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).

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.

Plus the upgrade didn’t seem to ruin anything.  All my settings, files, photos, etc. are all in perfect order.  This certainly made my night!  Now I can focus on my secret projects…

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!

Irregardless (a horrible mangling of ‘regardless’ which Merriam-Webster gave up on and made into a real word, blegh), a lot has happened in Katieland since November 23, 2008, the date of my last post.  Let’s review, shall we?

• I’ve relented somewhat on the word “blog.”  Don’t get me wrong – I still hate that word.  Hate it.  But I also hate the term “hang out.”  However, I am forced to use these words because there is no viable replacement for either.  At least not without sounding like a pretentious snob.  So, I will no longer tiptoe around calling this website a “blog” because in our English vernacular, that’s exactly what it is.  I know, this is terribly interesting. But hey, you’re the one still reading, right? Heh heh.
• Snow! We’ve had awesome snow for the last week or so.  I shall post some photos and perhaps videos soon.
• Speaking of videos, if you follow my Twitter, you know that I recently got a Flip Ultra from the wonderful woot.com.  I lof eet.  So video updates might be a regular thing around here.  I’m thinking I’ll go with Vimeo instead of YouTube, though.  Just because YouTube can be such a harsh environment and Vimeo seems more private and better suited to just messing around and showing bits of personal life.  Although I haven’t gotten any mean comments on my one YouTube video yet, I believe that is only because it’s clips of The Guild, not me or my friends and family.  I don’t think I can handle the mean YouTube commenters.  Plus I think on Vimeo you can choose your own video thumbnail instead of the one of three random screenshots on YouTube.  That’s cool.
• Marc is home!  My brother Marc has been in Taipei, Taiwan for 10 months and he finally came home Wednesday night.  On Christmas Eve, but that is only a coincidence since we don’t celebrate Christmas (more on that will be forthcoming in the soon-to-be About Me section).  My family is whole again and my mom couldn’t be happier.  Especially since he’s living at their house for the time being [winkyface].
• I’m going to walk away from the computer right now to check my mail.  If my Dr. Horrible DVD isn’t here yet, I will be back to cry about it… AGH! Still not here! What is the deal, United States Postal Service?!  Everyone else seems to have gotten theirs last week – where is mine?!  I paid for it with my own money and everything!  It’s not like I’m in another country or something!  Gah!  Okay, enough of that, but grrr.

So that’s your friendly Katie update.  I’ll be back soon to add videos and photos and such, but first I’m going to try to remember how I installed Wordpress so I can upgrade to Version 2.7.  That should be fun.

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!

I should be able to push, pull, and prod this site into exactly what I want.  Plus, I can update it in a browser now, with easy bold and italics and all the good things you take for granted in a nice text editor.  I’m really very excited about all of this.  I will leave the old html site up, though, because I still love it and it’s not really taking up any space that I need right now.  Soon I will have katiedurham.com direct people straight here, but I’m not quite ready for that at the moment.  I still need to figure out how to set up a gallery, what to put in the “About” section, and all that jazz. 

I just set myself up with FriendFeed, so it shows all my Twitter updates, YouTube stuff, and Flickr activity right here under “Katie’s Recent Activity.”  Nifty!  Anyway, I’m going to go put a link to here on the old site to show off my new skillz.  Then I will hunt down whatever insolent scrap of code it is that is making those lines in the sidebar still green after I changed all the colors in the stylesheet.  Grr!

But anyway, my own idiocy aside; yay!  I have the ability to make a sweet site now! Whee!  Now excuse me while I explore my new surroundings.  And please forgive the obvious sample theme.  That lady with binoculars looked like a monkey in the thumbnail, so I just went with that one.  Anyway, I’m excited!  Are you excited?  Probably not as much as me!  Now I shall frolick through the code forest – tralala la lala la!