Suicide Blonde

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

I'm too cool to blog



Ok, I'm NOT too cool to blog. I'm not to cool for anything for that matter. Never was, either. Not even in my young chick years. Which are, unfortunately, long gone.

I'm just very busy again and the paperwork and the whiny, demanding students have taken over my world and every surface on my desk (the paper, not the students). Therefore, for the time being I am forced to actually get stuff done around here, which is a bummer. Coffee consumption, personal hallway conversations with coworkers as well as hours spent blogging and sitting back in my chair with my feet up on the hard drive staring out the window are down considerably from just a week ago. Alarmingly so.

At left is a little quilt designed and stitched by a wonderful friend and coworker, Stacy. It is much nicer than this scan but I have to take it out of the frame to scan it properly and as you know, I'm kinda busy. It's entitled "Coffee Queen" and it's supposed to be me with a big grandma-sized cup o' coffee. If you look closely you can see the tendrils of the coffee aroma wafting up to my face. As you can see, my coworkers don't think much of my hairstyle or lack of it. The depiction, however, is quite accurate. The hair that is. But I love this quilt and my dear friend who made it. She is an artist, or better yet, an artiste. I always tell her that if I had her talent I'd be famous and more obnoxious than Donatella Versace, designing only for the stars and maybe royalty. Maybe. If I can stand having them around for fittings and such. And if they don't wear those silly little hats.


My friend makes quilts that are breathtakingly beautiful and poetic. It is hard for people like myself, cool yet untalented, to understand how a person like my friend gets her ideas, picks the different colors and prints of fabrics and then makes such incredible works of art! If you want to take a look, here's the link: http://stacywest.com/ You won't regret the trip.

But the REAL Coffee Queen is my friend Stacy, not me. She makes the best coffee and stocks up on those delicious and sinful creamers like Irish Cream and Hazelnut Vanilla, and what have you. She comes by my door every day with a huge smile and an offer of a cup o'java and her sweet friendship. She is a patient listener, a good friend, she gives the best advice ever, and when she doesn't know how to help she offers the best of the best: a big hug.

To all my loyal readers (and you know who you are, all three of you), Enjoy what's left of Wednesday. You are all in my heart and thoughts. I'll write something again when I get 5 minutes of peace at the office. And as my other good office buddy says: "Hasta" (Short for "Hasta la vista, Baby" but we're too lazy to say the whole thing.)!!!

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

"I'm Still Here"

My son sent me an email last friday with that title, "I'm still here." Since I last posted, his battalion has lost 3 more young men and the situation continues to be very dangerous. But he is still there and now we only have 2-1/2 months left until Sweet Homecoming!

Thank you for all your comments and for being concerned. I haven't been able to post because as Asst. Director (and future dictator of the world), I have not had 5 minutes to get to Blogger. It was really stressful to not be able to blog and set your minds at ease. Every single time I went into IE to blog, something urgent/important/needing immediate attention (according to someone else's opinion) came up. Sigh. I may not accept the title of Dictator of the World after all when offered to me, I'm just too exhausted. It may not be worth all the trouble and hard work, especially if I can't blog. I also need to do my nails.

On a lighter note, I was thinking in my car on the way to work this morning. There are two places where I do my deep thinking: My car (while I'm driving, of course, not sitting there in my car parked in front of my house, even though it wouldn't be a bad idea), and my bathroom. Ok, before you snicker, or even maybe if you already snickered, let me clear up here that I do not mean on the toilet. I am not a dawdler and I get my stuff done in like 5 seconds and head to the shower. THE SHOWER is where most of my deep thinking takes place. So many, many times I've had a really serious problem and under the shower I've had the "Aha!" moment of what I would do to resolve it. And there is one more place I do deep thinking: in my dreams. Very frequently, when faced with a dilemma, I will wake up after having dreamed something and my dilemma will have been automatically resolved. The night before I may have thought "Ok, I have to do this and this to resolve this." And in the morning, after my dreams wrestled with whatever issue was at hand, I will wake up knowing that whatever I thought I would do last night was silly and improbable and I have no other option but to (Insert Resolutionary Action Here). And it has always been the right action. Go figure.

What amazes me is that I consciously do not have much to do with any of this. My conscious brain is not taking the situation apart and analyzing it, then listing the possible actions, then weighing the consequences of those actions and then picking the obviously more logical one. It does not follow that pattern. It is more of an "Intuition and Impulse" kind of process whereby my subconscious is the one that analyzes and probes and probably uses what I learned in Business Statistics eons ago to come up with the best practical solution to (Insert Difficult Problem Here). And whatever personal CPU is doing this leaves me (my conscious mind) the hell out of the process since it knows I would only botch it. Super.

Where do you do your thinking? Are you a logical thinker, a mapper-outer of problems and a weigher of results in an orderly manner? Or are you, like me, a free-association type of problem-solver? I am fascinated by this subject.

Enjoy the picture of the lovely Morning Glory. This is one of my favorite flowers. Here in So FL it grows wild everywhere. There is even one type of Morning Glory that has a smaller red flower that is absolutely beautiful. I have tried growing these vines on the fences around my home to no avail. Obviously, the seeds need to pass through a bird's intestines in order to fully germinate anywhere.

Looking forward to your comments here!!!