As if I needed another thing to keep me from blogging...

my computer, Lappy 5000, is dead. At least, it's in a coma. I should have seen it coming. We've been reliably together for almost three years now, the letters have faded (or totally disappeared) from the keys and well, the hard drive may have finally spun itself into orbit.

A few months ago, in preparation for this certain inevitability, I began backing stuff up. I put my 1100 photos on dvd and backed up a good chunk of my iTunes. But until a total annihilation of data occurs, you can't know for sure what you'll miss. The first things that come to mind now are my photos (ha! already backed up!), music (well, some of it, but what about my just downloaded Christina Aguilara hit?--don't judge me. And what of my carefully amassed This American Life episodes, saved up for a full day of embroidery relaxation, but not yet on my iPod?), my Team Awesome Cookbook (I've been working on it for YEARS) and my writing portfolio, and my hours and hours of photoshopping?

I am devastated. Well, devastatingly inconvenienced at the very least. Cross your fingers, back your own files up right this minute, and God save the Macintosh!

Today is Awesome

1. I found a pair of underwear I really liked in the back of my drawer that I had thought was missing.

2. Our offer on our house got accepted by the seller.

3. It was totally hot and dry outside, then I just heard this whoosh and it started pouring. It rained for two minutes and stopped just as it had begun.

4. Craft Night 3.5 has been scheduled and I will get some cool magnets for my fridge.

Life is SWEET!

I'm a Home-O!

Matt would like me to stop saying this because he said it sounds like I have Tourette Syndrome or something, but I can't hide my pride! Matt and I are first-time home buyers and it SO EXCITING! In fact, looking at our soon-to-be house was the only thing Matt could drag me away from Harry Potter with this weekend and I didn't even begrudge him it. Our house totally beat up your honor student.

Finally, my team will have our very own fortress! It's a beautiful old house with a lot going for it now, but the potential energy is palpable, too. It's a stately hillside Craftsman bungalow in a historic district with windows and trees and yard galore and huge rooms with high ceilings. And according to MRT: we can now get chickens. I never thought I would have chickens, but fresh eggs are neat-o!

And while I'm dropping bombs on you all, how about this: I like mangoes! Yes, I do. It's true. The fruit I once swore that in it's very essence gave me hives of distaste and disgust is actually ranking very high with me these days (and I've still yet to try a mango lassy!). Apparently, I had a papaya when I was very young and that one dramatic and horrible encounter at a very tender age led me to swear that I would never again eat one, except I thought it was a mango. But my past wrath and utter contempt need not be wasted. Just take everything I've said about mangoes in the past and change it to papaya. Oh, and multiply it by infinity. The remembered taste makes my hair curl with revulsion.

Matt and I have a hoooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuse! WHEEEEEEEEE!

Confunded by the Fidelius Charm

You'd have to talk to the secret keeper to find me this weekend. Until a few hours ago, I spent my whole weekend as many thousands and thousands of others did: under the many magical enchantments of Harry Potter. And what a ride--every one of the 758 pages was dazzling, amazing, fantastic, and exhilarating.

And if you don't understand the Harry Potter mania, I simply cannot explain it to you, tried though I did to the Kroger cashiers who were dumbfounded by the excited fans that emerged en masse from the parking lot as the clock counted down to midnight on Friday. I'm not sure Matt, a fellow fan, but only mildly so, understood it, either. I was so gratified to see other Potter nerds so sensibly avoiding release parties just to get home and get Harry as fast as they could. As we drove home, I actually had tears of anticipation and happiness in my eyes. Matt was worried, but I feel it is all part of my fan-dom. I mean, I'm not camping out at Michael Jackson's trial or something. Then again, if doing that makes fans feel the way I feel when I think of Harry Potter, then maybe I get it. (Kind of.)

Just being around the others made me feel as though, on these adventures with Harry, waiting for each new volume, I have been part of something very special in a way that maybe won't ever be again. From now on, the world will always know how it turned out. We need never speculate, as we have whiled away months and hours doing, again. And in a way, that's sort of sad, but I feel so very special to have been part of this--of Harry Potter-mania. Thank you, J.K. Rowling. And thank you, Harry Potter.

And thank you Michael Jackson...for being a little too weird for me to care that much.

Email Major No More

There was a time during my freshman year of college when I was not only undeclared, but also incredibly confused about my major. Though I ultimately majored in English, which, along with my misguided aspirations in Political Science I indicated a preference for on my application to college, I went through a bizarre series of phases in which I was alternately interested in mechanical engineering (huh?), environmental science, linguistic anthropology, and cognitive science. With the exception of mechanical engineering, the others aren't terribly far off the mark, as there have been various threads of all those areas in my career (or whatever you would call my job history), but at the time, most of them seemed, well, far-fetched. The one thing friends seemed to latch onto about my personality was that I was incredibly good at email for someone who had only been online a few years. And I must admit, my forwarded jokes were the best of the best. I stripped headers like nobody's business and for the most part, I realized that the 15 minutes of Comic Sans MS were almost up. I was, or so my friends called me, an email major.

And from this humble beginning, I developed in the next years and months into a true steward of the internets, beginning with a modest My Yahoo! start page and a GeoCities home page (complete with roating "Email me!" envelope), amassing positive feedback on ebay, creating a blog, adding comments and an RSS feed, joining up with friendster, getting picked (in three-peation!) for Best of Craigslist, and eventually adding a Myspace presence. After that, I met Chrissy and though I never quite evolved to her level of delicio.us, I still carved out a place on various internetting communities and even an Etsy ID.

Now look at me--I am little better than beast. Blogging once in a blue moon, checking my email once per day or (say it ain't so!) even less frequently. I reach out and touch people the old-fashioned way, with a telephone or a hand. I ask people who might email me news to call me instead. (Don't worry though--I still hate the phone. This is just a convenience issue.) I am a shell of the woman I set out to be in college. Never mind the fact that I am gaining valuable life experience, dealing with the public and wearing comfortable, non-glamorous shoes and taking meeting notes on legal pads. Where is my Excel spreadsheet? Where is the perfectly ordered fortress built of 1s and 0s I meticulously crafted over the past 10 or so years? I will fight for you, iGoogle. I shall return. Email major? Never again. No. I am Dr. Internet and I'll come back swinging. Just you wait!

And speaking of birthdays...

Happy belated 5th birthday to my one and only (well, at least my favorite) blog! It's been a real hootenanny.

French-Roast is now officially in it's fiery SIXTH year. My how they grow up so fast!



...and many more.

Now Firing All Positions

I regret to inform you that if you're not already my friend, you may have missed your chance. It seems strange to say this in the prime of my youth, but there just aren't any more openings at this time--and this considering I've had a few quit me semi-recently. But other friends, I just can't quit you! And because that's so and I want to talk to you/see you more than once every eleventeen years, I'm calling a moratorium on making friends. I'm serious. I am going to have to start cussing nice people out or chewing bad breath mints or hitting small children with sticks or something.

Not to brag or anything, but I already have more phone calls than I can return (God knows I can't return that many, but even if I were a calling fiend, I couldn't keep up), emails than I can read (say it ain't so! exclamity! gone is the time when I leisurely read Dear Abby archives!) blogs I'm behind on--including mine, gatherings I'm out of town for (whether it's because I'm actually in my own town or in someone else's town for a different gathering), and birthdays I miss throwing big deals for. And I just can't have this any more. I'm tired and I love throwing big deal birthdays. And as far as I can tell, I'm booked through at LEAST mid-October. (I will NOT let my birthday pass without throwing myself a big deal. Exhaustion be damned!)

I was expecting to be able to have MORE time to communicate with friends when I moved here to the sticks, but I was hardly expecting the boon of crafters, skaters, and random cool/smart/interesting people who would show up bearing homemade jams and textile goods in the course of a few months at my doorstep. I'm overjoyed and overwhelmed at my good fortune.

And now a job, cruel employment (even though I like it bunches) has come between me and my once-generous hangin'-out time. So in my few waking hours while not at home eating or doing laundry or attending some type of practice/group meeting and my weekends already parceled out here and yonder, I have to keep up with people in: Georgia, North Carolina, California, Colorado, D.C., Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York, Illinois, Oregon, and pretty much every single town in Texas (well, a few anyway). Also, I probably left some people out because dude, this is exhausting. And some people are nomads anyway. Where do you folks get your energy?

So those of you that are in, are good. The others, well, just keep holding tight. I'm sure someone will die or join a cult eventually. In the meantime, who wants to have a barbecue or something?

Sincerely,
Ms. Popularity

P.S. Chrissy, I know I've let you down again, but I *swear* I will be back to being a funny/interesting blogger by mid-October at the latest! If you help me get rid of friends, I can up that date. :)

Half of nothing equals what exactly?

Several years ago when I had some friends over for dinner and they asked what they could bring, I remembered that I had forgotten half and half and asked them if they might bring a bit for the coffee after. I did not realize what a grave error I had made until I saw a quart of a new foreign substance--FAT FREE half and half---march through my front door. No coffee for me that night, nor ever after when this unholy matrimony of dairy and science is served up. I just can't. It freaks me out and doesn't add up, frankly.

I've heard the arguments about what this stuff is, but as I am just about t shoot them down, I just have to ask again: fat-free half and half? why? how?

I know about skim milk and how it's milk with the fat skimmed off and such as that and so you can have some milk without the fat of milk, if that's what blows your hair back. So if the half of half and half that is milk was fat free, I could marginally understand that. But totally fat-free half and half including the half that is CREAM? I don't understand this!

The point of cream is that it is deliciously fatty. In fact, in many recipes, it is the very fattiness of cream which makes it essential for binding other, lesser ingredients into a delicious, delicious snack. Yes, it's true. Consider that cream is just un-churned butter, basically, and butter's role, as we all know, is to act as fatness or rather, just be what it is--which is fat. (And yes I know that when you make butter, the leftover milk from the cream is--get ready for it: buttermilk, and no, I did not make that up--so there is some part of cream that is not in butter but instead makes an excellent addition to pancake batter, but basically cream=butter.)

So what next, evil-doers at Land O'Lakes bragging that you pioneered this monstrosity? Fat-free butter? Please, no one tell me if this exists. I can't bear it.