A book my boss gave me as a prezzie, haha. (I think he just had it laying around. No, I KNOW he did.)
I haven’t straight WRITTEN in a long time. Every time I go to post a bloggy lately, it’s picture-laden and for that I’m sorry. (ADDENDUM: I’m adding pictures because this many words alone looks boring, hehe.) As you can see, I’ve been taking a monstrous amount of pictures and feel like it’s a waste not to post them. Like I write this blog for myself. I write it for a couple of reasons:
a) I started writing a blog back in the dizzle because I needed a break at work. That’s the honest truth. I started blogging on MySpace in 2004 I guess. Times where I had something to get off my chest or I needed a second to collect myself or if I just wanted to take a break without disturbing someone else, I would blog for a couple of minutes, feel a little lighter and then go on with my day. Now it’s less a “get out of jail free” sort of thing as it is a habit.
Kristyn at the Echo Park Deep Pool.
b) I like doing it. Honestly, I kind of think that blogging keeps me happy. When I first started blogging, I really just blogged about anything. My personal life, my thoughts, my friends, my family, my job, mishaps and various splendored miscellanea. As I’ve gone on blogging, I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten away from posting personal thoughts. I think we all, as a culture realized that we’d better tame the information we put online about ourselves. MySpace was brand-spanking-new when I was doing that and who the hell knew that employers and schools would be looking at that info? Who really thought that it would spread so far as to become a cultural necessity? Honestly, I’m not much of a fan of Facebook’s platform but I like that it’s opened social networking up to people of all ages. MySpace was kind of like a seedy bar that you wouldn’t bring a family member to but you might go to yourself to people-watch. Facebook is like being at a brightly-lit family restaurant that people keep wandering in and out of. You expect people to be loud and chatty but everyone please keep your clothes on, Grandmas and children are present. Honestly, I really appreciate that shit. It allows us ALL to get involved and be socially connected. AND it kind of makes us all keep ourselves in check with what we put online because you don’t want your co-workers and various family members seeing a picture of you posing with a giant inflatable beaver or whathaveyou.
Edith looking out the window and enjoying life for once.
c) On that note, I find that having to keep positive has actually made my life more positive. I’m sort of a natural braggart because I’m a talker. It’s not that I am trying to BRAG but it’s that I tend to tell a lotta stories, some of which happen to be kinda awesome, and others that are kinda boring. Hey, don’t hate the player, hate the game. BUT, I realized that if I blog the awesome things that happen to me, I’m kind of writing the story of my own life and crystallizing the memories I WANT to remember and tucking the ones I don’t in the background. I have a photographic memory for like, everything bad that has ever happened to me. I spent probably ALL of my twenties ruminating on every single negative thing that I’ve ever done, that anyone’s ever done TO me, that has almost happened, that did happen…it was nuts and it was terrible. I was so goddamn miserable and basically stuck in a non-stop obsessive pattern of blech. And it made me negative as hell. When I started blogging though, I was able to kind of freeze-frame funny things that happened to me that ordinarily I’d only tell a friend in passing or just kind of keep to myself to chuckle over. I started getting positive feedback from my friends who found my anecdotes mildly amusing and a lot of times we’d end up talking and connecting via satellite about whatever all because I posted a quick story about busting my ass in Kmart.
This is some embroidery I started last weekend. I haven't done this in a dog's age.
d) And then I moved to WordPress. People were starting to defect from MySpace and I’m an early-adopter anyway so off I went as well. I’d kind of been toying with taking my bullshit to the World Wide Web at large anyway and so it was kind of a natural progression. I ended up posting over here and started off with like 2 hits a day, if that. Now, on a good day, I’ll get about 100 or so hits, on a day I haven’t posted, about 20 something. That doesn’t sound like a lot but to me it is. And what’s funny is that as soon as Johnny Depp said that he stands with the West Memphis Three, I have been getting hits like ba-fn-naners. In one day, I got almost 500 hits. Since last week, I’ve gotten about 1500-2000 hits from a WM3 post I wrote a year ago ALONE. So crazy and so awesome, for me and for the WM3 bc that means people want information and are paying attention…
Elvira is basking in the sun. I took this (and a lot of these pictures) with my iPhone using an app called Hipstamatic. Awesome.
e) But anyway, I moved to WordPress to continue babbling on, mostly for Kristyn and anyone who’s bored at work’s benefit. And then we seriously decided to move to California. With that, things kind of changed because I wanted my family and friends to know what was going on with us. The last few months we were home, we were unavoidably detained and almost sequestered, so intense was the focus we had to shine on the enormity of moving cross-country. There were people who didn’t understand. There were people who did. There were some complaints that we weren’t spending more time with everyone before we left and those who felt completely neglected. SO I started using this blog as a way to keep everyone up-to-date with what it was that was happening because I really didn’t have time to take each person aside and explain, haha. I had intended on basically live-blogging our drive from Northern NJ to SoCal but it didn’t work out that way. We lost iPhone service constantly. It was hella spotty at best. BUT, I took a shitload of pictures and WILL finish up my travel stories, I promise you that.
Here is Elvira giving it her all. She's trying to rip an Alf clip-on off a nail on the wall. I thought Alf was supposed to attack cats, not the other way around.
f) But in the meantime, we’re here now and living our lives in LA and things are happening in the interim. Before we moved here, we’d only come here once, spending all of four entire days wandering around. We saw a LOT on that trip BUT not enough to feel all “old hat” about this place. Almost every day we see something that makes us go, “Whooooa.” We’re both from the same town. We were both born and raised there. It’s two miles long. Sure there are like 40,000 people stuffed into those two miles but it’s two…miles. One gets tired of looking at the same two mile span of land no matter how many side-streets and alternate routes one dreams up. And LA is… 498.3 square miles of space. 498.3. When I say it’s huge here, it’s HUUUUGE here. And there’s so much to see and so much to do…and none of our family and friends live here. While some of them have been here, not even a fraction of them have so I changed this blog into sort of an “OMG LA!” blog. Oh and it’ll stay that way because I am wide-eyed as hell still and I don’t see that changing anytime soon since we’re poor shut-ins at the moment.
Here is Monster looking like a stuffed animal. Seriously, how is he this cute?
So yeah, that’s a lot of “wokka wokka” talk right there, sorry for the runaway train mouth. Oh well.
What else? Oh, I finally got a handle on my Nike + thing today at lunch. I walked for 31.1 minutes for 1.11 miles and burned 183 calories. I love this thing. Anything that combines my iPhone with anything else is a friend of mine. iPhone + sneakers = fitness? Okay.
Also, we have a lot of friends and family coming to visit this month so that’ll be fun and I’m sure you’ll hear/see all about it, haha.
Post-Valentine's Day cake I baked us this week since we were in NJ on V-Day.
Also, I need to get a job like WHOA. We need to save up for a security deposit for our next apartment. We don’t move until the beginning of September but this landylord of us has some tricks up her sleeve and I’d rather have that money sooner rather than later. I don’t wanna be caught unawares. Also, I wanna be able to BOUNCE right on time with nothing getting in our way. Do you guys have any suggestions as to what neighborhood to move to in LA? I mean we do but I’d like to hear some suggestions (and why) because maybe it’ll give us some idears. We like Silver Lake (Kristyn more so than I do) but things are getting straight up hairy over there lately for some reason. It used to be a sketch area but rose up like a phoenix only to suddenly have a rash of violent crimes break out within the past couple of months. The neighborhood leaders are taking it seriously, meeting up and taking it to the city leaders who are also taking it seriously. So that’s good news. But still…I, personally, want to live closer to the beach. We’re as far away from the beach as we can be and still be in LA City limits. That’s a bummer for me. So IDK, maybe we can find a charming area that’s more central LA. We shall see.
Okay, I’m going to sign off now before I get cataracts from looking at this screen and rheumatoid arthritis from typing on this keyboard. Also, I like you and want you to come back some day. “It’s always been you, Rach.”
Buberella 