On another note:

My lunch today is brought to me by the color Orange. I have oranges, carrots, cheesz-its and a sandwhich (which thankfully isn't orange). Perhaps I'll have to have many green things tomorrow - for balance.

Arbor Day

Saturday was Arbor Day, so in the spirit of the theme, we brought home 2 new trees. Our Fair City had an Arbor Day event, and was handing out free maple trees (not little ones either, ours is as tall or taller than me! I'll measure tonight). They had parks and rec and garden club people there, and some others, and another tree vendor. So...we got our free tree, and bought one spruce tree, sized 4ish feet. It was snowing and winding on Saturday (SPRING! I want spring!) so we didn't plant them Saturday.

Sunday we had some shovel work to do before we could plant the trees. We had a dead tree last year, and had cut down most of him, but still had to remove the stump...oof! That involved breaking up all the roots, digging down below it, and trying to pull it out. After trying to lift the sucker, and un-stuck it from the ground, we decided to try something fun. I have now an SUV. We decided to try out the 'utility' function. So, using our climbers skills, we used anchor points in the back of the car and created an anchor to hook the webbing attached to the stump to. Then, I put my new car in first (I can choose the gear, it's not a manual...but I have some options), and she PULLED. Out came the stump! Tonight, we'll have to go buy a wheel barrow to carry the stump to the back yard. In the hole we created, we planted the spruce. In the back yard, we planted the maple. Today, I hurt.

In the spirit of sharing....

May I borrow someone's eyeballs?!?! Mine have a curious new tendency to burn, itch, and irritate. Every day for the last week, I reach a certain point in the day, and BAM! a flare up of the worst itching and burning you can imagine. I know it's allergies, but I'm taking the one-a-day meds, and the extra innings meds on top of it. AND using allergy eye drops 2x daily. Honestly. I'm not keen on taking MORE medicine.

Hopefully spring will spring soon enough and I'll just have the day to day pollens to worry about. So, if you happen to have a pet, I will NOT be visiting your abode for the next week or so, maybe more, until this is under control. No use provoking the beast.

April Showers

...bring May flowers, and the return of allergy season, and the strong desire for a fire, a cup of tea, and a book....or a nap. Right now, I vote nap. Alas, not for a few more hours.

***EDIT***
I just heard on the radio that it may snow tomorrow night, leaving up to 1 inch of white stuff on the ground to wake me Saturday AM! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I am going to cry. I'm going to remove myself from my workstation to tear up in the Ladies. I'm going to have a tantrum and throw things - like hot water...as it's at hand. See above. Spring! SPRING SPRING SPRING, and FLOWERS! (Ok, I'll have my tantrum here instead.) I wanted to plant things on Saturday, not clean the house. Much more fun to make a mess outside than clean one inside. RRRRRRRRR.

Motorbike!

It's motorcycle season again! WHEEE! I rode mine to work this AM, my chin got a bit cold (from the wind rushing in up under my helmet), but otherwise no worries. I was amazed how quickly riding came back to me, after all - it's only my second season. It was like riding a bike....wait. Yeah.

Tomorrow it's supposed to rain, and storm, same w/ Friday. Saturday and Sunday have highs of 47....so probably this is the only day this week. But! I did get out in April.

Ouch!

Can I just say that I am not young enough to combine 2 hours softball practice with 4 hours gardening and not be sorry about it the next day?

I am very funny to watch, I'm sure, all hobbling around and such. Yet, I'm looking forward to attacking the last chunk of against-house landscaping that Trev and I didn't get to last night.

Oh, and my dad and Trevor cleaned our garage. It looks super-nifty!

Lastly, the ticks are out already...beware!

I need a metal detector!!!

I have so many bobby pins in my hair, I may need a metal detector to get them all out! Probably not, but I also have enough hair spray in my hair to service an entire high school cheer leading squad! But, my hair is v. cute! I don't want to take it down, but I have to. It's starting to be itchy, and I have softball practive tomorrow.

Why is my hair so cute?? Because Karin got married this past weekend, and i got the Very Cute Hair so I could stand up next to her at her wedding. It was wonderful. I'll not steal her thunder by describing every little detail, but she looked happy and that's what matters.

Now, I just need to go visit the shower to wash the spray out of my hair. Whee.

Crisis of Conscience

I am having a day! It started last night. I went to bed and the second I lay down, I knew I was going to have an asthma/allergy attack. So I got up, took Rolaids and used my inhaler and lay back down. It's only a matter of time when I feel like that but I've learned to try to get a few hours sleep before they hit. I managed an hour. I then spent the next hour or so in the bathroom (sorry for the overshare, my allergy attacks usually manifest in a gastrointestinal fashion). The one downside to trying to sleep before such attacks is that I end up in a dreamlike state and can't quite shake the fog from my mind. So I spent one hour trying to decipher what I was thinking, why I was thinking it, and determine if it was 'real'.

When I went back to bed I had a dream. In my dream I kept trying to get to my PE/CIH/CSP professional certification exam (yes, I had to take all three at once!). It was only a 2 hour exam ('only' because you had only that long to cover a crap-load of material), and it was on the U's campus. I was at work, in my cafe, eating lunch and trying to figure out how I was going to get there by my appointed time of 12:30PM. Then, just as I had determined how, Hulk Hogan and Jessie Ventura entered the area. They were beginning an American Gladiators/WWE Smackdown spinoff and it was taking place in the cafeteria!! I was stuck. I missed my time, but managed to somehow get a new one assigned to me (2:30) and I was in the process of fighting my way to the test (now on campus in some woods?) when I awoke. Anxiety much?

My current crisis is this. I want to write. Yup - this second. I want to sit down and work on one of the two ideas swirling in my mind for novels. I have places to go on the one I've sent a few chapters out to certain people, and I have a starting point - I think, for the other one. The problem, I'm at work and it's just past lunchtime. After this blog, I'll have to go back to doing work things. This blog is writing, so it's satisfying some of the urge, but it's not what I wanted to write, so my Muse is still playing hopscotch in the back of my brain. The urge to write is so strong I feel it in my chest and it's hard to sit still. I have a meeting in 50 minutes, I have to prep for it, I don't have time for this to be interfering, but it's not going away.

The worst part - I don't think I'll have time to sit down and work on the writing until Sunday afternoon. Who knows if the Muse will be driving me then, or if I'll sit down and...nothing! Sometimes I hate having a day job. It's almost clockwork when I want to write, and it's always when I'm at work. Is it because I'm at work that I want to work on the writing, or is it just that the Muse speaks to me at that time of the day? I may have to do something drastic. I may have to see if I can start waking up early to write! (GASP!) My excersise (read team sports) tends to happen after work, and so does my relax/chill time, so those are probably not the best times to write - it's hard to find the foucs. I may have to start setting a bed time, setting an alarm, and writing in the morning the way some people work out. Maybe that will reduce this NEED I feel right now. Or perhaps, it would just make it worse.

Enough with the "Raised" threat level, already.

This weekend Trevor and I took a trip to see my brother in CO. To do this in a reasonable time frame (e.g. not taking more than 2 days off work), we flew. The troubles and adventures we have flying is enough to fill a book, not just this one blog, but let me vent for just one minute about the loud speaker announcements in airports.

"The threat level, as determined by the Department of Homeland Security, has been raised to orange....."

Oh??? The threat level hasn't been raised to orange, it's been orange for over a year. I think they could spend the few dollars to record a new message that rids of of the 'raised'. Or, get rid of the darned thing. What are they trying to accomplish by telling us every 5 minutes that our world is no longer safe, and that we are almost, but not quite, at a state of emergency?? We've had to take our shoes off, travel without water (unless we bring an empty bottle and fill it on the other side, or buy their ridiculously expensive drinks on the 'inside'), travel with small portioned sizes of our liquids and toiletries unless we want to check our baggage, and subject ourselves to random searches (that in my opinion are quite inadequate to actually find anything) for over one year. I have read numerous articles where random testing found that TSA did NOT catch bomb parts, even with the 'increased' security. I'm inclined to agree with the articles. All they have done is increase passenger stress, the time to prepare at the airport, the price of airline tickets, and the hassles of flying. They are driving people away from flying, and they wonder why airlines are going bankrupt?

I am not saying that we shouldn't be a vigilant people, especially in 'today's day and age', but I remember when flying was fun. I remember when you got dressed up to go on a plane. I remember the sense of adventure. All I see now when I look around the waiting area of the airport is the sense of impatience and barely contained disgust. People no longer fly because it's part of the adventure of vacation, but because their time has become so pressed they have no other alternative, and they don't like it.

I realize that security is important - I'm in the safety and health field, for goodness sake - but since when did security include distrust and veiled malice for all of our fellow man?

This threat level isn't "raised", this is maintained, and it's time they either did something to return flying to it's normal state of operations, or made permanent their changes and did away with the message. I don't see them ever going back to 'yellow' or 'green' so perhaps it's time they recalibrated their scale. What happens the next time some random attack happens, and we need to find a way to keep it from happening again? Will we endure 2 years of 'the threat level has been raised to red. Please collect all your baggage at the airport from the seperate plane it flew on, and you may not have ANY carry-on items without a doctor's note'? What happens when they raise the level to red, remove more of our constitutional freedoms, and something else happens? Will they invent Purple? Will they finally kill the airline industry? Will the airline industry use that as an excuse to raise prices, drive out the small fish, and create a monopoly similar to the 'oil crisis, war' and the current gas price?

Why not spend the millions and millions of dollars per year on permanent, updated, security measures. Why are we still relying on x-ray machines that are 30+ years old (in some airports), and human error for our safety? How much training do our luggage searchers and person inspectors have to take, anyway? Are they trained on the making of bombs and terrorism and materials that would be used? Are they taken through practice drills, or do they spend the hours that a detective or law enforcement individual would have to be able to watch an individual and match up key behaviors with the materials? No. We'd have to pay them far more if they had that level of skill.

You what to know my personal opinion? If flying stays the same 5 years from now as it is today (no other attacks, no extra security, and no going back to the way it was), we'll have one or two airlines, insane airfares, and people will go back to the old-fashioned road trip for vacation. I personally think that even though this is hurting the airlines, someone is benefiting too much from the way things have been changed to to ever go back. They feel these changes are 'for the good of the nation', 'we have to protect our citizens from all threats', when really, they are just padding their pockets or advancing their own agendas. Why is it that noone looks at airports as a business, trim the fat, innovate, fix the problems or close down.

This stupid 'raised to orange' gets my water hot every time I hear it, but I'll get off my soap-box now. thank you