28 year old
Pagan female who lives in Florida with her guy and
two cats,
loves Disney, reads fanatically, tinkers in
photography and
believes growing up is overrated.
Help support
Pet Cancer Awareness
I lost my beloved cat,
Kush, to cancer
in 2003. Cancer is the #1 disease-related cause of death for
cats and dogs. With your support, together we can find a cure
Noah's Wish
Noah's Wish is a not-for-profit, animal welfare organization,
with a straightforward mission. We exist to keep animals alive
during disasters.
ASPCA
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
There are people on the net that have nothing better to do
with their time
then be nasty to other people online. They post rude comments, spend hours
a day talking about sites they hate so much, that they well, spend hours a
day talking about them. (lame) They mock the owners and posters for their
opinions and their right to free speech. They expect everyone to fit into
their narrow-minded little world view or else they throw a temper tantrum.
To these people I say grow up.
Here's a bit of info people...the web is
a HUGE place. If you don't like what I say here, or who I am, or what I
do, or talk about, or what I look like, or the color of my hair, or
whatever asinine thing you dwell on, go somewhere else. It's
really, really easy. Honest. You just click the little "x" in
the corner of your browser and *poof* the offending, big, mean and nasty
site has disappeared.
I pay for this site. It's mine. That
means I can use it for whatever the hell I want to. Don't like it if I'm
bitching about something in my life? Oh fucking well. Go somewhere else.
Think I'm stupid for expressing my thoughts? Too fucking bad, don't read
them. Somewhere along the line, someone forgot this simple fact: Live
and let live Don't like me, cool, fine, whatever, I don't care.
This journal is NOT for you. It's for me. I'm not in it for popularity or
fame or anything stupid like that. I write it because I need to write and
express myself and get things out of my head sometimes. So read or don't,
it doesn't matter, but don't waste my time (or yours) bitching about it.
*gets off soapbox*
Tooth Drive: I
raised $550 of $850 I need for my dental work when the
other shoe dropped. One of my teeth now needs a critical
root canal - over $2,000 in costs. There's no way
I can come up with this on my own in the next 2-3
months. So I need your help. Please consider using one
of my links below. Pass my
jewelry link along to others.
Help spread the word. If I were able to get $10 from 200
people, I would be there. I don't think it's that much
or that hard. But I need help. Thank you.
Dreamhost is a great webhost with a TON
of bandwidth and features. I use them myself.
use MISSM25OFF for $25 off!
free sterling silver & gemstone jewelry.
not a scam, lovely stuff use
my link and I get 50 cents
my handcrafted jewelry, wearable horns
and more! all hand made
donations through paypal with balance,
check, savings or credit card funds
Snail Mail
M. Turner
Po Box 1484
Elfers, FL 34680
Donations Through Amazon no paypal? no problem. use your credit card privately and securely though amazon.
So, Wednesday, I had a gravel throat. Not pain, just annoyance. Thursday it went full-on sore throat. Lots of pain. Friday, I woke up pain free. Throat felt better. No problems. Until about 10pm Friday night where my cold woke up from remission apparently. I didn't sleep for crap last night. My nose won't stop, I'm sneezing, I ache and I feel like ass that's been run over. Twice. Dammit. There goes my weekend. I've taken more cold, sinus, cough, runny nose, vitamins, and lozenges in the last 20 hours then I have in a years combined.
This sucks.
See what happens? I go forever without a cold. Then you stick me with people for 2 1/2 days and *poof* I get full-on sick. I'm going to keep hiding in my apartment instead. I forgot how much of an evil cesspool offices are for getting sick.
You can still leave your addy if you want a holiday card. Oh and Sherry - is there a route or box number? I wanted to make sure. Feel free to reply there if you want since it's screened.
If anyone finds the "off" button for my runny nose, would you point it out to me? 'Cause nothing I'm taking seems to hold the magic key.
Holiday Cards! Ok, peeps. I need everyone's address! I don't care if you gave it to me last year, odds are I no longer have it. I'm getting fully swing into my holiday cards and I want to know who wants one again this year. You don't have to send one in return, though of course, it'd be appreciated.
Also, if you're pagan and want a Yule/Solstice specific card, by all means, let me know. I hand make some for my pagan friends since you just can't buy them readily. Otherwise, no worries, they're simply "Happy Holiday" ones. (An assortment of funny, pretty, handmade and other.)
Go HERE to post your address. You don't need a livejournal account to post there. It's just so they're all in one spot. You also don't have to worry because it's screened so the post won't be made public.
Some of you have my street addy. Feel free to use it. If I know you, email me = missm[at]giveneyestosee.com and I'll give it to you. Otherwise, if you want to send me a card in return, you can use my PO Box.
Miss M. Turner PO Box 1484 Elfers, FL 34680
Please do leave your address though! I love to send (and receive) holiday cards. And I know joyful holiday mail is always appreciated by everyone. Cards will be sent to everyone who leaves their address.
Success! The turkey was hung by the chimney with care..... Oh. Wait. That's not how it goes.
Our very first home-cooked turkey dinner was a success. We were a little touch-and-go with the thermometer we borrowed from one of Love's friends as it didn't seem to be working. We were worried that we were going to overcook it. We took it out based on time, looked at it and realized it needed a little more. Guess my oven just isn't as hot because the 12lb took more like 2 1/2 hours after the 30minute 500F browning stage. I thought it would have been more like 2hours since it wasn't as big as the recipe was for. (It said a 14-16lb should take 2 - 2 1/2 hours so I thought it'd be a little less.)
Worked out okay though because when it was done, it was done. Perfectly. And - oh. my. goodness. It was so juicy. I totally give it up to Alton Brown for his superb recipe. It was a lot of work getting the brine, marinading it and then working on the aromatics for inside, but...not so much that it was hard. Just a lot of little steps with very controlled timetable. It's a good thing we made the brine the night before though. We had to mix it all up and then boil it before bringing it back down to room temp. That much liquid takes a while to cool. We put it in the fridge over night. Then we got up around 8am to start our six-hour brining. Around 2ish, we got the aromatics ready and put it in the oven.
By the time everything was done, we ate around 6pm. A little later then we expected - I was thinking 5pm - but, still ok. We wanted it to be dinner and not lunch anyway.
The complete meal
All told, we had just what we wanted and nothing we didn't. Love and I don't like a lot of the icky stuff that gets served at our families dinners. (Like green bean anything, or oyster stuffing ), so we just made what we wanted to eat. The menu included 12lb butterball, butter-tasin' crescent rolls, corn, cornbread stuffing, Love's home made mashed potatoes, an apple pie and cool whip. Just perfect. Especially for just the two of us.
We don't have a dinning room table - something we've both wanted for years but just haven't had the money for - so we decorated our coffee table and ate off of that.
We put down a place matt with pumpkins on it, a Boyd's angel figurine I have that's the "angel of harvet," a leaf candle holder and two other orangey candle holders. It looked pretty.
All-in-all it was a nice day. My throat was pure misery but I tried not to let it spoil my day. Today it's not sore but I'm coughing a bit. I think the Airborne and stuff is helping. My nose isn't even that bad. *knock on wood*
Hope everyone had a nice day. We sure did and though it was a wholly different experience doing it all ourselves and just the two of us, it was very nice.
Sore Throat for Turkey Day Sadly, yesterday's irritation has turned right into pain. I woke up with a gritty feeling in my throat yesterday morning. It didn't hurt, but it felt like there was sand back there and it was highly uncomfortable. It wasn't red or anything so I thought (and hoped) it might have simply been a result of the weather shift and the cold front that came through.
I picked up some of the Airborne Gummy Lozenges yesterday when we picked up the supplies for today's dinner. It didn't help with the gravel but I'm glad I got it because it helps with the pain. Because when I woke up this morning, it was raw, sharp pain in my throat. Ow....
But we got up around 8am to start our brining of the bird. Not much longer and we'll be ready to go to stage two: cooking! Despite it all, I'm actually excited about doing this today. It's fun even if it's a lot of work. :)
I just wish I wasn't clearly getting sick. And that my damned throat wasn't so painful. Blarg. Stupid germs from being out around 100 people the last couple days all day long. *grump*
Oh well. What can you do? I'm still gonna eat some bird. Just probably rest and be even more lazy then I'd planned to compensate. Oh and keep sucking down my lozenges.
Happy Turkey Day to all and I hope you're enjoying your day.
Brr...! So it was like 48F when I got up this morning. That's damned cold for us! (Remember, this is Florida and it was a high in the upper 80's last week.) They also have the damned a/c running at full blast in here again today and so it's freezing. My poor hands are icy. I'm wearing my jacket and it's not getting any better. I think it's warmer outside then it is in this office today, jeez.
So today I'm here until 1pm. They're closing early for the holiday. And they're closed tomorrow of course as well as Friday. Which is nice. Poor Love's company is ass and are always open on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Our turkey's been thawing in the fridge the last couple days. I've been reading and re-reading over my recipe to make sure I'm comfortable with it. I honestly think it'll be ok but you know, there's a lot of turkey day pressure for the turkey coming out ok. Especially when you've never done it before. I know it's mostly hype that a turkey is impossible to cook but it's still hard to overcome that little worry that it's an entirely new cooking experience. *chuckles*
I'm getting so much damned spam lately. It's driving me crazy. Especially since I have the exact same mail filters and spamassassin settings on my domains and only one is sending me this slew of junk. I mean, literally 300+ are getting through every day. Most go into my junk folder automatically once they download, but not all of them. Not to mention, they shouldn't be getting through to start with. It's quite irritating. I might open a support ticket just to see if there's anything going on. I've never had this kind of problem since I configured my spamassasin for the domains like...jeez, last year? Or earlier this year? I've got it very aggressive. I've got it set to just auto delete. And yet...blarg. It just keeps coming.
I've had a couple people contact me and work out some lovely custom jewelry pieces for the holidays. It's certainly not too late to shop for something pre-made or contact me (phoenixfire{at}phoenixfiredesigns.com) to discuss a custom item. Remember, handmade artisian jewelry is WAY nicer then the cheap junk at the mall.
Zzzzzz.... It would be a Bad Thing (tm) to just drift right off to sleep here at my temp job desk, right? I mean, like they wouldn't just let it slide would they? Yeah, didn't think so. Just checking.
What a absurdly windy night we had last night! 20-30mph sustained, howling winds. From about 4pm through at least 8:30am when I went into work. We had more and heavier wind then we did during Wilma. It was crazy. It was bringing our cold front in. It's still windy now but like 15-25mph windy more in gusty spurts then last night. It was insane how loud it was. It's nice out there now though. High 60's. The sun is warm (of course) but the wind is cool and it's breezy, so it's got that real Fall feel to it. (Which doesn't help my utterly overwhelming desire to curl up in bed and doze right now...)
The bad thing about super windy days like this is it drives my allergies bonkers. Something about the wind blowing in that stirs up all the schmutz and makes my nose run like crazy. I had to take an allergy pill this morning which left me all jittery and now...ugh, now I'm super droswy and ready to just drop. I swear, I could fall asleep as I'm sitting here if I didn't actively try not to.
We're going to be trying our hand at cooking our very first turkey this Thanksgiving. Never done it before. Never even come close. I've been watching a lot of Food Network turkey specials lately. I've settled on trying the Good Eats (Alton Brown) recipe. Seems to make sense and is pretty straight-forward. It'll just be the two of us so we'll have like a million pounds of turkey each to handle - the smallest we could find was almost 12lbs - but hey, what's Thanksgiving without a stupid amount of turkey? It should be a project. But, I've gotten pretty darn decent at cooking (if I do say so myself) the last couple years so I think we will be able to manage it. And heck, in case we can't, Cracker Barrel is doing full on turkey dinner take-out.
Brr. They've got the air on full-blast here so despite the fact I'm in a long-sleeved knit shirt, I'm positively freezing. It's not hot enough outside to compensate for the amount of artic a/c they've got running. My poor hands are turning blue.
Speaking of a/c, we had to have our entire wall unit replaced at the apartment yesterday. The unit had a bad freon leak and was freezing over every couple weeks. Which, besides being annoying, makes for an expensive power bill. (It runs for any number of hours as it's freezing up but getting hotter in the apartment, then you have to run the fan to dethaw it, followed of course by having to re-cool the apartment back down.) They made a mess. Cut out the drywall and everything. Though holy crap, it's blowing hard now. I think I found out why our power bill was so stupidly high this summer. We had $170, $150 and $160 power bills three months in a row. Which is insane. Especially for an apartment! Even during the hottest months, we've never had a bill of more then around $100-120 at any previous apartment. Low air flow and leaks - well, there you are. The system ran far too damned much and jacked up our power bill despite all efforts to convserve and watch the usage.
*hums*
Ok, I guess that's it. I'm just rambling. It happens when I'm bored. Heh.
Goblet of Fire, Weekend, Workday This will most likely be a long and rambling entry. Sorry in advance.
Mornings.... Ugh. I am currently excessively urpy. I feel like I'm going to be sick. I think it's the whole my-body-revolts-at-mornings thing. I got up and my stomach immediately was off. And it's just getting worse. Blah. I hate mornings. More then that, I hate how poorly my body responds to schedule changes and how sick I get when I get up early and how it simply will not just get used to it no matter what I try. It's been a problem for my entire life. I quite simply get ill from being on a "normal" schedule. I stay sick until I revert back to my normal. It's just something that most people can't understand. But think about how badly your body would respond to getting up at say, 2am to start your day.
Anyway, I'm trying my best to smile and not vomit. I'm here today and tomorrow and a half day Wednesday. Then another full day the following Tuesday. The money will help but it's just so hard to verbalize how hard of a toll it has on me physically. At home, on my own schedule, and being able to lay down when I need to, most people don't see my chronic pain issues. They don't see the IBS. And my migraines are managable. But violently shift my schedule, screw up my sleeping, my access to facilities when my stomach gets grumpy and stick me under florescent lighting for eight hours and well...my house of cards comes tumbling down. I don't look "sick" or "unhealthy" so people don't believe it's possible that I am.
Eh. Enough of that. It doesn't do any good to complain I guess. (Which, is actually another reason people don't believe the chronic nature of my issues. I tend to just live with them quietly.)
Harry Potter and the Quest for Tickets This weekend, I (and millions of other people) wanted to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in theaters. I still have two movie tickets from my Blinkgo wins and they're not good at our normal multiplex. (AMC) So when I look at the places around here I can use them at, the IMAX is one of them. Cool, I think. We'll see it there! Yeah, apparently like every other person in the entire region thought so too. They were sold out every single show on Saturday when we arrived. They were also sold out every single show for Sunday. Well, so much for that. But I was really bummed. I wanted to see it. I didn't want to wait until the following weekend. So we caved and hit the AMC anyway. The show was 7:45pm. We got there around 6:15pm anticipating there would be a lot of crowding. I'm very picky on where I like to sit, so we always have to get there early to get in line. What I wasn't expecting an hour and a half early was like a hundred people already in line ahead of us! Worked out ok though. It was one of the gigunza theaters (yes, that's a real word. Honest. ) so we got the seats we wanted. I packed an assortment of the 24lbs of candy we got at Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party so we had plenty of treats.
Thoughts on Goblet of Fire Ok, so first off, I liked it. And I definitely liked this director better then the last one. (I'm sorry, but I really, really disliked him and his vision of the HP world. And I hated some of the large and important things they cut out.) Anyway, this one I liked more. But I did have a few complaints. Most of them are the same thing I'd read from a few others already. They blew through the World Cup far too quickly. It wasn't the massive event that it should have been. It was also odd that Molly wasn't in it at all. And that Arthur was barely in it. (He also didn't look like how I envision Mr. Weasley but eh, that's me.) The story was also a little hurried. It was kinda rushed. I realize it's because of how much they had to cram into the movie, but...it felt a little breathless of a pace. The writing had a few rough spots I thought but it was obviously because they were trying to include more then they could show. Like after Harry gets the egg and Hermoine is on the bridge with him, she says, "But you told me you figured it out weeks ago!" It just sounded like it came out of nowhere. Having read the book, I realized it was a nod to that whole subplot of the challenge of the egg, but from a movie-only perspective, it felt like it just kinda came out of nowhere.
Those were all minor peeves though. The only major problem I had with it was Dumbledore. They made him FAR too angry, mad and hostile. He's none of the above. He's calm; he's serene. He is both childlike and posesses a wisdom born of long years. But he wasn't any of those in this one. When he grabbed Harry and shoke him, asking if Harry'd put his name in the Cup, ugh. It was frightening. You thought he was going to hurt Harry. It didn't come off that he was terribly frightened for him, it came off like he was pissed.
All-in-all though, it was quite good. And it felt more oriented to the readers of the books then the others in my opinion. Not in a way that made it unaccessable to the non-reader, but just like small nods of more inside references.
Did I mention it's on crack though?
*hums*
Well, I guess that's it. Days like this, I remember how lovely my iPod is. I've got it plugged into the pc speakers here and have, what, three days worth stored on here? And I'm only using like 5 or 6 gigs of my 20 at the moment. It's great.
Mkay, out for now I guess. I've got some mail to sort. Not that it'll take long but might as well get to it.
), so we just made what we wanted to eat. The menu included 12lb butterball, butter-tasin' crescent rolls, corn, cornbread stuffing, Love's home made mashed potatoes, an apple pie and cool whip. Just perfect. Especially for just the two of us.
It should be a project. But, I've gotten pretty darn decent at cooking (if I do say so myself) the last couple years so I think we will be able to manage it. And heck, in case we can't, 
Worked out ok though. It was one of the gigunza theaters (yes, that's a real word. Honest. 