cranky pixels

I’m out of coffee, so Ellison and I took a stroll and picked up a latte and some donuts. I love donuts. It’s not even the sugar – I really wish I could get raised donuts without any glaze. Then I would buy them by the flat and eat them for every meal of every day.

On second thought, maybe it’s best that I can’t get them.

I had an uneventful bout of online window shopping last night. For those who don’t know, online window shopping is much like actual window shopping, only in the comfort of your own bed. I am a huge proponent of activities which can be undertaken while snuggled under a blanket. I visited the Gap, where the denim pencil skirt I want so badly is still not on sale, and Old Navy, where it is inexplicably 1987, and 6pm.com, where the shoes are cheap but indexed so badly that you have to wade through twenty pages of bespangled mules to find a simple pair of flip-flops.

Despite adding several things to various carts, I didn’t buy anything until I got to Drugstore.com. Or, specifically, Beauty.com, which now shares a cart with Drugstore.com. I clicked over on a whim (and because the kid was sleeping on my chest, so what else was I going to do?) (digital illustration, shockingly enough, is v. difficult to do with one hand) and completely by accident stumbled on –

Well, here, let me give a little background: I’ve been searching for nail polish that is free from Formaldehyde, Toluene, and Dibutyl Phthalate ever since I got all weird and paranoid about chemicals (about the same time I switched out all my cleaning products for Method and Mrs. Meyer and Ecover) but it’s been just impossible to find. Which is weird, right? I live in Portland, for crying out loud; we’re practically the epicenter of the environmental movement. But, whatev. So I’ve been searching online, but aside from some weird water soluble (?) or peel-off (??) polishes, it’s been a big no-go.

BUT! When I clicked over to Beauty.com, I found butter LONDON 3 Free, which is not only all non-toxic, it’s British. I got some in Union Jack Black, Tramp Stamp, and Come to Bed Red. Will report back on final result, which I fully expect will be full of fabulousness.

The caffeine is finally hitting my bloodstream so I’m going into web design mode. Cheers, y’all.

Through my mighty powers of contagion, I managed to fell the rest of my household yesterday. Not So stayed home, which ironically meant that I got to sleep in. (Ironic, in this case, is apparently meant in the Alanis Morissette sense. Shush, I’ve had a fever.) Sleeping in when you have a cold is lovely. I highly recommend it to myself, and will keep it in mind for next time, when I will invariably be seized with a compulsion to clean the house the second I start feeling wretched.

What’s up with that, anyway? Whenever I get sick I get all over-achieve-y. When I was a kid, I used to know I was really sick because I’d voluntarily clean my room. (I was not a spic-and-span sort of child, obviously.) Now it’s cleaning plus work plus obsessively reading my RSS feeds because god forbid something should happen in the world without my knowledge. It’s almost a relief when the illness progresses to the point at which I can’t focus my eyes or stay upright.

But that’s all water under the bridge, since I’m better now. Well, except for a few errant sniffles. Er, and a bit of a hacking cough. Aside from that, though, I am the picture of good health!

Although maybe it’s a bad sign that I’m obsessively doing laundry…

Oh my god, y’all, I am sick again. How can this be? I never get sick. Yet, here I am, with my second ass-kicking cold in as many months. It’s not right, I tell you.

The good news is that my lovely husband got me the tissues with lotion in, so my poor beleaguered nose can get a break. Since I need to blow my nose roughly every ten seconds, this is a wonderful thing.

I hate being sick. I especially hate having a runny nose. When I was in high school we lived in the Santa Cruz mountains, way up in the redwoods, and my mom said she used to know when I was awake because I’d start blowing my nose. Which, way to recognize that your daughter is allergic to the damned trees, mom. So, yeah, I spent four years in asthma hell, and every time I get a cold it’s like high school all over again. Except with marginally better hair.

It’s Monday. And it’s June. How the hell did that happen?

I foolishly jinxed myself a couple of weeks ago by saying – out loud – that I intended to take some time off in June. Now, of course, I am inundated with unsolicited projects, which is lovely, of course, because I love my job, but also a wee bit frustrating. (Not that my “time off” would be actual time off, per se – I have a novel to finish, after all, and a toddler to…toddle, and a house that desperately craves some TLC, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.) So I’m torn between doing a happy little dance because I’ve got new projects and kicking things. I could always do both! That’s the principle behind Goth dancing, after all.

But I did manage to kick last week’s Cold of Death after only a day and a half of real illness. YAY, IMMUNE SYSTEM! Managed to kick it and still get the house tidy enough to have a friend over on Friday. I never have friends over! It was glorious, and why don’t I do that more? I mentioned the social anxiety thing in my last post, but what I don’t think I mentioned is that my social anxiety is SO MUCH BETTER NOW. Seriously, the Wellbutrin might not have done a lot for my, you know, chronic depression, but it went to town on my social anxiety.

Used to be, I literally could not be in a crowd of people without feeling like I was stuck inside my head. You know, watching the whole thing from about three feet back and cringing every time I spoke? Yeah, was not what I would call “good.” But ever since I started taking the meds, I’ve had no problem being in group situations. Even if there’s more than two people in the room, I feel like I’m actually present. It’s so neat!

Curiously, the lingering bits of social anxiety seem to coalesce around the making and execution of plans. I still hate contacting people. I still would rather poke myself repeatedly in the eye than actually call someone on the phone. And I still spend the time leading up to a social engagement in a state of hair-rending panic, imagining all the myriad ways I could make a fool of myself and cause everyone to forever shun me, which I probably did the last time they invited me anywhere, and they probably just invited me this time to be polite, and OMG I SHOULD JUST STAY HOME.

But as long as I ignore all that, I always have a fantastic time. And it’s getting easier to ignore, sort of. Sort of. Depending.

In other news, I posted another video post. Whee!