We all know about my addiction to television.  If you’ve been reading me for a while you are probably a little bit worried about my television addiction and the way it could influence my behavior in the real world (seriously? Why is there no underlying score playing against my every move? How else will the rest of the world know what I am feeling?).  And, you know, I know that we joke and laugh about how I should take this television addiction and do something productive with it like, write a book or start a television centric blog.  For starters I actually do contribute to a television blog on a regular basis–but, and this is sad, it isn’t anything I’d link to here.  Oh I’m happy to be a part of the company that runs the blog and all but because I’m supposed to be quasi-professional, I’m not as opinionated over there as I am here and you know, this is coming dangerously close to breaking the “don’t talk about work on your personal blog” rule.

Where was I?

Oh yes.  The television addiction.  Maybe I should call it the television Addiction because today I realized just how unruly it has gotten.  Check it out:

Today Will came home for lunch and we actually ate lunch together at the table.  Of course, we didn’t talk much because Will was playing a Final Fantasy game on his Nintendo DS and I was reading a book.  You would think that, because our attentions were focused elsewhere, the house would be quiet but no.  You silly reader, you underestimate me.  The television? It was on. While neither of us were watching it.  Because I’m so used to its background noise that I forget that it is there.  Lately I’ve left the television on while showering, reading a book and once when I went to the store.

Yeah.  That’s not so good.  My poor electric bill.

Here is the thing: Television? It is my drug.  I fully admit it.  It is my escape.  It is how I choose to amuse myself during my free time.  I love discovering new television shows and I have very definite opinions about what I will and what I will not watch.  America’s Next Top Model? Yes.  What’sherfaceonMTV’s Shot at Love? No.  I have enough useless television knowledge up in my head that I could, plausibly, single-handedly write a Leonard Maltin-esque guide to television.  I’m a little bit proud of this, and at the same time I know when it is time to admit that I have gone ’round the bend (look Ma! I’m growing!).

The thing is? I don’t mind the quiet.  In fact, I kind of like the quiet.  It’s easier to think when it’s quiet and to really focus on my work (okay, duh, but you know what I mean).  It’s relaxing and peaceful.  And I often miss it in the evenings when, between Will and I, we have four separate electricity hogging boxes all chiming away with television shows, WoW, instant messengers and e-mail notifications and I know that even if I turned off my laptop and the television set? The apartment would still be noisy.

Tomorrow I want to try having quiet all morning long.  I have to get up at eight.  I predict that I will last until roughly 10:30 (a half an hour after Will has left for work) before I switch on the television set simply out of habit.  I’m hoping that I have the sense to remember “Oh yeah! Trying something new!” and turn it back off.

Want some irony?  I wrote this blog post while waiting for Monday’s episode of The Closer to download into my Tivo from Amazon.  Yeah.  Addiction.  It’s what’s for dinner.

Every month, right before the irritation ridden angst fest that is my PMS, I go through a few days of absolute space cadetiness.  I have been known to open the refrigerator because there are dishes in the sink that need to be washed.  I’ll walk into the bedroom because I feel hungry.  I will sit down to watch television and before I know it, a half an hour has passed and I still have the remote in my hand, but the television has not been turned on.  During these few days it is not unlikely to ask me a question and then have to wait a very very long time for me to say “what?” because I’ve only just registered that you were talking to me.

Lucky for me, this month, those days started on the weekend–a weekend in which I didn’t have a lot of work to do so I could just zone out.  I spent Saturday lying on the couch watching Bones (yay Netflix) and then, yesterday I started watching the second season of Lost (woo Hollywood Video).  Of course because Lost is what it is, I rushed through today’s work so that I could keep watching and I am still not finished. Viva la tomorrow night when I’ll use it to unwind from baby-sitting.

I had thought about writing about my Batman/Christian Bale viewing experience but I think that will keep for a few days.

On Tuesday I baby-sat longer than usual for my friend Wendy’s daughter and as a thank you she sent me home with some peanut butter brownies.

Because of this week’s much heavier than usual work load (for which I am eternally grateful), I’ve kind of let the housekeeping go.  I think the last time I wiped down our kitchen table was…last Friday? Maybe Saturday morning? And since then, many many things have passed over it’s surface–clothes, containers, DVDs, shoes, cell phones, mail, you get the idea. The cat has even taken quite a few naps on it.  We haven’t, however, done much meal eating while sitting at it (though it has been used as a resting place for sandwiches and plates containing food).

Last night I sat down at the kitchen table to eat some one of the brownies that Wendy sent home with me.  I’d been keeping them in the refrigerator to keep the peanut butter icing from sliding off and they’d become a tiny bit crumbly.  I? Cannot let any part of a brownie go to waste.  So, after finishing the brownie, I brushed my hand across the table to get the brownie crumbs, tossed them in my mouth and said…

“Wow. Okay, that wasn’t from a peanut butter brownie… I really hope that was actually food.”

Don’t you so want to come over to my house right now?

She’s a couple of days early but Distracto Girl is officially in the hiz-ouse.  Good thing I only have two projects left for the week, eh?

I’m off to stare at walls…

I’ve sat here for over an hour trying to come up with a blog post but all I can think of is how much I want to go to Wendy’s (the fast food joint not my friend’s house) and get a hamburger.  I feel like I’m back in college with the midnight fast food cravings and the total not caring about leaving the house in my pajamas.  When I suggested it to Will and he said “but you’re in your pajamas!” I said “that’s why we’d hit the drive thru!” (moral dilemma: I know it’s actually spelled “through” but when the sign at the restaurant says “thru” how do you write it on your blog?)

Then I realized that if I actually ate a hamburger right before going to bed I’d probably have some pretty funky dreams.  Today I fell off of my two-day-long “stay awake in the morning” wagon and went back to bed after Will left for work.  Tomorrow, though, has to be a “stay awake” day because I have a crap load of stuff to do.  Of course, I had a crap load of stuff to do today and it all got done, but I wasn’t trying to shove that crap load of stuff into the “finished” pile while also trying to do laundry.

I’m kind of dreading tomorrow.

I really want that burger.  But I also really don’t want another dream featuring Geraldo.  Maybe I should have some cereal instead.

I sat down at nine o’clock to write a post about my tunnel vision when I have a lot of projects due and then I spent the last two and a half hours playing around with my site and iTunes.  Apparently tonight, the tunnel vision, I don’t has it.

Incidentally,

I know that I shouldn’t care about things like page rank and whatever, but part of me kind of does and I was really pissed off last year when my page rank dropped down to a three.  In the long run, who cares, but… I kind of do.  I deleted a lot of plug-ins and stuff last summer when a certain friend or two kept telling me that my site was taking too long to load on their computers.  Seriously–I was bending over backward trying to get rid of sidebar items, switching stat counters, everything I could think of and you know what?  None of it helped.  So back up it goes!  Hello my old sitemappy thing!  I don’t know what you do exactly but I’ve been assured by folks (Google haters btw) that you are necessary to my internet survival.  Hello Google analytics!  You are further proof that Google is on its way to turning into Microsoft and trying to rule the content of the internet, but apparently if I don’t let you crawl my site, I’m borked as far as attracting random readers!

Hey, you know? I’ve gotten wayyyy too many random visitors by way of google searches for “pizza plants.”  I feel really sorry for these people because I too wish pizza grew on plants and I imagine they are sorely disappointed when they show up here instead of a gardening site.

Further,

Under normal circumstances I love my iTunes.  I know that there are people who hate iTunes and I understand why (it is annoying that iTunes downloads can only be played on iPlayers and that mp3s need to be converted to iFormats to play on iPlayers) but for the most part, I don’t care about all of that brou-ha-ha.  What I do care about is being able to sort through my music in a semi-understandable fashion and being able to play an album in order.  There are a lot of albums in my library that had to have their own playlists created just so I wouldn’t hear the thing in some random iTunes designated (crappy by the way) order.  And don’t get me started on the whole each collaboration getting its own album artwork thing in the scroller setting (or whatever its called).

Finally,

my whole “going back to bed” habit is in the starting stages of being kicked.  This isn’t really because of any conscious effort to stay up.  It’s because yesterday was all drama filled and today was a baby-sitting day.  I wonder if I’ll be able to stay up tomorrow on purpose.  I get tired, but I can tell you it makes it a lot easier to go to sleep at night!

I know. But sometimes the obvious has to be stated.

Over the course of our day, the following things have happened:

1.  Will’s other sister (not the one who came to visit, the other one) called him while he was at work to scream at him for not telling her about our engagement.  Will doesn’t really get along with the females in his family and this is pretty good evidence of why.  While part of me wants to flog Will for not telling them sooner, the rest of me understands why he avoids dealing with them.  Even the happiest of situations can turn them into screaming wildebeests.  So yeah.  By nine in the morning he’d already had someone screaming at him.

2.  Two of our friends decided to split up.  They’ve been married for just over two years and when we lived in Roseburg, this was the couple we’d go out to dinner with when we wanted to do “couple” things like, well, going out to dinner because there wasn’t anything else to do in Roseburg.  And the decision wasn’t really mutual so much as it was the wife unexpectedly dumping her husband.  Will and I are trying to convince the husband to move up here and crash with us while he gets himself settled but, because of his outrageous car payment, he can’t afford to just up and move, even if we didn’t charge him any rent.  So, while he saves up money to move (because the Wife decided that she wanted to keep the apartment), they are going to keep living together in the apartment.  They’ve moved into separate bedrooms, but…what kind of hellish torture that must be!

(We’ll just sort of…gloss over the fact that if he’s living there and still paying half the rent and his entire car payment he isn’t likely to save up money to move any time soon)

3.  Will’s company is going through budget cuts and they are letting one of Will’s favorite coworkers go so that they can keep Will.  While it is certainly flattering to know that they will do whatever they can to keep him even if it means working around his impossible fall school schedule, Will still feels really badly for the coworker that they are letting go.  He even begged them to put him down to part time again so that they could afford to keep the other guy, but I guess they wouldn’t listen.

I’m trying to think of a funny way to wrap all of this up, but…yeah…I’ve got nothing.  I’ve been writing allllll day so my brain is fried.

I think that this has been a Monday of Garfieldian proportions!

If you are ever in the Portland Metro area, you must have dinner at the Black Bear Diner in Beaverton.  Will and I took his sister there for dinner tonight and it. was. so. good.

The other fun part of the diner (besides the yummy food) is that the outside of their menu is designed to look like a newspaper from 1959.  You always hear about how much the prices have gone up but when you see a classified ad selling a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom home with a yard, garage, family room and den for $16,000?  You almost fall out of your chair.  New cars for $2000? Jeebus.  It almost makes me want to live back then, but then I realized that I’d officially be considered “bad” because I’m living with my fiance before we are married.

When I mentioned this, Will said “it’s still frowned upon you know,” and Missy (Will’s sister) and I looked at each other and almost at the same time said “I don’t know anyone who didn’t live together first!” and “Now its weird not to live together before you get married!”  Poor Will.  I think he really does want to live back in 1959.

I felt it was my duty to remind him that in 1959 he wouldn’t be able to play WoW or spend so much time on the computer because…wait for it…there weren’t any personal computers back then!  Will insists that he would love to work outdoors and has this romantic idea about being a farmer but whenever I suggest we do anything that doesn’t involve climate control, he gets twitchy and says he’d rather stay home.  I say that the man who thinks walking a few blocks to the store instead of driving is “weird and un-American” would have a pretty hard time being a real farmer.  But because I want to be a good fiancee, I simply patted his knee and said “of course you’d rather work the land honey.  I totally understand,” while rolling my eyes at his sister.

You know, ’cause I’m supportive and stuff.

People, I have discovered something that has the potential to be very dangerous.  I can use my Tivo to download television shows from Amazon.com. Thank god the shows cost $2 per episode or I’d have all sorts of things being downloaded right now! Though I have to say that this thing downloads slower than my old dial up connection used to download stuff.

I discovered this in a fit of “I’ve watched all my Netflix but my body doesn’t want to concentrate on work and I know it will be at least a couple of hours before I end up going to sleep!”  I mean, sure, I could clean the kitchen but really–who wants to spend their Saturday night cleaning their kitchen?  Yeah, Will’s sister is supposed to visit tomorrow but if you ever saw how Will’s family kept house you would understand why I am not worried about her opinion.  A sink full of dishes? Is nothing compared to the way that house was kept.

Okay, end of tangent.  The point is this:  I can download television shows from Amazon into my Tivo.

It’s a good thing I almost never have any spare money because this? Would suck all of it right up.

Last night Will and I went to see the Foo Fighters at the Rose Garden here in Portland.  For those of you who don’t know and couldn’t guess, I’m a pretty big fan of Nirvana.  I came late to their party (which is a long long story) but once I managed to get my hands on their music, it was over. I was a Nirvana-head.  I still kind of am, but I have to admit that (until last night) I hadn’t heard much non-top-40 Foo Fighters.  I know, I know, Dave Grohl is a rock god among men and has talent oozing from his pores.  I get it, but I didn’t get it until last night when we went to the concert.

First, unlike the other concerts I’ve been to (the most recent being Etta James when she played the Halfshell in Roseburg a couple of years ago) these guys played. And played and played.  They played for more than two and a half hours and only had a couple of “talk” breaks.  I was really glad for this because this was Will’s very first concert ever and I wanted it to be a good one.  By some miracle we ended up with perfect seats too, so I think that as far as first concerts go, this one was pret-ty awesome.

I also feel very proud of my Nirvana nerdiness because I had been hoping they would play at least one or two Nirvana songs and while they didn’t play anything that I recognized immediately as a Nirvana song, they did play a song called Marigold.  During the performance I leaned over to Will and said “I think this is a Nirvana song!” because it just sounded…like Nirvana (how many times can I use the band name in one paragraph? Let’s find out!)!  Then today, I was looking up Dave Grohl on Wikipedia and sure enough, Marigold was the B-Side to one of Nirvana’s singles.  (*sigh* remember when there were such things as B Sides?) It didn’t start out as a Nirvana song–it was written by Grohl for another group, but then he and Kurt Cobain played around with it and ended up re-recording it.    I feel very proud that I was able to recognize the band’s ness.

The concert also serves as proof that, especially in the case of Will and I, opposites really do attract.  After the concert, while we were waiting for the train home, Will said “Wow–Dave Grohl must have to get wasted to be able to go out on stage every night!  There’s no way I could ever even think about doing something like that!” at the exact same time that I said “Dave Grohl looked like he was really enjoying himself! That looked like so much fun; I want to be a rock star!”