone to help me out really makes a difference to my spirits.

Yesterday I drove to work because I felt like crap (sinuses) and knew I would leave as soon as Toni's deposition was over (she's one of our attorneys and I was preparing her files for this case). On the way home, I remembered that I have a trunk full of donation items including my old Sony TV that needed to be dropped off before I can plan to take my car to the body shop to have its smashed fender replaced. I pulled into the Salvation Army and asked if they took TV's. The attendant said they don't as too many people drop off ones that don't work. We walked back out to my car and I popped the trunk so we could unload it.

The TV was gone.

All the donation clothes bags were there, but the TV that had been nestled in their midst (the remote control tied to the antenna) was gone. While I stood there, babbling and perplexed, the attendant laughed, "Well, you wanted to get rid of it anyway." Which is true, I just hadn't meant for someone to break into my car and take the damn thing. On the way home, I called Rob (home with his back) to ask whether he had taken it out of the trunk since we'd both seen it in there on the Sunday we found my car all beat up. We know it was in the trunk after it got hit because Rob opened the trunk looking for an ice scraper and that's when I remembered I had put all this stuff into the trunk to donate. Obviously, someone else saw the TV in the trunk and went and helped himself to it the next time I parked at the bus stop.

Oh, well. At least I did get rid of the old TV. It worked perfectly well, but it's older than my cherubs and unnecessary with Rob's big screen downstairs and the former living room TV in our bedroom.

My sinuses are completely full. Don't you hate that feeling that you wanna sniff but you can't cause there's no place for the air to go?

Sometimes when Rob gets up for work and rustles through the closets and drawers looking for his clothes, I sort of wake up, then drift back to a deeper sleep until my alarm goes off about an hour later. In those interludes, I often have some really interesting dreams.

The other day, I dreamt that I was attending a movie premiere in Los Angeles and had arrived at the red carpet before my date. I stood there, quietly absorbing in the enormous energies and activities all around me, elated because I had such a cool date -- Harrison Ford! But not Harrison with the earring, nosireebob! My date Harrison Ford was about 15 years younger than he is now :) how cool is that? And I thought for a moment upon waking, "Gee, I'll bet Calista's going to be upset." heh!

Some mornings after an interesting dream, I'll lie there listening to NPR trying to remember what made that particular dream so good. Is it the people in it? Or is it more the emotional aspect? I lean toward the latter, mostly. The dreams that stick with me longest are either ones in which I'm filled with sublime joy, or I'm an emotional wreck. Naturally I prefer the peaceful dreams, but funny dreams can be good to remember too. Like the time I was on Gilligan's Island as Gilligan (doh).

I feel sick as a dog. It's so unfair; I had my flu shot, too. :( But I think standing outside waiting for the bus has done me in. Rob hurt his back and is laying on the couch. Or is he lying? I'd look it up but my head feels about ten feet wide.

Might go upstairs and lie down.

How embarassing. :)

Snow photos! And more snow photos!

I hope this eases your snicker, Broos :)

I'm going to download the photos from my camera and post them. It's still snowing. It's over my ankles between here and the garage. Our little concrete lamb that sits beside Maggie's outdoor water bowl is almost completely gone. The water bowl is completely covered.

Kinda pretty, actually. At least it was till I trudged back and forth to dump the trash and take out the recycle bin.

I walked to the bus stop this morning in the falling snow. It's a fine, powdery stuff, so no crunching footsteps, just that serene silence of an early morning walk.

Forty five minutes later, I repeated that walk to return home. Two of the buses that should've come by, did not. Rob is at work now, chortling at me for not getting up at the crack of dawn like he does to make it to work. In fact, I walked past his car twice, as he had driven it as far as the bus stop. It has two inches of snow on it now, and it is still snowing. My legs are frozen, and my purse was full of snow (so I dumped it out on the floor, where Mittens and Maggie got to poke around at the snow and my purse's contents with their little pink noses). I called in to work to let them know I would be late. Number One said, "Hey, it's snowing and nobody works in Seattle in the snow."

Of course, if I don't make it in, I will never hear the end of it from Rob.

So I am going to have a cup of coffee, thaw out in front of the heater, and try again in about 20 minutes.

Before Rob has time to post, I better confess: I did not have my current insurance card in the car. (o,o)

When he and I walked down the icy road to get to my car, which I'd left parked near the bus stop on Friday, we found that someone had slid across the road and very rudely took out my front left fender, destroyed my turn signal and left parts of my car all the way down the block. :(

The policeman arrived afterI I'd called 911 and asked to see my insurance and my driver's license. So I hand over the insurance info pack to Rob to dig out my card, then give the officer my license to hear Rob chortling, "You don't have a new card. What was it you told me? 'I gave the card to you when they first arrived in April?' You haven't got a card; you're getting a $500 ticket!"

You see, back in September or so, Rob had been nabbed for speeding and he hadn't his insurance card in the car and I gave him a piece of my mind for his thoughtlessness. :) hehehe, guess he gave that piece back now!

Anyway, now I really must take a day off work, so I can drive my poor sweet Subaru to a body shop to get the front fixed. Maybe I'll ask them how much it'll be extra to paint the hood while they're at it.

Happy new year, everyone! :)

And so, another year dawns and it is snowing in Seattle. On New Year's Eve, since I had to work all day, some of the attorneys in the office and I stood in one of the windows (we're on the 38th floor) to watch the snowflakes drifting down and melting before they reached the street. Snow is sticking around our condo, though, which makes it rather pretty. I look out the ground floor windows here and there's white fluff in the flower troughs and on the roof of the garage.

While on one hand, I hope that the year is a lot more calm and relaxed the the prior two, I am already off to a running start. I spent the better part of the past two weeks pondering new documentation for the little game, and on January 1st, started committing it to paper (well, pixels, at any rate). This morning, I had a two hour conference call with the paralegal association's directors, which I attended only because I saw my name on the agenda, as newsletter editor.

Rob's behind me playing Horizons, which is a new multi-player game that some of his EQ buddies play. He's a cute little green dragon. :) He also got Final Fantasy XI, which I'm dying to wrestle away from him to try, only I've been spending some time with FFX-2, which he got me for Christmas.

I need more hours in the day :)

We're also still pondering the move. I started off by filling my car with stuff for Goodwill; there's lots more where that came from! I also need to arrange for a plumber, a maid, and some carpet cleaning. Sounds like a day off is in my future, and hopefully I can squeeze in a mammogram while I'm at it (hahaha, squeeze in a...oh, never mind).

I don't really make New Year's resolutions; do any of you? If I did, it would be to find more time to sit and relax with cats and spouse, just watching TiVo.