Enough Already!

Yes, I’m still among the living, to the disappointed chagrin of some and morbid curiosity of others. So what have I been up to? Besides the holidays, followed by end of calendar year work, followed by end of fiscal year work, mixed in with preparing for taxes, mostly I’ve been feeling rather anti-social. I love blog hopping, I really do, or at least I USUALLY do, but reading and commenting on blogs pretty much seemed like more than my grouchy old self could handle— I hadn’t even been visiting icanhascheezeburger.com until last night because I didn't FEEL like smiling, dammit!

And I’ve been grouchier than usual. Not just in the blogosphere, but even here at home there has been more than the usual snapping going on between all of us. It’s all the damn snow and cold... we’re sick of it. Living in northeastern Ohio, we’re no strangers to winter hassles, but this winter has been particularly brutal and enough is enough already! Unfortunately it’s only February. A few years ago we had another bad winter, not because it was brutal, but because it lasted from the end of October to the middle of May. I sure hope this brutal winter doesn’t last that long, but realistically we won’t see much relief until sometime in April. Whatever happened to global warming anyhow?

Even worse, I haven’t read a book in... Holy Crap, over a month, maybe even six weeks! At first it was because I didn’t have time to read a whole book and I knew if I picked one up I wouldn’t put it down until I was finished. I just couldn’t take the time away from work. But as time went on, I realized that I had deprived myself too long and to pick up a book now would set off a reading binge that would bring everything else going on to a complete halt. Now I’m starting to get the uncontrollable yearning to escape into the pages of a good story and I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. I'm still working on the most excellent anthology, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance, that I keep in the MomMobile to read when I'm waiting at the dentist, doctor, etc. Lately it's all I can do not to snarl like a rabid beast when it's our turn and we get called in.

A few non-work related things I HAVE been doing though is watching DVDs, listening to CDs, and listening to audio books. My family hates trying to figure out gift ideas for me because when I want something I just buy it for myself. So this past holiday season I came up with a list of DVDs and CDs that I wanted, and between Christmas and my birthday they came through for me (although I used Amazon’s holiday DVD sale to buy a few for myself too). New CDs from Blake Shelton, Sugarland, and David Cook are all loaded in the MomMobile and I’ve been listening to them while plowing through the snowdrifts and careening across the ice packs. Audible.com offered up the first Southern Vampire audio book, Dead Until Dark, at $4.95 so my collection is now completely up to date and I've been happily listening to the earlier audio books in the series while working. I swear that some days audio books are the only thing standing between me and a complete freak-out.

Now, here’s the thing with the DVDs—I seldom sit down to watch movies because I just don’t have the patience. I’d rather create the movie in my head while engrossed in a book. Movie Theaters? Yeah, I’ll enjoy them when they stop the movie for me to get up and go pee, or grab a snack, or give me a lamp so I can read a book during the boring parts. People don’t seem to appreciate my PDA light either. Go figure. Yet during my anti-social grouch time, I’ve been not only watching the DVDs I received as presents, but I’ve been surfing through the HBO, Starz, and Showtime On-Demand channels. And I’ve ENJOYED them! In fact, coming up next is a QB's Commentary post about some of them.

I've got a few non-work related projects I've got to take care of too and I've put them off long enough. I need to finish clearing out my HP TX1000 laptop so I can send it in for repairs before my extended warranty is up. Remind me to never, ever be an early adopter again, okay? I've got to finish weeding out our bedroom closet, and then I need to finish physically organizing all my books, although with the Need-To-Read Beast trying to take control, the latter may prove to be a real time suck since I won't be able to resist reading as I sort. After I've tamed the book piles, maybe I can actually start loading them into LibraryThing. Oh, and I've yet to get around to calling Time Warner about supplying me with a different cable modem so I can install the new router that I bought over the holidays. My youngest demon spawn is chomping at the bit to get on XBox Live and I won't let him suck up all the bandwidth from our current ancient modem/router combo unit.

Have I mentioned how in awe I am of all of you that seem to effortlessly do everything? I mean, I have it relatively easy and I'm whining about not having enough time. I cannot imagine how those of you who truly seem to have a bazillion things to do manage to accomplish ANYTHING, yet you somehow GET IT ALL DONE! I particularly don't understand how you can do it all and still be prolific bloggers. Seriously, this post and the next one, which is a video review, took me ALL day yesterday and half of today to write and pop in the links and pics. I have got to be the slowest blogger ever.