One Abnormal Girl

I swear I’m going to stop reading http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com long enough to post this.

The new job is still entirely tolerable.  This is the first job where I have a title (even if it has “assistant” at the end) and an office and a pay grade that actually covers my bills with a bit extra to keep me from panicking once a month.  This is also the first job to make me feel like I actually need my intellect to do it.  It doesn’t require any knowledge of anthropology or linguistics, no, but at least I don’t feel like I could replace myself with a well-trained monkey.  I have responsibilities and projects and I play an identifiable role in the university.  It’s not what I’ve been dreaming of, but it’s a lot of what I’ve been wanting.  It’s a lot of what I used to hear about and envy, even if it was small things like having personal business cards, or an office (however small), or desk supplies that I requested myself, or an absolute need for Microsoft Outlook.  It’s also permanent, and starting in April there will be benefits.  I am grateful.

I’m also in a position now to sleep in the bed of my choosing.  When I decided to make the move to the west coast, I was actually a bit excited at the prospect of having to build up my furniture collection from scratch, with a design in mind.  Having to go the cheap route for my furniture purchases, I haven’t been able to keep with that aesthetic at all, but at least I might have a platform bed with a Japanese futon.  I’m in the process of purchasing that, but now I need to figure out what to do with the king-sized bed that a family friend generously donated to me before I even got here.  I’m glad I’ve had a bed to sleep on for the past 7 months, but it’s awfully hard to get rid of.  Right now there’s a post on craigslist for it.  I’d have given it away if the local Goodwills/Salvation Armies were willing to come get it.

I swear I had more planned for this, but there is a steamed/over-steamed artichoke to be eaten, and I am a slave to artichokes these days.

One last thing, though: I replaced my old Website with a new one.  I might be adding a few more things to it, but right now it’s doable.  I like the simplicity.  Most of the more wordy content is in the blog anyway, and the pictures are all in a gallery (which has also been updated a little), so I’m happy with this.  I ditched the clutter.  I just need to think of a better quote title.  It’s intended to be changed every few days/weeks, I just can’t think of anything since that particular idea settled in my head.  Hmmm.

Finally, I am only just now using this icon by sky_dark.  Mmmm.  Soak it up.

When I first found Blinklist, it was pretty fantastic, and boasted a lot of improvements over the bookmarking giant Del.icio.us.  By now, however, the greatest of those improvements (the ability to mark certain bookmarks as private) has already been incorporated, and all Blinklist has over Del.icio.us is an easy-to-type domain.  But my real concern here, as I was never tempted to use Del.icio.us before, is that Blinklist has become almost unusable.  It feels as though its developers have left it behind: the Firefox add-on hasn’t been updated in years, there have been no major changes aside from the removal of some useful features, and the service itself is majorly unreliable.  Even when the service is up and responding, I can’t trust it to hold on to the link I just submitted to it.  Blinklist is becoming less and less usable.

This leads me to either Del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia.  The former is no-frills but simple; the latter is gorgeous but socially complicated.  There’s no requirement to use all the social tools that Ma.gnolia boasts, but just having them there makes me feel like I’m not living up to its standards.  So despite the fact that Del.icio.us can’t seem to overcome its infatuation with pre-Windows-95 underscores, and forces me to un-private every single link I just imported, I’m choosing Del.icio.us.  So begins the edit of all 644 of my links.