*yawn* It's almost 8:15, but I've been up nearly two hours, since I set the alarm to go off at 6:20 so I could be up and online in time to chat with Jevim before he left for work. It wouldn't have been so bad if I'd actually gone to bed when he did, but I was restless and so I took a late night bath and a little of Morgan Llewellyn's "The Elementals", grabbed a couple cookies and a small glass of milk, and climbed in bed.

My cat, Munchkin, heard me in the kitchen, so she hopped up into bed with me for some milk (I confess, I'm weird, I pour a small amount out into the palm of my hand and let her lap it up), and stayed for a little while -- standing on the book, of course, so I couldn't read -- then she lost interest and headed off to do whatever -- probably sleep with Mom. She refused to have anything to do with me when I first got home from the trip, but she's warming up to me quite quickly. Before I went off to take my bath, she actually came up in bed with me and stayed for about ten or fifteen minutes, getting petted and scratched, and loved in general.

I guess I must have fallen asleep fairly fast after my bath; I woke up a couple times in the night, which is typical, and I had a strange dream about getting my hair cut (something I want to get done, it's getting unruly at this in-between length), and walking to some store to buy haircolor (a lighter color than my hair, which is medium-dark brown), and coming home and hiding it from Mom. Then the alarm went off, and I managed to wake up fairly easily.

Hopping online, however, wasn't so easy. I turned on the monitor, and there was a notice from Win95 saying my C: drive was full, and asking if I wanted to empty the recycle bin. I told it yes, though I swore I'd had some 70MB free last night. Emptied the recycle bin, 880kb free. Tried dialing up, but it complained there wasn't enough free memory to complete the operation. Ack! So I looked around and deleted some long-forgotten and unnecessary stuff, and it finally let me log on. Jevim wasn't online yet, but it wasn't long after that he showed up. We chatted, and I went through deleting files that I no longer needed, until it was about time for him to go to work. That was when my ISP or the telco or someone decided to give me a hard time; I got disconnected three times, after long silences; really annoying when I'm trying to tell Jevim goodbye so he can head off to work. Of course, it quit hanging up on me as soon as he left. Weird...

Jevim almost managed to put me back to sleep with tons of *hugs* and *snuggles* this morning, but after being annoyed by the modem hang-ups, I wasn't so sleepy anymore, and I ended up hitting a few random Open Pages sites. Didn't really find anything that particularly drew me in, but I did hit a site that seems to have disappeared, and sent Kymm a message, hoping that was the right thing to do about it. I looked through the list and found Aries Moon, and checked the latest entries there as well, and now I'm here.

There's so much I want to accomplish, I really don't know where to begin. Some of them are New Year's resolution type things... like trying to watch the news every day and find out what's going on in the world around me ... and some are just sheer creative energy things, like wanting to totally redesign my main site and move it off of GeoCities because of those stupid pop-up ads. I don't mind the full-page ones near as much as those at this point, because the pop-ups always cause Javascript errors for me with IE 4.0. *grrr*

Anyway, here's a list of some things I'd like to get accomplished, or try to start doing.... maybe telling other people about them will help me get to work on them. I know if Jevim sees them, he will make it a point to remind me about them every so often, which helps.

• Start keeping up with world & national news (technology news too, it's more interesting to me)
• Finish Jevim's afghan
• Finish Mom's cross-stitch
• Get the rest of my stuff from my trip sorted and put away
• Learn more about how to use Frontier
• Update and move my main pages back to my ISP
• Finish the short story I started at Jevim's...

Speaking of said short story, it seems Jevim ran across one of my files that contained the first ideas for the story. He mentioned it last night, and sorta said what he thought of it, though I didn't figure out if he liked the idea or not. He said it sounded similar to some other stories he'd read at one time, and it got us off on the topic of religion, and started him rambling for quite a while. While he was talking about the story itself , I kept making excuses for it, like "Sometimes I come up with some pretty strange ideas," and so on... I shouldn't, and I shouldn't feel like I have to, but I guess I'm expecting criticism and not wanting to hear it.

Jevim asked if I knew what his views on religion and all were, and I said I wasn't sure, so he told me. I'm still not too sure, but then I'm not terribly clear on what my views are, anymore. I pray, sometimes, mostly when I'm scared of my body doing something I know it shouldn't be doing (all the problems with the kidney, which has been whining and complaining again from time to time), or when I'm worried about someone. Jevim's comment was that there are so many different religions that claim to be the "one, true religion" and only one of them can be right. I think I like Mercedes Lackey's theme in her Valdemar books better, "There is no one, true way."

Still lots of things to figure out in that realm, but I think that's a lifelong process. I used to go to church here in town with Mom all the time, but I've only gone once this year. Why? I don't know... part of it is that I don't feel like I have any close friends there. Mom has her lady friends, who are all old enough to at least be my grandparents, if not great-grandparents, and while I like some of them, I'm not close to any of them except Leona (Mom's closest friend here in town) and I think of her more as a grandmother than anything else.

I'm rambling an awful lot, and here it is only 8:37... this could be a monster entry if I keep it up. But I think I'll go devote some of this creative(?) energy to something else. Breakfast, firstly. I'm hungry!! TTYL...