I feel very wary of taking sex tips from people who use language like this, “In this position, the base of your ardent manroot is rubbing directly on her white-hot passionflower.” Ah, what NOT to put on your penis.

As the author says, “If you find yourself… on this page, well, who the hell’s fault is that?”

ffear.

What a fun site! Too bad I didn’t find it before Easter. (Link swiped from Swallowing Tacks.)

This site is horribly tacky. I feel terribly bad about Elian’s situation, but the “drop the chalupa” makes me laugh!

Does that make me a bad person?

Oh my. There’s a third The Crow movie in the works. I can’t decide how I feel about that.

Tired of your car’s paint job? Need a little help paying off the loan? Willing to turn your car into a rolling ad? Then check out Autowraps.com. (What - ever!)

Please pass the painkillers.

It appears my desire to get back to the figure I had in high school might finally be growing stronger than my desire to veg on the sofa and eat Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. I went to the gym Monday night with Dale and Aaron, and we went again last night.

And, dear god, I was perky about it.

I have never, ever, EVER liked exercise. I took dance classes (tap & jazz, I was way too clumsy for ballet) for years. From like 6 to 15. Yet I remained an utter klutz lacking in anything even resembling coordination. I liked my dance classes. They were fun. Probably ’cause I never considered dance to be exercise.

Conversely, I’ve always hated P.E. And what I hated most was the damn physical fitness testing they did twice a year. Fucking shuttle runs. There was little to me that was stupider than have to run back and forth across a gym floor in order to pick up blackboard erasers.

I thought I was free of P.E. once I got into high school. I was wrong. I got stuck taking two semesters of it my junior year. Technically, what I took was “P.E. 2″ and “Net Sports.” Net Sports should have been renamed Pam’s Crippling Injury of the Week. That class confirmed my belief that I will never ever be any good at 1) volleyball, 2) tennis, 3) basketball, 4) anything else involving a fast moving spherical object that hurtles towards me.

But, I was lucky in those days. I was a Girl on the Go, always busy with various school activities. And though I lived on a diet of fast food, I remained a wonderfully petite 120 lbs. (Which was just right for my 5′3″ frame.)

Once I began college, a much less active schedule, the Freshman 15, and birth control pills conspired against me. I gained more weight than I cared for, but it didn’t really bother me. Until I got my first desk job. 5 years ago.

Yep, I’m a cube slave and I’ve got the web butt to prove it.

My steady weight gain over the last 5 years did finally level off, but at a point I’m far too ashamed to admit to. (Only two people know, and if they open their mouths, I will rip out their tongues. Yeah, you know who you are.)

I’ve tried various diets in the past, but I’ve never lasted long. I have no self control. I like food. I love food. I hate diets. Plus, Dale refuses to diet with me, so it’s hard to stick to a low-cal shake when he’s eating Chik-fil-A.

I’ve joined gyms. HUGE waste of money. Dale joked last year that we should be able to write off our fees for the Q as a donation. When the Q’s contract was up, I vowed to just start using the little gym at work, rather than sign another contract with a commercial place. But Dale did. And he started going with Aaron.

One night, before I realized it was happening, I said, “Hey, do you want me to go to the gym with you?” I did. Then I went again. Then I joined. Then I didn’t go for a full week after joining. Then I kicked myself for joining another gym and then not going. Then last Monday I went back. And I worked out with Aaron while Dale partnered up with Rollo. And I felt GOOD afterwards. Very tired, sweaty, and sore, but good. And hyper. I was very very hyper.

How could I possibly be hyper after working out with the guys for 2 hours? I have no clue.

Though I was still sore from Monday’s work out, I went again last night. I did all the exercises that Dale and Aaron suggested, even though I really don’t like free weights. But I was feeling kinda irritable, so when Dale kept telling me the 7 1/2 lb weight I was using for a particular exercise was too light, I decided to prove him wrong by smashing it into his face.

Then I stood over his bleeding body and screamed, “That heavy enough for ya, bitch?!” until Aaron told me it was my turn on the bench and I snapped out of my fantasy.

I did cheer up again by the end of the work out, once again becoming really really annoyingly hyper. And, once again, I made the mistake of drinking too much water right before the ab work out.

But, I am actually noticing results. And, I’ve lost a few pounds. Not enough for anyone to notice, but the scale told me, and that’s enough. Hopefully, it will be enough to keep me going. That, and the wonderful encouragement I get from Aaron.

Yesterday started out pretty crappy. Dale’s back up this week for one of the other guys, and they were just having a mess of problems. His pager and the phone were going off continuously from like 3-5 am. When the alarm went off in the morning, we just whimpered. I crawled out of bed and called Alex.

“Hey Alex, it’s Pamela.”

“Hey, how’s it going?”

“Pretty crappy” (I gave him the rundown.) “Would it be OK if I came in at lunch time?”

“Yeah, no problem. Thanks for calling.”

“Oh, thank you, Alex!”

Then I reset the alarm for Dale and crawled back in to bed.

I got to work at 12:30. Got to my desk at 1 pm. Construction has turned our parking situation into a nightmare. I figured it would be easy to grab a spot around noon, but I guess no one wants to go out for lunch for fear of losing his/her space. So I spent an unknown amount of time circling before spending 10 minutes wiggling my Escort into a simulation of a parallel park in a badly angled space. Halfway through said parking, I had to pause to let someone slowly squeeze by.

The rest of the work day went fairly quickly, and I left at 5:30. When I got home, Dale was crashed out on the bed. I snuggled up against him, and cuddling turned into a nice bout of friskiness.

We then got dressed in our workout clothes, then sat on our asses for 2 hours until it was time to head to the gym.

Yeah, I actually 1) dragged my fat ass away from the computer, and 2) dragged my fat ass to the gym!
e all started out doing some cardio. As I haven’t gotten used to the ellipse machines, and all the treadmills were taken, I settled for a recumbent bike. 15 minutes later Dale came over and hovered until I finished up my 20 minutes. Pathetically, I was mildly annoyed with him for a moment when he was talking to me while I was trying to read the closed captioning for the game show that was showing on the overhead TV. Like I watch game shows. Like I’d ever seen that one before. Like I would ever watch it again.

As the three of us prepared to begin the weights part of the routine, Aaron’s friend, Rollo, joined us. We paired off - me and Aaron, and Dale and Rollo - and began to push it. Push it real good. Uh huh!

Most of the time, I didn’t even know what I was doing. I just did what Aaron told me to do, sweated a lot, and (surprisingly) whined only a little. Dale wussed on the ab exercises and went to sit in the dry sauna while Aaron and I crunched and side bends, and all that other fun stuff.

Note to self: don’t gulp the last few ounces of water from the bottle before starting an ab workout.

My stomach hurt so much when we left, I felt like I was perpetually trapped in mid-spew. That moment when your stomach clenches just before the instant replay of your last meal.

Ugh, my stomach’s hurting just thinking about that.

Anyway, Dale begged me to go to La Morada with him after we’d showered. (Yeah, we know it’s rather late for dinner, Scott.) I don’t like the place, but finally agreed to go. Turns out they were already closed. So we went to Trudy’s.

Yu-u-um! Great queso, great salsa…. My tongue was fried by the time my big burrito arrived. I ended up taking half of it home.

Oh, let me backtrack a bit. The crappy day upgraded to OK while at work. Then it rose steeply to great after my frolick with Dale. It dropped a bit after that, but stayed good, and not even going to the gym put much of a damper on it. Spirits rose again at dinner, then trouble started.

Around the time we started on the queso and salsa, I started having trouble breathing. This has happened before, it was mild, and it usually passes quickly so I ignored it. By the time we got home, it felt like my air passages were swollen or being constricted by invisible fists. It felt like there was a thumb on the base of my throat, pressing just enough to make me gag a little. Within minutes of putting my leftovers in the fridge, I was hurking like a cat with a hairball. Nothing came up and it passed, but the difficulty with breathing didn’t. Around midnight, over and hour since it had started, I asked Dale to take me to the emergency room.

I figured I was having an allergic reaction to something I’d eaten.

While I was checking in, I started gagging again, but it passed before I had to find a bathroom. I got the standard once-over then after a few minutes’ wait, I was taken back to a bed behind a curtain. I was hooked up to a machine that would take my blood pressure “every hour” (Hours? I’m gonna be here that long?) and a little thing to monitor my pulse/oxygen level.

Dale must have still been feeling his endorphins from working out, because he was in quite a mood. I was lying there, trying to breathe and feeling gaggy, and he’s cracking jokes. He got worse after discovering that making me laugh could make the pulse monitor spike.

The constriction was easing up by the time the doctor finally appeared. I told him I was starting to feel some heartburn, so he sent a nurse back with an antacid and some nasty shit that looked and tasted like liquified chalk. “Can you, like, hold your nose while drinking that? It tastes really terrible.”

She wasn’t kidding. I thought I was going to barf it back up.

That stuff was to numb my innards. It did a good job of also numbing my upper lip, the roof of my mouth, and the back of my throat.

While I was busy making Bill the Cat faces (gaaa! Gaaak!) and sticking out my tongue, the xray technician came in to wheel me away for some chest shots. That was at least quick.

By the time the doctor paid his second and last visit to me, I was feeling fine and wanted to go home.

The diagnosis? Not asthma. Not allergies. But gastritis, exacerbated by acid reflux.

According to doc, my stomach was spewing forth its acid, which was then going down into my lungs and irritating my air passages.

Mmmmm, yummy! I hardly expected to be drowning in my own stomach juices at the ripe old age of 26.

So, I was sent off with instructions to avoid cigarettes (don’t smoke), alcohol (hey, Friday was a rarity), and spicy food (what? no! damn you!).

My warranty must have expired at 25.

I’ve been wondering what the supersecret project (DeepLeep) is that Ben Brown’s was writing about, and today I found out it’s gone beta!

So far, so cool. I’ve registered, but not poked around too extensively, though I have to admit that merely giving me the capability to access my bookmarks from any browser would have hooked me.

Now, if only they could give me access to my domain email from anywhere….

(The one I saw looked just like this.) These last two pictures are actually of a ‘46.

ove this morning on my way to work.

I drove past a beautiful, shiny antique car. I was smitten immediately. If I hadn’t already been running late, I probably would have followed the car. To perhaps find out what kind it was. To get a picture, at least. But, alas, my destiny veered towards the access road.

I’m hardly a connisour of classic cars, but I know what I like. And what I like are the rounded yet sleek designs of cars from the 1940’s. Unfortunately, the shiny maroon car I’d seen lacked any identifying emblems, or I was simply unable to see them as I drove past. And, though the rear of the car was much more sloped and tapered than what I remember from the styles of that era, I guessed it might be from the late 30’s, if not from the 40’s.

Once I arrived at work, daydreams of cruising had to be suppressed in favor of the realities of HTML and table layouts.

Thoughts of the mystery car didn’t resurface until some time in the afternoon. I took advantage of a lull in project assignments to start searching the web. But, how was I supposed to begin?

I began by searching for “classic cars.” I looked at the first few hits, but I wasn’t seeing what I wanted, so I searched within my results for “1940s.” Ahhh, this batch of hits was much more promising!

It took a while before I even found a car that was close to resembling the one I’d seen. It was a 1948 Packard. But the grill and the front end just weren’t right.

I did a search on 1948 Packards and got this page (which has a link to the one above). Lo and behold, the car displayed right next to the Packard was my love! My dream car turned out to be a 1947 Buick. (Check out the customization and price tag on that baby!)

Dale has also recently fallen in love with a car. His passion is quite a bit younger than mine, though. He yearns for a Mitsubishi Eclipse Spider. (I can hear the collective sigh of guys everywhere.) I’d been protesting such a purchase, since we’re in the process of signing over our souls for a new house, but after finding the Buick, i sent him this email:

You can get yourself a Mitsubishi Eclipse Spider if you get me this car. … a long url …

And I do mean THAT one, not just same make and model.

Note the upgrades and the price.

His charming and succint response suggested I had been smoking crack or a similar substance.

O, damn the cold heart that would keep me from my love!

I found some really good classic car sites during my search. The images above were found on these and other sites.

• The Classic Car Place
• Deals on Wheels
• My Classic Car Online

While do I have my own domain (midnightgarden.com, in case you hadn’t noticed) and I can send and received email from it, I don’t like to use that account at work, so for the past few years I’ve used the services of free web-based e-mail providers. That way I can subscribe to sites and mailing lists, and have the emails available to me from work and from home. It’s a sound idea. Now if only the freemail providers would cooperate!

I’ve avoided using the “big name” providers like Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, etc., because I’ve come across places that won’t accept email addresses from “anonymous” providers. I started out using gURLmail.com when they first came online. I snagged one of the always-coveted “first name” addresses. (You get one guess as to which name I got, and I reserve the right to kick you in the head if you’re wrong.) gURLmail worked out rather well for a couple of years, until their servers appeared to be overwhelmed by the number of users and began to go down regularly, like every other day. I put up with spotty email access for a few months, then decided it was time to go in search of a new provider.

A year ago, my sister began using the freemail service of a provider called Bombdiggity.com. I decided to check it out, ’cause I thought the domain name was amusing. Though I was wary of the 4 MB limit (I’m notorious for holding on to email), the interface seemed clean and easy enough to use. All email that goes out had a promotional footer attached, but gURLmail does the same so I was used to it. Plus, I’d again gotten a first name email address.

In the beginning, a banner ad appeared at the top of the interface page for Bomdiggity. “No biggie. I can live with that.” Since then, BD has changed their interface, disappeared off the face of the internet for a few days (I contacted their upstream provider, BigMailBox.com about that and was bluntly told they hadn’t paid their bill.), been lagged to Hell and back, and worse. When I first started using the service, a url in an email would be converted to a link that merely opened directly in a new window. Later on, the link would open in a framed window, with a link in the top frame that said, “– To return to your mailbox, close this browser window. — Click to load the page below into this full browser window.”

Ummmm, OK. I didn’t really see the purpose to that, but I played along. I’d seen similar done at other sites, and I think gURLmail might have begun doing it right before I left them. But little did I know it was an omen of worse to come.

Late last year, the link-to-a-frame-window-then-click-again situation got weirder. A link in an email would still spawn the framed window, but instead of the desired page appearing in the lower frame, a user would see a plain white page with “Click here to visit http://the.link.com.” So now, getting to a link from an email meant clicking TWICE. How bloody annoying! And I still don’t see any purpose for that.

When this double-clicking crap began, I filled out Bombdiggity’s customer service form with my thoughts on the stupidity of this tactic. I didn’t use bad words, and I stayed on the side of polite, but I never got a response. So I sent it in again about a month later. And still got no response.

Since then, the banner ads at the top of the interface page are broken half the time. A tiny banner has been added to the sidebar navigation. And when you first log in, you get a pop up ad. Kathie, who began using Bombdiggity shortly after me, wrote in to complain about the pop up ad. SHE, at least, got a response, though it basically amounted to, “save your breath; we need the ad money.”

I know I’ve already complained a lot, but I haven’t even gotten to the technical problems yet.

On several random occasions, email I’ve received at BD has come through as utter garbage. Like the text of the email was dumped into a blender and the resulting hodgepodge of letters was poured back into the page, in all caps, minus spaces. Last week I learned that random email I’ve sent from BD has done the same thing on the recipient’s end. I took one of the complaints and forwarded it to Bomdiggity/BigMailBox. The exchange has gone something like this:

Pamela:
This is the second complaint I’ve received about this particular email.
It seems to be an occasional problem that recipients of my mail get nothing
but garbage, as if there’s an encoding problem.  I don’t believe it to be a
problem on the end of the users, because they’ve been using various mail
clients.

  <garbled email snipped>

BigMailBox Support
Thank you for your email message.  In order for us to better assist you,
please send us a copy of the “spam” message to our Abuse Department at
abuse@bigmailbox.com.  Upon receipt of your email we will delete the
user’s account that sent you the message.  Thank you.

Pamela
I’m not reporting spam.  I’m reporting that email that *I* am sending to
others through bombdiggity/bigmailbox.com is being turned into garbage by
the time the recipient opens it.

BigMailBox Support
It appears that the “jibberish” is a result of including a image within
the message.  If this is so, please verify that the original send is not
send the message a plain text.  This maybe the cause of the problem.

Pamela
I did not send an image with the original email.  It was pure text.  I’ll
paste the text below:

  <snipped>

BigMailBox Support
Did you copy and paste the information into the mail program?

And we go back and forth for a couple more emails as I try to explain that I did not use HTML in my email, etc. It’s been three days since I sent my last reply, and I haven’t heard back from them. I’m not holding my breath.

I’d actually decided over a month ago that I needed something better than using freemail. I’d just been lazy about finding another solution. But the last couple of weeks have brought more and more incentive.

Email that I sent out days, weeks, and even MONTHS ago is just getting to the recipients (including a couple I sent to myself). Zach just responded to an email sent about 2 weeks ago. Kathie just received an email I sent her exactly 2 months ago.

Last night I got a mailer-daemon error that the system “could not send message for past 4 hours.” This was an email to Phaedra at her Bombdiggity account, and the original mail was sent April 11th, NOT some time on April 13th!

But today…. ah, this is the clincher. Another mailer-daemon message that one of my emails was “undeliverable.” Please note that this was an email I was sending to myself.

   Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 00:15:27 -0700
   From: Mail Delivery Subsystem 
   To: pamela@bombdiggity.com
   Subject: Returned mail: Cannot send message within 5 days 

   The original message was received at Fri, 3 Sep 1999 09:42:23 -0700
   from www@localhost

   [edit: the rest of this post seems to have disappeared. :(]

I am so so so so so so so sorry that it’s been so long since I’ve updated! It’s just that, well…. I’ve had creative-block. Stuff’s happened. I’ve wanted to write. Oh, BOY, have I wanted to write, but I just haven’t know how to say what I want to say.

And, in my defense, I’ve been pretty busy at work the last couple of weeks. Today I sat through three meetings, bringing my weekly total to 11 hrs spent in 8 meetings. (And four of those hours were in ONE meeting!) And that’s not counting the meeting that was cancelled on Tuesday, nor the couple of meetings I couldn’t make because I was either in other meetings or trying to get some work done between meetings.

Still, three of my five big projects are on the verge of moving from my “current” pile (a nasty storm of paperwork on the left side of my desk) to my “completed” pile (a very nice neat stack of papers carefully marked off with completion dates and placed to my right until the pile gets too big, then they go into the filing cabinet - yeah, I’m dorky that way).

My biggest project (which is actually scattered all across my cubicle, and parts are even taped to my whiteboard) isn’t going to be wrapped up any time soon. We’ve been working on it for months, and it’s got so many phases, we’re going to be working on it for months to come. It’s really been quite interesting, and now that our work is more visible and less abstract, I feel much less put out over the amount of time it consumes. I’m really excited about the first phase going live.

And the fifth big project on my plate? Well, I haven’t heard from the requestor since it was begun two months ago, which isn’t too surprising since one of the three near-done projects is another one from the same guy. But, since that other project is nearly done, I’ll probably be hearing about this last one soon. Until then, I’ll just leave the neat green folder I started for it carefully tucked away atop one of the precarious piles of paper on my desk.

So, what else has happened?

Oh yeah! They finally poured the foundation for our house! (Uh, there’s actually no reason to go visit those pages yet, because I haven’t updated them yet. My bad.) Actually, it was poured a couple of weeks ago. Dale and I went out one day at lunch and got to watch cement plop down. Ooooo. Exciting! (Actually, it was! If you’re building or have built your first home, you know what I mean.)

Dale and I were out at the site last weekend. They’d started the frame of the first floor. We usually go out on Saturdays, but he was restless this evening so we went out again. The first floor is framed and so is half of the second story.

Really, it is VERY exciting for us!

There is plenty more that I could write about, but it’s already 1 am, and I’ve spent the last few hours trying to clean the computer room. Between the dust and the cats, my eyes, throat, and sinuses are killing me, so the other stuff will have to wait. I will get to it, I promise. I’ll actually probably cheat, and come back and fill in the missing days retroactively. (I hate those big lapses in dates!)

‘Til then, go see Bert is Evil! (I just rediscovered this site earlier today. In between meetings.)

Note: This was originally an email I’d sent out to my friends. I meant at the time to turn it into a journal entry, but I was busy, so I just included myself in the list of recipients. The free web-based email provider I was using was having problems at the time, and I didn’t receive the mail back. I then promptly forgot about the whole thing. Until today, April 14th, when it finally showed up in my inbox. So for 10 days, this story was lost in email limbo. Weird, eh?

Get this:

Yesterday morning I got up to use the cordless phone and it was dead. Dale and I forgot about it until that afternoon, when I tried to use it and it was still dead. The second phone (in the computer room) was also dead.

*boggle*

I checked our records and saw that our last bill had been paid in mid-March. We’ve received no disconnect threats anyway. I emailed Dale and he emailed back to let me know he’d tried calling home and had just gotten a busy signal.

I looked up SWBell’s customer service info and emailed it back to him so he could call the phone company. (He happened to have both mobile phones in his car.)

Their response was that there had been a massive line outage in north Texas, but no reports in our area, so we’d be lucky if a guy could make it out in day (now today) to check our line.

Dale just called (me at work) to say a phone guy did show up this morning. Our line was fine, but our cordless phone had apparently blown and was shorting out the line.

Well, Sunday we’d had rainstorms all day. That night, there was a particularly bright flash immediately followed by a loud thunderclap. (Scary enough to make me yelp and jump!) Dale was like, “What was that pop??” I hadn’t heard anything but the thunder. Apparently that was our phone blowing.

Dale said the chick at SWBell he spoke with yesterday must not have known what she was talking about, because the tech today reported that he’s been to four other apartments in our area, all with the same problem. Apparently blowing up and shorting the line is a common problem for cordless phones.

So now we’re out a $200 phone/answering machine. Time to go shopping.

And, I hope no one’s tried to call us since Sunday.

This is what often makes it difficult to be productive on our computers. Please note all three cats have staked out space on the desk!

I had to give up on putting papers where Spritel is, because he’d try to lie down on that spot and would end up knocking the papers on to the floor.

It’s hard to tell, but Pumpkin’s butt is right where I need to put my arm to use my mouse. He’s also sprawled across an address book and our cordless phone. I swear, that cat is comfortable anywhere.

At least Maggie’s out of the way, up there on Dale’s monitor.

The words on the Crate & Barrell box on top of the shelves are backwards because the webcam is taking pictures of our reflections in a mirrored closet door. Hey, we didn’t pick that. We’re just renting.

Today I managed to convince Dale to go to PetCo with me. We were in search of Pumpkin’s favorite toys - little sparkly pompom balls. He (Pumpkin, that is) has dozens of them stashed around the apartment, but we can’t find any. Earlier I caught Pumpkin scratching at the dresser drawar where I stash the balls before handing them out to him, one at a time.

The last time I’d been to PetCo, they didn’t have any of the balls in stock. Fortunately, they had a lot this time. We bought 4 packages, each with 4 balls inside.

Not only does Pumpkin love these balls, but he’s got his favorite color. I made sure each package had a purple and silver ball. What a weird little cat.

Back at home, Dale and I plopped on to the bed and called to Pumpkin. He came running when he heard the shopping bag rustling. His eyes were all big and round and he was so excited! I opened one of the packages and tossed a ball. Pumpkin was off the bed in a flash, and trotting back with the ball in his mouth before we could even laugh.

Thus began another game of “fetch.”

Later, Dale and I geeked out for a while on our computers. When I went back into the bedroom (hours later), I discovered that the small shopping bag had been ravaged. Two packages of balls were on the bed. So were an empty package and three loose balls. The fourth package and its contents were no where in sight.

Little thief!