randomosity

* Well, the person I voted for in yesterday's special election won. She still has to go up against the Republican candidate at the end of Sept (yesterday's election was the primary) but it looks pretty good for her since the dead guy they're replacing was a Democrat and the district is pretty heavily Dem. Not many Repubs turned out yesterday, but then, there was only one candidate in the Repub primary, so they probably figured why bother.

* The rain held off for the entire Sox game yesterday, which I'm sure made my mom and friend M very happy. And it was a GREAT game. Come-from-behind victory, last-minute bottom-of-the-ninth heroics, the works. I hope our game next week is as good.

* Yesterday I saw something kind of odd on the way home. There was a car parked at a bus stop and a woman in uniform standing there looking at the back of the car with notepad in hand. Okay, all normal so far; she's writing the car a ticket. But then I noticed that next to her, there was a man in uniform, also looking at the car, also holding a notepad. And then I noticed two more!

Best I can figure, they were meter maids in training, practicing writing parking tickets. (And as three of them were men and the woman was middle-aged, there really MUST be a better term than "meter maid.") (And it's not often that you get to write a sentence with three gerunds/participles in a row. Go me.)

* In other "things we see on the road" news, I forgot to mention that on Sunday when we were leaving the cottage we saw a family of four deer! Standing right there by the side of the road. The area around the cottage is fairly wooded, but there are also a lot of houses, and it's a loooonnnng time since I can remember seeing any deer around there -- let alone four at once! It was cool. Mom and I oohed and ahhed about it for miles. :)

more later....

do you?

If you're like me, you check "Joule" regularly to see who on LJ has friended and unfriended you. (To use Joule, just go to http://marnanel.org/joule?user=chlaal but replace "chlaal" with your username.) And if you're like me, when someone unfriends you, you wonder why. (Especially if it's someone you know in RL!) You wonder whether you did something to upset them, or said something on your LJ that pissed them off, or what. Maybe you even click on their username to see whether they made a post about it (like, "I'm unfriending a bunch of people who pissed me off" or "I'm too busy to read my whole flist so I'm cutting down" or whatever). And then you wonder whether you should unfriend them.

And then there are the people who will friend you and unfriend you repeatedly. Why do people do that? I'm not asking rhetorically, I really want to know.

In case you aren't aware, LJ has things called filters. Filters can be used for two purposes: to control who sees your posts, and to control which posts you see on your friend-page. You can set up a "default" filter that controls whose posts will appear when you go to www.livejournal.com/users/[yourname]/friends. So if you get annoyed with a particular person and want to stop reading them for a while -- why not just remove them from your default filter? It's a lot easier than unfriending and refriending. And the beauty of it is, they will never know. Some of you reading this are not on my default filter, meaning I don't read your journals every day. But you can't know who. And everyone's happier that way, don't you think?

I just don't get it. I don't get the constant unfriend-refriend-unfriend game. Why?

lack of empathy

(LOL, piney61 told Kevin Millar to "please hit some HRs or something" and he hit two! sweet!)

You know one thing that toddlers sorely lack? Sympathy. And patience. Okay, that's two things, so sue me.

Specifically, sympathy and patience with their mama when she has to spend all evening running to the bathroom with delightful diarrhea. Toddlers in my experience ;) are remarkably intolerant of such behavior. I'm sure it's just a design flaw or something. Probably to be fixed in the next release.

Yeah, so I don't know whether I should really say that I'm having diarrhea as a symptom/result of this pregnancy, because it's not too frequent (thank goodness), I'm talking about once a week here. But still, that's consistently at least once a week since I got pregnant, whereas before that I don't think I had had it in months. So, one does have to wonder. Specifically, one has to wonder "what the hell can I do about this and how can I keep it from continuing throughout the entire pregnancy??"

Oh, and then one has to go entertain one's toddler and give him some good attention to keep him from total meltdown. And also, drink some water. 'Cause one doesn't want to get dehydrated and such.

Luckily, one's -- eh, to hell with that -- Luckily, my aforementioned toddler went to sleep pretty easily and only a little later than what-used-to-be-usual-until-a-couple-months-ago. And so, I must away to bed myself, for lo the earth doth spin apace, and the morning cometh way too goddamn fucking early. Forsooth, y'all.

what's wrong with this picture?

I'm taking an online survey and it goes like this:

question 1: are you currently a) pregnant b) trying to get pregnant c) not pregnant and not trying d) not sure
(I answer "a")

question 2: which trimester are you in? a) first b) second c) third
(I answer "a")

question 3: is this your first pregnancy?
(I answer "no")

question 4: how many babies have you given birth to in the past 6 months?
(I answer 0 (zero) and thank goodness I'm not pregnant again after just having had a baby less than 6 months ago!)

question 5: how old are you?
(I answer 31)

question 6: are you male or female?

LOL!!!