Category Archives: me!

Where does the time go?

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Is it really Friday already? Is it really about to be July? How does this happen??

Sigh.

A quick report of the weekend…Rand and I attended Conterpoint in Rockville, Maryland. We could hardly pass up the opportunity to see Tony and Vixy, Seanan, and Wild Mercy all in one place! They were all fantastic, as were the other concerts.

Wild Mercy made me cry twice…once with their rendition of Hallelujah, and again with a new song that was basically that scene in Titanic, when the mom is telling a story to her kids to get them to go to sleep so they don’t realize they’re gonna die…except on a spaceship. Yeah. *sniff*

Jen, who plays harp and sings with Wild Mercy, has the cutest baby in the world. (yes, all babies are the cutest babies in the world…) Seriously, though…baby Maddie was so happy and content all weekend, even with hundreds of strange people about.

baby maddie

I’m sure there were a million things I wanted to say about the weekend, and maybe I’ll remember them at some point. 😉

I also managed to squeeze in a visit with my college friends Holly and Mary (and their families), who both live in Maryland.

mary, me, holly

We ate at the Cheesecake Factory, and I finally got to meet Mary and Holly’s children. It only took me three years to meet Holly’s!

Anyway, yay for time spent with friends, both old and new. 🙂

CD Fire Sale–helping out friends in need

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My friend Seanan is helping out a friend by donating sales of her live album Pretty Little Dead Girl. Here’s the whole story directly from Seanan:

A fire sale is what you have when the house is on fire and you need to get things out of it, right? ‘Here, buy my stuff before it gets smoke-damaged’. Well, a very good friend of mine has a house that’s on fire right now, and that means I’m having a fire sale to try to help her put it out.

For the next week, all proceeds of sales from my first album, Pretty Little Dead Girl, will be going straight to her and her family, to help them get through a rather nasty financial crunch — basically, she starts her new job in two weeks, but until then, there’s no money to do fun things like ‘feed the resident small child’ and ‘keep the electricity running’. If we can manage to sell forty copies of the album, at $15 a pop, we’ll raise six hundred dollars, and get them through this stupid speed bump.

To order Pretty Little Dead Girl and donate the proceeds, go to:

https://www.seananmcguire.com/secure_order.php

Put ‘fire sale’ in the comments field. We still have to charge postage (and the international order surcharge, for people outside the US), since I don’t have any money either, but all actual sale-of-CD proceeds will go straight to the donation pool. I’m probably going to do a few art sales or auctions to help this along, later in the week.

Please, feel free to repost this entry, modified as necessary, especially if you have a reading list that differs substantially from mine. The fire sale will run from Thursday, June 28, through Thursday, July 5.

Thank you.

Addendum: Because a few people have asked — if you want to contribute to the fire sale, but either don’t have $15, or don’t need another copy of Pretty Little Dead Girl, you can send non-CC PayPal directly to:

delirium at xocolatl dot com

For those of you who don’t know her, Seanan rocks. She’s an awesome person, and a brilliant songwriter, and, well, even if it weren’t for a good cause, you’d want to own her music.

New calligraphy

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Inspired by my friend Eden…new baby gifts:

zoe

holden

Items can be purchased in my Etsy shop!

One more to add…I made this for the lovely and talented Seanan McGuire, as a “thank you” for helping to promote my calligraphy in her LiveJournal. I was quite happy with the way it turned out:

Stars Fall Home

(click to see a larger version)

The lyrics are from one of Seanan’s songs, “Paper Moon,” which is on the outstandingly awesome CD “Stars Fall Home.”

(see, they’re great for all kinds of occasions, not just weddings!)

Some photos up

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I’m still working on adding titles and descriptions, but I’ve got some photos from the weekend up if you’re interested. 🙂

(I don’t have a whole lot there…many were blurry or otherwise unusable. Good thing lots of people had cameras!)

mousie eats vixy's head

Other thoughts/musings to come. 🙂

Welcome Summer Picnic

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Tonight, I took my little to the annual Big Brothers/Big Sisters Welcome Summer Picnic.

We ate, played games (you might see us sack racing in the Buffalo News…ooh…), made fun little picture frames, and had an all-around good time. I, uh, fell a little the second time we did the sack race. I think my knee is going to be awfully sore tomorrow!

frames

Jessica

let there be light

There will be a photo of the two of us up on the official site as soon as they get them uploaded…someone was wandering around with a camera snapping them!

My little is 16 now, and we’ve been matched for three years. It’s kind of hard to believe! I’m so proud to be a part of such a wonderful organization.

Here’s a photo of us at the 2006 Big/Little celebration (my eyes are half-closed. I look drunk.)

And here’s one from when we went to Niagara Falls last summer (another bad photo day for me…)

Seven Random Things

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I was tagged by Ensie. Seven random things about me:

1. I’m really short. All the women in my family are short, but I think I’m the shortest. I just crack 5 feet.

2. To date, my longest relationship has lasted 3 years and approximately three months. I’m looking to break that record this October.

3. I slept with a teddy bear well into my adult life.

4. I have weird fingernails. My nail beds are wide, and the nails flatten out when they get long. It looks bizarre, so I keep them short. (I had acrylic nails for a while, in my 20s, but the upkeep got to be both too expensive and too time-consuming for my taste)

5.  I’m pretty low-maintenance, appearance-wise. I wear little (if any) makeup, I hate spending more than 5 minutes on my hair, and I’m not into fashion at all.

6. I have a weakness for sandals. I don’t buy expensive shoes, but my sandal collection is larger than it probably needs to be.

7.  I hate, hate, hate “stepping in wet.” If my socks get wet (by stepping on a wet bath mat, for example), they must be changed immediately. I do everything in my power to avoid this circumstance.

As for tags, I know Samantha likes doing these things. And, well, whoever wants to participate. Leave me a comment if you do! 🙂

Augh…

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This day just keeps kicking my butt.

I could write a long missive about the state of health care in this country, but I won’t. What I will say is this…it’s embarrassing when a 32-year-old woman is reduced to tears because the nurse tells her she’s going to have to come in for a physical before she can get her allergy medicine refilled.

“Um, how much will that visit cost?” she whimpers.

The story has a semi-happy ending, though…after being put on hold a number of times, I was told I could come in to pick up some samples to get me through until my visit on July 13, and that my visit would be billed as a follow-up instead of as a physical.

Sigh.

Then I tried to go to Caffe Aroma on Main Street, which alas, has closed. In its place, coming soon, is “Sea Bar!” Whatever that is. Grr.

So I’m at Starbucks (grr) paying for an hour of wireless access (GRRR) so that I can write this blog post.

I could have gone home and written it for free, except it’s hot. When’s it going to rain, anyway? It looked like it was going to rain earlier today, except, um, not. It got so windy that my basil plant blew off the windowsill.

Whine, whine, whine.

I’m going to try to accomplish something now. I hope your day is better than mine. 😛

Quick weekend update

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Rand and I spent the weekend in PA with my family. It had been a while since we’d seen them, and my aunt was in town from Maryland. My brother was also home, with his Shih Tzu puppy, Dudley:

Dudley

Dudley is a very active little guy, and so he was tough to photograph. Currently, he’s afraid to walk down stairs, so he climbs to the top of the stairs and waits for someone to come and get him. (my brother had the same problem when he was a toddler. heehee) In this photo, I was trying to capture him waiting at the top of the stairs.

I was a little concerned about how my allergies would be with the dog around. I took my regular allergy medicine, and I was fine. I’ve since learned that the Shih Tzu is one of the breeds that are typically good for allergy sufferers. They have hair rather than fur, and they shed very little. Of course, I was still careful to wash my hands and such after playing with him.

I didn’t really take any other photos…I didn’t bring the camera, so I only had the phone!

Anyway…we had dinner at my grandpa’s on Saturday night, and breakfast on Sunday morning. My aunt made her famous chocolate chip cookies after Saturday’s dinner–yum! I should have taken a picture of those. They’re about the size of your head!

After breakfast on Sunday, we presented my dad with his Father’s Day gift-the series set of Firefly, and some dark chocolate non-pariels. We also visited with my other set of grandparents, who recently celebrated their 60th Anniversary! Then, before heading back to Buffalo, Rand and I went for a walk/hike with my parents at East Branch Dam. It had gotten pretty warm by that point, so the walk left us rather tired.

east branch

(Photo from the US Army Corps of Engineers site)

Click on the photo-I added notes.

I have to be on my way, now. I actually have work this afternoon! Happy Monday, everyone.

It’s a bloggy, bloggy world

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Create a Connection–Getting to Know You Day 6/13

When did you begin your first blog and what inspired you to do so?

I started my first blog (titled rather boringly “erin’s blog”) in late 2002 or early 2003. I was inspired by my good friend Eden of So Anyway, who had sung the praises of blogging and first sent me the link to Blogger to help me get started.

My blog sat mostly empty for quite some time. I posted now and then throughout early 2003, and when I began student teaching in the fall of 2003, I started a second blog-my online student teaching journal. (I don’t think that one’s online at this point…)

The thing that really got me blogging regularly was The Breakup in the fall of 2003. My long-term BF rather abruptly called it quits, and I began blogging regularly both as a way of dealing with my feelings and letting my friends know what was going on in my life without having to tell the same stories over and over and over again.

When I started dating again, I blogged about my experiences to entertain people, and soon I had a small but loyal readership!

Unfortunately, the vast majority of those early posts were lost in the Tragic Blog Incident. (I accidentally deleted my database. Don’t ask…)

Do you have more than one blog? Why? How are they different?

Oh, Lord. I have several.

There’s this, of course. I also have a livejournal account, because I have many friends and acquaintances who are LJ users. It’s mainly a mirror of erin-go-blog (which is even easier since I found the LJ crossposter plugin! I used to re-post or index manually).

I started a writing blog the first time I did NaNoWriMo. I was posting my daily writing online. That didn’t last long.

My friend Jen and I keep The Chronicles of 27, a place for sightings of the number 27 in popular culture. I’ve been neglecting that one a bit!

I have a writing blog, strictly for the purposes of talking about writing, keeping track of my goals and accomplishments, etc. It helps keep me honest. 😉

I have a book blog, Required Reading, which is dedicated to YA literature–book reviews, interviews and news. That one’s fairly new.

My professional website, Educating Erin, is technically a blog, though posts are infrequent. Basically, it’s just a simple way for me to keep things like my resumes, clips, bio information, etc. online. I also have a segment of that site dedicated to my fledgling calligraphy business.

Another group blog I’m a part of is [Your Agenda Here], but we haven’t been keeping up with that one much either. Maybe as election season comes upon us, we’ll get back to it?

Whew! I think that’s it.

How would you characterize your blog?
Creative
Political
Informational
Community-oriented
Or something else?

Oh, I’m firmly in the “something else” category. I think they call it “kitchen sink” blogging.

To paraphrase Oprah, what is “one thing you know for sure” about blogging?

I know that I need to keep my blogging under control; otherwise, it can kind of take over my life!

Is it important to you to get feedback in terms of comments or pings? Why or why not?

I think, to some extent, we all like the validation that blogging brings us. We create these little communities where we listen to and support each other. I love hearing from people, even if it’s just to say “Right on!” or “I enjoyed reading this.”

There is a negative side to feedback, of course…the ever-fearsome troll. I can’t stand it when people are nasty just for the sake of being nasty. A mean or needlessly negative comment can ruin my day.

What 3 blogs would you recommend to our readers and why?

Hmmm…my afore-mentioned friend Eden at So Anyway…

Eden is hilarious, and her blog never fails to entertain. She’s also a fantastic writer.

Pesky Apostrophe

Mac is smart, funny, insightful, and a lot of fun to read.

Debbie’s Blatherings

Debbie is a Toronto-based freelance writer and illustrator, and also a good friend. Her posts are always chock-full of good stuff, including her cartoons and fabulous photographs.