Jeans and Sneakers

I don’t think I really ever post about my chinchilla on here anymore.  I’m doing so today because I’m worried.  A few months ago Turbo was having trouble eating.  We’d give him a craisin, and it looked like he would wince in pain and drop the food.  Then he started drooling.  That’s a bad sign in rodents, as it is one of the main symptoms of malocclusion, a condition in which rodent’s teeth grow continuously faster than usual (all rodent’s teeth continuously grow, but it’s usually not an issue because they eat and chew on things often enough to keep them down to a normal size.  Malocclusion is when the teeth grow too fast or from the root up into the skull, which can’t really be treated).  Rob took him to the vet, and they looked him over, said he had some spurs growing off the sides of his teeth that were causing sores in his mouth, but that they filed the spurs down and he didn’t have malocclusion.  We took him home, watched him carefully, and after about 3-4 weeks he seemed back to the normal, happy, healthy chinchilla we love.

About two weeks or so later, he started drooling again.  Rob took him back to the vet, and they filed down his teeth again, but this time it seemed like a more minor treatment, as if the condition wasn’t as bad (they put him under the first time and the second time I don’t believe they did), and he came back home groggy.  We watched him again, but he seemed to not recover as quickly.

Last night Rob went to give him a craisin, and he could hardly eat it.  I don’t even think he ate the whole thing.  He called the vet again to ask what the deal was and if he could bring him in, but they told him that the dr. wasn’t there, and that he could bring him in today.  Rob got off the phone and went to pick turbo up, and that’s when he noticed that his left eye was incredibly swollen, and the lids were stuck shut.  Rob tried to clean them off with some water and a napkin, and lots of puss started oozing out.  Rob called the vet back and they gave us the name of an emergency clinic, but they said that they didn’t think the clinic had anyone who was familiar in the treatment of exotic animals.  So we cleaned out his eye with saline solution, and though yesterday we got his eye open again, as of this morning it was stuck shut again.

We took him to the vet, and now we’re waiting for the dr. to see him.  Last night I did a bunch of research, and I’m so worried, because I’ve read that eye problems can be a common symptom of malocclusion caused by the roots of the teeth growing upward through the sinuses and into the eye socket.  If the dr. didn’t take an x-ray on his first visit, they could have misdiagnosed him, and he might have malocclusion, and he could be in serious pain right now.  We might have to put him down.

Turbo is the first pet I’ve ever had (that was kept for more than a day, and wasn’t a hermit crab.  Those don’t really count.), and I’m worried out of my mind.  He’s only 4 years old, and healthy chinchillas can live up to 20.  I’m not really a religious person, but when I get scared, I still ask for help from anyone willing to offer, so I’m asking anyone who might be reading this, please keep Turbo in your thoughts and give him your best well wishes.

I know, I know, I haven’t blogged in a mad long time.  There’s a partial reason for it.  I have some pretty big news.

Holy crap, I’m engaged!  Today was our 5 year anniversary, and man did Rob surprise me.  He picked out the perfect ring, cooked me steak dinner, got my favorite kind of wine, got down on one knee, and even hid it inside something sweet.  I was totally shocked (and still kind of am!), and happy.  :]

Secondly, I’m going back to school!!  I didn’t want to write about it until I was fairly certain I’m going, and I’m all registered for my classes and stuff, so that’s that.  I start on my birthday.  There’s been a few complications, including having to go part time instead of full time (unless my letter to the dean actually does anything), because of my bad grades from my first attempt at college.  And since I’ve registered late and all, I’m kind of stressed because I haven’t heard back from the financial aid department yet, so I have no idea how much I’m going to owe them if anything.

But I’m going for a BS in Computer Information Systems.  It’s going to take a while, since I don’t have that many credits from school before, and I’m going after work, not during the day.  I’m super excited and Rob’s being great and supporting me and stuff, and I can’t wait to begin.

I also had a car problem, and some work stress and a trip to Philadelphia, so I’ve been kind of busy, not to mention last weekend Rob started wiring the lower level of the house so that we can begin to finish it.

I did start knitting again, the socks.  I’m finding it so hard to keep an interest in knitting socks on one circular.  The razor cami has come to a halt. . .even after I bought a knit picks circular needle for it, I keep messing up the pattern.  I might pick it up again, sometime.

I also sort of stopped reading Atlas Shrugged again.  Last weekend it was all I wanted to do, but then I got up to one point and it just got repetitive, and I put it down.  Other than all that, I’m glad it’s weekend!!

Not much has been going on.  We got the lawn done.  We’re literally watching the grass grow.  Knitting has pretty much been on hold, though I did buy a one-piece circular needle so that I can continue messing up the Razor cami.  Lace has a way of boring me to pieces.  Enough so that I pay attention to something else and then make mistakes.

Today I went to the library on my way home and got some musical cd’s.  I want to try and sing more again.

I’m feeling rushed.  Stressed and busy and stuck.  I want to learn stuff and things, but when I get home after work I’m all tired and stressed and I want to try and recouperate so that I can fall asleep at night.  Excuses, excuses right?  I’m a little bit emo today, a little bit hormonal.  :[

I am learning things.   I suppose I’m not satisfied with the speed with which I’m learning, which is just stupid, you can’t really rush learning, and even if you could, why would you unless it was absolutely necessary?  I guess I’m just past the point where I feel it’s ok to settle for now so that I can get something later.  That was fine a few years ago, but now years have passed, and I’ve gotten nowhere, and I want change.  Immediate change.  It’s not going to happen, especially not without any real effort on my part, I can’t keep expecting things to happen and telling myself not to worry about things when I’m doing nothing to change the way things are now, nothing to move forward, nothing to improve and excel.

It’s hard to push yourself when you’re unsure, and full of self doubt and years of I can’t, and you can’t, and blah, blah.  It’s hard.  No one said it would be easy, but god damnit it’s HARD!!  I feel like I need structure, something to help me push myself and so today I considered school again, only to be debated on it by at least one person whose opinions and thoughts I trust.  Debated and defeated.  Don’t waste money on shit you don’t really want.  Don’t waste time and effort on shit you don’t really want.  Don’t waste any more of yourself because you’ve only got what you’ve got left and there’s no sense in waste.

Rush and rush and rush and damnit, wrong direction again.  Start over.  At least I went right with one thing, one thing, one person, one situation, one circumstance that I trusted and so far it panned out alright.  For a long time.  Maybe I can do it again.

I had my 90 day review today.  It went pretty well, actually.  Well, they’re happy with me at least, with the work I’ve been doing for them and the efficiency of which I’ve done it.  But they want me to do something I’m not sure I’m capable of.  It’s a marketing position, and they want me to be basically the new creative mind behind marketing.  I don’t know if I can do that, because I don’t particularly care for the product.  I don’t mean that I dislike it, I just mean that I have no interest in it.  Makes me kind of nervous.

It makes me more than just nervous.  Thinking about years of them expecting me to be the brain behind new campaigns and stuff. . .I don’t know.  I pretty much don’t want to.  After the review I started thinking about my situation and how I always manage to do this to myself.  Well, it really comes down to the fact that I don’t know what I DO want to do.

I thought about it, getting more anxious and more stressed with every passing minute.  How do I prevent career catastrophe without having a plan?  I started grasping at straws, trying to think of a quick, plausible sounding solution to getting out of a situation, to getting out of this job.  I have a bad habit of doing that.  It’s as if there’s a limit to how much dislike I can have for a job, and before the limit is reached, I’ll be fine, practically happy with it.  Nearing the limit, I’ll start calling in sick, slacking worse than usual, but still telling myself that I’m happy, that it’s a GOOD JOB and that I’m lucky to have it.  And then the limit is reached, and it’s like a bomb goes off in my head, and I can see the train wreck coming but feel helpless to prevent the inevitable disaster.  Dramatic, right?

I went to lunch thinking maybe I could quit and get financial aid and go back to school full time.  Maybe I could go for psychology since many of the people I talk to on a daily basis come to me for advice.  It’s something I’m naturally good at and that would make a great career, right?  Shrinks make lots of money, right?

Ugh.  I know myself a little too well and have played this game a little too often to let that argument work.  I could quit my job, and go back to school for psychology, but then how would I pay rent?  How would I get to school, with no gas money?  Oh well I could get a part time job, I told myself, yes, yes, a part time job and I’d work and pay rent and go to school. . .

Do I really want to be that much in debt again?  No.  What if I went to school part time?!  Well then I’d have to either keep this job or find another one, AND find a school that had the degree I wanted out here in the boonies that offered night classes, or online coursework. . .sounds like a big hassle for something I know I only want to do because I’m freaking out about not wanting to work here.  And besides, is this job really that bad?  Casual dress, hour lunch break, relatively close to home, the job has a lot of perks that ALL of my previous jobs did not have.  And it’ll look good on a resume, regardless.  I still don’t want it, but I told them I was looking for something for 2-5 years while I learned what I needed to start a business.  Couldn’t that still work?

Maybe.  But I know how I am when I’m at home, I want to do nothing, sit around and play games or watch movies but basically do nothing, and there’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to get and retain customers, and working for yourself is unstable income. . .

I came up with an idea.  A more stable idea.  And it feels right.  It feels different from my usual quick fix job switch.  It involves a plan, and at least years of dedication to the plan and learning, and really trying.  God, I know I’ve said shit like this so many times, that I have an idea and I really think it’ll work this time.  Hopefully this time I’m right.  Stick to the plan.

Totally unrelated– my knitting has come to an almost halt.  The Razor Cami is obnoxious, I freaking HATE denise needles, my cables are separating from the black plastic connector tips. . .such cheap garbage.  I want to buy some knit picks options needles, but I don’t have the money yet, so the project is snoozing.  I should pick up the socks again though, no reason not to finish those.  Maybe later.

Tonight we went to go see the new hulk movie.  I was kind of looking forward to a new Ed Norton flick, he’s a pretty good actor.  We left the house kind of late, so we missed the previews, but made it into some good seats just in time for the beginning of the flick.  Nice.

All was going pretty good, until about 5 minutes into the thing, when some guy and his 4 or 5 year old kid came in and sat right behind us.  I remember when my brothers were little, I remember what it was like watching a movie with a small child.  Why would you wish that on an entire theater of people?  The kid could not follow what was going on.  He had like no memory retention.  I’m suprised he knew who his father was, because every time the scene changed, he’d ask “Who’s that?  What happened?”

To add insult to injury, rather than telling his kid that they’re in public and to please be quiet and stop asking questions, the dad would give the kid lengthy explanations of what was going on, who that guy was, and why he was doing what he did.  Seriously, WTF.  Isn’t it bad enough that your kid is loud, and asking what happened every 5 minutes?  You have to explain to him that the two main characters were about to get it on, but didn’t, because hulk couldn’t get too excited without turning green?  And then answer your cell phone. . .TWICE?!  Your kid asked you IF YOU COULD GO HOME YET.  HE WAS OBVIOUSLY BORED.  Do not bring small children to the movies because you want to see it and can’t find a babysitter.  Jesus.

Anyway, other than that fun experience, the weekend was pretty  mellow.  Mostly gaming and visiting parents for father’s day.  Work is work, and things are moving along.  I don’t really have anything else to write about, and I’ve got an 11pm bedtime, so I’m gonna get going.

So last night I was having a fit of boredom.  I’ve been meaning to get a new book, so I went to the bookstore.  After looking around for about 20 minutes and trying to ignore the 7 year old girl in the cd section with the headphones at max singing along at the top or maybe middle of her voice, I found a paperback copy (I love paperbacks.  They’re more casual, more ME than hardcovers) of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.  My friend Eric from upstate was the first person to suggest this book to me over 6 years ago, and I’d never gotten around to reading it.

So I bring my selection up to the counter, and there’s a young guy working, probably a few years younger than I am.  I quickly wonder if he’s going to try to strike up a conversation with me, and if he does, if it’s flirtatious or just business.  Being female does come with some built in skepticism.  Anyway, I put my book on the counter, and he says “EVERYONE is buying Ayn Rand today.  I dunno what it is!”  I told him that I’d been meaning to read the book for some time, but just now got around to picking up a copy.  He asks me if I’d read Anthem, another popular Rand novel, and I told him no.  He said that they’re both “Heavy” reading, and that though he’s never read Atlas Shrugged, he has read Anthem, and he was turned onto them by a friend of his who’s read both and “is very heavy into objectivism.”

Uh huh.  I nodded, completed my purchase, and walked out.  Now I consider myself to be a fairly intelligent person, at least in so far as common sense.  But when you wander into the realm of literary intellectualism, I’m pretty wet behind the ears.  I read what entertains me, reading is a form of escapism for me mostly, so I tend to stay away from anything non-fiction, political, or otherwise boring-sounding.  :p  My point, if you’re still with me, is I had no idea what objectivism was.  The conversation ended there because I had no idea what he was talking about, and didn’t want to needlessly make myself look ignorant.  So I did what any modern 20-something would do, I came home and googled it.

Turns out, I knew what objectivism was all along, and not only that, I’m a pretty close follower.  Here’s a quote from Wikipedia (I know, not always 100% accurate, but mostly. ..):

Objectivism is a philosophy^[1][2] developed by Ayn Rand in the 20th century that encompasses positions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics.^[3]

Objectivism holds that reality exists independent from consciousness; that individual persons are in contact with this reality through sensory perception; that human beings can gain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation; that the proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness or “rational self-interest”; that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights, embodied in pure, consensual laissez-faire capitalism; and that the role of art in human life is to transform man’s widest metaphysical ideas, by selective reproduction of reality, into a physical form—a work of art—that one can comprehend and respond to.

See, I thought this was just common knowledge.  Reality exists with or without you, you exist and can interact with reality through your senses, you gain knowledge about reality through your senses and thought processes, the most base purpose of life is to enjoy it, and art is your perception and reiteration of reality as you see it, or choose to reproduce it or it’s opposite to directly affect you or others by way of their sensory receptors.

I mean, duh.  There’s a book about this?

I bought it before knowing the word “objectivism”, and because what I read on the first page captivated me.  I wanted to know more about what was going on, and what was going to happen.  I’m still going to read it, but I was interested to find that institutes and societies have been drafted based on something I have always took for granted, to promote ideas and beliefs that I never questioned.  Interesting.

I’ve been trying to get rid of this shirt tan I got when at Marj’s graduation.  Saturday I went out and bought sunblock so that I could put it where the tan already WAS, and therefore tan where the tan WAS NOT while  outside.  I don’t think it’s worked too well so far.

Other things I did Saturday. . .dishes, video games, all in all it was a pretty mellow day.  Yesterday was similar, except I did laundry instead of dishes (crap, I have to finish my laundry!), and then we went to Rob’s parents house for dinner.  We were going to bbq, but it got late really quickly, and we didn’t have any lighter fluid, so at the end of the night Rob made me a pan-fried burger, and I passed out.

The burger was really good.  Actually this is more important than it sounds, because last year, the burger company that makes the frozen burgers that we usually get went out of business because they couldn’t control their E. coli contamination.  (Wow, just a totally off on a tangent comment here– bath & body works honeysuckle body butter REALLY smells like honeysuckle.  It’s pretty awesome)  We bbq pretty frequently in the summer months, even if it’s just dinner for us, and we had total faith that Topps burgers were the best frozen burgers out there.  You didn’t even have to season them, and they came out flavorful and delicious.

So it was with some trepidation that we drove to the supermarket in search of a replacement burger.  It ended up being not so bad.  The frozen burger section was pretty ransacked, considering it IS Memorial Day weekend.  But we picked up some reduced fat Bubba Burgers, 1/4 lb.  They were tasty!  In a pan!!  That means that they’re going to be even better on the grill!

Does anyone know why these are shaped like strawberries?

Today we’re grilling again, though some friends might come over.  I have some more cleaning to do (that I’m NOT looking forward to), and other than that, it’s Monday.  Tomorrow is Tuesday and I have to go back to work.  That sucks enough in and of itself, but I’m also a little bit more wary of it, since I have a dr’s appointment to go to on my lunch break tomorrow, and it’s worrying me a little bit.  I should be fine, but it might suck a little.

Finally done with this!!  Well, after I take it off the pins, I’ve got to weave in a few ends, but I’m not trying to rain on my own parade.  I probably should have woven them in first, but I don’t really care at this point.  I’ve started an Anthropologie Inspired Capelet to celebrate.  I’m really using up my stash yarn this year, it’s awesome.  I unraveled a tube top I knitted in my first year of knitting that didn’t work out, and I’m using it for the capelet.  I still have most of a cone of it left. . .and I have a sweater in mind for it.  It’s half merino half acrylic, so it’s really squishy.  I hope it doesn’t smell like the Cascade 220 smelled when I washed it.  It smelled BAD. I should invest in some wool wash.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.  I’m going to Rob’s grandma’s house for dinner, and then to my mom’s house to hang out.  Should be a packed day (I’m going to be so sick, dinner, and then cookies at my mom’s, lol).  Today I have to go pick up some flowers.  I think I might get my mom some too.  And I have to start my trial run Magic Loop socks so that I can show my mom tomorrow how that works.

I’m in a pretty good mood today.  It was sunny out before, but the clouds have come in now.  It’s still a good temperature and I opened some windows to get some fresh air in the house.  I also cooked the greasiest breakfast ever, and I’m kind of regretting that.  But what can you do.

Things are in the works, I’m still broke, but trying to figure out ways to compensate.  We’ll see if any of it pans out.

The internet is down here at work which leaves me with a whole lot of nothing to do. I’m already on edge with other multiple concerns, and this lack of distraction isn’t helping.
It didn’t take the german guy here long to ask if I have a sister. Funny, that.
I’ve decided that I’ve been dwelling too much on stupid negative things in my past, and its really dumb to be sad right now, when everythings going so well. I’m going to work on it.