goals for 2008

Now that we are, oh, about an hour away from being three months into 2008, I figure it's finally time I get around to posting something I meant to post back in January.

I'm not one for new year's resolutions, but at the beginning of the year I often set myself some projects to accomplish by year's end. Invariably I fail to do everything I want - but that's pretty much how life goes. It never stops me from setting myself ridiculous little tasks every January (and usually abandoning them about mid-February).

I wanted to try something a little different this year, tho'. I kind of went micro and macro, both more specific and more broad in my aims at the same time. Hmm, that sentence isn't going to make much sense until I tell you what my goals are. So without further ado:

my goals for 2008

• learn how to play bridge


• travel more


• craft more

and yes, the ever-popular

• blog more

The bridge thing is mostly Nana's fault. She was a big bridge player, and I now have all her bridge supplies - decks of cards, cute little scoring pads, etc. I figure I might as well put the stuff to some use. Learning to play bridge also fits into my long-term super-secret plan of turning myself into a demented 50's mod housewife.

Traveling, well, I always want to do more of that. But it's really going to happen this year. Specifically, I want to go to more places I've never been before. Man, it's been five years now since the last time I took a trip off the continent! It sucks that the bulk of my international travel took place between 1997 and 2001. I miss jetting off to crazy, exotic places. But this year... well, let's just say our passports expire this year, and we've already sent them in for renewal. More on this in a future post...

As for crafting, it just occurred to me when I finally got back to FL after dealing with all Nana's stuff that so much of the excess crap I keep hauling around from place to place is craft supplies. Stuff I'm planning to use to make something, someday. Well, we are out of space and I can't keep carting all this stuff around, so that someday is today. Or at least, it's this year. Crafting is something I love so dearly, but I don't do nearly often enough. So I'm making it a priority to set aside the time (even if it's just once a month) and actually complete some long-festering projects this year. It'll clear out some closet space, and it'll make me feel better.

More blogging, well, I'm not setting a schedule or anything, just trying to make sure that, when I have an idea for a blog I want to write, I actually follow through on it and sit down and write the thing before I forget what it was I wanted to say in the first place. That's all.

I guess if I have to sum up my goals for the year into one over-arching theme, I'd say it comes down to this: be more productive. Make significant progress toward long-term plans by finishing specific small tasks. Less sitting on my ass and more kicking ass. I've been keeping it up fairly well so far, and it's past mid-February already, so. I think 2008 is going to be a good year. :)

.....

I got the power

So apparently there's a massive power outage here right now.

Our power flickered earlier - not even long enough to reset our clocks, but long enough to knock out our DSL modem for a little while.

Thank goodness our power is not out here, because it is really f'ing hot here today (it's 83 in the apartment right now with air conditioning blasting and fans on high). I would be about to die right now if we had no power.

We've also got a tornado warning on for Broward county right now, too. Dang. Crazy day today.

.....

who the hell am I going to vote for?

Well, the short answer to that is that I'm going to vote for whoever the Democrats put up this year... but I really thought I'd be more excited about voting for either the first viable female candidate for president or the first viable mixed-race candidate. I am pretty pleased that it's definitely going to be one or the other this time, but I have serious reservations about both Hillary and Barack. (Briefly, I think Clinton would be plenty competent, but I'm still annoyed by her refusal to admit that voting for the whole Iraq thing was a mistake, and she is a little too business-as-usual Beltway-insider standard-politician for me. Plus, her term would be marked by a lot of bitter, counterproductive personal attacks on her and her husband, because some people just hate them, period, and I just don't want to have to watch that shit. As for Obama, I think his idealism is refreshing, but I also think that it will be very disappointing for him and his supporters when he can't deliver on all the great shit he has promised. Some people will turn on him when that happens, and I don't want to watch that, either. So.)

Policy-wise, I know I'm a Kucinich girl at heart, but since he dropped out (and even if he hadn't, he still wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell, I know that), who should I support?

Vote Chooser has a quick little 10-question quiz, which told me my views are most similar to Obama's. But Glassbooth.org's more in-depth quiz says my views are 88% similar to Mike Gravel's (which, I mean - is he even still running? Really?), 76% similar to Clinton's, and only 73% similar to Obama's.

So I suppose I'm still going back and forth on which one I'd prefer, between Hillary and Barack. Honestly, though, I know I'll be fine with either of them. A ticket with both of them might be enough to get me really excited come November.

.....

foodstuffs for your perusal

Johnny made tortilla soup for dinner tonight, and it was really good. Mmm-mm, tasty.



See how pretty it was! :D (There's also an overexposed-but-not-so-blurry pic of it on my Flickr.)

He used the funky poppy-seed-filled tortilla chips from Trader Joe's that Nana had, which are really pretty stale by now. Despite the staleness, they worked quite well in the soup.

Later, we went to the grocery store, where I was momentarily taken aback when I saw this on an aisle endcap:



The package was barely labeled in English at all. It was a "Holy crap, I really do live in Florida, don't I?" kind of moment for me.

.....

I totally called that one

Panthers won, 4-2.

I was almost afraid, about mid-way through, that I had jinxed it by forgetting to not root for the Panthers and root for the Caps instead. (Hey, it is really pretty hard to root against the home team when you're at a sporting event, and everyone around you is rooting for them, and you know every player on the team, and even have dumb nicknames for most of them, but you don't know all the players on the opposing team, so even tho' you'd like to get all excited about them, you just can't. I'm just sayin'.) But the Cats managed to pull out a win, and my streak of only seeing them win home games when I root for the visiting team continues.

They're playing Carolina tonight, and I'll be rooting for the 'Canes, of course, but that's not a home game, so I have no idea how the Panthers will do. Brind'amour's out for the rest of the season, tho' (the bitch - where am I going to find another center for my fantasy team at this point in the season, dammit?), so that definitely puts the Hurricanes at a bit of a disadvantage. It'll probably be an interesting game, one way or the other.

a trend I have noticed

How can you tell if the Panthers are going to win a home game?

Well, am I rooting for them, or the visiting team?

If I'm rooting for them, they're almost certainly going to lose. If I'm rooting for the visitors, the Panthers will probably win.

I'm not sure why they've been so consistently disappointing to me this season, losing when I want to see them beat the pants off their opponents and bouncing back when I'd like to see them lie down. They didn't do this last season (then again, last season we caught far fewer games than we've seen this year, since we didn't have the half-season ticket package). But they really have been amazingly consistent this year. I've only seen them win once this season when I wanted them to win (the 2/1 game vs. the Canucks), and I only managed to catch that game on TV.

There's only about a month and a half left in the season at this point, so we'll see if this bizarre track record holds. They're playing the Capitals tonight - in their four previous meetings this season, they've won twice and the Caps have won twice. The Caps are doing pretty well right now, and the Panthers are kind of slumping... but I'll be rooting for the Caps, so I'm betting the Panthers will win. Just to spite me.

(Actually, I'd be fine with either team winning - I have the "home team" thing going with the Caps, but the Panthers really need the points to move up in the Southeast Division right now. They've got no chance at winning the Cup at all this year, but it would still be fun to see them in the first round of the playoffs, even if they did get spanked like the Thrashers did last year.)

short films - yayness!

Cinema Paradiso is showing programs of all this year's Oscar-nominated animated and live-action short films this weekend! I'm so excited - I always want to see them every year and I never get to. But this year I can do it!...

...provided I feel better by this weekend than I do today... ugh... It is, apparently, time for my annual kick-my-ass cold-flu-sinus-whatever. My throat is killing me, I ache all over, I feel feverish, I've got chills, I've got some post-nasal drip going on... I seriously feel so crappy, I don't even think I can make it to practice tonight (which is extra-sucky, because I haven't been on skates since December, at this point, and I'm still aiming to get back in skating shape in time for the (deleted) on April 5-6. Ha!).

:( Guh. Please kill me now.

timely

There was an article in the New York Times last month about hoarding, and today's Topical Currents on WLRN is doing a segment on hoarding right now, too (Joseph Cooper handling the subject with his usual idiocy - man, get him off the airwaves, already).

How apt that this subject is in the media right now, as I deal with an apartment overflowing with things, both mine and the stuff I've just inherited from my grandmother.

I actually checked the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization's scale for rating the severity of one's mess, and I would like to point out that my crap doesn't extend beyond level II disorganization (out of 5 levels, where level I is a "normal" household). Nana was not really a hoarder, either. She packed a lot of stuff into her place, but she found a place for all of it, and the public spaces in her home were never unlivable.

My problem right now is that I have to cram most of Nana's stuff that I want to keep into a space that was already inadequate to hold my own stuff. It's not that I don't want to get rid of anything - I do want to! It's just so hard to sort and organize and figure out what needs to go and what can stay. It forces a lot of hard choices that I am usually not willing to face on a daily basis. Give up a hobby I love and all related paraphernalia? Or give up boxes of shiny trinkets that remind me of Nana and my family history? I just spent like, two weeks weighing and choosing from among Nana's things. That was hard enough on my heart - I need a break before I do more of it.

But I don't have time for a break. Our living situation right now is untenable. Our apartment is a disaster. Johnny would be fully within his rights to throw up his hands and walk out on me, and the fact that he hasn't is a testament either to his complete insanity or his deep well of patience with me for which I am eternally grateful (or both - he did know what he was getting into when he married me). There was a time when I thought the amount of my stuff was manageable, if I could just organize it better. It's past that now, tho' - now some things 100% need to go. Which things? That's a good question and I'm glad you asked.

It's overwhelming most of the time, to the point where I sometimes don't know where to begin. But nothing will ever get done if I don't get off the couch and get back to work, I know, so I'm off. Wish me luck.

(Now my mom's house, on the other hand... level IV+. And that's gotta be dealt with ASAP, too. *Sigh* I honestly don't know what I am going to do, there.)

Zed's not dead, baby

Did you hear about what happened to Richard Zednik on Sunday night?

Watch it here.

That is crazy nutso. I am so glad he didn't die, and that it looks like he'll be able to play again. My first impression of Zednik when he started playing for the Panthers this season was, "Wow, maybe he can energize the scoring lines on this team and seriously make a positive contribution." That quickly changed to "Wow, this guy is kind of a spaz, and he can't seem to find the net - he keeps trying the same dumb play over and over again, even when it clearly isn't working. Why, exactly, did we pick him up, again?" But apparently he'd gotten his shit together in the past couple weeks - he even had a hat trick in one game recently. He finally found his groove, yay!

And now this happens. Like the Panthers don't have enough problems already. They actually had a shot at winning the division, had they managed to keep playing like they'd been doing lately. Now, I think we're pretty well fucked. Oh well - that's nothing new for this team.

A couple more things: I love that Zednik's doctor described his artery as "beautiful". :) And the incident has also prompted some discussion about how much protection NHL players should wear (specifically, whether neck guards should be made mandatory). I can understand both sides of the argument. More protection is, in general, a desirable thing; but you can't prevent every freak accident, especially in a contact sport like hockey. While I'm glad that helmets are mandatory (and I think visors are becoming so, being phased in for all new players and optional for older players, as helmets first were - tho' I can't find anything to back that up right now), I'm OK with leaving neck guards optional for now. I don't really know how neck guards work, but I can imagine they'd be cumbersome in a way that helmets and visors really aren't. And neck injuries like this are way more rare than blows to the head in this sport. It'll be interesting to see if Zednik starts wearing one when he comes back. I do wish the NHL would make players wear their helmets properly, tho' - a guy getting his helmet knocked clear off his head should be a much more unlikely occurrence than it actually is. Ah well - the smart ones are already wearing their equipment properly and opting for the extra protection. The ones that don't, well, I guess they know the risks.

In other hockey news, I can't believe the 'Canes traded Mike Commodore and Cory Stillman to Ottawa. Man, I will so miss having Mike Commodore on the Hurricanes, but at least they traded him to another team I like and not someone horrifying like the Thrashers. And this blog pretty succinctly sums up what's wrong with the Lightning now, alas. Oh, yeah, I never did mention here, did I? This Tampa travel guide site contacted me on Flickr for permission to use one of my Lightning pics on their site. I get a photo credit and a link to my Flickr page and everything! (It did not seem to bother them that the picture was not actually taken in Tampa at all.) (Nor did the poor photo quality bother them - they use a really tiny size of the pic, so it doesn't really matter.) Woohoo! It seems like a decent site, so if you're planning a trip to Tampa anytime soon...

Giants win! Giants win!

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and little children shout;
But there is no joy in Beantown — mighty Brady has... uhm... failed to throw a pass his teammates could catch in the last crucial minute of the Superbowl.

Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it? ;)

Anyway, most of the time, I couldn't give a rat's ass about the Superbowl... but this year, I decided to root for the Giants, because I loves me an underdog, and I'm also sick and tired of hearing about the damn Patriots, already. Most of my family was rooting for the Pats. No particular reason - I think my uncle was just keen to see someone get a perfect season, and my mom thinks Tom Brady is *cute * (bleah). So we had a little bit of a sofa-spanning rivalry going on.

Most of the game was pretty boring, but I was mostly ignoring it, looking up only for the commercials (which were also pretty boring this year, no?). I spent the evening sorting through Nana's unused greeting cards - I carted a whole book-box full of them out of her place, and in the end, I only took a handful for myself. Unsurprisingly, most of them were a bit too old-lady for my tastes. Anyway, I didn't really watch the game until the 4th period. It got pretty exciting there right toward the end! Needless to say, I was pretty pleased when that guy (#17, whoever he is) caught that touchdown pass. Beautiful - textbook-perfect - I pretty much hate football, but that was a thing to behold.

Now I'm just wishing I'd put some money down on this... I could've made a buck or two!