Je ne parle pas français

You know, THOSE days.  The kind that sucks, but you couldn’t say why… Today has been one of those days for me.  Nothing has gone amiss (except that ONE crappy Words With Friends game, thanks a lot jbert21)… everything has been pretty much on track for the day.  I don’t know why I’m feeling glum, but I am.  Maybe I’m just tired of winter.  Maybe I have cabin fever, and I need to go somewhere totally fabulous and warm.  Maybe.

I want to go to the Keys.  Or the Dominican Republic.  Or Puerto Rico.  I’m pretty sure we could get there pretty cheap from Newark.  Really, I don’t care where we go, I think I just need a few days off to relax and do a whole lot of nothing.

It’s not even that work is overly stressful.  Like I said, there is really no reason for my mood.  I’m sure I’ll work through it soon, but for today I’m feeling foul.

And I think I’ll stay that way for the rest of the night.  Thank you very much.

I WILL BE IN SCHOOL FOR THE REST OF ALL TIME AND ETERNITY!  Yes, I understand that I have just e-shouted that statement… because if you were within earshot, I would likely have really shouted it.  I have now been in school for 10 terms straight, and I’m having a devil of a time getting motivated to do my schoolwork.  I know that I have to, and I know that I’m almost done, but really… I just want a break from school.  Why can’t I have a summer break?  Why don’t I get to take 3 months off to enjoy the summer sun?  BECAUSE THEN I WILL BE IN SCHOOL EVEN LONGER!  And I can’t have that.

Seriously, I should have finished back when I was supposed to be in college.  Back when I didn’t have to work full time on top of going to school at night.  It is truly my one big regret.  I should have stuck through it, and finished school.  There, I said it.  I hope everyone is happy.

The better part about all of this, is that it’s not making me a better person.  I’m not learning anything that will be of much use to me that I don’t already know.  I’m going through the motions to get a piece of paper that says I went to college.  If I would have done this at 18, I would likely have learned things I didn’t already know.  Or if I were getting a degree in something different, like Pre-Revolutionary American History, or Literature of the Pampas… but instead, I’m getting a degree in Business Administration.  I’m just frustrated.  I want it to be over.  It will be soon.  Just not soon enough.  Boo.

I’m addicted to last.fm.  When I plug my iPod in, like magic, there is a list online of what I have listened to that day.  Some days, it doesn’t work, and you’d think it was the end of the world.  I really genuinely get pissed off when my tracks don’t update to my last.fm page.  Seriously. I understand it’s a sickness.  Or maybe just a silly obsession.  Maybe I just want everyone to know that I LOVE MUSIC MORE THAN YOU DO.  And my last.fm proves it, because I have listened to almost 79,000 songs since I signed up for my account.

I want to hit 100,000.  I only have to listen to 21,000 more songs by the end of the year.  That’s only 1909 songs per month, which averages out to 63.64 songs per day.  Today I listened to 93 songs at work.  OK, I didn’t really LISTEN to them, but they played in the background on my iPod.  I heard them.

So, along with my goal of going to the gym 150 times this year (which I’m SUCKING AT so far), I plan to hit 100,000 songs on last.fm by the end of the year.  Can I do it?

I’ve decided that I’m going to listen to EVERY song that we have in our library. That’s a lot of songs. I’ve been doing it for 5 days now, and I’ve found some great stuff that I didn’t know we had. I suppose I could go through the boxes of CD’s in the basement, but since we’ve gone digital with most everything, I can’t keep track of what we buy as easily.

There was a time when I had to spend half a day alphabetizing CDs after spending the other half of the day cataloging them. Now it’s much easier. I pop the CD in the computer, let iTunes do it’s thing, et voila. It all syncs to CDPedia, which then syncs back to my iPhone, and I have a complete list of what we own at all times. OR, we buy it online, and I don’t even have to worry about the CD part. OR Frank buys it online, and I have no idea that we even have it until I start looking through his iTunes folder…

What I’m getting at, is that I’ve decided to listen to what we already have. To accomplish this, I have set up a genius playlist in iTunes that pulls 100 songs that have a play count = 0 (excluding Christmas music). I have this on in the background at work. There’s some really good stuff… a lot of things I’ve found are songs from CDs that were bought for only a specific track…

I’ve also found some WTF songs in there. There may even be some purging of the library. Seriously, what was I thinking?

So, I decided that I was going to try and make a list of my top 10 favorite songs of all time.  I got it down to 11… and then, as I was listening to it I realized, these may NOT actually be my favorite songs.  Then I started to second guess myself, and rethink the 11 that I had in my top 10.

Then I started adding my REAL top 10 to the 11 I already had.  In the real world, the real top 10 plus the 11 existing choices would be 21… or 34.  I have 34 songs in my top 10.  They all mean something very personal, and I’ve been trying to cut it down, for the last 20 minutes.  I got it down to 39.  Yes, that’s right… take some songs away from the 34 I had, and I’m left with 39.

Doesn’t it make you feel great that I do payroll for a living?

So now I’ve decided to go back to the original 11 in my top 10.  They were the first songs that I thought of for a reason.  They are the songs that I can listen to over and over and never get sick of them.  OK.  I lied.  Back down to 12.  I’ll stop now.

My top 10 (that consists of 12) songs, in no particular order are…

• Older – George Michael
• Mad About You – Hooverphonic
• Constant Craving – kd lang
• The Man With the Child in His Eyes – Kate Bush
• Limits of Our Love – Charlotte Martin
• Summoning of the Muse – Dead Can Dance
• Carolyn’s Fingers – Cocteau Twins
• Be My Hero – October Project
• Good Enough – Sarah McLachlin
• Tear in Your Hand – Tori Amos
• Feels Like I’m Already Flying – Bel Canto
• Let Her Go – Strawberry Switchblade

There.  et fin.

Just testing one of the new features of the updated WordPress.

corryzahn’s Music Profile – Users at Last.fm.

So, I realized that we were using WordPress 2.0.2 on our site, and the most current version is 2.9.1. I’m almost a FULL version behind. Of course, it’s most likely due to the fact that I DON’T EVER POST ANYTHING on here… but that has all been fixed. I have upgraded to the most current version of WordPress, and even installed some nifty new gadgets… or widgets… or something. It’s all supposed to make the site easier for me to still do nothing on. Maybe I should figure out if there is a way to make my blog update my twitter, which in turn updates my facebook…

I know we still have this blog and website, and I hardly ever use it.  As a matter of fact, the last post on here was nearly a year ago, which relegates me to the role of “suckiest blogger ever.”  But I rarely have much to say, and so I have found that Twitter and Facebook end up being an adequate substitute.  I never feel compelled to write witty prose, since I’m limited to only 140 characters.  That’s not a lot of space to say anything, which works out great when you really don’t have much to say.

Les and Casen are in NJ, we at least Les is right now.  Casen is back in Utah visiting his dad for Christmas.  It’s odd without him here.  It’s nice having family around.

I suppose I should get up for the gym in the morning.  I only have to make it 3 more times this year to reach my goal for 2009.  As there are only 7 more days in 2009, I really should get on that.

I think our webhost made some changes, because for a long time, I couldn’t get to any of the pages on our site. I finally had some time this afternoon to sit down and figure it out… It appears that all of our pages were set to 777, and should be 755. I don’t really know what that means, but there was a handy dandy tool on their site that allowed me to change it at their direction, and the site is back up and running (not that I’ll pay a lot of attention to it, DAMN YOU Facebook!).

Things are going well, and spring is finally on it’s way. We are planning to spend the day tomorrow doing yard work. I think this will be the one time this year that I’m excited to do yard work.