KirstenL4W

No offense to anyone who is on MySpace (especially those on MY friends list!), but most of the people on there are not the sharpest tools in the shed. My intro clearly states that I do not collect friends and I will not just randomly add people just because they asked. I checked my email earlier today and saw that I had 2 friends requests. One was from Adam (172640993 if it’s still up), who is a 22 year old Leo. The other one was from Jonathan (172639018), a 23 year old Capricorn. Now get this - both profiles were exactly the same, right down to the friends lists (which included Jenna Jameson). What kind of idiot does this person think I am? I also got a friends request from a local crap band. Just because I live in Las Vegas and clearly don’t have the same taste in music as you do, which anyone would know if they looked at my friends list, doesn’t mean that I want to add you so that I can have some God-awful music blaring from my home page.

MySpace has its purpose, I suppose, but I just don’t understand why any intelligent, internet-savvy person would want to use it. The only reason I’m on it is to keep in touch with my nephew, and he never emails me anymore (because he’s 13 and 13 year old boys don’t email their aunts).

3/30/07 7:09am update - I just checked my email and “Donald” (173334809) who is 21 and a Cancer, just tried to add me. I sent a message to MySpace to report the abuse, gave them all 3 user numbers, and told them to do something about the bots. We’ll see if anything happens (yeah, right).

Yes, my friends, it is that time of year. I thought I could avoid it, somehow, but no, nature had other plans. The winds that we’ve had this week have forced pollen spores into every crevice of my body, along with dust and other particulate matter that I’d rather not think about. I thought I’d be fine, but yesterday the pressure started. Just one side, but I sure was sneezing a lot. I’m still sneezing, my left sinus in my cheek is painful at best, and I can’t see straight. It doesn’t help that it hurts to wear my glasses right now. I’ve taken the allergy meds, and though they keep my nose from running a marathon (thus saving me money in tissues), it does nothing to help the pressure or my vision. Right now, the main pollen in the air is the mulberry tree. Where the heck in the desert are the mulberry trees? I can’t recall seeing any here. I know that soon the olive trees will be blooming, but for some reason the thick coating of yellow pollen they leave all over the city doesn’t bother me as much. Whoever said that moving to the desert was good for allergies had no idea what they were talking about.

Weather map courtesy The Weather Channel

…will add an air of sophistication…

I found a cool new tool to add to my template over at BlogU. It allows the pullquote formatting that you see in this post. I’m always looking for easy ways to format my blog to make it even better, and this pullquote stuff will add an air of sophistication to my posts. But don’t worry, I won’t overuse them by putting them in every single post. That’s just annoying.

Where in the world have you been? My travels in the past decade have not been as extensive as I would like them to be, but I couldn’t live with either one of my parents forever (as much as my mom would like that!). I checked off every state and country I have ever set foot in, so while to some of you these figures are artificially inflated, it works for me.

Gale challenged her readers to an IQ test, found on Blogthings. Here’s what I got:

Your IQ Is 125

Your Logical Intelligence is Below AverageYour Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Exceptional

A Quick and Dirty IQ Test

Though I did score higher than Gale did, I did not score quite as high as I did on a more in-depth test I took last year. You can see the results of that test here. But if we average them out, I have an IQ 136, which I am still quite happy with.What is your IQ on the Blogthings test vs. the Testriffic test?

There’s a bit of a scandal going on in the blogosphere. It concerns Bobby from The Bestest Blog of All Time. When the site was started, it was supposed to be a simple link exchange - exchange links with him and you have a one-stop shop for finding all sorts of new links. Great idea, and I exchanged links with him, and got a decent amount of traffic for my little blog. But then Bobby started getting full of himself. He redesigned the site to make it harder to navigate, harder to read, and recently, hasn’t even been updating with new links, which was the main purpose of his blog in the first place. Sure, he still has little about nothing worthwhile scattered in between his PPP posts, but on his site, I really don’t care about the posts. I just wanted an easy source for new links. I haven’t yet decided on whether or not I’ll take down the link. I need to sit on that for a bit and see what develops.

Since Bobby has been seriously slacking, I’ve been finding new blogs to read elsewhere. I go thru all the links on the blogs that I link to, and chase links again from there. Chasing links is much more fun than expecting them to come to me, and I’m almost assured that I won’t come across any crap. (Hello, this is my furst blog post and i am an eggspert on how to make moneey bloging). No, chasing links is a much better way to find blogs that offer quality content, even if that content doesn’t interest me at all. If I like you and want to read you on a regular basis, I will link to you, simple as that. I like it when people link to me, but I’m not going to be a link hound. If you like me, link to me. That’s the way it should be.

One more thing that bugs me. I understand that certain people want to keep certain blogs private. That’s not an issue. But what bugs me is when people make their profiles private. Now, when I see you left an interesting comment on my blog or someone else’s blog and I want to check you out a bit more, I can’t even see what blogs you have because I can’t read your profile. It’s not that I want to stalk you or anything. I just want to find and read interesting blogs. And privacy concerns? Well, this is the internets, but you’re not required to put your name, dob, SSN and other major identifying details on your profile. You just have to have a name, and it doesn’t have to be real. So why can’t I read your profile to find out more about witty commenters?

Here’s my advice: If you’re going to start a blog, have some real content on there that people actually want to read. Make your profile public, even if your blog isn’t. You can always put a note in there on why the blog is private. And if you do start something and can’t continue, either pass the buck or have a compelling reason on why you’re discontinuing.

What do cheese and lemons have in common? Well, for starters they’re both yellow. And they both have to do with weird food issues I have.

It’s no secret to those who know me that I ? Pasta. I also lurve garlic. So one evening, when out to eat at a local chain restaurant with my mother, I saw Lemon Garlic Chicken Pasta on the menu. It sounded good, and this place was a safe bet as far as ordering “outside the box,” so to speak, so I ordered it. But something just wasn’t quite right. I could not get over the feeling that it was laced with lemon dishsoap. It didn’t taste soapy, but that artificial lemon scented cleaner feeling was definitely there.

A couple months later I thought I’d bring in one of my usual micro-meals to work. This one was also a lemony dish, and again I got that weird lemon cleaner vibe. That was it. I was done with lemony dishes. I don’t even put lemon on my fish. Who said that seafood had to be served with lemons, anyway?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate lemons all around. I love a good refreshing glass of lemondade. And lemon meringue pie is da bomb. Lemony sweets in general I love. It’s lemony savory dishes that I take issue with.

Now on to the cheese. I have the opposite affliction with cheese. I love cheese, especially the hard cheeses that have a nice sharp flavor to them. Bring on the Cheddar! But desserts? Nope, not for me. No cheesecake. No cannolis. No dessert foods that involve cheese. It’s just too heavy for me. I like my desserts lighter in texture and calorie density (ok, maybe not that second one, but dessert should not sit like a brick in my stomach).

I do have many other food likes and dislikes, but these are the ones I get the most comments on, because of the rules that come with them. Yes, I’m weird. Go ahead, tease me all you want. I dare you. I’m still not having Chicken Piccata for dinner with cheesecake for dessert - even if it’s chocolate cheesecake.

In case you didn’t know, I am a redhead. A natural redhead. It runs in the family. My grandmother on my father’s side used to have red hair before it turned gray. My aunt used to have red hair but it turned blonde. My cousin has red hair. My uncle has red hair. My niece has red hair. And one of my uncles on my mom’s side has reddish hair. You can definitely tell who we are.

As a kid, I used to hate my red hair. Red hair attracts all sorts of attention that I just did not want, since I was a painfully shy kid. As an adult, I learned to love it. I don’t like being the same as everyone else. I usually don’t like standing out like a sore thumb, but being just different enough that people are envious rather than afraid. Red hair is perfect for that, especially when I tell them that it’s natural.

Recently, I have noticed a couple gray hairs popping up. More than a couple - maybe a few. Maybe a few more than that. Enough to be visible and bother me. All I know is, at 32 years old, I am not ready for gray hairs. I don’t even have kids yet! Are kids supposed to be what give you gray hair? No, this must not be allowed to continue. I am seriously rethinking the natural redhead thing. I might have to visit my friend Miss Clairol soon.

I do have the fiery temper that redheads are famous for. I’m generally a mild-mannered, non-confrontational person. But piss me off and forget it. That famous redheaded temper comes screaming out. All the other assumptions about redheads, the ones about being a good lover and such, I have no comment. And I could never be attracted to a man with red hair. I think I’d feel too much like I’m dating someone in my family, and that is just. so. wrong.

You’ll notice that I’m part of a ring called Redheads Rock. I have a cool graphic for that one, but I’ve been lazy and haven’t put it up there yet. Today I was doing a bit of websurfing and came across another blog. *Red has a great post with all sorts of wonderful quotes about redheads.

So there’s my post for today. If you want the summarized version, here it is:

Yeah, so I have red hair. No, I don’t dye it. What’s it to you?

I feel old. I was…

• 27 years old at the time of the 9-11 attack on America. It was scary day, I won’t ever forget it
• 25 years old on the first day of Y2K and very hung over.
• 23 years old when Princess Diana was killed in a car crash. I cried when I saw the princes walking behind the casket
• 20 years old at the time of Oklahoma City bombing. I felt sick to my stomach when I heard that there was a daycare that was directly hit
• 20 years old when O. J. Simpson was charged with murder. What a circus that was!
• 18 years old at the time of the 93 bombing of the World Trade Center. I woke my mom up from a nap to tell her.
• 16 years old when Operation Desert Storm began. I was hoping to be the first generation that had never seen our country at war. I cried because I wasn’t.
• 15 years old during the fall of the Berlin Wall. There were some German exchange students in my school. What an experience that was for them, being in America when history was being written at home.
• 11 years old when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. I was in 6th grade. I remember this day vividly, because my 5th grade teacher applied for it.
• 9 years old when Apple introduced the Macintosh. I don’t remember the actual release of this, but I do remember using the Apple IIE in elementary school.
• 9 years old during Sally Ride’s travel in space. This was so not a big deal to me. I don’t even remember it.
• 6 years old when Pres. Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr. I didn’t even know about this until nearly 20 years later when I read an article in Reader’s Digest.
• 5 years old at the time the Iran hostage crisis began. I remember being in 1st grade watching the hostages being released on TV. I had no idea what the significance was at the time.
• 2 years old on the U.S.’s bicentennial Fourth of July. My aunt still has some of that bicentennial eagle, flag, 1776/1976 decor in her house. She’s working on it, though.
• not yet 1 year old when President Nixon left office. All I get out of this is to tell people that I was born during the tail end of the Nixon administration. Doesn’t work, though - they still think I was born during the Reagan era.

Did I mention that I am getting new gray hairs daily? I may need to rethink this natural redhead thing.

Quiz found here.

So far I’ve worked out at Curves exactly twice. Sometimes I am doing things right after work (like going to dinner with friends) and I don’t want to be all sweaty. But the rest of the time, I’m just tired. Take yesterday for example. I got ready to work out, changed into my sweats, then got in the car and went home. I was exhausted. All this week I’ve been tired and going to sleep way earlier than usual. At this rate, I’ll get down to my goal weight in about 5 years - maybe. That’s just with exercise. I need to change the diet part of it too. My current diet, while not terrible, still falls under the “could do better” category. Last night I dusted off my South Beach diet book and had a flip through. I have to go shopping this weekend, so I think I’ll start that up again. It’s so hard when one falls off the wagon. Last time I was on SB, my roommate would complain a lot because the stuff I cooked had odor and it would wake her up. She insisted that if she cooked when I was asleep it would wake me up, but I’m not like that. I don’t have a freaky sense of smell like she does. If she dropped all the baking dishes and pots and pans, then I’d probably wake up, but a smell won’t do it. Anyhoo, it’s a moot point now. Like I care if my yummy cooking smells wake up the neighbors. As long as I know that I’m eating healthier, then I’ll feel better. Everyone else be damned if they don’t like the steps I’m taking to better my health.

Ok, so the blog design person I contacted isn’t taking new jobs right now. I emailed my friend VegasRic since in addition to his mad Photoshop skills, he also has mad web design skills (though you’d never know it from his blog). I don’t need anything fancy, just his brain and his software to come up with something a bit more personalized. I’ll keep on working on things with my html cheat sheet, and the few books I bought, to see what I can come up with on my own. I have a few things done so far, and it’s kinda the direction I want to go in, but I’d also like it to look a bit more feminine, without being all over-scrolly and such.

I would love to have a bunch of designs at the ready to change them at whim, sorta like the way I change my desktop picture on my home computer. And yes, Blogger still needs to come up with way more designs. The ones they have are decent, at least in a design sense they are good, but they lack variety as far as different themes go.

At least I’m throwing myself into more web design, which came to a screeching halt when I switched over to beta.