I had to sign up for this complicated online thing with the Virginia Terminal for one of my clients at work today. As well as being extremely user-unfriendly, it asked for answers to a series of 'security questions' on the first login so that it can ask one randomly from now on. The instructions said, "Answer honestly, and you will remember."

The questions looked like,

Mother's maiden name... pretty typical.
Father's place of birth... I have no idea, at least I can use where he grew up.
Elementary school... I had three!
Color of first car... Lucky for me I got a first car in time.
Make of first car... See above. I was almost out two whole questions.
First boy/girlfriend... I guess it seems as unlikely that someone wouldn't have a first boy/girlfriend as not having a first car, but I feel sorry for the person stuck trying to answer that.
Favorite food... Changes daily... Are they serious?

One of the advantages to being on lithium, besides it working almost instantly, was that I knew what it was. I couldn't even name what I'm on now without looking at the bottle, but it's smaller and doesn't taste bad.

Without the instant effect I've had to train myself to remember to take my drugs every, every day. I'm not so much afraid of forgetting and something going bad now, but of forgetting and getting back in the mindset that I don't need to take it.

Random found shopping list poetry in a QFC elevator:

glider
Milk
Cold Medicine
Tomato
The smallest
Violin playing
My Hart Bleeds for you

I gave out my URLs again last night, which got me looking at my other sites myself. Usually I'm embarrased by my old writing; I'm embarrassed by the early years (and maybe the recent ones) in my happy-clicker archives, but looking at stari.org, I think I was a decent writer at some point. I didn't realize how far back that one goes. I forgot the web journal part existed long before the domains themselves.

I still like the design of that site too. I need to get back to my idea of turning stari.og into a photo-blog.

I don't know what made me look out the window when I woke up this morning, but the last thing I was expecting was a layer of snow over the parking lot. It was even hailing a bit last night, in a cute little hail ball kind of way, but I forgot about it by the time I got inside.

I almost went and took the bus to work. My boss has threatened to come pick us all up if it snows. I so miss snow days...

My 8th grade English teacher taught me how to carry a cup of tea, not looking at the cup so that you won't spill.

Good spam line of the day: Sex without gravity, WOW!

Bartell's has plush Peeps toys! I wanted to get one for Andrew, but I'm trying not to inlict useless objects onto people after trying so hard to get rid of my own.

I finally repurposed a CD holder full of discs for games I forgot I owned, so I can stop carrying around 20 CDs in my backpack and car.

Marketers still need to learn, 'carb' is not a unit of measurement. '4 carbs' to me says,

1. Simple carbohydrate
2. Complex carbohydrate
3. ???
4. ???

A new record in clumsiness last night when I sliced my thumb with a paper cut while feeding junk mail to the shredder.

I wonder if I was a kid in school today, would I be diagnosed with ADD? I'm not (though it was suggested by someone—Gryphon?— once). Or even if I was, it would just be putting a negative label on things I don't consider negative traits about myself.

Anyway, with a decently slow time at work I found myself trying to crash the Windows calculator program with a very large number.

It reminds me of when I was learning BASIC as a kid. The book I was learning from had a list of all the error messages and their meanings in the back, so I went out to try to get each one.

I just managed to swallow a sneeze. I didn't mean to, more trying to keep the soup I was eating off my monitor... was a really weird feeling.

I stopped writing almost a year ago after I got a new job because for a while everything important in my life was suddenly, 'I have a new job!', 'this is what happened at my new job!' After a couple weeks of this I started thinking, no one cares about this except me anymore, but everything to me was still all about My New Job, so I stopped writing altogether.

Now it feels like everything is all about My New Car.

I'm feeling crampy and tired today. (At least my nipples are better?) I set the alarm clock on my cell phone and lay down in my car, listening to Iris for a while at lunch.

Technology is being my friend again. I've decided to order one of these pairs of boots:

http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/10069247/c/59711.html
http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/11064061/c/3.html

Other than the price difference, what should make me pick one over the other?

I answered a call from a woman looking for Marcio after he had left for the day. She said he had offered her a job and she was calling back. It's so painfully slow right now I don't know why we'd be having another person.

Judy tells me to keep learning about the business. I started to think, I love my job but by the time I get to a year here maybe I should be forming some kind of plan on how I'm going to move on.

It's been a long, long time since I've had a good TMI post. I'm having bad pre-period painful-to-touch nipples right now, so of course I've managed to brush something against them through my shirt about twenty times today.

Technology is not being my friend today.

Ever since I was a kid I had dreams where I was driving. I suppose some people have flying dreams, I have driving dreams. They would be more detailed as I got older and had more knowledge on how to actually make a car move. One common theme—I'm sure there's some kind of meaning in this but don't really care—I would have trouble making the car stop. I wouldn't be able to push the brakes hard enough... and wondering how to explain this when I wasn't old enough to begin with.

For the first couple weeks I had my car, every time I closed my eyes I would see it driving down streets on auto-pilot until I consciously made it stop. I couldn't sleep because I'd have to keep waking myself up to not see myself crashing into other cars, people...

When I lived in Indiana my friend Eric and I would drive the city around for hours at night and talk. (Honestly, there isn't much else to do in Evansville when you're underage.) My escape fantasy has always involved driving on a highway at night and a fascination with city lights.

Such an everyday part of life and I couldn't even do it until last September. I still hold this over my dad's head, though I won't actually say anything to him, I have dreams where we're screaming at each other.

The last time I felt like hiding but thought I shouldn't be alone, I went to Jeremy's. Driving down Aurora with loud synthpop is amazing therapy in itself.

Wednesday night I was feeling crazy and it hadn't gone away by morning. I had that feeling driving to work—I was running late and I wanted to just keep going... I took Friday off. My boss is good about that kind of thing and I haven't even had to tell him I'm crazy yet. (I'm still learning that I can't just tell people I'm crazy and have them know exactly what I mean, so bear with me.) I thought about using the day to go somewhere far away, drive to Canada.

Friday is a much better day to take off than Monday because you don't feel pressured to get your slacking and relaxing in before it's too late in the day to count, and still have to go to bed in a few hours. I got dressed two times during the day—once to go to Uwajimaya for bubble tea, and again to go to the grocery store. I spent the entire rest of the day in pajamas and it was wonderful.

This has to be one of the silliest things I've ever seen: One of my co-workers had both a 'Show Desktop' and 'Shortcut to Show Desktop' icon on her desktop.

For the record, I still hate new-Blogger.

I love Zappos because I can search for 'black boots, size 10, no heel', however, they do not have an option to search for 'not covered in fur'.

Things that make me feel very 'adult': (Defining 'adult' as how I saw people my parent's age when I was a kid.)

1. Writing checks to pay bills. (Paying bills online makes me feel modern.)
2. Scraping my car windows in the morning.

Actually I'm so inexperienced at this car thing for my age. The first time it got cold enough, I didn't even have an ice scraper. I did the entire thing with my bus pass.

Somebody sent this comic to NWR for valentines day. I forgot how much I love Story Minute.

It's true... there's no reason to complain about double standards when they work in your favor, right? February 14th has to be the most blatantly female-oriented if-you-love-me-you'll-buy-me-flowers fake holiday... Ah, but who am I to complain? My boss has been working with a salesperson from a printing company (er.. printer company?) who left coffee mugs full of candy for me and Judy (the two women in the office this time of day.)

My real reason for posting... Gwen posted this song (with video) in her livejournal, now stuck in my head, so I must pass it on. It's not work-safe, family-safe, or make you wonder what kind of freaks my friends are -safe. 'Do you take it?...'