No Snow Here! :)
It’s snowing in NOVA (northern virginia), where I used to live; I am very happy that I am not there. I am relishing the fact that I don’t have to deal with shoveling snow, scraping car windows, huge heating bills, frozen fingers, toes, and ears, panicked drivers, drivers who refuse to admit there *is* snow, no bread or milk in the grocery stores, trudging through the snow to feed animals, muddy boots, slipping on ice, or any of the other “joys” that snow brings. People like to think of snow in romantic terms, when they are looking at it through a window or on TV, but once you have to actually deal with it physically, it quickly loses its appeal. Granted that some of the problems I listed are specific to the NOVA region, or specific to living in the country; when I was in WV the snow was much less of a problem – the roads were always cleared and the entire equestrian facility was indoors, but NOVA is unique in the fact that it gets pretty much every type of weather, yet doesn’t know how to handle any of them. I don’t miss that one bit.
I feel like I’ve been slacking the last two weeks; it took me a while to recover from Nanowrimo and the holidays, with the holidays being the more stressful of the two. I’m not a very social person and being around a lot of people at one time is exhausting; its ok if we’re all focused on one thing, such as a game, or at a meeting, but when its just a social event, and there are a bunch of different conversations all going on at once, I find it very trying. And of course, when its family, you get the added perk of arguments and tempers flaring, plus these aren’t people you’ve exactly *chosen* to hang out with, so you might have little to nothing in common with them. I’m practically the opposite of most of Gary’s family (not republican, not christian, and not at all interested in having, seeing, or hearing about kids), so I’m usually at a complete loss of what to talk about around them. I’m a complete failure at “small talk” in general, which doesn’t help; the point is, spending the weekend socializing with family was to me akin to running a marathon, which doesn’t mean I’m against doing it (I would try to run marathons too, if my body was capable of it), just that I felt completely drained afterwords.
I’ve pretty much given up on trying to get a bunch of my tie-dye on the market for the christmas rush. Frankly, I think tie-dye is more of a spring and summer item anyways, no matter how cool-looking those hoodies and jackets I did are. It still would have been a good idea, but now I’m running out of time – orders would have to be in by friday I think to ensure they’d get there in time. I did post a few items and I did get one custom order, which means I finally got all of my supplies organized and usable for the first time since I packed them up in VA. I still need to make a bunch of tie-dye, for my own presents to give; planning to do it all next week. If I have time, I want to do the rest of the blank AOL shirts I have, so I can give them away to people when I go to VA in January.
One of the reasons I’ve done less for tie-dye and other things over the last two weeks is that I’ve actually been really busy in the job-hunting department. I’m not sure if its something about the end of the year, or if its just because I did a revamp of my resume, but I’ve been getting a *lot* of inquiries all of a sudden, as well as finding a lot more jobs to apply to. This has required filling out a bunch of extremely long forms, each of which seem to need a different special piece of information that I have to look up, plus lots of emails and calls from recruiters, and several phone interviews (at least *some* of which I think went well). Most of them have said that they probably won’t be making their decisions until January though, because of people being gone for the holidays; makes you wonder why they started the process at all instead of waiting.
I finally saw Inception; people have been telling me I need to see it ever since it was first released in theaters. I have a well-known obsession with dreams…which is why I was told to see it. I think it was a pretty good movie, but it wasn’t what I expected, so I ended up somewhat disappointed. There was an extra feature on the disc though that talked all about dreams, and that was interesting, particularly when it talked about gamers and lucid dreaming. I’m a lucid dreamer and a gamer and apparently the two often go hand in hand. I have a hate/love relationship with sleep – I hate the process of trying to get to sleep, which I find really difficult, but I *love* my dreams and never want to wake up, even from nightmares. The story I wrote for nanowrimo has a lot of stuff about dreams in it as well; I think I was hoping Inception would help give me some more ideas for it. The problem with the dreams in Inception though is that they are all technology-based and a lot of it didn’t really make sense (even to a dreamer). Oh well; I still enjoyed it. 🙂
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