Long Time Gone

Well today is the first time I am posting in about four months or longer. The first thing I want to say is, I guess, related to that. I decided to note here (in direct contradiction of a promise of sorts to the people at the AAYSR site who did my review way back around the time I was last posting, give or take a few days/weeks) that I finally posted my 100th tweet on twitter within the last half hour. If the time stamps don't reflect what I say it's because I have the time zone wrong on the blog but haven't bothered to change it since that is the way it has been since the beginning. That is my excuse anyway. It is 1 hour behind (Pacific Time I think it is called - it is the West Coast time regardless - ie: BC & California). I always forget what our time is called and that is also why I haven't corrected it. I guess it would be easy enough to ask someone a bit smarter to tell me what it is. Anyway, on to other things.

I am not really sure whether to start at the beginning of when I was last here and move forward to now or to go backwards. It might seem obvious to start at the beginning but I think there are two reasons to start at the end at work back. Maybe three. First, the new stuff is freshest in mind. Second, the new stuff is kind of the reason I finally am getting off my duff to post again. Third, my vitamin d deficiency being what it is, I guess there are only two after all. LOL. And no, in my absence I have not lost my love of the term LOL. :) Well, I guess a decision has to be made. Oh, before I get to that, I remembered #3. Posts are by default backwards so I thought that might be a good reason to do it that way. Nonetheless, I have made the bold decision (pun intended) to go with oldest to newest. Just seems to make more sense to me to go chronologically.

Keep in mind that the older stuff may (or may not depending on how things work - which you can never tell) be sparser in detail as time may have taken it's toll on my memory of those events. See vitamin d deficiency in previous paragraph - lol. So onward and upward (backward?) to about 4 months ago. First off, I just went into edit to see what some of my last stuff was although I had an idea (of the very last one anyway) since I was stuck there so long. I mean, periodically I would come back here and debate a bit whether to post or not. After all, obviously, some things did happen - not the least of which way my birthday!, but I never could get in the spirit. In going into edit, I took note of exactly how long it's been. It turns out it is actually not quite 4 months. In fact, it is exactly 3 months and 3 days (3 hours and 3 minutes? Probably not. LOL). In case you are thinking, so what?, I mention that to note that I was gone slightly less long than I thought which makes me slightly better at posting (and therefore a slightly better person. LOL).

I guess I want to mention near the beginning that my review at AAYSR ( http://www.iwillfuckingtearyouapart.com/ ) was not great but went much better than it could have. The date of my review was Thursday, September 9th, 2010. The reviewer (Madame Bellicose), in her comment to me (approximately comment 40 or 45) did note that she didn't say she hated my blog, just that it was too much yapping about twitter, facebook, and especially, blogging about blogging. LOL. I have to admit, I can't exactly completely blame her for that view. There were alot of those type of posts. I would, in my defense, like to say though, that if you treat my blog like the treasure trove it is - lol and are prepared to hunt for nuggets of gold - lol, I am sure you could find a few. And after all, they only would have needed to read about 100 posts in their entirety. LOL. By the way, now may be as good a time as any to share a joke I came across at about this time about LOLing since I've been doing so much of it. I can't remember where exactly I came across it, for attribution purposes, but I think it might have been at imdb. Then again, maybe not. Well, here it is. I seriously doubt whether you are LOLing as much as you say you are. LOL. :) That struck me as somewhat true and definitely funny but in my case maybe not the most accurate.

If you didn't want to spend all that time scanning back to get to Sept 9th on the review site, I will give you another way to check it out. Go to my second last post, ironically titled "I'm Back, And I'm So Excited" and go to the comments section at the bottom. There is only one comment. It is from Madame Bellicose. If you click on the link she made directly in her short comment, where she highlighted the word reviewed it will take you not only to the AAYSR site but directly to my review (which after all was 3 months of reviews ago so I understand if you don't want to wade through all of them - although I must say the site's reviews are awfully funny and can be addicting)...

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... don't worry I'll wait for you to read my review. LOL. Done yet? Agreed, disagreed, wet your pants laughing? Whichever, I am glad to have been reviewed. It's nice to be validated. Someone reviewed me!

Next up, in checking the web to see when exactly the Chilean miners were freed I found an article datelined October 11th (my birthday!) that said it would be the following Wednesday. I briefly mention the miners as it is a feel good story that beats hearing about the Chilean earthquake. Let me just say that I am looking forward to my Chilean FB, etc. friend FJ, who has posted a guest column here as have I on his blog ( http://english-fj.blogspot.com ) getting back to his blogging and writing his thoughts on the subject. I was about to say "him getting back to his blogging schedule" but as he pointed out when I asked him about his not blogging on his English blog for even longer than me (our last posts were the same day but his last post, which you will see if you follow the link to his page, is a guest post by me - his last post of his own was about a month earlier still!) he told me he "doesn't blog on a schedule. LOL. Come on FJ. If I can do it so can you.

BTW, if you check out FJ's blog, you might be in for a treat if you like shorter posts. Because English is his second language and the English blog (he has a Spanish one you can link to there if you happen to read Spanish) is to practice his English and, while not a stated aim of his - lol, so I can read some of his thoughts and not have to use the annoying mechanical translation feature that is a blessing, I guess, but does not work that well. Including my guest post, FJ only has about 17 posts up on the English blog so far, so if you want to check out a new blog that you can easily read in it's entirety in a short time, then check him out. Also, if you are so inclined, please consider "officially" following him as he only has about 5 followers so far. This may also be a reason why he isn't posting. I'm sure he would really appreciate it. Also, he loves comments (don't we all - lol).

As I said, the dateline on the miner story I read to get the rough date of the rescue was on my birthday, which brings me to, well, my birthday. LOL. This is where the laughing will stop for awhile. Some bad stuff happened the day I celebrated my birthday as well as, I forgot about till I mentioned the birthday, on Sept 19th which was shortly after the review so the first crummy thing I am about to mention could have been placed between those two stories but it actually is better this way as the two stories are same shit, different pile kind of things. So from the beginning, in somewhat short form. On Sunday night, Sept 19th, at about 8 pm I was getting off the bus at the stop near my mom's house. I had just had dinner with a friend at my mom's house, then went to a discount movie with the same friend not too far from mom's by bus. After the movie, we went our separate ways. She back home on the other side of town and me back to mom's to get a ride home with my brother.

As I am getting off the bus I did not notice it (I definitely pay more attention now - but that's closing the barn door a little late) but some asshole on a bike was lurking. The thing is the bus stop is within spitting distance of my mom's house. You can see the garage from the bus stop. It's about 1/2 a block away through a parking lot and down a flight of steps behind a building. Anyway, I am a little less than halfway through the lot probably when said asshole rides up behind me and takes my purse. Yep. There's a first (and hopefully last!) time for everything. Right out of my hands. I could feel the tug but unfortunately, instead of that making me reflexively hold tighter, it made me let go. Because it was raining slightly and also probably because I happened to yell something at the young kid on the bike (that's the closest I could come to a description for the police - a youngish man, teen to early twenties) he got about 20-30 feet away, I would guess, before he fell off the bike.

I am not in the shape to run up and get him not to mention I wasn't expecting it to happen so I was even slower than that but I headed towards him and he ran off without the bike. Lucky for me, I didn't catch up to him. Who knows what he would have done. There would have only been a very slight chance I would have gotten my purse back and could have gotten hurt. Still, it's possible I could have yelled enough to scare him away. I'll never know. So anyway, I decided he wasn't coming back for the bike too. I took it down the steps and through the alley and back yard and left it in the back yard out of sight of the alley he had just run down like Speedy Gonzales (I just got the bike down the stairs and looked down the alley and he was a little more than 1/2 a block away at the beginning of the next block just standing there, resting I assume) for the police to take. I was hoping that maybe they could i.d. him through the bike if, on the off chance, it was some dumb kid doing this on a lark as a newbie and on his own registered bike. Ha. As if.

Well, one good thing I have to say about this was that when I called the police they certainly responded! They were there within no more than about 15 minutes and they sent three officers. Maybe one of them was a student or a teacher. Not that it helped though. Two of them searched the immediate neighborhood for either the kid or, more likely, the discarded purse but came up empty. The officer who took my statement was nice enough but I am not sure he wasn't new or something as he tried calling my cellphone (as if they would answer and if they did that they'd tell him anything) rather than asking/telling me about possibly GPSing the location. Of course, I lost far more than I originally thought about at first glance. Thankfully, I had little money ($10) in there but of course it's all the things you have on you. The phone especially. And the bus pass. The i.d. Drivers License. Library Card (a bigger deal than you might think - just think how many items can be taken out at once and at what cost per item if you forget to cancel it).

Fast forward to the day we celebrated my birthday. My birthday fell on Thanksgiving Monday this year so we celebrated it on a Friday. That day, before we went out to a nice restaurant for a family/friends celebration where my mom celebrates all the kids (me, my sisters and my brother) birthdays on my birthday (I guess cause I'm the baby - lol along with a couple of my friends. Just before we went for dinner, mom and I went out into the garden to take the heads off all the carrots. One of the few things left in the garden. Being stupid, I, the last one out the door, decided not to lock it. I did close the door. But I didn't lock it. Especially stupid since I usually do. Well sure enough. Someone "breaks" in. I didn't even know my purse was gone until after dinner since I didn't bother to look for it when we went out since I wasn't paying so I thought I'd leave it at home. Uh huh. I noticed pretty much right when I we got back because I got money and a gift card that I went to put in my purse. That was g-o-n-e.

Thankfully, my mother had her purse in a less visible place and the person who came in was looking for a quick score. Also, thankfully, even though it was about 3 weeks between each purse snatching (a incredibly short period in which to be robbed twice! but an extremely long time to wait to do what I did) I didn't yet replace my i.d. and although I did replace my phone I didn't yet activate it so it was safely in a drawer at home. Also, my bus pass was in a different location entirely by sheer luck even though we of course had driven to the restaurant. I guess it is also lucky we didn't chance upon the person who took it as, again, who knows what level of larceny they were at and what they would have done. On a side note, that is to say looking on the bright side, the dinner it self was lovely, everyone enjoyed it and as it happened after and not before the robbery all my gifts were intact.

At the beginning of this post I said that the earlier stuff might be of sparser detail due to the time factor. This was obviously not the case. For one thing, I didn't think about what I was going to write about for the early stuff until I started writing. So I didn't even think about the robberies. Or the fact that the details would still be fresh (like a gaping wound) in my mind in all the minuate. So it works out well that the last stuff I want to discuss in getting back into things on the blog (and that I had planned out a bit more than the early stuff) is all stuff that I feel now like summarizing rather than going into detail on. There is time enough for that later. These things are much more recent, and thereby fresh, so I can come back to them in more detail at a later time. I'll mention three things. First, on the "technical" side of things (again disregarding my promise of sorts to the AAYSR people), I finally learned to copy and paste. LOL.

I know, I know. How pathetic. Since I promised to keep the rest short, I will leave the sorry details for another day. They are kind of funny. I think so anyway. Next up, in the celebrity news section, there is the news of the royal wedding s. Yes plural. Again, not to go into detail but in reading about William and Kate, I came across the news (almost 6 months later - lol) that Prince Albert of Monaco is also getting married next year. More on my thoughts, as a big-time royalty watcher in the past, about both of these upcoming events in a future post or two. Finally, I will leave you on a funny note. Again, it involves my Chilean friend FJ. I haven't been on FB for ages until recently and when I got back on I asked him if he was on imdb.com so we could follow each other there as well as we also do on goodreads.com. Anyway, that was the main conversation but is beside the point as far as getting to the funny.

In one of those recent talks, the most boring subject in the world came up. The weather. Yet this is where the funny comes in. When I told him how cold it was here as of just recently he said, and I quote, "When I pick up ice from the freezer, I try to imagine your weather". LMAO. Kind of like if I were to say "When I sit by a campfire, I try to imagine your weather". Well that's it for now. Next time, maybe a little more on some of the things I just touched on. Or maybe I'll talk about something that I left out - my new favorite tv shows or some past, present, and future movies I have seen/would like to see since I spend so much time browsing around imdb. I did decide that so as to, sort of keep my promise that I mentioned today twice before, I will perhaps talk about movies/tv (a la reviews, previews), news in general (both serious and silly) and even, yikes some personal stories that I promised more of, way back when I first started this blog (see my first entry).

Bye for now, Hope to see you soon but I think I'm through with the promises. Too much pressure. LOL.

Carmen