GO-bama!

You guys, we have GOT to elect this man. We've just GOT to.

Obama's acceptance speech was fantastic. Even the Republican operative/contributing analyst on NBC said as much. (And then we stopped listening to analysts, because they are generally annoying, and I'd rather just formulate my own thoughts.)

I have so many favorite lines: "Eight is enough!" "Change doesn't come from Washington; change goes to Washington." "America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this." It didn't make me cry the way his "This is the moment" speech in June, but it made me happy and hopeful. And it was really wonderful to feel that way.

His speech was smart, tough and inspiring. I think he's smart, tough and inspiring. More than 80,000 people showed up just to hear the guy talk. We've GOT to elect him.

File this under "that figures"

On Monday, I bought myself flowers for the first time ever.

On Tuesday, buckets of dozens of free bouquets of cutflowers showed up where I work.

Not that I'm really complaining...I just find it funny.

Flowers

One more thing - to combat my crabbiness, I bought myself flowers for the first time ever today. I happen to live with a lovely person who quite often buys/sends me flowers - much more often than my friends' husbands seem to send them flowers. And he usually sends them to me at work, where I have to pick them up from the reception desk and then carry them all through the building back to my desk, while people stop me and ask me who sent me flowers and why, and comment about how pretty the flowers are and that their husbands/partners/significant others never send them flowers. This, overall, makes me feel even more loved and spoiled than one might typically feel when receiving flowers.

However, today I bought a $5 bouquet of the sunniest, cheeriest yellow cut mums at Target all for myself, and I would highly recommend it. I totally cheered up just looking at their happy yellow color. Than Hannah and I brought them home and I cut the stems way down and stuffed them in this cool purple vase that I have, and the combo of the bright yellow flowers bursting out of the purple vase was somehow even cheerier.

I got my money's worth. :)

A thankful heart is a happy heart

So, the title of this post is a song that's in the Madame Blueberry episode of Veggie Tales. It's a lesson about being thankful for what you have.

After several viewings of this episode, and having the aforementioned song stuck in my head for days and days and days, I have decided to actually listen to it. This is because I have been super-crabby about work for the past few days. (I think I have done a good job controlling the crabbiness outside of work.)

Suffice it to say that my work life is changing again and, after just taking my new job a couple of months ago, my responsibilities are shifting a bit. Although the logical part of my brain sees that there may be some good opportunities lurking in this situation, the illogical part of my brain would just like things to stay the same for 5 minutes so I have a chance to get good at what I'm doing without having to add more new stuff on top of new stuff. That's the part of my brain that's been making me crabby for the past week.

So I have decided to try very hard to be like Madame Blueberry, and be thankful for what I have: a good job at a company that's been around a long time (not to mention the wonderful non-work things I have, like my awesome family and good friends and a nice roof over my head). This is not to say I have totally banished the crabbiness, but my hope is that it will help my attitude recover a bit.

Also, I realized that school starts next week. Instead of panicking, I am also trying very hard to be thankful that I have the means to advance my education and learn new things.

I don't think this rosy view will last very long, as I am cynical and sarcastic by nature, but at least I'm making an effort here.

I am still not, however, thankful for what I have to go do now, which is work on my budgets for the next fiscal year. I just can't be thankful for budgeting. It is one of my least favorite things.

But I'm thankful for everything else. Really.

The Dark Knight according to a clown-phobe

I did it. I went to see The Dark Knight. I know I said I wasn't going to see it in the theater, but a few factors were at play here. One was, we had babysitters available on Saturday night and we wanted to take advantage of that. Another was, just about everyone I know has seen the movie and I was really starting to feel left out. And the last one was, Brock told me he thought I could handle it, and that he didn't think my clown phobia was necessarily as debilitating as I might portray. (It's true that I don't generally run screaming from clowns, but they do freak me out pretty severely; still, he thought I would be okay and promised to warn me as much as possible about parts where I might want to cover my eyes.)

So, here is my review of The Dark Knight, from a clown-hater's perspective:

• Heath Ledger is the best Joker ever. And he really didn't frighten me much from a clown perspective - partially because I just kept telling myself it was Heath Ledger under all that makeup. Also, he was just a scary character, and would have been whether or not he was in creepy makeup. That was one really bad Bad Guy - the scariest kind of bad guy, who's not motivated by anything other than wanting to create chaos.
• I did spend a LOT of time hiding from clown masks, though. (There are three things I'm really afraid of: clowns, masks and storms. This movie had two out of three.) I felt like I missed a lot of the movie because of it. Brock was really good about warning me when I might not want to watch, but I felt like that happened pretty often.
  
• Two-Face actually freaked me out more than anything in the movie. And since he figures prominently in the last quarter of the movie, I didn't watch a lot of it. I listened to it, at least.
• I thought the film, overall, was really excellent. It didn't feel like a comic book movie at all. It just felt like a scary movie about Good vs. Evil and Order vs. Chaos. So I can see why people are saying it's one of the best movies ever. The story was really good, and there was a lot of suspense, and the chase scene through Lower Wacker (called Lower Fifth in the movie) was awesome.
• Speaking of Lower Wacker, it was cool watching the movie and recognizing all the stuff in Chicago.
• The "disappearing pencil trick" was amusing. Disturbing, but amusing.
• Maggie Gyllenhaal was way better as Rachel Dawes than Katie Holmes was. Sorry, Katie.
• Christian Bale is hot.
• It should have an R rating. Brock and I were talking about this, and we're sure it got a PG-13 because there's virtually no bad language and you really don't see a lot of blood or anything. But it's pretty intense and scary. I don't see how anything with that many bombs and fire and scary stuff can NOT be rated R.
  

Overall, I'm glad I saw it. I wouldn't say I enjoyed it entirely, but I did get to see what all the fuss was about and agree that it was deserved. I don't think I need to see it again anytime soon...or maybe ever...because there were just a lot of parts that made me really uncomfortable. But that's just because of my own personal phobias and has nothing to do with the movie. *chuckle* If you don't have a problem with clowns or clown masks, and you're one of the five people on the planet who hasn't seen the movie yet, then you should totally go see it.

If you do have a problem with clowns, just get it on DVD and watch it with someone who's already seen it so they can tell you when to cover your eyes. :)

I HATE storms

Hate them, hate them, hate them. I don't care how old I get, I have come to terms with the fact that I will always be terrified of bad storms. Last year's almost-tornado experience didn't help this; in fact, I think it probably made it worse, because now I kind of know what I'm really up against. And tonight we've had bad storms.

So tonight, Brock is stuck in D.C. because his flight home to Chicago was canceled (see: bad storms above). And we've had tornado warnings and sirens going off and everything, and it's just me and Hannah. And when the most calm person in your house is the 3-year-old, you have a problem.

I have to say I think I did a pretty good job faking calm. We just went and played in the basement for an hour or so, and Hannah had a delightful time. She just kept saying, "Wow, it's pretty stormy outside, huh?" She totally didn't care at all. Why can't I be like that? I was a basket case. I'm quite impressed with her.

Despite my inner panic, I'm actually pretty impressed with me, too. I don't think Hannah had any idea how scared I was when the sirens went off.

I HATE storms. Hate them. I hope they're done for the night. We're down to a "severe thunderstorm watch" now, so hopefully things will calm down some.

Work, schmerk

Today was the third day in a row that somebody cheesed me off after 4 p.m., causing me to do additional work that made me NOT leave at 4:30, which is supposed to be our official "quitting time" but really hardly ever is. But today I really wanted to leave at 4:30, and I didn't get to. Leaving anywhere after 4:45 gives me stress about getting to pick Hannah up from daycare in time...leaving at 5:10 makes me positively twitchy. Leaving at 5:20 means she is for sure the last kid at daycare because I can't roll in any earlier than 5:59 (pick up has to be by 6:00).

I used to leave work by 4:45 or so every day. It doesn't work that way anymore - not with the new job. Today I really wanted to leave earlier because we had no food in our house and I wanted to make a mad dash into the store to buy milk (because we were completely out) and something for dinner (because last night we had fish sticks and today we didn't have any other options). It worked out okay - Hannah and I just made a quick trip to the store after I picked her up - but it's frustrating. And I would have been able to leave on time every day since Wednesday if people would just not give me trouble. Argh.

So we finally got home, and Hannah and I had a lovely time making pizza. We had dinner, she got a bath, we watched Veggie Tales and then we read two bedtime stories. My outlook on life was definitely improving. Then I sat down with the computer to do some mindless reading, and my computer won't load any of the blogs I like to read. I can live without most of them, except for Go Fug Yourself. I haven't read it since early this week and it makes me happy, and I was looking forward to the comfort of noting that, even if work bothers me, at least I've never walked out of the house looking half as bad as some of the people on that blog.

So now I'm annoyed again and there's nothing I can do about it, because my tech support is out of town.

Argh.