Author: Teel

I’ve managed, over the last few years, to get my emotional overeating just about under control. I still do a little emotional overeating, but it is always within reason and within the bounds of what is controllable under the rest of my diet. I don’t overindulge in emotional overeating anymore, and it has made quite a lot of difference.

I still seem to do some emotional overspending, though. I haven’t thrown myself into debtor’s prison yet, and credit card companies seem to love me and banks have told me that they’d love for me to buy a house, so I think I’m doing a good enough job keeping up on payments on everything appropriately. Still, when I get really deeply emotionally affected by something, like the recent death of my mother, I tend to find myself overspending.

An effective preventive measure is to just keep me away from anyplace that sells anything I might like to buy, but am otherwise keeping myself from buying because it would not be economically feasable. Like Zia. I know that right now I’m in a little extra bit of debt because of the cost of taking this summer school course, so I shouldn’t be spending anything at Zia if I can avoid it. Except as I walked home from class tonight, straight past the Zia, I found myself wandering inside and looking around. After my second, dangerous pass through the store, I sort of looked up through a purely mental haze and realized that I had no idea what I was looking for or why I was even there. I looked down into my hands and found that I had some $50+ of CDs and DVDs.

I just made another couple of quick swipes at names I always hope will have something used but never do, and proceeded to the checkout. I tried to get away with what I had in hand, but I also suggested that I ought to pre-order the Harry Potter DVD used. Now, some of the Zia employees are cooler to me than others, and some of them recognise me as a regular who can’t seem to help himself from spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars there every month. This guy grabbed the used copy of Harry Potter that was waiting patiently for someone else who had special ordered it (and who had already been called to come pick it up a couple of weeks ago; I’ve been hovering over this thing since it came in) and added it silently to my total, now some $72 dollars with tax.

So, now I own Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone on DVD, Say Anything on DVD, The Crow on DVD, the two newest White Stripes albums, and that Avril Lavigne album people have been harrassing me to buy.

Oh, and I don’t have Mariah Edgeworth’s Ennui, a book that I’m supposed to read and respond to by 9AM Thursday, but which does not appear to be readily in print or in bookstores of any kind.

Everything is going so slowly. I am so tired right now. I tried to make a big post about everything that’s going on yesterday, but my fumbling fingers and my browser conspired against me and ate it right before I finished. I got woke up at 3:30 yesterday morning and didn’t get to sleep until 11:30 last night. I was awakened by the death of my mother. I was kept awake by homework. I’d love to be able to take a nap this afternoon between work and class, but I guess I’ve got to go sign some paperwork this afternoon, so depending on how long that all takes, I might be pretty ragged when I get to class tonight.

I just want to get back into bed right now. I just want to curl up under a warm blanket and sleep. Ran a few minutes late to work this morning because I didn’t want to get out of bed. Which for me is pretty bad, and starting Thursday for a couple of weeks will be totally unacceptable. Right now we’re short-staffed at work, which is part of why I’ve been working at all, and from Thursday the 20th through the 4th of July, I get to cover for the person who opens up the building and has to be ready to take calls at 5AM. A little over an hour earlier than normal, for just two weeks. Incidentally, the last week and a half of my night class. I am not looking forward to the exhaustion sure to entrench me in the next couple of weeks. I wonder how early I will collapse into sleep.

I’m going to go try to sleep and take calls at the same time right now; see how good at this I’ve gotten. Probably post more later.

I don’t know what to say except that I apologize for all the in-fighting on these blogs recently. We all know each other pretty well, so we tend to get on each other’s nerves once in a while. I’ll do what I can to keep myself toned down for a while.

I’ve got quite a bit of homework to do this weekend. i really should get started on it right away. The class is 3/5 over, but I feel like I have 60% of the work still ahead of me. I have to prepare an oral presentation for Tuesday night’s class on Jonathan Swift, do the reading and response on his assigned work by Tuesday morning, write one (or two, I have the option of writing a second paper) paper on a subject of my choice from the 17th thru 19th century (the second paper would be on any subject in english lit. before the 17th century), and read Ennui and Mansfield Park by the end of next week as well. From there it’s smooth sailing, and if I can get all of this work done, done well, in and on time and well-written, I can get the A I needed and then see whether I can afford to go to school in the fall. A question I don’t even want to consider until I have confirmed that I will be able to go.

Oh, and there are like, 6 or 8 movies out right now that I haven’t seen yet, some of which I’d like to. And everything that was on TV in May on tape that I’d like to see, and about 22k words left to write in that novel I was working on and my blog to redesign and that webcomics project I mentioned for which I may have to learn a couple of new programming languages, and I learned about nVidia’s new Cg programming language, and I’m thinking of learning that to make new forms fo art with. Plus I have bills to pay and plans to make and screenplays and song to write and … I’d also like to take some time out once in a while to go out and have a good time. Maybe meet Liquidmercurial for the first time in years and years. Maybe take some time to plant something other than grass and oleanders in the yard (actually, I’ve mostly been cutting back the oleanders).

Oh, and I’d like to be able to make a few posts here every once in a while, too.

“We don’t understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it
and admit it.” -Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910)

Or at least some of us should admit it.

So, the Cotton Candy Machine I ordered finally arrived today. I got a sweet deal on the shipping because the guy on eBay I bought it from (New, Sealed in box with Lifetime Warranty, by the way) only charges $10 shipping for UPS Ground on machines, and will throw in free shipping for any flossugar you buy with a machine. So, I ordered (Angela paid for some of it) almost 17lbs of sugar in seven different flavours. I won’t have to buy more for ages. I don’t know how much it cost the guy to ship 25lbs from TN to AZ, but I’m glad I didn’t pay it.

Anyway, I was so glad to see that UPS had delivered the package even though I was in class tonight that I almost started dancing. I almost stopped and posted about how great UPS is for doing things like hiding my package out of sight and leaving me a note about where they put it, so I don’t have to wait until our schedules coincide to get my shipments, but I think that that sentence did that. I opened it up and read all the instructions and safety precautions and guidelines. (This is something I actually enjoy that seems to upset the people around me when they see me doing it. I don’t know why. I probably wouldn’t have been able to get the cotton candy right without guidance.) Then I fired it up, and per instructions, practiced with regular sugar (so as to spare my ‘expensive’ flavoured sugar), trying to figure out how to catch the flying, light-as-air, melts-in-your-mouth sugar on a paper tube. I got a little bit of the hang of it and started in on the Banana sugar right away. It didn’t seem to behave properly. In fact, it seemed to not create cotton candy at all. Was I doing something wrong? I let the machine spin down and tried again with a second batch of Banana. This time the machine started vibrating as a minute or two passed. I double-checked my instructions; putting too much sugar in can make it vibrate. I waited longer… now almost twice as long as I waited for the plain white sugar, and all of a sudden a double batch of cotton candy started pouring out onto my increasingly skillful paper tube, this time bright yellow.

I grabbed some of it and let it melt in my mouth as the machine was spinning up again. I had opened and put in a scoop of the Pink Vanilla (standard cotton candy flavour) to add to the outside of the Banana cone I had already started. This went on even better than before, and by the time I put on the third coat (Watermelon) I had something that looked almost like the huge spools of cotton candy you get at midways and carnivals. The instructions told me (and this is why I love instructions; they’re so often very, very correct and helpful) that it would take two or more scoops to make a full sized ‘cone’ of cotton candy. And it did, and it was delicious. And by the way, each scoop is less than an ounce, so I consumed something like … 35 calories.

Which is why I’m still hungry.

But, since I’m going straight to bed, I’m not going to eat. It’s usually not a good idea to eat within an hour or two of laying down to sleep. Doesn’t digest properly, can keep you awake or wake you in the middle of the night, or if you’re old and shrewd with money and the food is mustard or undercooked potato, it could even give you visions of the dead. (Which could then be exploited to make TV shows, right?) Anyway. Off to bed. I shall probably eat breakfast in the morning.