A V-Day to Remember

I can't say I've ever particularly been a fan of Valentine's day, but one of the many things I love about Brian is we tend to see eye to eye on how to celebrate various holidays. We like to thumb our noses at consumerism and go out of our way to avoid doing anything that resembles what we are expected to do.

This year we happened to have a particularly wonderful time on Valentine's day. We woke up early and had coffee like usual. Then Brian made us fancy (non-alcoholic) smoothies for breakfast.

After that, we went to the bank and opened a high-interest checking account, consolidated, and officially connected our finances. Nothing says "I love you" like "My money will be yours if I die," right?

Once done at the bank, we made full use of the small snow-cover that had fallen the night before and spent an hour or so on our cross-country skiis. It was only my fourth ski of the season, and the snow was far from ideal, but the glide was surprisingly good given the stickiness of the snow and I managed to both thoroughly wear myself out and work on my technique a little.

After skiing, we came home, ate lunch, showered, and then crashed out for a lovely late-afternoon nap. Then we woke up, made orangegingerduck for dinner, which we enjoyed along with a nice bottle of port we got for Christmas.

How we're going to top that next year, I have no idea...

Never Judge a Book By...

Over the last year or more, I have gotten fairly addicted to audio-books - mainly because I have discovered I can listen to them at work on slow days to take my mind off the slowness and keep the time moving along.

I am aided in my audiobook addiction by the fact that the Iowa City Library has an astoundingly comprehensive selection of books on CD. These books on CD are also astoundingly popular. So, to get a new book to listen to, all I have to do is watch their online catalogue like a hawk until the book I want is checked in, go to the library asap in hopes that no one will check it out again before I get there, find the book I want to read on the shelf, bring it home, transfer the contents of between 6 and 25 cd's to my computer and then move them over to my ipod in stages as I listen to them.

Yeah, it's kind of a pain, actually.

So, naturally, I have been watching the library's online audio-book service development with great interest. When I discovered it last year, they had a slim selection of books that could be downloaded and listened to on any mp3 player except an ipod. That did me very little good as my ipod is my only mp3 player. Lately, however, they have started providing ipod friendly files which can be downloaded and listened to. To get around copyright issues, after a certain amount of time these files simply corrupt themselves so you can't play them anymore.

Wonderful, I say.

It is true, however, that there isn't really a very big selection online yet. It is also true that I am not nearly as discriminate a listener as a reader. In fact, I often prefer to save books I'm really excited about for taking in the old-fashioned way - curled up on the couch and turning pages. The stuff I listen to has to be on the fluffy side or I can't follow it and concentrate on my work at the same time.

But we all have to draw the line somewhere. Yesterday I found myself listening to something I had downloaded simply because I could put it on my ipod and it was available for checkout. Five minutes in I realized it was pretty much vampire soft-porn.

Weird.

Needless to say, I deleted those files well before my time limit ran out. I also ran a google search on the book, just out of curiosity. This proved to me the dangers of indiscriminate downloading. Had I actually been in a library looking for something to read and somehow picked this book up off the shelf, the cover would have deterred me from so much as reading the first page.

Ah well. Live and learn I suppose.

Thaw

Every time I walk past a window today, I do a double-take. Funny, I have gotten so used to seeing a ground covered in white, seeing soil and dead grass throws me off.

We've had a few days in the 50's, a few nights that haven't frozen. Today we're forecast to reach 63. I must admit that, on a rational level, I am not all that pleased with this turn of events. We cannot expect real, consistent warmth until late March at the earliest, and several solid months of soggy spring doesn't appeal to my lifestyle much. I'd rather it stay frozen (which means a clean horse and the possibility of skiing) until just a few weeks before summer is good and ready to come and dry everything out until next fall.

However, we all know there are a lot of levels beyond the rational one. My mind can say, "Yeah, you don't fool me, winter. I know this isn't the end," all it wants. I still feel a stirring in my blood when I step outside. I can't help but breath deeply and savor the dampness is the air. Yesterday I was driving around in a t-shirt with the windows down - singing and feeling somehow woken up. Steen is already starting to shed.

Spring is such an all-encompassing, primeval thing. It's hard not to feel it in your bones.

Seizing

I'm definitely at an interesting point in my life right now. The future is looming large in the form of my wedding and house-hunting. Also, my side-project, building websites, earned me more in January than it did for the entire year last year. If I keep up even a quarter of the work-load I've had so far this year, it's going to mean big changes in my life. More income, to be sure, but less free time too.

Lately I have been spending a lot of time thinking about life and what makes it good or bad on an incidental level. It is amazing how long it takes just to figure out what should get a priority slot in the daily grind. It takes even longer to learn how to keep giving that thing a priority slot when the thing seems non-essential, and life gets busy (which it always, always, always does).

At the ripe old age of 27, I know that happiness in life is not so great a mystery as we all like to say it is. There have always been three basic elements to my lifestyle during the periods of greatest sunshine in my life. I am most happy when I:

• Spend time on worthwhile pursuits.
• Eat and sleep well.
• Stay active.

For me, that sums it up. Oh, well, actually, with one other pretty big thing thrown in:

• Keep a clean living space.

Of course, all these things are complex and ever-changing. In college 'eat' meant put food in my tummy. Now it means eat fresh foods mainly consisting of whole grains, local produce and small amounts of good meat. Also, a clean dorm room is a far cry from a clean house.

Still, the list seems so simple when broken down this way and yet it is so hard somehow to stay in a consistent pattern of living to acheive my full level of potential happiness. I get stuck in these weird habit-spirals, where I know that my unhappiness level is directly related to how much time I spent on my computer vs. how much time I spend with my horse. Yet, when I'm pushed into my 'computer' mode (almost always by a rush of web-work) I get trapped there, and I end spending more time on the computer than I really need to because I can't get out of my rut. Then I feel stressed and rushed in all my other pursuits, so I don't clean the house as thoroughly and start skipping meals or eating quick things that aren't as healthy. I don't have time for the barn day after day and then the part of me that needs a horse to be happy starts gnawing away at the rest of me.

This goes on for a few weeks and then one day I walk into the living room and notice the piles of lint in the corners and the heap of mail on the edge of the couch and I freak out, run around cleaning like a mad-woman for three hours and then sit down, look at my life and ask myself, 'what happened?'

Well, I lost track of something simple.

Carpe Diem is so easy to say, but so hard to do. And so much about life is cyclical anyway, perhaps the ups and down are inevitable on some level. I know I am lucky in that my downs aren't really all that down and also Brian steps up to the plate and shops and cooks a lot when I'm slowly expiring under a heap of rush-jobs. Still, I'm going to try to keep work in better perspective for the rest of the year and keep in mind that money isn't worth having if you're too unhappy to enjoy the things it can bring you.

Changing Gears and Gearing up for Change

Yesterday we made a few fairly big steps towards our future. The first (though not remotely the biggest, I suppose) was I finally successfully removed Norton Anti-Virus from my computer. I have used Norton for many years, but have been dissatisfied with the sluggishness and strain on system resources lately. I decided to switch to Avast! months ago, but no matter how thoroughly and cleverly I removed Norton, Norton left behind something that shut down all my network connections (in spite, I am convinced). I tried every trick I know, and still, bye-bye Norton meant bye-bye connectivity.

Anyway, finally yesterday I figured out how to fix the problem by manually editing the registry. I am happily online and Avasted, and can safely say I will never use a symantec product again.

For another big change in the software department, I installed Google Gears yesterday. This program allows you to run gmail off your desktop and back up your email on your own machine, but does not change the way you fundamentally use gmail and all your backed up messages still also remain on the server. I have been trying to find a way to slowly wean myself away from eudora for the last year, and since I have yet to find a similar desktop program that I could stand using, my means for doing this has been a slow transfer to gmail. Google Gears will make this transfer easier and more practical, so I am curious to see how it all develops, since the program is still in beta.

But by far the biggest change is, at this point, an intangible one. Yesterday we started house-hunting in earnest. We are discovering that balancing all our hopes and dreams with the practical manifestation of what is for sale in the areas we want to live is difficult, to say the least. Yesterday we looked at 8 or 9 homes from the outside, and inspected the insides of two. One we left quickly, fighting down a feeling of panic. The second one we have been talking and talking and talking and talking about. Last night we wanted to buy it. This morning we woke up second-guessing the smallness of the bedrooms and the fact that it has only one bathroom. Now, having looked at many more houses, we are kind of back to wanting it again because of the endearing quirkiness of the house itself, and the awesomeness of the kitchen.

So, we shall see what happens, but are hoping to buy our own place within a few months.