My sister-in-law is officially makin’ babies. Well, one baby. She said I should put this counter on my site and I agree:

Wheee! I’m going to teach this kid the most obnoxious things. So excited.

Update 01/07/2010: It’s a boy!

Who’s yours?

Oh, by the way, I have a job now.  Yayyy…  I forgot how I don’t like working.  Heh.  Ah well, income is income.  At least I can work in my jammies (and I most certainly do).

I’ve never been one to stress.  Really.  Public speaking is rated as one of the things people most fear - even above death.  It’s no problem for me.  I’ve been giving public presentations since I was seven (or six?  I forget when I learned to read properly).  I seem to be missing the gene for stress.  Or at least the regular kind of stress – the nail-biting, overeating/undereating, hair-pulling kind. 

You see, for me, stress registers itself in odd ways.  The first thing I seem to do is convert my body to run on Guam time, going to bed at 4 in the morning and getting up at 1 or 2 in the afternoon. (Is that Guam time? Am I using parentheses too much?)  I suppose if I lived in Guam, I would run on Eastern Standard when under stress.  This still wouldn’t be useful – I live on the Pacific coast.  Although I suppose I’d be a few hours ahead of everyone – that might be nice.   But I digress…

The point is, I’ve been out of work for… let’s see… almost two months now.  I’m not sure on the calculations.  I’m not good at math.  I tend to convert things in my head to something like this: “I’ve been out of work for [math amount] of months.”  Literally.  Ask my roommate – she used to hearing “math amount” spoken frequently in the apartment. 

Anyway, the point is that I’m unemployed.  Very much so.  As you might guess, this is stressful – especially (cue dramatic pose/delivery) “in this economy!”  So what do I do?  Stop spending?  Well sort of…  It gives me yet another reason to not go grocery shopping (an activity I detest).  My only problem here is that online spending doesn’t feel like real money and therefore… oh wait, it still is real money.  Crap.  Start job hunting?  Well yeah, I’ve applied at many companies, but I’m sure there are a lot of applicants with more experience.  So I’m at a loss for my next step.

Quick aside – I hate my neighbors.

So I’m job searching.  Which, as you must know, is very difficult in this economy.   What makes it more difficult is that I’m searching for at-home employment with flexible hours.  This is necessary, as my mornings and afternoons are mostly filled with a very important activity, especially starting this September.  If you know me personally, you likely know exactly what I mean.  If you know me only from online interaction, you might not.  Interested? E-mail me and I’ll tell you all about it. 

So this is why I’m blogging tonight (still hate the word “blog”).  Blog when something happens, right?  Update – I’m unemployed!   If you know of an open position for an at-home medical transcriptionist with flexible schedule, let me know!  Also, I realized that I really have no “so busy, you guys” excuse to not blog anything lately.  Seriously, I’ve been up till 2 o’clock in the morning lately playing Age of Empires II – and losing.  I’m not good at strategy war games.

Okay, I’m lying – I have no idea why I’m blogging tonight.  I guess I miss it a little.  Also, I really want to start writing again, so I’m following the old “read a lot, write a lot” creed.  I found some old stories from high school creative writing classes and man, they were good.  Maybe I’ll post them later and see what you think.  Yes? No? You, my invisible readers.

Another thing – I’ve been getting a ton of spam from “BUY [insert medication name here] ON THE INTERNETS! IT’S THE BEST THING EVAR!!!1!” spambots in the comments section.  I’ve decided to coin a term: “Spambien”.  I checked and that’s not a thing.  I made it up myself.  Yay me.  I might put some sort of prove-you’re-human test on the comments, but… then I’d stop getting e-mail.

And now, I’m not going to lie to you.  I’m not going to bed like a responsible citizen.  I’m going to play Age of Empires II.  I’m in the “Conquerors” expansion and I’m playing the Montezuma campaign.  I’m likely to get obliterated.  Again.

Cheers!  And Merry Unemployment, if applicable!

PS:  I missed you, blog.  I really did.  Let’s get back together.  We can make it work, I promise.

PPS:  I love Wordpress.  It’s lovely.

I have a few minutes before I run off to my friend Simone’s house, so I thought I would share a couple of videos I uploaded to Vimeo last night.  There are a few more on my Vimeo profile here.

Here’s me being childish and NOT resisting the urge to climb a pile of filthy snow:

Dirty Snow Pile – Must Climb from Katie Durham on Vimeo.

And here is Marc as we’re putting his luggage in my car at the airport:

Hi, I’m Marc. from Katie Durham on Vimeo.

So that’s all for me for the moment.  Oh wait! I found this cool site through and ad on Flickr where you can self-publish professional quality books.  Nothing new, really, but I still got excited about it.  Maybe I should finally write something!

Caio, internets!

I was planning to wait until I had everything all in place before I redirected all katiedurham.com traffic to this WordPress page, but I finally decided “meh.” (It’s a real word now, see?)  I’ve pretty much abandoned doing anything to the old site, so why bother sending traffic to it?

Therefore: welcome to the shiny brand new katiedurham.com!  It is made with WordPress, which I am quickly falling in love with!  I just ended a sentence with a preposition!  Meh!  It is far from complete; I still haven’t written an “About” section or put anything into “Projects,” but “Gallery” is full of fun stuff!  I uploaded everything to Flickr and let WordPress and this great Joe Tan plugin do the rest.  Thank you to all programmers who give their awesome free plugins to all of us mere mortals.  The FriendFeed plugin over there on the sidebar is a plugin by Evan Sims.  I love plugins!

Also awesome:  Moments ago, my browser freaked out and closed everything, but WordPress has autosave and I lost nothing of this post!  I love this.  I really do.

Anyway, welcome to the new site.  You can still find the old site by clicking the link in the sidebar down there on the right.  I’ll leave it up for old time’s sake and all that, but all new content will be here.  I’m sure I’ll be adding more in the other sections as time goes on.  But for the time being, take ‘er for a spin, and let me know what you think!  You can e-mail me or leave a comment below.  Enjoy!