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Are you pondering what I’m pondering?

Unless you’re trying to refinance your house, immersing yourself in web comics or reading the Seven Spiritual Laws of Success… Probably not!

In the re-fi department: Epic FAIL. Property values have screwed us. It’s also my opinion that our loan processor screwed us by waiting 2 months to get our loan started. Had she gotten off her ass and started it last month, I feel certain it would have gone through. Yes, I’m a little bitter.

In the web comics department: Full of WIN! I happened upon a ustream.tv live stream of PvP‘s Kurtz drawing yesterday and ended up meeting some awesome people and getting the comics meetup group I’ve been wanting to do handed right to me. Awesome! If you are interested in this group, please shoot me an email.

In the Seven Spiritual Laws department: Full of WIN! I started reading this book again just a few days ago and have been blown away by the resonance I feel with the Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. Particularly the 5th and the 6th. You can get the gist over at Chopra.com. For such a small and unassuming book, it packs a powerful punch. I can’t help but feel that the comics meetup group was offered to me in response to my asking for it. I just can’t. As I’ve said before, I think that The Seven Laws is my religion. All I know is that they work.

And finally, I’ve read several good articles in Wired this month. That is a mag that either I flip through without anything grabbing my attention or I read it cover to cover. This month, it’s cover to cover. There is an awesome article on brain mapping and today I read an excellent article about a woman that was billed as having perfect memory – until she was diagnosed with OCD.

The Memory article rang true to me because it offers a more scientific reason for people who are obsessed with their personal history and cannot let go of past events. I always say “Let it go!!” and it turns out, letting it go is the thing most people do to get over trauma, etc. But this woman’s case has illustrated that constantly going over past events of your life does indeed make it impossible to let go of the events and therefore let go of the neuroses that were brought on by the events.

What the first batch of scientists thought was perfect memory, turned out to be perfect memory of ONLY this woman’s personal story and big events (plane crashes, other disasters) that occurred during her lifetime. And it was seemingly perfect recall because ALL her time was spent going over and over the details of her life. This “perfect memory” case was actually an OCD case. All it took was a professor of psychology spending two days with her and asking questions that were not about her own story to figure out that she didn’t have perfect memory at all. A brain scan proved that not only were her memory centers normal, but the OCD areas were abnormal – she definitely has OCD. Makes sense to me: the whole process of memorization is going over something many times. If you repeat stories about your life’s traumatic moments over and over, they are only going to be ingrained.

What’s truly amazing about this idea of reinforcing memories (or NOT) is that it is also one of the Seven Laws: #6 The Law of Detachment. The law of detachment is basically: LET IT GO.

Hmm. Maybe I’m onto something… ;-)

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Back to business

Not that we ever stop working, really, but now that all the xmas crap is down, it’s back to normal life. And not a moment too soon, IMO!

I’m really happy with the new hard drives. Now I realise just how slow the read head was on the old one. It would take up to 30 seconds to launch an application, whereas now it’s under 5 seconds. As it should be on a Mac with dual 1.8Ghz processors and 1.5Gb RAM! It’s the old frog in water thing – you don’t realise the temp is going up because it’s gradual. That hard drive was really dying, but since I use it every day, I didn’t notice. I again thank my Weasel for burning that DVD and catching the errors before I lost all my shit. Thanks, honey!

In other news… We’re on our diet for reals now. We must reform our wine- and beer-sodden ways. We will be curtailing our social events to help us get control of our alcohol consumption. I’ve always been a lush, but I’ve made Nick one, too, so a hard shut down is really necessary. As much as it pains me. :-( I’m sure my liver will appreciate the respite. HA!

We’ve got Phoenix Comic Con Jan 22-26 then I’ll be driving back, so I won’t return until Feb 1 or 2. We’re excited to try out this con! Also, we’re booked for Heroes Con in Charlotte NC in June and we’ve decided to attend APE rather than Comic Con this year. We loved Comic Con, but APE is in San Francisco where we have friends who might put us up and it’s a smaller con, which is appropriate for new artists like us. Comic Con, while amazing and fun, really isn’t worth the money for us as a business. It’s too big for startups. We saw a small bump in hits after the Con last year, but definitely not enough to justify spending another $2500. So, it’s APE for us!  As it is, I’ve no idea what to do about my cats. I *do* plan to PAY for whatever house sitting I arrange.

I guess that’s where we are for now. In the spirit of Reducing Our Fat Asses 09, I must go put my fat ass on the Rack (treadmill). My goal for now is 1 mile a day. Modest, yes, and very doable. In one month it will be 2 miles. Then it’ll be increasing speed to do whatever I can in an hour. Wish me luck!

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Comment re-post

I liked my comment on Green’s post that I decided to repost it here. My views on healthcare [or lack thereof] and why HSAs [Health Savings Accounts] are NOT the answer. This is edited to be stand alone.

I have to warn everyone off the grand experiment of the HSA. We did it last year and got screwed royally. Not only does NO ONE understand it, but you pay a premium each month (ours was $250 or so) for absolutely nothing. You get no coverage of anything. Which means that YOU get to pay insurance rates for all your healthcare. YOU get to pay the $150 bill for a Dr visit. YOU get to pay for the $652.33 blood work. YOU get to pay $22 PER PILL for your prescription. (Real numbers. MINE.)

Continue reading “Comment re-post”

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OMFG. Religious Right Strikes Again!

I was just looking at the headlines on this site (right column, currently) and clicked on this:

Teens Experiment w/ Anal Sex, Risk Health
Experts say as social mores ease, more young heterosexuals are trying anal sex.
ABC News Wed, 10 Dec 2008 08:14:52 -0500

Oh? Anal sex is new, is it? Well, it’s good to know I’m on the cutting edge with something!! ::snicker::

And I adore the way this article is totally slanted towards how bad and nasty anal sex is and how you’ll get AIDS and die if you do it. Lovely quote:

“In the Hasbro study, females who had anal sex were more likely to be living with their partners, to have two or more sexual partners and to have previously experienced coerced intercourse. Males who engaged in this behavior were more likely to identify themselves as being homosexual, bisexual or undecided.”

Oh, so anyone who does this is a whore or gay? Rilly? Damn, no BIAS there, eh? And the last line of the article is precious, too:

“But it’s not just rubbing elbows,” she [Kuriansky] said. “Anal sex is a serious public problem.”

It’s articles like this that prove the media is not liberally biased. Just damn. It’s run by old white men and women who tchuck tchuck at all the crazy kids these days. It’s no different than it’s always been. Humans are horny and we’ll put various things in various orifices for fun. It’s been that way as long as we’ve been here and it’s not going away. It’s just that we can talk about it now. It’s even sadder that people read this slanted article and don’t even know it’s slanted. The American populace is so uneducated these days, no one even knows what slant (lack of objectivity) and bias mean. ::sigh::

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OMFG I’m so tired of this!

So, another two days of my life have been eaten by the vile organ. I know I whine about this every month, but just DAMN. If you had chills, sweats and nauseating cramps, you’d whine, too.

At least the Dr I’m seeing is supportive of my getting the vile organ removed. She is encouraging me to call her surgeon and see if I can negotiate a deal. ::sigh:: Even a “deal” here is twice as much as Costa Rica ($10-20k on a good day here vs $10k for tickets, the surgery and a nice stay at the beach there). The thing that holds me back from Costa Rica is that I have no referrals. I don’t know who these fuckers are down there and have no idea if they are decent or just veterinarians on vacation. Not that a veterinarian couldn’t do the procedure, I mean, hell, it’s the same parts as a cat or dog. It’s the sanitation and recovery that worries me. And having to go alone. SUCK.

So, I’ve had two more days of my life sucked away by a vile nasty organ that I don’t want and won’t use. That makes about 720 days (almost 2 years) of my life by my count wasted due to this bullshit.  So, yah, I’m BITTER. I’m bitter that every female I know without her uterus (conveniently paid for by insurance) is happy as can be. They don’t have to sit up all night with chills, sweats, body splitting cramps and nausea. They don’t have to feel like they got run over by a Mack truck for days. They don’t have to have their husbands take up the slack because they can’t get off the fucking couch. (Good thing I’ve got an awesome hubby that doesn’t mind taking care of me.)

I really hate to go into debt, but I just can’t live like this. I just CAN’T. I’m going to explore Costa Rica some more, but dammit, I just want it done and over with. I just want to be free.

Is that so much to ask?