Happy Christmas Eve, all!
I'm currently sitting at my desk, pretending to work, and ignoring the fact that the kitchen and the rest of the house needs to be cleaned before my brother-in-law gets here and we bust out the Chinese food and the best Christmas movie ever: A Muppet Family Christmas
It occurred to me that I didn't make a proper Christmas list this year. Because I am plum out of money, I find it ridiculous to expect other people to buy me things. I mean, I've had to throw some stuff out there as I'd otherwise be badgered with the, "JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU FUCKING WANT FOR CHRISTMAS!!!" questions being shouted at me by angry family members who are clearly standing in the middle of a mall and have no fucking clue what to get me.
But what do I really want?
Here is my ridiculous list:
A big-ass, geeky, girl-powered coffee book table. Fucking. Awesome.
Elizabeth & Elizabeth: The Golden Age
I've only seen Elizabeth once and Elizabeth: The Golden Age on a flight to Tokyo, and I'd love to own both. As you'll see from my next item, I'm going through some sort of ridiculous "I <3 British History" and "I <3 The Tudors" phase. I'm currently reading Sovereign Ladies by Maureen Waller and it's such a good read. Enjoying every minute of it.
Again, I'm going through a small obsession at the moment. I would like to feed it in any way possible.
I don't even talk on real phone. Ever. I just want it on my desk.
I've already written about these both here, and on BitchBuzz. I still want them. I think lusting after shoes for more than 3 months means that I'm serious about our future relationship, and that they should just trust me, and somehow, someway, make their way to me. Now, preferrably.
The Phonofone II in Limited Editon Black
This is one of those beautiful gadgets that while I may never actually *need* in my life time, it is just so gorgeous that I just want it. Want it. To stare at. To drool at. To love forever, and ever, amen.
Along with my obsession with the history of Britain, I'm slowly becoming a full-out Doctor Who fan. (I'm sure Iain will scoff at the "slowly" bit as pretty much every night for the past two weeks I've insisted we watch an episode - or 5 - on the iPlayer.)
Would I use this sonic screwdriver? No. It would sit on my desk. But, I would love it, and I would look at it and perhaps even touch it a couple times a day. My desk is where I spend most of my time, so why not adorn it with expensive things to look at?
Anyway, folks...
I hope you all have a fantastic Christmas or whatever the heck it is you celebrate, and a fabulous New Year.
Today is one of those days when I'd just love to hug the Internet.
Not the entire thing, but just my little network of people that I talk to and @ most of the day.
A lot of this happens on Twitter. Some of it happens here in my blog comments. It happens on comments on my Facebook status or on my wall.
For every bad day I have with the Internet, it simply takes one good day to erase practically all memory of me wanting to bang my head against the keyboards and then throw my precious Samsung out the fucking window.
Today on Twitter, between my friends Vikki, Iain and Lewis, and a bunch of other fabulous people, we managed to get a ridiculous amount of people to change their Twitter avatars to a photo of themselves when they were younger.
My entire Twitter feed was made up of mostly bucked-tooth, long haired, cheeky-grinned kids. And it was brilliant. And we all had a good laugh about it and made sure to tag all of our tweets with #mewhensmall and it became one of the number one trends on Twitter today.
Shit like that makes me warm and fuzzy inside.
I'm totally Scrooge like. I bitch a lot. But at the end of the day, I do love the Internet.
There. I said it.
It's a handful of days until Christmas and, to be honest, I wish it would just hurry up and be done with.
We're spending Christmas with Iain's grandparents, just the four of us in total, and I'm really looking forward to it. I suppose the only thing I'm really hoping for is that we can swindle them into watching the Christmas Doctor Who special.
It would be nice to see all of my family in the UK, as well as my family in the US, but that just hasn't worked out for whatever reason this year.
So, what have I been up to?
In the past couple weeks I...
- Went to Le Web in Paris, where I stayed in a hotel without any WiFi, and then spent the conference freezing my ass off with limited internet connection.
- Due to the freezing cold and to being around my lovely, sick husband the day before, I came down with a fever half way through day one of the conference. By day two, I was absolutley dying, (along with the internet in the venue) and ended up absolutely hating every minute spent in freezing ass cold Paris. The Eurostar when you've got a fever isn't much fun either.
- I misssed three really cool Christmasy events due to my illness, and have not been to one Christmas party this entire year.
- Our TV broke, and we can't afford to buy a new one, or even fix whatever is wrong with it. Happy fucking Christmas.
- Been in a small altercation with a group of pikeys at an 18th birthday party we DJed at a couple days before we went to Paris. It ended with two bouncers, five police men and three bar staff helping protect me from an angry group of drunk, agressive people who were screaming things at me like, "Go back to fucking yankee land, no body wants you here!" and "I'm going to fucking punch you in the fucking face!!" as well as, "I hope you have an escort out of here or else I'm going to fucking murder you."
Murder me. Yes.
We later found out that this group of wonderful people were gang members. Literally. Who is even in gangs anymore!?
- Due to me being sick, I missed the cut-off date to send any packages to the US for Christmas time. So, no presents from me to my family this year. How sick with guilt am |? I don't even want to talk about it.
- I passed my Life in the UK exam this week, so now just have to send in my visa application with a check for £750 and I'll hopefully be able to gain Settlement in the UK, and never have to deal with fucking immigration issues every again.
All in all, I suppose my general feeling is BAH-FUCKING-HUMBUG.
I haven't enjoyed Christmas since I was about 11. Before my parents got divorced.
Yes, I love spending Christmas with my new husband, of course I do. But let's be honest, being poor three Christmases in a row hasn't exactly helped my view of Christmas. I get really frustrated not being able to afford to buy people I love cool, thoughtful presents.
No matter how you want to look at it, the fact of the matter is, is that this Christmas marks the end of a very hard year. I've not had a proper pay check in 6 months, I'm working at my own start-up that shows a world of a potential, but isn't earning me any money, yet. My husband was made redundant over a month ago, and I'm going to punch anyone who complains or even expects us to actually give them a proper Christmas present in the face.
I find it really rude that so many people are just not comprehending the fact that my husband and I do not have jobs!!!
Like, I'm not asking for a fucking pity party or money or charity, or anything other than a little god damn understanding. My family has been amazing about this, they know, they understand. Shit, my mom was laid off a few months ago, herself.
I'm runnning a start-up, my husband is DJing his ass off and finding whatever work he can and has been supporting me and my website for the past few months...
It's rough in our household.
So, I'm sorry if I'm not really into the party, omg Christmas let's go out for expensive cocktails and go ice skating at Somerset house sort of mood.
I'm just thankful to have a home, a supportive and loving husband, my health (for the most part) and for the fact that despite being sort of poverty stricken, I can run a website and a business that I am really passionate about, even if it's not profitable yet.
I guess all I want for Christmas is a little empathy, a little compassion, and perhaps a little help.
Apparently the folks from Pownce have made their way over to Six Apart...and Vox?
According to the fabulous Susan Mernit:
News today that SixApart, the blogging/CMS/publishing tools company that powers this blog, has acquired Pownce, the twitter-like microblogging service run by Leah Culver and others and launched almost a year ago...
As with Rael Dornfest, this is clearly a talent and tools acquisition, but with this acquisition comes the "advisory services" of Digg's Kevin Rose and Dan Burka. In his acquisition.welcome post, CEO Chris Alden notes his plans to marry Vox and Pownce; you can see the vox blogs of Leah and Mike Malone have been up for 5 whole seconds. Community manager Ariel Waldman also has a brand spankin new Vox blog, so I'd say that signals intent to bring some of the Pownce cool kids sass into the now snooz-ier than planned Vox brand.
Question: Does this mean that VOX will finally be getting some love? Does this mean it will be compatible with Firefox 3?
I'm excited and nervous all at once.
You may have noticed that I didn't exactly stick to my whole NaBloPoMo thing...and I couldn't care less.
I took on way too much stuff last month, and I just happy that November is done and dusted. I didn't exactly do NaBloPoMo so I could WIN or anything...I just wanted to get back into a groove. And I think that I, for the most part, did. It felt nice to have a busy blog again.
Part of me wishes I had stuck to it...but I just know how I felt after being awake from 3:30am until 11:30pm with only a few hours to nap on the Eurostar last Wednesday night, and I just couldn't get myself out of bed.
What this has made me figure out, however, is that I need to find better, easier ways for me to blog. Whether it be from my phone, or smoke signal.
Much to catch up on, but I just want to start this month off on a positive note. Last Wednesday, Iain made it possible for me to catch the Eurostar with Liz down to Paris for a day.
The sun was out.
My lame attempts at French and slightly-more European appearance led to a much more pleasant experience with the Parisians - and one lady even came up to me and start speaking French! (I was sort of flattered.)
I hated The Louvre less, and am even excited at the possibility to go back and to look at even more things that I missed before. Did you know that you could see parts of Napoleon's apartment in The Louvre? It will blow your mind, seriously, GO.
I was also extremely blessed to happen to be at Notre Dame when 5:30 mass started. I got to stand in one of the greatest cathedrals on earth, and hear a choir sing hymns in French. (Maybe it was even Latin. I don't know.)
It was beautiful.
I could have stayed in there all night...Touching the ancient walls and listening to foreign songs being sang in foreign. tongues.
I was lucky enough to be invited to attend the LeWeb conference in Paris next week - so, lucky me, I get to go back to Paris for a whole three days and two nights to attend one of the most fabulous technology conferences in the world, as press, for my new website.
I'm excited, to say the least.
For some reason (probably because VOX isn't compatible with Firefox 3, you can't see all my photos that I uploaded from my flickr acount.
You can see them here instead:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/catesevilla
I really love this post from, eh, The Huffington Post about gratitude.
It's easy to get really wrapped up in yourself.
What you're getting, what you're giving.
How things are verses how you wish they were.
I suppose a little patience and a little compassion can go a long way. Focusing on the task at hand rather than what you'll get out of it. Having a conversation because someone needs a listener - not advice.
Little things we forget. Little things that sometimes add up to big huge things because we haven't figured out how to take it all in stride.
Gratitude is a big thing. Self appreciation and self acceptance are even bigger.
So other than complaining about Spam and posting photos of dogs in Princess Leia slave costumes I haven't really written much here. My efforts at NaBloPoMo are pretty limited and I kind of don't care. I seriously, seriously have so little time and November was pretty much the worst month I could have decided to blog every day.
This weekend it snowed for a couple hours on Sunday morning, which was very cool for Liz. (And me.)
We drove all around Surrey yesterday and went up to Box Hill to look at the view.
Today Liz and I went around London and got caught in a freak hail storm which broke both of our umbrellas.
I saw this big spider again at the Tate Modern. (I also decided that people who tape a bloody bandage to a canvas and call it art deserve to be punched in the ovary.)
I went to St Paul's Cathedral again.
And I have so much work to do that I think my head is going to explode and my heart might spontaneously combust from all the stress and sheer fact that I have not slowed down in so many days and that there is no end in sight gives me a little panic attack every time I think about it.
That I'm sick and tired of waking up to Spam comments in foreign languages from what seems to be the same person making different accounts every single morning.
Today in London it was fucking freezing. It was sunny and beautiful - but after being on South Bank for more than 15 minutes my thighs were numb and I couldn't feel my face. Liz says it's the coldest she's ever been in her life.
I guess that's the "Arctic Blast" they were talking about on the news...
Today we did a lot of touristy things, elbowed our way through the morons in Topshop so Liz could purchase an impressive amount of socks.
Today is a good day. It started out with me smashing my finger in a dresser drawer, bending back the nail and getting blood under it.
But, the rest of the day is fantastic.
My friend is here! Yay!
And. AND! She's brought me Ranch and Nutterbutters and fancy knitted fingerless gloves, like Felicia Day in Dr Horrible.
Tomorrow, we're off to London to do the touristy thing.
I haven't had a day this nice in a really long time...
