Bloggety Blog

On MarketingProfs.com' BLOG: When will BLOGGING become last year's fad?

I had to BLOG it. So BLOGGING ironic.

No, but really... it's all relative

My boss suffers from Plantar Fasciitis, which if you don't know is essentially pain in the arch of your foot due mostly to your weight distributing itself unevenly along your foot when you walk and your arch muscles being not quite up to the task. It's actually very common, my mom and two of my aunts have the same thing.

Anyway, he wears orthotics inside his shoes to keep his feet from hurting. He has one pair of shoes that squeak like a mouse with the orthotics inside, something that of course I must tease him about. He's a good 9 years older than me so age jokes are my favorite.

Yeah well age is relative, you know. About 20 minutes after I made fun of him, calling him an old man with his squeaky "orthodontic" shoes (another one of my favorite pastimes; using the wrong word to be silly - GEEK) he walks by my office again while I'm listening to my iPod. He comes around the desk and touches the wheel to see what I am listening to, and Lo! And Behold! totally busts me listening to Joni Mitchell.

S: :| You're listening to Joni Mitchell.
L: :| Yes I are.
S: I thought you'd be listening to Kid Rock or something like that...
L: Hey, actually I really lo-
S: No. No. I do not want to hear it. You have no room to talk. You're not that cool.
L: (shot down) Okay, no I guess I really have no room at all.

Proof of the eclecticism of my iPod

Is it me or do Kenny Rogers and Lionel Ritchie sound exactly the same????

Horrible! Yet Somehow Humbling

The dryer took a crap the other day while the warden was drying a load of his clothes. Stopped spinning and refused to start again. I've been thinking for a while that it was gonna die soon but my thinking was mostly along the lines that since nobody but me cleans out the lint trap, it was going to catch fire and burn the house down. So I guess it could have been worse. Also it had been losing power steadily for the last couple months (but I actually think that if the warden had gotten back there and cleaned out all the years of fuzz, that problem would have gone away).

So.. here I am hanging clothes on a clothesline in the back yard. I hate this because of how rainy the weather has been and I don't think of things like taking down the clothes on the line (why would I) when it starts raining (inevitable, with the way this spring is going). I also hate it because instead of taking 35-40 minutes to dry a load and get the next load in there, it takes more like 3 hours for one load to dry enough to put away.

On the other hand this whole experience is humbling in a way. I remember when Moe was a baby and it was just her and I living in our little shotgun shack in Rocky Ford, Colorado. Those were the days when we lived off less money for the entire month than I now spend on my car payment. I used to use cloth diapers on her, which meant that I was perpetually in a state of laundry doing. (Come to think of it, I still am, but I have more kids now...) I didn't even HAVE a dryer then so every load got hung outside. I got pretty good at it too, being able to hold something like 1,000 clothespins in one hand in order to get everything pinned in a systematic way.

I dunno if there's a lesson to be learned here; I suppose there should be some kind of deep moral about having come a long way from those days through a combination of hard work and perseverance, but instead it seems more like I'm just kinda spoiled now. And I probably pay too much for my car.

123.5

Well.

I had hoped to post the next weight loss update when I broke the ever elusive 120 mark but now I am thinking that it might just not be meant to be. :( I have been stuck at 123.5 for a while and the stupid scale just REFUSES to move!! At least to move down. I fluctuate between 123.5 and 126.

WTF man.

Anyways, I do realize it is more about inches and fitness than whatever the scale says... muscle is heavier than fat.. blah blah blahty blah blah. So anyways... here are today's measurements. They are not bad by any stretch of the imagination, I just had a goal of 117 that I don't think is gonna happen.

May 31, 2007
Weight: 123.5
Bust: 32 (at least it hasn't shrunk any MORE!!)
Waist: 27
Hips: 36.5
Thigh Circumference: 20
Upper Arm circumference: 9 (it's apparently really hard to shrink these without surgery. At least they are redistributed some so it looks like muscle instead of BLOB)
Dress Size: 4

Give Snape a Chance

There is no question that Snape is a double agent but of course there is plenty of controversy regarding which side he is really batting for. I subscribe to the school of thought that Snape is really working for the Order of the Phoenix. He is very loyal to Dumbledore (which will be proven later), and killing Dumbledore was on Dumbledore’s orders. Recall the conversation Hagrid overheard between Snape and Dumbledore in the Forbidden Forest, wherein Snape complains that Dumbledore is taking too much for granted and maybe Snape just doesn’t “want to do it anymore”. Snape is in the enemy’s council so deeply that he has tough choices to make for the greater good. Think about the way undercover narcotics agents often end up with a drug habit after being in deep cover. And that’s exactly what Snape is in: deep cover, and all the dangers that come along with it.

1. Snape makes an Unbreakable Vow with Narcissa Malfoy. There was absolutely no way he was going to get out of making this in the presence of Bellatrix and Wormtail. Bellatrix is too jealous of Snape’s closeness to Voldy – first thing she would do is run to Voldy and tattle that Snape was unwilling to help Draco kill Dumbledore.

2. Snape is in anguish after killing Dumbledore. Harry notices it but does not interpret it correctly. Additionally, Snape screams at Harry, “DO NOT CALL ME A COWARD!!” because Snape just did the hardest thing he ever had to do.

3. Now for probably the most pragmatic argument: Dumbledore is the most powerful wizard on the planet. Do we really think Snape or anyone would be able to just off him at any time unless Dumbledore orchestrated it that way? Voldy couldn’t kill Dumbledore in the Ministry – how the heck could Snape?

And for the argument that Snape did not really kill Dumbledore/ Dumbledore is not dead:

1. Dumbledore mentions several times throughout the series that “there are worse things than death” and “to the well organized mind, death is but the next great adventure”. Dumbledore was not afraid of death in any way, which is important to understand so we can continue to see him as the antithesis of Voldy, who fears dying above anything else.

2. Literarily speaking, it is a necessity that Dumbledore must die. This is down in the rules of classical literature, which we know JKR studied. The hero’s mentor has to be displaced in someway, whether be through death, imprisonment or what have you. Dumbledore is the teacher, the great wizard, Harry’s Obi-Wan if you will. Harry can’t face his destiny if his mentor is still around. Harry even muses about this at Dumbledore’s funeral:

And Harry saw very clearly as he sat there in the hot sun how people who cared about him had stood in front of him one by one, his mother, his father, his godfather, and finally Dumbledore, all determined to protect him; but now that was over. He could not let anybody else stand between him and Voldemort…

Yes Dumbledore is dead, sadly. As JKR told fans at the “Harry, Carrie and Garp” event last year, we need to get our selves through the five stages of grief and move on – he is not going to “pull a Gandalf”. But Snape is not evil, nor is the explanation that Harry thinks he has about Snape’s conversion to Dumbledore’s side the whole story. This is another thing that JKR has done several times: we think we are getting an explanation but it’s not the whole thing… and we don’t learn that until later. Example: the night Harry got his scar is explained in each of the first five books. Each time we think we have learned what there is to know. We are still learning about what happened that night, and each time we get more information, we realize there is still more we don’t know. It is the same with the reason that Snape is working for good. In fact, JKR even tells us that Dumbledore struggled internally with telling Harry more than “Snape was sorry”, but of course Harry did not interpret it correctly again.

OMG I soooooo can’t wait for Deathly Hallows…..