Post posted by Sacha on October 22nd, 2009 at 16:18
As I’m writing this, my wet socks are annoying the hell out of me. Most of the time, I act before I think and so I always walk outside on my socks when I know I shouldn’t. Today I was prepared: I knew I had to go outside, so I put my shoes next to the door. “There is no way I’ll be walking on the cold, wet concrete outside”, I thought.
One hour later I was walking cheerily after the men who were going to repair my washing machine, totally oblivious of all the plans I had set in motion before. I guess you understand I totally forgot to put on my shoes, making my feet wet and cold. But it don’t matter because I have a washing machine that operates!!! Yeah :)
While I was waiting for the repair men to arrive, I was taking pictures of my books. My books are so incredibly awesome, they deserve to be photographed. Today I took their picture without myself in it, because by now we all know what I look like when I hold books.
It took me about as long to take pictures of the books alone as when I take pics of me and my books. It was hard, because there was always a book that had a shiny nose, a book that wasn’t paying attention, a book that looked kinda fuzzy so its title was unreadable or a book that just had the awesome idea of stepping out of the picture. Aargh.
In the end, I did manage to get them all to look in the same direction, stand still and smile:
I’m very proud of my books and of the way they are all standing there, next to each other. Ain’t they cute! I love them all, but some more than others – don’t tell them, some might get jealous and start pushing others of the shelf.
Some books have clones (like Dark Art: that one has been cloned a few times on my bookshelf and I have given one clone to a good friend of mine). Other books will have clones soon! And very soon, a complete book ABOUT clones will be added to my collection. Awe-some!
And now I’ve had it with these cold feet! I am going to have me a washing fest. Let’s see how good that machine has been fixed.
Post posted by Sacha on August 29th, 2009 at 20:41
Woohoo, I’m back! I have been silent on the internet this past month. The offline world has been absorbing all my attention, there wasn’t anything left for my internet life. I haven’t even been listening to books! And here is why:
Marriage. My little brother married on 07-08-’09: August 7th 2009 (in Holland, we use the normal date notation: dd-mm-yyyy). He and his lovely wife met on 01-02-’03 and they got engaged on 04-05-’06. There was no other day they could have gotten married than on 07-08-’09. I sure hope they’re not planning a divorce on 10-11-’12 but they must do something special on that day, because it will be the last of these special days.
Aaaaanyway! The marriage was awesome, we went all the way to Belgium to celebrate. The day was just perfect in all the ways it could have been: great weather, a wonderful group of people, a lot of fun and two awesome and beautiful newlyweds. And we were not the only people to be impressed by the cute couple: everywhere we went, people stopped and applauded to the couple, which made them shine even more bright than before.
A few days later, death. First, let me tell you about Elementary: that’s the huge external hard drive my boyfriend had given me on my birthday last Christmas. And by ‘huge’ I mean really HUGE: 1TB. That is 1 TERAbyte of hard drive, or 1,000GB (gigabytes) or 1.000.000.000.000 bytes. Today, that’s a LOT. I don’t know what I will think of that in the future, but today it’s a lot of space to fill. And so I did: I filled my hard drive with all the audiobooks I had and it was nearing 300GB last month.
We had some great times. I filled the drive with my books and the drive gave me many books to listen to when I was in need of listening pleasure (which was often). I had about 60 special audiobooks that were my ‘bed books‘: books I prepared so I could listen to them in bed. That means I had removed the music and author’s comments at the beginning and the end of the files, and I cut the chapters into shorter files, so I could jump back easier through the book. I even removed the loud noises that could wake me up again if I had fallen asleep while listening. It had been a lot of work, let me tell ya. And I loved to listen to those books in bed.
Do I need to explain what happened next? I still don’t know why or what, but my drive just died. 300GB of audiobooks gone. I was sad. I was most sad about losing the work I had been doing: my bed books. My favorite bed book, The Corridor by Zan, contains over 22 hours of listening pleasure and I will have to do it all over again. Makes me sad.
On a more positive note: I had been backing up all my pictures and other data on DVD’s, so I didn’t lose any important stuff. I have been downloading my audiobooks since The Day Of The HUGE Loss and I must admit, it’s a nice way to clean up your hard drive.
On an even more positive note: my sister is pregnant again! That’s the birth, although the birth part won’t be happening until later this year. But I’m going to have another niece/nephew and I’m extremely thrilled about it! And while I’m on the subject of births and new lives, I am starting a new path in my working life. As of this week, I’m an assistant teacher at a school for adults. I love the work, it’s so different from the computer programming I used to do. Really, it’s like night and day, totally different and very awesome.
So, there you have it. A few major events in the life of a little lady. A little bit of sadness, some changes and a lot of happiness.
Post posted by Sacha on July 27th, 2009 at 21:14
Yeah! Look at this awesome ’70s look. I love the ’70s, I am from the first half of the ’70s and now I finally dress like… I’m living in the ’70s!
I adore these very cool jeans with the very wide legs on top of the AWESOME pink boots! So even though it’s summer and everybody is wearing flip-flops and sandals, I had to wear my cool pink boots today! Luckily I didn’t have to go very far, so my feet endured. I was walking like a real 70s chick, I can tell you that.
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So there I am, me and my cool pink boots (and different pants, but who could tell). Okay, my boots are not so very cool now, because my feet are HOT and sticky! And stinky too, if I don’t take them boots off now… |
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Glorious! This shirt tells you exactly who I am.
A National Divas Ass from 1973. |
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Now it’s time our the sweet kitties to have dinner. I totally ignored them while posting this post. Yeah yeah, it’s a cruel world. Well, FTW!
Really. As I tweeted today: I still can’t get used to FTW meaning ForTheWin. I keep thinking FuckTheWorld! when I see it. I’m just a FTW-kinda girl.
And if you don’t like what I’m saying, then… WIN YOU!
Post posted by Sacha on July 22nd, 2009 at 11:14
| Seeing is in the eye of the beholder. I love to see and look and watch. If I had to choose between seeing and hearing, I’d definitely choose to see. That may sound weird for someone who loves to listen to books instead of reading them, but listening to books only gives my eyes the opportunity to see lots of other things while I’m ‘reading’ a story. Double win! |
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Seeing extraordinary things is, of course, much more fun than seeing ordinary things. To me beauty is being different than others. That goes for people and for animals as well as anything else. There has to be something ‘wrong’ with something to have my attention. My big cat Tom for example, he has an ear with a little rip in it. He’s broken and I love him for it. The fact that his stomach is going bald lately, that’s an error of a different kind and I think I will have to see a vet for it. But hey, the weather is fine so I don’t think he’ll catch a cold or anything. |
| Seeing my own eyes can be really weird. Have you ever looked into your eyes in a steamed-up bathroom mirror? That’s scary!! I really don’t know how, but my eyes get a weird glow, they become two shiny disks. It scares me to look at me when I glow. Now, outside the bathroom, I have green eyes and I think that’s awesome. Mostly, because it’s different and I already explained that I like different. |
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Seeing under water can be nice, I guess. I don’t really remember when I last did that. But I did have my eye under a faucet today, to rinse out the anti-flea drops I accidentally sprayed in my eye. That is one bizarre sensation! I still don’t understand why, but I suddenly felt very distressed, with feelings of shortness of breath. I ask you: WHY? My mouth and my nose were nowhere near the water, there was no way I was drowning, yet my brain yelled “STRESS! STRESS! I CANNOT BREATHE!!!” It was a very weird sensation, because my brain did not understand the panic I was feeling. Are there anti-drowning sensors in my eyes, and if so, what is the reason for them being there? Wouldn’t it be much more effective to put those sensors in my nose? |
| Seeing life the way I see it, can be big fun. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, I tend to see things a bit different than most people and people don’t always ‘get me’. I love that, because I get to make great jokes that other people wouldn’t think of and it makes them laugh hard. Well, sometimes they do anyway. Mostly they just stare at me because I’ve gone WAAAAAY over their head with my jokes. Hey, as long as I can laugh, I am okay with that. Ya see? |
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And because I love to make people say ‘huh?’, I have a puzzle for you! In one of the pictures, there’s one object that is a little bit different than that same object in the other pictures. Can you spot it? (no, it’s not the eyes. That would be too easy) |
Post posted by Sacha on July 13th, 2009 at 21:22
Yeah. I’m not playing hard to get, I am hard to _get_.
Most of the time, people just don’t seem to ‘get’ me. They don’t understand what I mean because I’m always talking from some other reference point or thought or I’m just speaking in a completely different universe than most people. I seem to have a knack for saying exactly the thing that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever at the exact right moment when nobody seems to expect any word from me. The funniest part of it is, that it’s often my jokes that nobody gets. So I’m standing there, all smiley face and expecting everybody to burst out laughing with me and then they go “Hm? I don’t get it”. I get that. A lot.
And this is not just when I speak English (I can -somewhat- understand if people think my English a bit weird, it’s not my native language so I make funneh mistakes). It mostly happens when I speak my own language because that’s the time when I let my guard down and just let my witty jokes flow out of my mouth without giving it a good evaluation. Also, my mind is already 20 steps further down the road when I’m speaking that thought aloud, too far away to realise it may have been smarter to keep my jaws plastered together with a nice smile on top for better effect. And third, if I think before I speak, the other person gets his/her joke in first.
I am starting to accept that I live in a world where I am certainly not part of the mainstream-way-of-thinking and that is very fine by me. But just once in a while, I would love to have some people LOL about my (very funny and witty and quirky) jokes. Or maybe not. The pressure to perform must to be huge if you always say wonderful things that everybody ‘gets’. No, I think I’m very happy in this little corner of the universe where from time to time somebody accidentally gets me and the rest of the time they just let me be me because I just have a very unique way of saying things.
So, if you tell a joke in a small corner of the universe, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?
It is, but only if I get it. Got it?
Post posted by Sacha on May 13th, 2009 at 15:37
How many followers do you have? If you know the answer, you are either a religious figure or you have a twitter account. I count myself in the latter group, with very little followers. That’s fine with me, because although I would love many people to read about what brilliant things I’m tweeting, I have no idea how to keep track of everything everybody else is saying! Just let me say my piece and let me think my piece reaches all over the world, and let me be happy with the relish even though it doesn’t approach reality. The same with this blog, actually.
This weekend I had my first Real Life Follower. I must admit that being followed in Real Life has its advantages. There’s no way a person can pose as another person so I could see what ASL my follower had. This follower’s age was quite old, its sex was male, and the location was quite obvious, I take. The follower followed me into every store I went. He even stood by my side while I was shopping for tampons, which was quite nice of him. He must know how women hate to shop for those things alone (you know I’m being cynical here, right).
I know, this new age is all about information. Everybody can know just about anything about everybody at any moment in time and we have the power to let everybody know that info. But I’m not all that used to being broadcasted all day long, let alone having somebody follow my every move. It scared me, because I could not turn off the program nor could I make myself Invisible (a great feature on ICQ. Whatever happened to ICQ, I wonder). In short, I wanted to Escape. ESC ESC ESC.
After having visited – and being followed in – 5 stores, I finally logged on to the supermarket. Of course, my follower found his way into the program as well. Nimble as I am, I quickly threw down my shopping cart and logged out fast. Because of his older software, he was stuck inside, stuck behind the security gates he had just passed. And I was out. I had managed to block my first Real Life Follower.
Did you notice the transition? I suddenly went all computery. Okay, let me reverse that with this awesome video of Real Life Twitter.
And while we’re on the subject of Info on the internet… why can’t I find any information about that foggy mirror eye halo oddity? I want to know why I see two scary discs in the places of my eyes when I look in my mirror when it’s fogged up. Or am I the only one who sees those things…? It looks very creepy and ghosty. So I guess that, after being Followed in Real Life, I am now being Haunted through my Foggy Mirror. Man, this world is getting crazier by the day.
Post posted by Sacha on April 1st, 2009 at 23:59
Blogging is a difficult thing. I say what I have to say and so many words come out. That’s because my mind goes in many directions and each direction wants attention and wants to be written down. The extra hard thing is to skip some directions; I can’t write everything down. Would be cool though!
Haha, ain’t I a funny girl. Worrying about my blog posts being too long to read or about not writing interesting things, while nobody is actually reading this stuff. So, I’ll just keep on doing what I do best: use many many words to talk about a lot of things. I just need a place where I can use a few more characters than the 140 that twitter forces me to use. Because while twitter is an excellent way to practice compactness in my writing, I do need to be able to ramble from time to time. And this is the second post today. I am on a roll, people!!
But for now, it’s time to do something else. I really don’t know what, but I’ll think of something. Talk to ya later, sweet dreams!
Post posted by Sacha on April 1st, 2009 at 22:45
So, this is what I was thinking today.
I was enjoying my very very hot bath and thinking how that’s not healthy, I’m always wondering if suddenly my heart just wants to quit because of all the heat around me. So, I never drink cold drinks in my hot bath, because that may just stress my body too hard: very cold coming in while it’s extremely hot outside. The only option for me is coffee, which I drink anywhere, baths not excluded.
OK. Bath. I had ants running around my bath tub. Some of them fell in and I think they died. Must have, with all that heat. So then I had ants in my bubbles. I didn’t want to move too much, because then the ants would break the water and float down. Then they would be IN the water and could possibly float into body orifices. Eeeew.
So, I was in my bath. Thinking how the heat isn’t healthy. I saw my heart beating on my arm. No, that’s not really what happened of course. I saw the blood pumping through my veins because my heart makes blood do that. And that got me thinking: if my heart decided to just quit, would I then see my very last heart beat (i.e. the last motion of the vein I was watching) or would my mind stop before that last pump? Would my mind register that the vein suddenly stopped moving and would I have the time to think ‘Oh, shi…’ ?
My mind is weird like that. Could be because of all the caffeine I put in my body. Today I learned from the TV (do people still know what a TV is?!?) that a lot of caffeine can make you hallucinate. That explains a lot to me. I have been seeing things from the corner of my eyes for years! I always hoped I had some psychic abilities that I would understand some day. Now I understand that it all came from my caffeine addiction. Unless…. My super psychic abilities hallucinated the TV show so I would never find out how extremely psychic I really am. Because I would psychicly rule the universe if I understood my powers. And there you have it.
What I also learned from TV: a cold virus on a bank note can survive for 17 days! That’s over 2 weeks! Can you imagine how many people one bank note can infect before it gets touched by another sick person, only to infect the bank note again? I now completely understand how everybody gets a cold all of the time. Also, I think it’s very healthy that we are in an economic crisis right now.
Enough talk, I will try to think as much tomorrow so I can blog about it. Talk to ya later!
Post posted by Sacha on March 29th, 2009 at 15:43
Hi tweople!
Twitter is such a fun tool. It’s definitely very hard for someone like me, because you have to cram anything you want to say in just 140 characters. Boy, that’s HARD. But it’s so very cool when I can use exactly 140 chars! I love that. Of course, that is without cheating on the characters. So, no using extra letters in a word just to get to 140. The messages where I use exactly 140 chars are extra special to me :)
Besides twitter challenging me to think in short message flashes, it also challenges me in understanding how it works with followers. I still haven’t figured that out completely. I do understand that I can follow people, so I can read their messages. And people can follow me, so these people (the following) read what I write. However, I can’t write a message to somebody that doesn’t follow me back. Unless I’m replying to a message they sent first and only if I use the _reply_ button in my twitter client. Are you following me (yeah, pun intended!) ?!?
I wonder how people (I call ‘m tweople) that follow a lot of other tweople can keep track of all their messages. I can get kinda crazy when the messages start piling up in my twitter client when I haven’t checked it in an hour. I really want to read all of it, because I want to know what everybody is saying! Don’t wanna miss that one big message, you know. And my list only contains 27 tweople at the moment. At some moments, it’s very easy to keep track because when I get out of bed here in Holland, most of my list has just gone to bed (US). But when they wake up, they all start twittering and twattering. Especially the authors. They lllllove to write, it’s in their blood. I love that, but some days it’s just a big message overflow to me.
So, how do tweople keep track of everybody? I have absolutely no idea how those #hashtags work and I don’t know if I want to know. I think it’s a big secret, because I haven’t found a cool short list of twitter tips (twips?) online. Just like the reply-to option, that is being kept secret too! I had to find out by accident that it really IS possible to write a message to a non-follower. Okay, I’ll explain how I found that out, because that’s another thing about twitter.
There are tweople with bots that search for specific words being used by anyone on twitter. Or tweople search for the words themselves, possibly. It’s just a lot of work IMO. Anyway. For example, somebody or some botty is looking for the word ‘carrot’ because this person just loves anything about carrots. And I twitt “Today I heard that joke again about the carrot cake. How old is that joke?” Then the bott picks up the carrot and puts me on the following list. Because if I talk about carrots, I must be a very interesting person and who would want to miss a word I say? I wouldn’t! Well, it’s a way to get your following list filled, I guess.
I mostly follow authors of the podionovels I’m listening. But that’s a whole new story, I’ll talk about that another time. Right now, I have to get used to the daylight savings time change we had last night. We just lost 60 minutes last night. 60 minutes gone. Poof. I weep.
In case you want to know how I – girl of many many words – can write messages in 140 chars or less, add me on twitter. I’m zzacha. If you talk about carrots, I may follow you back ;P
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