House Guest! Wee!

I was so wrapped up in what I had to do today. I was packing up stuff from my cube, which was bittersweet and a little tougher emotionally than I had bargained for. More on that Tuesday.

As for the other....yes the date with K went splendidly and all his friends were very nice. We had a good time laughing and joking about all kinds of random things. Once his friends left, K asked if I wanted to watch a movie. I said sure. We paused the DVD to finish our conversation. 4 hours later we are still talking, have entirely given up on the movie now, and are now starting to comprehend the possibility that I may not make it home in a conscious state. So I ended up crashing for a few hours and left the next morning.

So in my infinite wisdom, instead of using this week of no school and little work to finally detox after a year and a half of school/work/life hell, what do I decide to do? Invite him over to my house. On Friday.

I didn't think he'd actually accept so quick of an invitation. And now I'm like crrrraaap time to get this frat boy college kid house into good shape. Well, at least as good as it can be.
My legs hurt. My feet and neck are quite angry. But I only have the bedroom and living room left, along with a few things outside. Yes, he knows about the cats, and I've given him a heads up on some of the crazier traits of the house, but still, it's nerve-wracking. Whole new level of trust here on my end.

But in preparing for all this, I completely missed the late night 12/22 slot. It's kind of a weird anniversary. It's precisely the moment my ex A told me he had feelings for another girl and that he just want to leave us all, Spidey included, and just start over. That night just rocked my world, and it took weeks for me to even start moving past basic survival.

What difference a year makes. I am a lot stronger mentally. I have goals and will pursue them no matter what. I will not just date any man, but one who is sure of himself and will not make me suffer from self-doubt. Trust is difficult for me still, to let someone into my life and know he is going to be loving and accepting of me no matter what.

I'm grateful for what happened, because I love being who I am now. But I'm also terrified of the unknown future.

My christmas gift to you, dear reader

As you can see, I've been doing a bit of sprucing up around here.

2011 has been a, well, interesting year. That's the best way I can describe it. It was far better than 2010, even though it has been full of enough chaos that I've considered moving even farther out into the country and adopting a hermit lifestyle, if for no reason other than simplicity. Though trying to finance my hoard of guns and food for the inevitable zombie apocalypse would likely not make it so simple.

I struggle with what to write here. There are some experiences I would love to share with the two people who still follow this blog, and one day, I'd like to actually increase that number. Consistency and actually posting would probably help with that. Perhaps five readers? I suppose I can dream.

But some of what I would write involves other people who were in my life. Oddly enough, I want to thank them more than anything, because I would not be who I am right now if it wasn't for the extreme shifting of life in this past year. There are days where I struggle with life, but that heavy dark cloud of depression and insecurity that has hung out over me for years is shrinking every day.

So, perhaps anything super sensitive, I'll post to another, lesser known blog. I'm not quite sure yet. This blog and I are old friends and we're just getting reacquainted. At the very least, I should be able to post more, even if it is just randomness about the cats and rants about this whole "dating" nonsense I've been experiencing.

Now, after all that seriousness, let's get down to business. What would this blog be without a cat picture?

Bagheera does not really have the grace of his panther namesake. He's actually more of a bull in a china shop. And he looks like a panther that swallowed a basketball. As you can see though, he is quite offended when I refer to him as Sir Chunk.

2011

While I can say 2010 has royally sucked, I'm going to look forward to 2011. Life will get better and the only person who can make me happy is me. Time to break through all of the stress and worry and start enjoying life.

Little cryptic, I know, but it's the best I can do.

You should be seeing more of me in 2011.

How a Visit to the Post Office Can Change Your Perspective on Life

Today I swung by the post office during my lunch break. An older gentleman with what looked like an oxygen tank was working his way down the sidewalk.

Normally I would patiently wait behind him, but today I tried to scoot around him & ended up startling the poor man. I apologized and started to head for my car. He said, "Miss?" and I turned around. He said "Do you know what women and days have in common?" then responded "Just like days, some women are more beautiful than others." I couldn't help but smile at that. He said, "It makes every day worth it when you can make someone smile." I smiled again and agreed with him, telling him to have a nice day as I headed for my car.

As I headed to my appointment that I was running late for, I couldn't help but think about that man. About how I have lately been having such a hard time with life and I've been bouncing from one thing to another just trying to survive another day. I've been spending all my time worrying about school, work, money, sleep, and family. And here is this man who is connected to an oxygen tank and probably struggles just to get out to visit the post office because of his health issues. Yet for all his troubles, he goes out of his way to make someone smile.

While my struggles are many not insignificant, this one moment really put things in perspective for me. And I'm sure he'd be happy to know I was sharing this with the Internet.

High Impact = less likely to knock you over with my bosoms

From screaming fatgirl:

Hmm. Maybe I missed something, but why not reduce the exercise so that you don't work your body so hard? That would make your calorie consumption fine and reduce your overall fatigue.

I'm doing both, really. I'm upping my calories a bit and I'm reducing my exercise to try to find a happy medium. I may not be cutting my activity level enough though. I'm going to try it at this level for the next week or two & see how it goes. I've got 2 more weeks until school starts, and when that starts up, I probably will only get 4 days of moderate exercise a week instead of 5, so I will dial it down even more then.

Another thing is that I LIKE exercising. It really helps keep me from dragging if I can get up & do something for 20 minutes a few times a day, and the 3-4 times a week I really push myself in longer workouts make me feel strong & accomplished.

Besides, I'm not going to DENY myself the ability to eat more healthy food ;) That's just wrong!

So happy it's Friday. Not looking forward to all the things I have to do this weekend, but it's a break from work nonetheless. And, hey, exciting! Carnival of the Cats will be here Sunday, so get your entries in!

Here's the new sports bra I got. I was all excited about the "high impact" thinking I could stop bullets with my chest. Alas, I think the high impact means it keeps OTHERS safe so I don't knock them over with the "girls" while exercising. Boo ;)

Hippos on Parade

I really haven't been much in the so-called "Christmas Spirit" so far this year. We haven't put up the tree, and if it wasn't our year to spend Christmas with Spidey, we probably wouldn't even bother. Which is kind of sad for me, really, because the holidays are usually a happy time of year for me, and all the lights and decorations really lift my spirits.

The year leading up to this point has just taken too much of a toll on me, though. I lost my grandfather and I lost Miya. I've been in therapy since April to deal with many issues, some of wish I can't discuss here quite yet, that have been plaguing me for probably 20 years. I was down and out for about half of July due to my appendix. At my job and with my particular client, holidays are THE busiest time of the year and major moneymaker, which equals long stressful hours for me & my team. As with everyone else, there is also the constant threat of layoffs and dire employment news.

I'm just exhausted, burnt out, emotionally raw, and beaten down. Even the holidays can't lift my spirits this time.

But since Spidey is here, I don't want to deny him the enjoyment of a Christmas tree and decorations and good memories. We only get to spend Christmas morning every other year with him. So we will have the tree, and even though money is tight, we will do what we can to keep with some of our fun traditions and have a nice Christmas.

Plus, the cats would sulk if they didn't have the annual Spikey Green Beast to destroy for a few weeks.

Anyways, even though I wasn't much in the spirit of things, I decided to attend the Gallatin Christmas Parade this year. Adam was participating to help out his family with their entry. The parade had over 100 entrants this year, and they were all supposed to have a minute to stop for judging in front of the Gallatin Public Library.

So I found myself smack dab in front of the library, freezing my butt off and waiting for entrant #80, camera in hand. There was plenty to see before then, though.

There were clowns.


And classic cars.


And music.


And cows.


And LOTS of dancing. I believe this was choreographed dance group #376,504.


And Grinches with fake snow.


And safaris, thanks to Safari Studio Adventures, entrant #80...my father-in-law.


And for those of you familiar with "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" we have...a hippo.


Sadly, they took so much time with the earlier entrants that the later ones did not have time to stop, and the hippo didn't get to jump down and dance like he had planned.

After #80, I gave up and left. It was cold, and the parade was just way too long. Next year, they definitely need to coordinate better and limit the entrants. Other than that, it was pretty entertaining.



Have YOU hugged a hippo today?

Who's Your Daddy, Hostmonster?

So I'm going to rant about all this domain name forwarding, DNS hosting nonsense for a moment.

Hostmonster is on my sh** list. They wanted me to pay double the price I paid 2 years ago for hosting my site, when nothing else had changed.

Unfortunately, we are pretty broke at this point and we're trying to save as much as we can for some big ticket items we need (new car, fixing up the house, etc.). And, of course, with the lovely unemployment figures our state & county has been seeing, there's always the big L word dancing around in the back of our minds.

Plus, I just wasn't updating that often, and I couldn't guarantee myself that I wouldn't wind up doing the same thing if I renewed.

So I decided to keep my domain name (The cats would never have let me give THAT up) and just forward it to a free Blogger account. That way, I wouldn't feel guilty if I didn't update and feel like I was wasting money. The domain name renewal is relatively inexpensive, so no big monetary loss there.

Hostmonster was all on board with this, and I was set to renew my domain with them. Their help site told me specifically how to contact tech support to make Cname and Arecord changes (blah blah technical jargon blah blah) in order to forward my domain to my blogger site. I followed the directions, and at first, it worked like a charm after a minor redirect hiccup.

Then all of a sudden the redirect stopped working. After some back and forth nonsense with Hostmonster, they basically said they could renew my domain name, but they wouldn't host the DNS nameservers or whatever it is that I need for the redirect. (I've dealt with some techy things, but even this mess is over my head, so don't ask me to explain fully just yet). They said I could find DNS hosting for FREE or...I could just renew my hosting packing with them.

Kind of stupid to pay $100 or more for something I can get for free.

I could've done the free DNS host and let Hostmonster keep my domain, but their lack of explanation, plus the misleading help page and constant back and forth with their tech support really pissed me off. So I transferred my domain to Godaddy. So not only did Hostmonster lose my hosting business with their hosting fee jackup, but they lost me entirely as a customer for not providing a basic service that others provide for free.

Godaddy renewed my domain name at a lower price, PLUS they offer DNS hosting services for it. Unfortunately, it'll take a day or two for the DNS to update, so for now, I have to use my blogspot address before the redirect takes effect.

Eventually I'll probably get my own space back. Godaddy has some good rates, and I could get 3 years worth of hosting for $50 less than 2 years with Hostmonster. But in the spirit of saving money, I'm going to wait until we're a little more financially stable. The nice thing about WordPress is that I can export my Blogger entries and reimport them into WordPress, so it won't be an extremely difficult conversion.

So while I haven't been around much, I'm not down and out just yet.

2 blogs or just 1 super-sized one?

I've thought about creating a new blog for non-related cat posts. Often times, I'm reluctant to post about myself because, well, this is "When Cats Attack", not "When Michelle Attacks". Plus, I know some people drop by and just want to see the kitties and really don't want to hear me drone on and on about my personal life.

I don't really want to go this route though, because I know it can be a hassle for people who want to read everything to have to go to 2 separate blogs or have to add an additional feed.

So here is my solution. Over there on the left sidebar, you'll see a little grouping of category links. When you come to this site, it will default to all posts, but if you want to see just the cats, then you can click "Just Cats". If you want to read about just me & my randomness, click "Just Me". If you want to go back to all posts, then you can click on the main link at the top to go back to the main page, or just click "See it all".

For you RSS feed users, you can also subscribe to these different categories, so you only see the posts you want in your Feed Reader. Those can be found below the categories.

Good? Confusing? Crazy? If you have any questions, let me know.

Carnival of the Cats

So I've gone completely crackers this month and thought I was doing the Carnival next weekend. I apologize for that. Please be sure to check back on Tuesday and there will be a Carnival by 6pm CST.

Thanks!

We're Moving

If you're seeing this message, then that means all is well.

I'm still hanging around, but I can't justify paying for my own web space any more. So When Cats Attack is still here, but we're moving over to Blogger. My domain hosting company is in the process of pointing the web address here, so hopefully you'll be seeing this message in a few days.