It Came From Outer Space…

I tend to have an issue some times with wondering how I should dress. There’s a certain amount of costuming that’s stereotypically associated with this profession. Often people think of fortune tellers and they imagine a gypsy with huge hoop earrings, head scarves, lots of bangles and flowing clothes, perhaps even a shawl tied around the neck, hands covered in huge rings.

I’m not like that.

It’s not as though I wander around all day in boardshorts either, but I have a certain style of dress. I’m kind of casual, and often I wear jeans and those “ironic t-shirts” or I tend towards the more gothic style of clothing. The main thing about me is that I have multi-colored hair, right now it’s mostly red and purple with a bit of blue, but I have plans to go green, blue and purple in the not too distant future. I love making my hair multi-colors…which is great when you work from home but when I worked in an office they didn’t always like blonde and red streaks let along the fit they had when I mentioned that I loved blue hair.

Ah, well…if people have a problem with it I guess they just won’t come here, but it makes me wonder how people on guru.com will see me…ah, well. I’m not losing anything if they don’t.

Our house is doing pretty well at the moment about conserving things, about the only problem we’re having is conserving water, partly because my son likes to sneak outside and play with the hose, and partly because the plumbing fixtures out there leak when they’re put on, so while you have water coming out of the hose, it’s also leaking out around the head of the tap and where the hose meets the tap at the same time.

So, one of the things I want to do is fix the taps so that they don’t leak. We’re using a well, so while we don’t have to pay for all the leaking water the environment will.

The other thing I’m going to do, and keep forgetting to do is put a bottle full of sand in each of our toilet cisterns so that we don’t use as much water each time we flush. Simple but effective.

I’ve never really understood some of the meanings that people find in dreams. I know if you dream about certain symbols they’re supposed to mean certain things, like if you dream about getting a package in a dream it’s supposed to mean that you have hidden creative energy that needs to be expressed.

For me more often than not my dreams don’t seem to be symbolic but memories of things, or the symbolism is something which means something only to me. For the longest time I dreamed about interacting with characters from Joss Whedon’s Buffyverse, and the characters were representing their archetypes, if Willow was involved she meant I was interacting with someone who was a geek, for example.

Perhaps dream interpretation is open to interpretation?

You might not think that you can reuse as much as you can. I’ve been getting some lessons in recycling which have amazed me. It’s pretty straight forward to re use something like baby cribs, many convert into toddler beds, or you pass them down to your friends or relatives as they have children and they pass them back and so on; but the other day I received a gift for the munchkin’s birthday, a bucket, spade and fork set for the beach or yard, which were made from recycled milk cartons. That really surprised me, especially because they’re very sturdy. They have to be to survive my son’s not so gentle play.
There are also some fellow Punkymoms who have made purses and bags with old video tapes.

What other creative ways have you guys heard of reusing things?

I have several different means I used for relaxation. Most recently I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XII because we’re not lucky enough to have a playstation 3, but seriously we have an XBox 360 and Wii, I don’t really think we need another “next generation game system”. I find the role-playing games to be very relaxing, because you can zone out and be in another word for a while, and other games like the fighting games often serve to just frustrate me and wind me up because of the way they work, so they’re not so good.

I’m gratified to hear that the Wii is coming out with their Wii Fit program too, that’s something that’s going on my wish list. In mean time I’ll just play Dance Dance Revolution as a means to work out.

Every once in a while you get some opportunities when you’re a small business owner. I get offers all the time for free credit card machines, free pens all sorts of things, most of the time they sound great, but they have some sort of catch.

So, I read about the latest small business opportunity and I wonder, where’s the catch? However in that site’s case the catch for me is that I’m not in the right place to invest in something right now. If I was I’d love to use that site, because they make it easy for you to match yourself with something that’s within your budget.

For me I’m already semi-established and I know I’m working the way that I want to, even if I’m not bringing in as much as I would like. I’m learning a lot, but if you’re looking to start something and aren’t sure where exactly you want to go, going through that site might help you connect with something that’s going to be worth your time.

I was reading an article that I saw on Lupa’s livejournal, and thought that I would share it. America’s Waste Habits are Scary.

I had to think that I contribute to this. There have been so many times recently that I’ve thrown out things, the other day from our fridge, pantry and freezer I threw out a whole helping of Pizza Hut cheesy bread that had dried out, half a tub of cantaloupe pieces, half a bag of grapes, 5lbs of potatoes which had gone rotten, and about a cup of stale milk and some sour orange juice.

Why?

Because they get forgotten in our fridge, and in the case of the potatoes they’d gone rancid. That was the third bag of potatoes I’d thrown out in as many weeks, because I was being lazy and using mix-mash or french fries instead of potatoes, so they would sit in the bag in the pantry until they went soft and exploded.

We’ve come up with better ways to handle that. I’ve stopped getting french fries altogether, which also saves space in our freezer, and when I get the potatoes I take them out of the bag and sit them on the wire shelves in our pantry so that they don’t squash each other, or sweat in the bag. My husband commends my home made french fries, which are actually baked to be more healthy over the frozen ones any day, and I’m happy that my son is going to know what potatoes look like instead of thinking they come in a box.

Real food! And it’s BETTER for you too, who knew? LOL.

But seriously. I am ashamed about how much we’ve been throwing out. I get this stuff with the goal of eating healthy and then it gets ignored in favor of snack food that we bring in or that our friend’s bring over when they come over to game. It’s not good for many reasons. I’m debating starting a compost heap for those times that we have to throw something out, but in the mean time I’m trying to inventory what we do have so that we can engage in better purchasing and disposing habits, and hopefully use more than we have been.

It doesn’t seem like much for just us, at times, but it sure does add up.

My laptop has taken a dive again. I wish it was something simple like computer memory being the issue, but it’s not. I’ve replaced the power supply, or at least have an order in for one, but it seems like the monitors not working either. It’s very frustrating.

I’m locked out of quite a bit of work, and all the email I received in the past two months as well as the article for the Tarot World Magazine and a couple of stories as well. It’s very frustrating. I’ve put a new screen, and a new keyboard in already in the past two months, and replaced a battery. Now I’m going to have to replace the battery again, no doubt, because the power cord will probably have killed it, and then I might have to replace the screen again…but it’s very frustrating, I’m wondering what’s going to go next.

It might be better for me to buy another laptop for cheap, and refurbish it and start over from scratch at this point. If I keep having to replace parts on this one I may as well.

I do have the desktop PC that I can use in a pinch, as I am now, but I like the laptop because I can take it outside and do work on the patio while the munchkin builds sandcastles and I can take it in the bedroom if I’m feeling ill and things like that.