Random things:

• I totally forgot I was almost out of insulin in my pump. So I went out to lunch, and now I have 1.5 units left. That will not last me until 5. Oh, what to do…
• Social networking is a little douchey. Maybe a lot douchey. Not that being on Facebook or Twitter in itself is douchey. It’s just douchey when you also come across as a hipster, probably my age, and spend a whole lot of time re-posting trendy things. Or if you just advertise bullshit. Seriously, ga-vomit.
• Living in our new house has been completely awesome. How and why did we stay in apartments for so long? I love having a yard and a garage. Though planting some flowers last weekend really kicked my ass. Who knew that was so much work?
• I really hate this purse I’m carrying right now. Earlier this week I found a bottle of syrup and two screw drivers in it. It’s pretty ridiculous.
• My blood sugar is spiking. I need to go home to change my pump reservoir. But I’m going to have to come back up here because I have a meeting at 3 something. God damn it.
• I do not like Friday meetings.

Well, duh. But I’m ridiculously afraid of someone I love or myself dying or being mangled in a car wreck. It seems the most likely way for someone to die. Also one of the stupidest and most senseless ways to die. One second of choice could change the outcome. I hate thinking about it.

And I really hate hearing of fatal accidents in my town. Much less on a major intersection I travel 4+ times a day. A teenager was killed at such an intersection this afternoon.

This intersection is ridiculous. I’ve lived in my apartment complex for 5 years and the area has gotten increasingly busy, to the point where the city started to expand it a couple months ago. The intersection is between one 30 mph road with a stop sign and a 60 mph road with no stop sign. The 60 mph road is only 2 lanes. It is HORRENDOUS. I’ve been wanting them to expand the road and put in a light there for years. Well, I guess that’s what they’re finally doing with the construction. The problem is that while the construction is going on, they’ve made the intersection a hundred times worse. There is no speed slow down and they’ve blocked all sides of the road with construction barrels, leaving no room to move if someone pulls out in front of you. Plus these barrels completely block the view of those on the 30 mph road trying to turn or cross.

So, it came as no surprise to hear of an accident on this road today. AGAIN.  There have been countless accidents just in the 5 years I’ve lived here. People suck at driving and don’t pay attention, that’s a general rule. Add that to this completely unsafe construction and road conditions, and now we have a fatality.

Just makes me more ready to move and be done with that intersection and that road (the 60 mph one).

Sometimes I feel like car wrecks like this are some kind of cosmic warning to watch myself. Or worse, a sign that I will soon be in such a situation. Because I’m just narcissistic like that. It easily could have been Andy or me in that intersection at that exact moment. And obviously this can happen anywhere else for that matter.

Speaking of car accidents, I recently finished reading The Gargoyle, by Andrew Davidson. It starts off with the narrator getting in a car wreck that leaves him so burnt he loses all his toes, a few fingers, his hair, tear ducts, ability to perspire, burnt off lips, raspy voice—oh, and his penis burned away too. Really fantastic book though; I highly recommend if you can stomach his injuries.

I really hate car accidents.

Also read Southwest’s “apology” blog.

Sitting next to fat people on a plane is hardly the worst option. For me, I avoid small children first. No amount of fat is worse than getting next to screaming, squirming kids. I wish they had a day-care section of the plane roped off.

Next I avoid old men. Haha. Sounds silly, but I swear, I get next to older men a lot, and more often than not they’re all elbows, knees, and newspaper. It has nothing to do with their size; and I’m not saying they’re bad people. The one’s I’ve been next to just have a habit of being all over the place and not caring about personal space at all.

After that, I avoid college-aged kids. They’re usually loud and obnoxious.

I guess the point is, why is it fat people get kicked off? Tall people don’t get kicked off if their legs are too long and they have to spread their knees into my space. People with the most annoying kids in the world don’t get kicked off for being turdy parents.

If Kevin Smith could fit with no seat belt extender and with the arm rests down, he certainly was no safety risk. I’ve certainly seen people way larger, using the extender fit into one seat and be allowed to fly. And, regardless of ANY of that, even if he was too fat (he wasn’t), the way the employees handled the entire situation is completely absurd.

And if you can’t listen to his entire Smodcast, you should listen to the last 20 minutes or so when he talks about how when he finally got put on a plane back after all this nonsense–with two seats, mind you–a heavy girl sits next to him and gets lectured by another Southwest employee about the necessity of buying two seats in the future.

Douche-baggery!

So, I get the information for the new system. Learn the API, program our site with the test credentials, get everything good to go…. HALT! Some kind of drama between the fiscal office and this new company holds us up for 6 months.

Fast forward to around August. They’re ready to get moving again, they just need us to run a security scan on our web server and that is it. We’ll be ready to go after that!

Fast forward to January. They finally tell us we’re certified. They just have to get us a production user name and password.

Fast forward to today. They send us our user name and instruct us to call customer service to get a temporary password since it’s not secure to send a password via email. Okay. Call customer service, wait on hold for what seems like an eternity. Get temporary password. Try to log in so I can set our actual password.  What happens?

If you expected me to say it worked great and we’re finally set on this new system, you’d be wrong.  Instead I get this message:

“Your account is inactive. Please call your reseller to activate it.”

WOW. Amazing. So now I’m waiting for our person to do that / hear back. Do you think they’ll get it fixed today? Or perhaps sometime this spring? 2010? Before I die of old age?

Turns out they got back within an hour. Saying, oh oops, it’s fixed now, but if you have more problems call tech support again. Guess what? Didn’t work, had to call tech support again.

This guy was a piece of work. The first thing they ask for is your merchant account number, which I have from them directly in an email. Well, they actually gave us our account number wrong in the email. They left out the first two numbers. Seriously.

Anyway, this guy takes some time to figure out that it’s not our user name that was inactive like he thought, it was actually our entire merchant account. Brilliant! He couldn’t find any reason for it to be inactive though, so he just turned it back on, gave me a new temporary password, and what do you know, it finally worked.

While I was on the phone with him, I figured it would be a good time to go ahead and confirm this production URL they sent us for the web service we use to connect to their system. They sent us this in an email, with this phone number I was on the phone with at that time listed as who to call if we had questions/problems. Well this guy had absolutely no idea what I was talking about with the web service. I read the URL to him. NOTHING. Not a damn clue. I said “API” to him, and he thought I was talking about another company.

UNBELIEVABLE.

So who knows if this will work. I’m extremely skeptical.

With jury duty and MLK day last week, I barely had to work at all. It was pretty fucking sweet. I go through this every year after Christmas break: I cannot get back on the ball for the life of me. It stays this way definitely through spring, partially recovering in the summer and fall. Sometimes I think I never get over the burnout, and just get suckier at being an adult the more time passes.

Anyway, jury duty? I highly recommend it. Why are people so negative about getting out of work and sitting around doing nothing for a few days? I got to read–a LOT. It was awesome! I hope I get picked next time, so long as it isn’t a murder trial or something scary like that. Haha. Of course, now that I know I like it, I’ll probably never be called again. Can I volunteer?

I’ve been a big pile of poop about eating and doing well at boot camp the past two weeks. Partly monthly hormones making me insane as usual, and also part burnout from EXTREME boot camp the first week in January, I think. I don’t know, but I really need to stop eating like shit. Why will I never have control over this? They say anorexia is about control: the person feels she can’t control anything in her life, so she controls food/her body.

I’m the exact opposite. My entire life is well controlled–particularly diabetes. Diabetes makes my world revolve around constant complete and utter control. Therefore my ability to control my hunger (or false sense there of) goes down the toilet. And it’s interesting really, because control of my diabetes revolves around carbs–which is the food I love most. So even when I’m going out of control with binging on food, I’m still in this sick twisted sense of control because of diabetes and my unwillingness to let that go to hell. It’s so absurd and mental, and I’m completely self-aware of it and still can’t make myself stop.

Kind of like picking out my eyebrows, my other lack of control issue. Same situation really. I think I have some kind of warped OCD tendencies.

If I could ever fix those two problems with myself, I feel like my life would be completely settled. Like the end of a novel. How ridiculous does that sound? And I’ve felt like that with food since I hit puberty.

Who’s crazy? ME.

Hmmm mmmm mmmm.

Hahaha. I’m not surprised at all. But, I don’t really mind either. It seems like it might be interesting. For a few minutes anyway. We’ll see how long it takes me before I get over my initial amusement.

At least I get out of work for a few more days.

That’s about all there is to say about that.

When I was very little (3 or so) I had a super awesome brown Fisher Price record player and my parents bought me lots of fantastic ’80s pop singles, such as Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Beat It by Michael Jackson, some Madonna, Ghostbusters… and Let’s Go Crazy, by Prince, the B-side of which is this song, Erotic City.

And this song was always my favorite! Way cooler than Let’s Go Crazy. Of course, I had no idea what they were saying or referring to in this song. It just cracks me up… I really wonder what my parents were thinking when I was playing this in my room all the time. For years. Really. Ha.

I remember playing again when I was a bit older and thinking, “wait, did he just say ‘fuck until the dawn’?” And that’s what I assumed he was saying from then on.  I don’t think I played it as loudly in my room when my parents were home after that.

Anyway, it wasn’t until much later that I looked it up on the internet and saw there was some controversy around the use of the word “fuck” and that maybe he was actually saying “funk.” Oh horse shit, that is so fuck.

Funny none the less. Oh and I just looked up George Clinton’s cover and it freaks me out. And there is no way they’re saying funk.

On Saturday, Andy and I are leaving for vacation in California for a whole week! Andy and I never go on vacations like this and I’m super excited. I still have lots to do to prepare to go away. Laundry, pack, shop for a few more items I think I might need.

You know what I don’t need to do to prepare for this vacation? WORK. OR HOW ABOUT SIT IN THIS DAMN OFFICE?

*Explodes*

I rarely just randomly write in this blog. This is only the second time I’ve posted since January. I just don’t have a whole lot to say, especially about Sims and this post has nothing to do with The Sims.

That is how much I don’t want to be in the office right now. I’ve got about an hour until lunch and it’s just brutal. It’s not helping matters that I seem to be ridiculously tired this morning.

If I could just focus on one of the many projects I have going on at work that are going to bite me in the ass after vacation, I would be okay. But sometimes, often times…okay just about all the time…I have absolutely no will power. The only work I seem to be able to make myself do at the moment is piddly bottom of the barrel things of no importance.

Though I do have something to take care of after lunch that is important and doesn’t involve sitting in front of my computer, which is what I’m having a problem with the most. Hopefully it will occupy me enough that time goes by at a  reasonable pace.

RATHER THAN BACKWARDS LIKE NOW.

Somebody save me please?

How do you all like Sims 3? I like it, but I don’t think I love it. Yet. When I play, I don’t really feel like I’m playing a new game, because I feel like I play just as I did with Sims 2. It isn’t the same as the leap from Sims 1 to 2, but we all already expected that.

That said, I love the graphical enhancements of the game. The colors are so much brighter, and the scenery is amazing. Someone somewhere pointed out how they thought it was funny that the trees and bushes move with the “wind” now, but a Sim’s hair no longer moves like it did with Sims 2. And I think this says a lot for the game as a whole. It feels to me like they focused a lot more on the scenery of Sims 3 than the actual Sims.

Create-a-sim in Sims 3 is frustrating. You just can’t make a face move very extreme. Though I suppose there are already hacks on modthesims, I don’t like having to use hacks if I can help it. As usual, the hair / makeup selection that comes with the game is pretty lame. But compared to what came with Sims 2 it is great.

Having different body types is wonderful! I love that you can have fat, muscular, and everywhere in between. However, does anyone else feel like all their sims are super short? I hate that we can’t use the stretchskeleton cheat to make different heights. I really wish height was something they figured out for Sims 3. I think the default height looks weird–really, they all look very, very short. Big heads or something. I don’t know.

Also, I think the toddlers are scary, ugly string bean little things. Ick. They give me the heebie jeebies. And what is with the SUPER RIDICULOUSLY LONG toddler life stage?? Kill me now. They’re toddlers as long (it seems like longer!) as they are children.

When Sims 3 was still in the works, I thought I remembered reading that they were going to focus less on needs (bladder, hunger, energy, etc). What a bunch of horse shit. I find myself having to pay attention to them so much more in Sims 3 because they’ll get in a bad mood real quick if you don’t. No more forcing them to do things when they’re in the red on a need, it just doesn’t work as well.

I don’t like skill building in Sims 3. And I miss aspiration rewards. I don’t find most of these new rewards very exciting. And I miss the silly “supernatural” aspect of the Sims 2. Sure you can make Sims with blue and green skin, but it isn’t the same.

So, yeah. I don’t know. Some days I like it more than others. Maybe I’ll like it more once expansion packs come out and fill the game out more. Or once CC truly comes around. Though I’m skeptical that will work as well as it did with Sims 2. Modthesims for Sims 3 scares me at the moment. Yuck.

As many know already, storytelling in Sims 3 looks like a nightmare. And uploading to the exchange will not happen since they decided to shit on the pictures. Really, what were they thinking with that picture quality? It’s made even more ridiculous by the fact that each one of us gets a certain amount of space (a gig, I think?) for uploads. We should be able to pick the quality of our pics and allot our space as we see fit. Stupid stupid stupid.

I’ve come to realize, I don’t know how to take good pictures of Sims without pose hacks. Or maybe I just don’t know Sims 3 expressions like the back of my hand as I did with Sims 2 yet, so I get frustrated trying to portray anything. Either way, I’m not too jazzed about it yet, like I hoped I would be.

So that’s about it. I don’t feel much like talking in communities or taking pictures or making stories yet. I just play the game for now, and I don’t even get to do that as often as I’d like. I’ve managed to get myself into a busy summer. Or at least it seems that way. I’m traveling more often than usual this summer. Went to Colorado for work a few weeks ago. Been to Houston several weekends lately, went to Wimberley, TX the weekend before last. Next weekend going to DFW to see my parents.

After that, Andy and I are going on vacation to California for a week. I’ll be gone the first two weeks of August, the first in Colorado, the second in McAllen, TX, for work. I’m still doing Adventure Bootcamp every morning at 5:30. Oh, and Andy and I recently got engaged.

I just feel busy. I know it’s not busy compared to how a lot of people live. But I’m pretty lazy, and feel like I have a lot going on right now!

I’m also pretty grumpy at the moment about a shit project for work. Literally. A project about animal shit. And it’s just shitty (as in I hate it really bad). I’ll be happier after Tuesday is over because I’ll be able to ignore it again for at least a few days.

Maybe this fall I’ll find more time for Sims and actually creating things once again. I really miss it and hoped I’d just get right back into it immediately after Sims 3 was released. It didn’t quite work that way. Oh well.

I’ll try and update this site more, really I will.

Not a whole lot else going on, except work, which isn’t exciting and still eats up too much of my day. We had yesterday off, which was nice, but now I’m sad because we have no other holidays until March (we get a few days spring break). I should be grateful we have what we do! Andy doesn’t get shit until Memorial Day.

Anyway, it’s about a month until Sims 3 comes out. WHO’S EXCITED? I AM. At least, I hope I am. I got bored to death with Sims 2, so I’m hoping that’s just specific to Sims 2, and not Sims in general.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is a new place to “hangout” for The Sims 3. I will always love the Sims 2 Writers’ Hangout, but the more I click my bookmark out of habit everyday, the more I realize that place just isn’t for me anymore, and I don’t think that will change with Sims 3. If I could go back, there would be a LOT of things I would change about that place that I helped implement when I was helping administrate. A lot. I think the entire structure is just set up to fail and breed drama.

With Sims 3, I’d like a more general social site that has groups you can join/leave that focus on the various aspects of the game. I like writing stories. But that’s not all I like. I liked contests, games like legacy, and even editing pictures for a time. I think with the Hangout, part of the problem was that things weren’t catered to different interest groups very well, and that set the ground for lots of drama over editing and its varying degrees.

I would like a Sims 3 hangout that is more like one of those Ning sites (though not hosted on Ning, I’d like one hosted on a server where I have access to the database and files). These types of sites seem more user driven rather than admin/mod driven where you have to wait for a mod to do everything.

I think we were too strict at the Sims 2 Writers’ Hangout and it led to lots of bitchiness. Too much griping about things being out of place, and too many things being out of place in the first place! That forum just wasn’t very expandable!

If we had a site more like the Ning communities, users could help define the latest sim trends/interests rather than overloading a mod with a million PMs about each idea. And the users could take off with groups, and this would show the mods what needs to be focused on more, rather than a single thread before the idea takes off and then TONS of waiting for all the mods to converse about it, and finally the setup time. I really disliked that about the Sims 2 Hangout.

I also like the Ning sites and how the user profiles are set up with blogs, photo gallery, and other add ons making keeping up with people easier, and making things like intense and distracting forum signatures unnecessary.

Perhaps I’m just too obsessed with the TuDiabetes community as of late, and how wonderful and successful that place is. Basically, I would like a TuDiabetes for Sims, if that even makes sense.

Maybe I’ll do it too. If I like Sims 3 enough to be obsessed with it, of course.

By the way, I hope mentioning this in here doesn’t jinx things, but one of the first things I am going to put out with Sims 3 is a new version of Cornflake Girl. Entirely different–main plot elements the same, but written in a different form that I think makes the story more interesting. Hopefully I will stick with it. As for I Woke Up LA–I don’t know. I lost my place with that story. No plans to continue at the current time. Not until I figure out where it’s going for real, if that ever happens.