Personal
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Insert “Hot For Teacher” Joke Here
Well guess what I did today. I was lying there in bed, when my phone rang. The school needed me to come in and substitute! Just like that. For some reason I thought I had to get some sort of “you cleared the background check” notification in the mail, but I was wrong. Anyway, I got to “teach” my first class today, and I survived being in the same room with several children and even managed to communicate with them almost as if I were a human being, so that was good. Less good was the fact that I didn’t have any caffeine for the entire day until I got home in the afternoon. See, when I got the call I wanted to make a good impression, so I didn’t dawdle over a cup of instant coffee but just got dressed and out of there. “I’ll get some in the school at some point. Surely there will be coffee somewhere.” I haven’t been in a school for non-adults in a very long time. There was no coffee to be had, until I got to the teachers’ lounge and saw the pot! Of lukewarm liquid which had a coffeelike flavor but turned out to be decaf since it had absolutely no effect on my headache or my caffeine-starved synapses. So by the time I got back I had a splitting headache which only now has subsided. Lesson learned.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Night Thoughts
Gah. I just killed what I think was a “kissing bug.” They look like stink bugs only longer. (And when I squashed it, it smelled like perfume of all things.) So now I’m sitting here wondering if this thing I thought was a pimple on the end of my nose is actually a kissing bug bite, and does that mean I’m going to die of Chagas disease. So I’m just sitting here thinking that it would be hilarious (no, not really) if I came down with a serious disease after a lifetime of pretty good health in the Age of Obama and his magical unicorns. I really don’t want that—I don’t want to join the nation of sickies we seem to have become, obsessed with something called “health care” which means “money to pay for all the drugs and doctor visits and things shoved up our butts” which is apparently the fate every American has to look forward to. Include me out, I hate going to the doctor and can’t be more bored with the thought of my personal health.
I think it’s just a pimple, though.
Just a reminder I’m having a bleg, rather urgent—I’m feeling just a bit of despair about my chances in the job market. I am having increasing difficulties thinking of ways to “sell” my talent and experience when apparently I don’t have anything anyone wants. Yeah, gloom. Anyway, thanks to anyone who donates—every little bit helps. At least I need enough to put on my phone account so I can call the funemployment people and wait on hold for an hour.
I’ve also reached a kind of mental impasse in my plans for my future web presence. My original idea was to just revamp this site over to Wordpress. That’s still the original idea, but… I find myself resenting having to do it using my current web “brands.” I am feeling increasingly alienated from “spleenville” and “twisted spinster” and all the rest of the stuff that once sounded so cute and snarky and clever, but now it just seems sort of stupid and childish. On the other hand, there are all these other people with the same name as me and if I went with my real name I’d disappear into a crowd. (On the other hand, when I do a search under “Andrea Harris” spleenville.com comes up second on Google.) But I just haven’t felt very splenetic these days. And on the other hand I certainly don’t want to buy yet another domain name—that would be stupid, considering I’m thinking I might have to dump the whole mess and go to a free service. I could always open up another blog on Wordpress.com. Their service has improved quite a bit even in the past few months. Eh, I don’t know what I want to do. Well, except get a job, get over this writer’s block, save enough money for my own apartment, be able to pay my bills, etc. I still feel like I’m floating in midair.
Emergency Bleg
Arrgghhh… still no job, I can’t even get interviewed, I’ve heard nothing from the country school board re my eligibility for substitute teaching, and I’ve run out of money, and trying to get through the labyrinthine unemployment system is eating up all my phone minutes on my dying cell phone. Right now I’m on hold, again, and I only hope I can get through to someone before my account runs out of money and cuts me off, or my battery dies. And then I don’t even know if or when I’ll get any funemployment play money. So. It’s time for another bleg. Anything you can send will help, just click the Paypal button to the right, etc. Arrgh.
Update: Sigh. And I gave up being on hold after nearly eight minutes at 20 cents a minute passed by. I went and applied online at several local grocery stores. I emailed the local funemployment bureau about the form they need to send to the department of the previous state I worked for so I can reopen my claim and I got an email back asking me to call the number I was on hold on forever. Well I don’t have seven minutes left in my phone, so they won’t be getting a call from me today. And I am now considering taking my site down and going back to Blogspot or Wordpress.com, because if I can’t get a job I’m not going to be able to afford this server space anymore. As if to push me along that road the site was down just a while ago for five whole minutes. I am just so frustrated.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
DEAD KEYBOARD
OF FFS. I WAS TYPING A POST WHEN MY WIRELESS KEYBOARD JUST DIED. I AM USING THE ON-SCREEN KEYBOARD THING WINDOWS FORTUNATELY HAS TO WRITE THIS. I AM USING ALL CAPS BECAUSE I AM EXTREMELY IRRITATED.
Well, I hope it’s just the batteries. The thing takes two AAA batteries which of course I don’t have, and I am not driving to the store at this hour. I only hope I can afford two little batteries; I’d really rather just get a regular wired keyboard but I don’t have the spare 20 bucks for that, if they still sell for that cheap.
Oh well, my mouse finger is getting tired. This sucks. 
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Wimpy flu, and an oldie but goodie
Well, if that was the swine flu (excuse me, the “H1N1” virus—do the “H” and the “N” in that stand for “Hate Not (Muslims Who Can’t Stand To Remember Pigs Exist”?)) then it was the wimpiest flu ever. I already feel 99% back to normal. I’ve had mere colds that were worse than this. Ha, my cold beat up your flu. Anyway.
I’m actually going to try to get a few things accomplished today, so I probably won’t be posting much until later. In the meantime, enjoy this old post of mine from 2005. I happened across it while doing something else (I don’t really sit reading my old web writings from years ago all the time, really I don’t), and thought it was amusing in light of the fact that nowadays we are supposedly under the more-enlightened, “reality-based,” totally non-racist and non-stereotyping care of progressive liberal Democrats. Or as Florence King put it in one of her essays, “The Victorian ideal of the woman as Angel of the House lives on in the black hearts of liberal men.” Snicker.
Update: a couple of links in that post are broken because of a site crash-and-move. Oops. Here is the link to the post about the guy who threatened me (in the usual passive-aggressive beta male way of too many male bloggers), and here is the post where I finally banned Patterico (!) for telling me I can’t take a “joke.” I apparently had a much shorter fuse then than I do now, but really, 1) don’t tell me not to take threats to my person seriously, and 2) don’t defend weak betas who don’t have the courage to own their own gaffes. Xlrq wanted to have his cake and eat it too—he wanted to be able to act the Big Mister Man and say “Will no one relieve me of this troublesome blogger!” but also be able to say for his less robust readers “Heeeyyy, it was just a joke! Lighten up, Francis! I din’ mean nuthin’! Chicks, they get all upset…” Remember the old Chinese saying, “He who tries to sit on two stools sprains groin.”
Ah, the old days when I’d get into internet scrims and lay down the banhammer left and right. Good times, good times…
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Urrrggghhhhh
Well, I had hoped to avoid this, but I should have been warned by my recent bout of Mystery Gut Problems. My friend has been sick with some sort of virus (probably not swine flu, since the symptoms aren’t that severe), and this morning I woke up feeling just fine… until I got up and sat in front of the computer. It was then I realized I was very, very tired—unusually so, since I had had a good night’s sleep for once. But my appetite is still okay, so I made myself a tomato, onion, garlic, and spinach salad. (I had been craving tomatoes since the day before, so I went to the store and got some. I want more—they’re cheap, and good—the tomatoes up here in Virginia so far have been way more delicious than any Florida tomato I’ve ever eaten.) The cat is in the other room for some reason…
I feel a bit better, though still rather tired. And on a good note, I weighed myself this morning and I have gone down to 172 pounds. That makes it 23 pounds I’ve lost since I moved up here. And that’s despite eating potatoes over the past couple of days—I just haven’t been consuming mass quantities like I used to. Anyway, here’s my weight loss plan: eat normal amounts of food (that means small amounts to most Americans, but you really shouldn’t eat a giant serving bowl of pasta on your own, you know), fill up with salad, not bread, avoid snacks between meals (yeah, grandma was right), avoid sweet things like candy and ice cream and cookies—you really don’t need them, and you shouldn’t be “comforting” yourself with food anyway; go for a walk, or read a book—stop eating when your hunger goes away, not when you’ve “cleaned your plate” (American plates these days are too big and full), avoid fast food—or if you must go to McDonald’s, just get one hamburger and a small fries—and don’t live in Florida.
Also, I’m having a bit of a fundraiser. I’m waiting for the county school system to finish processing my application for substitute teaching, and then I have to wait for the school to call me to fill in, and then it takes (so my teacher friend informs me) about a month after that to actually get paid. In the meantime I’m very nearly flat broke, and would sure like to pay for things, like… well, more tomatoes, maybe some chicken broth—hey, and this informative and popular website! And my cat—she needs food, and the more weight I lose, the less flesh there will be for her to gnaw on in desperate times. Someone think of the cat! Anyway, the easiest way to get those spare dollars and cents to me is by clicking on that Paypal button over there in the side menu.
Updated: I just have had it with squinting at tiny gray type. This is not a full redesign by any means, but I’ve embiggened the font slightly and expanded the paragraph line-eight just a little, and set the font color to black instead of the shade of gray it was. Hopefully it will be easier on everyone’s eyes.
Update 2: Or it could be swine flu—my friend just informed me that one of the main symptoms is fatigue. Also that it’s not really a very strong flu—which is good, I had a bad bout of flu when I was in high school and I missed a week of school. Things like going to the bathroom, which was across our small house, involved pauses where I had to rest by lying down on the floor. Fun! Anyway, so far I don’t feel quite that bad.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Surfacing
I’ve got some kind of bug, or I ate some bad food (I’ve decided to blame the leftover spinach; I really don’t do well with leftovers), so I’ve been uninterested in posting anything. Also, I’ve been fighting a battle with my cat’s fleas—I finally had to buy some overpriced flea soap, which I can’t afford, and I had to wash her twice in the last week. This involves me getting into the tub with her and listening to her yowls of Fear! and then having to wash myself to get all the flea soap off. I hope that soap did better than just make sure her fleas are nice and clean.
I’ve also been struggling with figuring out a new site design. I promise it will be plain, easy to read, dark-text-on-light-background, light on the graphics, etc. I want to overhaul the site to get everything tied together a little better than it currently is.
And that’s it. I can’t remember anything else I wanted to post about, so I’ll end this here.
Monday, October 05, 2009
These Andrea Harrises are not me
As a public service announcement, I thought I’d alert my internet fans as to who Andrea Harris is not. A Google search of my name brings the Real Me up second on their page (!) with a link to my main site. Yays! However, I am not:
This expressionist artist.
Or this business consultant either.
I did not contribute anything to these books.
I’ve never lived in New York City. (Though I’m only a six hour drive away now! My new ambition: driving up to the city for Christmas. Just for a day.)
This is not my Twitter site!
I’m not on Facebook, though other Andrea Harrises are.
We are a diverse group.
I’m not Linked In, but this namesake is.
You don’t want to see me dance, but maybe this other not-me instead.
This Andrea Harris lives in England and has acted with David Tennant in Hamlet and in Doctor Who, so I hate her. (Oh not really.) (Yes, really.)
I was not saved at the tender age of fifteen! And I’ve never been to Barbados. But I have been to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. I was five.
Uh-oh. Don’t worry—I’m still here!
Or am I?
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Work Preventer
By way of explaining why I haven’t been posting much lately…
Yeah, that’s it, it’s the cat’s fault.
Also (grrr) I’ve been having some trouble with my Library site. I decided to upload a simple table of contents plugin widget thing, and try out some new themes, and now it’s being all balky. Also some asshole using a gmail address and a fake xanga.com url is spamming my comments over there with those stupid “asdfghjkl thanks for this!” comments. I have comments set to moderation but registration isn’t turned on, but I may have to do that. Well no one has commented on the Library site yet. It may be the theme I’m using—it’s pretty, but I’m thinking it’s not the best theme for my purposes (web-fiction) as some others. But I don’t want to play with the site if someone is trying to hack it.
Anyway, that’s all for now. I have an interview with a local school where I’m trying to get a job substitute teaching. Yeah, I know, teaching, ugh—but it’s not “real” teaching, and it will be better than the big nothing I have now. And I’ve been wanting to work on more of my story but I can’t seem to concentrate. Argh. Woes.
Update—the problem with the Library site seemed to be with the Table of Contents plugin I installed. I removed it, and now things work fine. I’ve switched to a plainer theme right now, but I’m still not sure what I want to do. Oh well, bedtime.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
A Few Things
I’m all aches and pains today for some reason… and my darned heating pad is refusing to stay on my shoulders. Anyway…
I finally got Chyrp installed on one of my server sites without breaking any of my other setups. It’s a real nice new blogging program, very plain, yet with plenty of bells and whistles for all that. I’ve also been experimenting with two free blog sites, Tumblr and Posterous. Both have their good and not-so-good points. They’re both decent alternatives to other free sites like LiveJournal and Blogspot. Maybe one day I’ll write proper reviews. I’m also thinking of installing one of those content management systems, Drupal or Joomla, or maybe both, and trying them out. What can I say, I like to try new stuff—also it’s good to learn how to install and set up sites with different types of software, because you never know.
A few days ago I downloaded a copy of the eBook edition of Internet Famous:A Practical Guide To Becoming An Online Celebrity. The author was offering if for free—I don’t actually know if it’s still available for free, though. Anyway, I’m not really interesting in being an “online celebrity” but I was curious (hey, free stuff), and there are some parts that look useful even for shy wallflowers like me (cough)—such as a chapter on keeping your internet reputation under control. When I’m done reading it I’ll post a review, but as it’s a 240-page pdf file, that might be a while.
I’ve been trying to do some actual writing, as opposed to blogging and (mostly) reading blogs, and it occurred to me that I might want to write under a pen name for the simple reason that my real name is rather awkward to say. Here it is: Andrea Alicia Harris. It doesn’t exactly fall trippingly off the tongue, at least not to my ear. It’s like this: “Andrea,” then not quite a glottal stop but a sort of “catch” before “Alicia”—too many “ah” sounds all seem to run together too—and then a catch-gasp at “Harris.” I’m exhausted just thinking about it. And even leaving out the middle name is hardly better. It’s such a simple name, you’d think, but so awkward to say! I want something more… mellifluous. Maybe I’ll just use the trick I pull when I’m doing my futuristically altered place names and terms for my science fiction stories. I came up with a list of how the names of the months might sound in, say, a thousand years (assuming all the recording we have done of current English doesn’t slow down language mutation):
January—> Janyori
February—> Fegyori
March—> Marrik
April—> Ebru
And so on. Let’s see, my name could be… Andralika Perris. Andrali Caris. Andrelik Eris.
Meh, too cutesy. Maybe I should just use “Adrian Harris,” since “Adrian” (or if I want to be pedantic and use the proper feminine spelling, “Adrienne”) is what half the people I’ve met in my life have called me after I’ve told them my name:
“Hi, I’m Andrea.”
“Oh hi, Adrienne! Nice to meet you.”
And it runs nicely into the “Harris,” which after all is a nice English name. I think I like the male spelling of the name, “Adrian,” better too. Heh, if I ever publish anything and become known, feminists can write about how my using a “male” name is giving into the patriarchy.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Stuck in Lodi again
Guess what? The agency called me and informed me that my assignment at the auto auction (my tiny, part time job) is finished. I should have known something was up when they brought in that local college girl whose mother worked at another branch of the business… Oh well, it wasn’t exactly paying me a great deal; it was barely more than the weekly allowance I used to get from my dad when I was in high school. So it’s back to being full-time unemployed. I’ve already got the substitute teacher application halfway done (waiting for the TB test to finish; so far I don’t see any suspicious skin activity where they poked me), and I’ve got a resume and letter ready to mail to this place looking for office help that wanted a mailed resume. And so on.
On the bright side, I don’t have to wake up at 5:30 AM tomorrow, so there is that.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Lab Rat
I have a bump on my arm, courtesy of a clinic in Waynesboro. See, my friend suggested I try applying to be a substitute teacher in the local school system. Apparently you don’t actually need a degree to substitute teach, which if that was true in Florida in the 70s explains a few things about my grade school years. And… this should show you how desperate I am to get a decent job. I’m also going to apply at places like Walmart’s and Big Lots—why not? It’s better than nothing; my current assignment is only four hours once a week, and even at $15.00 per hour that’s barely enough to pay my car insurance every month.
Anyway, to be employed by the school system here in Virginia (and probably lots of other states too) you have to take a TB test. So I called around and found a place that does it for twenty bucks. I went and a cheerful Oriental lady shot some stuff into my arm, and I find out Wednesday if I have tuberculosis or not. Well… I haven’t been coughing lately, and when I do I figure it’s allergies. There’s lots of pollen around. Yeah.
Okay, off to clean the cat box.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Thanks and stuff
I just want to say thanks to everyone who has donated to my Paypal account recently. Thanks to you I was able to buy groceries and gas for the car, instead of having to decided which one I could do without for a few more days until I got my next tiny paycheck from my part-time job.
Anyway. I’m still fooling around with Twitter and my various side-projects, but one day I really need to buckle down and get all my theater reviews done (thanks to my friend and special free nights at the local theater I’ve seen quite a few plays since I moved up here; also since this area has almost as many colleges as it has churches so there is always something going on that doesn’t cost very much). And I have to do some other writing, and so on. I’m trying to get myself out of my creative rut, in other words.
More later.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
An experiment
Here are some stories. Enjoy.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Say what?
Oh this is funny. I started fooling around with Windows Live (I must say the interface is nice and clean and easy to read and it seems to load fairly fast), and I decided to get a “space” page, and then while I was doing that my Windows Live settings suddenly switched to all Portuguese. So now I have to figure out where the hell the language settings are in a language I don’t speak. I’m using my long ago Spanish, Italian, and French lessons to piece my way around—thank God the Romance languages are all sort of similar.
Update: okay, all is back to Inglès. 
Update the 2nd: I’ve gone and signed up with “Share This.” I’ve added it to my site here too. There are other sharing things like Add This and so on, but this was the first one that came to mind.
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