Paris is AMAZING!!

Today, I got to Paris.

So many beautiful things to see...

I will post more and pictures once I've had some sleep. They are uploaded to Facebook so far, if you want to see them.

 Here's a sample:

deep in the heart....

I am seeing if I can post to this from my Blackberry (this was unsuccessful, hence why it's taken me so long to post it =) But, I did save it on my BB and here's what I wrote when I was there). I am in Texas right now and have been having a fabulous time.

There's this friend that we've known for over a decade. A million years ago in what seems like a different lifetime, my husband and I volunteered for a customer service position for a game called Everquest. The guy was a kid when we met him, now he's 25 and he got married this weekend. He asked my husband to be his best man and he's camped with us at Burning Man the last few years. It's really amazing and sort of funny sometimes how things happen and how people come in to each others lives. I am glad and proud to have Ross and Lauren as our friends. I hope we get to visit them again, soon, some day!

Here's Ross:

Here's Lauren before the wedding:

They are good friends, beautiful people and I feel priveleged that they included us and they were very good to us when we were there. Good times, guys. Truly family of choice.

There was an Elvis sighting....

Anyway, this is the first time as an adult that I have ever visited the Dallas/Fort Worth area and it's not really what I expected. We headed the other day down to the West End where the wedding was going to be and we come off the freeway to be driving along the stretch of road where Kennedy was shot...we could see the grassy knoll right there. It was very surreal feeling because we hadn't sought it out, we just sort of stumbled across it.

Being the morbid soul I am, I had to go back the next day and take pictures:

View from the X where the car was

Closeup of the window where the shot was fired from

An X in the road where he was shot...

And finally, from the Dallas Aquarium, our friend the turtle, who posed for us and everything:

What you lookin' at?!?

And that's part of what happening in Forth Worth/Dallas. Next stop, PARIS!!
Peace!

Time flies...

when you’re having fun! another birthday has passed, and now i am 41. when i was 21, i would mostly have sworn i would never live to see the age that i am now. oddly, i got to be 38 when my mom was still here. she was 38 when she had me. i had the distinct pleasure of looking at her and saying “WTF were you THINKING?!?!” she always said that my sister and i kept her young, but i’m not so sure =)

now, as i look at the calendar, there are 15 days until i leave for paris. i have some things to figure out on this wild blog thing before i go. i’d like to be able to update my blog from my phone, but first i have to figure out some stuff on my phone. worst case, i will try to upload and do stuff between internet cafe’s and phones =) best case, i will have a shiny new little netbook to take a-travelin’ with me. i am such a geek gadget girl. that should be a nickname or something, i am sure.

i leave in two days to go to the wedding of a friend. it’s going to be interesting, that’s for sure. i am still debating how all-inclusive i want this here blog to be, because it’s personal and professional, to some degree. i sort of gave up on punctuation, which i knew would happen the first time i got lazy or bored when typing. i guess that day would be today =)

my birthday was quiet, but good. i got to go out with some of my family, then with the rest of my family the next night, which i think everyone enjoyed. hooooray for me, i got to be there both nights =)

just wanted to take a moment and update. here’s a picture from a recent bellydance performance:

fantabulous weekend...

i had a really great time this weekend. i was going to try to be all “proper english” and stuff on this website, but really, it just takes too much time. i’d rather write about what’s happening while i am living this life.

the first thing of note today is that thirty days from TODAY, like RIGHT NOW, i will be in Paris, France. sorry, that deserved capitol letters because it’s going to be the trip of a fucking lifetime! with only 30 days to go, i realized that yea, i probably ought to start practicing those french phrases so i don’t look like more of an idiot than i surely already will =) i do need to pull a phrase for today, but it’s going to have to wait, i left the darn book at home.

 so, THIS weekend, on a whim, i asked my daughter if she and her boyfriend wanted to go with me to the Whole Earth Festival, where i had a fire spinning gig. i’d never been to the whole earth festival, and it was pretty amazing! we had such a fantastic time! here’s my daughter and her boyfriend: 

and finally, here’s a headline that we got in the davis newspaper, as part of the whole earth festival:

what was actually middle-aged, but still cool is the whole earth festival, not us…although we had recently been having an internal debate about that. i am glad i can look at this three months later and smile. these are good times, and as i look back on this, i have to realize and appreciate how very fortunate i am to have the life i do.

peace…

This whole integration thing...

Is sort of a trip for me. It’s so funny because when we all first started playing on the internet, it seemed like part of the charm of the whole thing is that you could be anonymous…you could be whomever you wanted to be, in different guises, all over the place. That thinking has obviously completely reversed, but I can’t lie and say it didn’t make me nervous to think of integrating some of the pieces of myself into this one place. I kept thinking “Is there anything embarassing in there?!?! Anything to be ashamed of?” Well, if so, I figure people who find this either already know me and know enough about me to not be shocked, or it’s maybe personal and they shouldn’t look too close =)

This is also a place for me to use as a testing ground. Now that I’ve taken on some private web clients, I REALLY need to update my skills too, so I can keep up with these folks and give them what they want. I can’t believe how much has changed and how much is possible with the inter webs and all the stuff that’s happening these days. I am quite sure I am getting old, but I could spend all my time working on this stuff! Oh, wait, I already do =) That’s not entirely true, but I do spend A LOT of time doing this stuff.

Right now, as part of my web work with Controlled Burn, I am trying to find another, open source bulletin board software. So far, the ones I have access to are smf and phpbb. I don’t know that much about forums. I’ve administered them before, but mostly from the advanced user perspective. I’ve installed smf for another client (Asha) and it’s pretty cool, so far. There are some limitation. Here are questions I have about smf:

1. I turned on the spell check, why doesn’t it work or how do I access it and/or make it work? 
2. Can I make it have a facing “announcements” style page like what CB currently has? 
3. I REALLY REALLY REALLY want whoever is writing that ‘repeating event’ add-in for the calendar to be done with it. 
4. What sort of minefield am I entering if I try to import the old forums to the new ? 
5. How far back to archive? 

Honestly, phpBB seemed sort of cool, but the basic package is SERIOUSLY barebones and absolutely anything cool you want to do requires additional tweaking and/or installation. Just not sure I am up for that, although I am sure once I learn it, it would be good.

I didn’t really intend to talk about that here today, this started as a whole “integrating my identities” thing =) I guess as a gemini, this should be making me nervous, eh?

I am also seeking a good flickr widget or plugin that will put pictures in posts. I’ve tried a few, but they don’t work when you activate them. I also need to clarify what the person I am helping wants, exactly =)

Finally, I am looking at a good feeder widget that would allow me to post once on the main wordpress site, and then feed to at LEAST facebook and myspace. This is for Controlled Burn. I’ve tried a couple, but again, on installation, they don’t work right.

That’s it for now….back to the drawing board.

 Peace.

New Endeavors...

It used to be that the internet was all about anonymity. Now, it seems like people are proud and loud and want other people to know who they are on the internet. Or maybe it’s that we’ve all gotten used to people being able to “Google” us and find out details about our lives. Maybe we now understand the true folly of “anonymity” and how obscure that can really be. Or maybe ego plays a part, and we each want a part of ourselves to linger…

After many years, many blogs, a lot of experience, and times, good and bad, this is my attempt to create something comprehensive about me, what I do, what I like, what I don’t, a place to catalog my rants, revel in my triumph’s and cry in my beer. =)

This theme is meaningful for me, right now, at this moment because in June, I embark on a trip to Paris, France, for my first trip out of the U.S. aside from Canada. No, I’ve never even been to Mexico. Everyone has to start somewhere, and this is my start. Look around, be amazed, dazzled, chagrined, mad, or ambivilant, but enjoy what you see here, it’s me =)

Peace.

update….

(Preserving the Open Diary history.)

okay. od opened an auto-dave draft of my last entry, so i had to make sure i didn’t write over that before i started this entry.

i am all sorts of messed up in the head right now.

first, my son is doing fine. he was a squad leader for the first couple of weeks, and then he wasn’t the squad leader anymore, but we’ve gotten some letters from him, and he seems to be doing well. the first letter he sent, made me cry. i am so proud of him…he says that many of the other guys write every night and he just doesn’t feel the need because i raised him to be strong, and that is certainly true. so, we shouldn’t take his lack of constant communication for lack of care, but for self-sufficiency. that made me very, very proud because that’s exactly how i take it. he is more verbal with his girlfriend because she needs to hear his words more than we do. his staying with us before he left was good for everyone. he says he feels closer to us than he has in years and i also feel that way. it’s alternately easy and hard to have grown-up children. i am happy that he is doing well and is self-sufficient. i know i have done my job…he credits me with perhaps more than i deserve, but i did raise him and i feel accomplished that he is a good person, for the most part.

another thing that happened about a week after my son left is that i started a new diet/eating program. i had been saying to myself for a long time that i wanted to do something structured…and i was getting flyers all the time for the center on metabolic studies here on campus, but they always talked about using our state ppo insurance health benefit for this, and i have the hmo health insurance, not the ppo one. so i said to myself, "the day i see my insurance offered on that program, i am going for it"…and it happened later the same week my son left. i called, they had an "orientation" session, and then i contacted my doctor to see what he thought. he asked me if this was something i really wanted to do, and i told him it was. he is also a friend, so he helped make sure i had all the papers signed, approvals done and such in time to be able to start the program the next week. my insurance is paying for everything except for the actual food…they give you everything you are supposed to eat.

so, this week will be my fourth week on this program. i’ve done well as far as the numbers on the scale go. not like, jaw-dropping good, but well enough…manageable even.

the thing that’s messing me up is all the mind-fucking that goes along with body image, weight loss, health. there’s so much negative connotation for me with this. on one hand, i don’t want to end up like my mom, and that’s the major reason i am doing this. another part of me likes who i am and says "fuck your preconceived notions of beauty". this all came about because my fire group got a "community member-at-large" and asked that person to talk to people in the larger community and see what those people thought; their perceptions of the fire group. what came back was a whole lot of ugliness. she said some people said we were only a group of fat, old, ugly members anymore, and some of them even said they had brought people to our event last year who ended up making fun of the people on the stage. part of me thinks these people are small-minded, but it still annoys me. and i’ve thought if some of us should step back because we are hurting the group. the issue is that the pretty people don’t participate anymore, for a variety of reasons. if it wasn’t for us old, ugly folks, some of the time, we wouldn’t have enough people to keep the show rolling, keep the gigs going, etc.

but this whole thing also plays into this whole complicated thing concerning my relationship with food. it’s all very twisted and dysfunctional, and it’s definitely making me think a lot about my motivations, the things that make me eat, and how i react to things. now, i am out of time…i will have to finish this later.

peace.