Stream of Conscience

I noticed today that the Post Office distribution center had their flag at half staff. I was trying to think of why, and I can only assume that it’s because today is the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Immediately my thoughts went to my parents and wondered just what they had gone through.

My dad was in his first year of law school at the University of Iowa (then called the State University of Iowa, because Iowa State was just a college). My mom worked at a bank in Chicago. They had been dating for a couple years and it was serious enough for both of them to know this was the person they would eventually marry. Dad signed up for the Navy and went off to Officer Candidate School. I remember Mom telling me that they thought the war wouldn’t last very long, but it was something like two years before she got to see him again.

That’s also when she started smoking. She said it’d be months before she heard anything, and everyone else was doing it. It just seemed to be the thing to do. I guess it helped ease her anxiety. Sadly, she was never able to kick the habit, and eventually the cigarettes took her life.

I met with my cardiologist today. He’s such a good doctor and so easy for me to talk to. He has 2 young kids, who I imagined were getting excited for the holidays, so I wished him a Merry Christmas. He told me that this year was a little tough because his mother died about a month ago. He mentioned that the hole is really huge, which I can certainly relate to. I thought about telling him that I understood, because my mom died just a few weeks before Christmas. But this was his moment to grieve a little. There was no need for me to turn it around and make it about me, even if I’d have meant it in the kindest of ways.

Crap! I spilled diet soda all over the keyboard. Now my “v” key sticks. It probably wouldn’t be so bothersome, except that there’s a “v” in my last name. And (actually, more importantly) it’s playing havoc with my ability to copy & paste, since I use the shortcut keys.  It’s a good thing this keyboard is a piece of crap & I was planning on replacing it anyway.

Yes, indeedy. One of the these days I’m going to stop deleting my blogs when they just quite aren’t the way I want them. I guess the problem is I now have so many blogs, I’m not sure what to do with them all. And every now & then I try to pare them down.

Right now I have a blog on WordPress.com, but I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I don’t want to delete it because I finally got the username “gailann” when I signed up for it. And if I delete it, I can never get the name back. Right now it’s home to a few posts about the TV show Supernatural. I was going to make it my place to review episodes and comment on the show in general. But I found that most of the show’s fans hang out at LiveJournal. So once again I created a blog there. At first it was mainly to comment on a particularly entertaining blog there. But since there’s a whole community of Supernatural fans over there, I’m trying to move all SPN related stuff over there.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do with the WordPress.com blog. Nor do I know exactly what I’m going to do with this one. Maybe I’ll use this site to test my burgeoning WP theme skills (or lack thereof). I actually have another blog where I was doing that, but I managed to booger it all up. It looks like crap now and I can’t figure out how to fix it. (I know where the problem is, but it’s fairly PHP-intensive, and I know next to nothing about PHP right now.)

In the meantime, I’ll be playing with different themes here, trying to see if I can either find the perfect one, or tear them apart to learn from their construction and create my own. So don’t be scared if you come back & find that everything looks different. It’ll still be me.