Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

Holy Hatbox, Batman! We’ve Been Nominated!

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This week I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that I have been nominated for the award of “Best Writing” in the “Share The Love” Blog Awards over at One Woman’s World. To whichever of my wonderful readers nominated me for this honor, thank you so much!

If you’d like to help share the love, click here to help narrow down the list of finalists. You can vote once in each category, and this round of voting will close at midnight on February 6th.

I’m especially honored, because I’m in the running with some of my very favorite bloggers, including

Almost Somewhat Positive

The Patent Princess

Miss Britt

tiggerprr’s scratching post

Wacky Mommy

An Island Life

So what are you waiting for? Go! Share! Love!

Expanding The Reach Of My Powers

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I’m very excited, because today my powers are going to be featured in a new, very cool online forum.

You may have heard me mention before the Artella website, home to “The Waltz of Words, Art, and Spirit”, founded by the wonderfully amazing Marney K. Makridakis. Her latest venture has been to create a daily online creativity newspaper called “The Daily Muse”. And today, an article that I wrote entitled, “How To Thrive As A Dilettante” is being run there. It features such helpful insights as, “If the number of jobs on your resume is equal to or greater than the number of years you’ve been out of college, you’re probably a dilettante.”

“The Daily Muse” is a members only feature, but if you click this link you can receive a free, “no strings attached, no credit card necessary” membership to “The Daily Muse”.

I hope you enjoy it!

Sometimes, Math Hurts

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Yesterday I tutored one of the eleventy-thousand high school students who have a Spanish exam coming up this week. After we had finished and I was walking him to the door he said, “Man, I can’t wait until next semester when I get to start fresh with a brand new 100 in Spanish!”

“Um, not to burst your bubble or anything,” (Liar, liar pants on fire! Anytime anyone says that, that is of course exactly what they want to do!) I said, “but that’s not actually true. You don’t start each semester with a 100, and then your teacher takes points away from you. You start each semester with a zero, and then everything you do earns points towards your grade.”

Imagine a baby, sitting in a field of golden sunshine, surrounded by tiny butterflies, happily playing with a ball while puppies and kittens look benevolently on. Then imagine that you stride up to that baby, smack that ball right out of its hands, and start yelling at it, for no reason. Imagine the expression on that baby’s face when, smack in the middle of all of that goodness, it discovers that such wretchedness and misery exists in this world.

That’s pretty much what this student’s face looked like after I’d finished breaking this news to him. So if you heard any cosmic shrieking yesterday, or sensed any rending in the fabric of the universe, don’t worry. It was only me, shattering the illusions of the young and the innocent.

And incidentally, this is exactly why I majored in words.

Surrender

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Yesterday, in our continuing efforts to break up with our bank, I went to clean out our safety deposit box and turn in our keys. I also had to sign our original contract and state that I had, in fact, done these things. Interestingly enough this act was not referred to as anything like “Termination of Contract” or “End of Rental Agreement.” It was termed “Surrender“, which I thought was ironically appropriate, given the fact that we’ve been locked in unending mortal combat with this institution for the past year.

So yes, we may have surrendered this particular battle. But seeing as how we have already opened up new accounts with a bank that does not cause its customers to feel as if they are being repeatedly and inappropriately violated in their most tender parts with sharp, pointy objects, we are most definitely winning the war.

Government By The People

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Tonight in the car, on the way home from voting.

Me (to my husband): “What is eminent domain?”

My husband (so stunned that he physically recoils): “Did you take Civics?”

Me: “Ye-es.”

My husband (in a tone that clearly says, I cannot believe I let you sleep in my bed every night): “Do you watch the news?”

Me: “No. Could you please just answer my question without trying to make me feel bad?”

My husband: “Um, no, apparently not.”

Breaking Up: Still Hard To Do, But Getting Easier

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Tomorrow we are going to break up with our bank. And I can’t wait!

Earlier this year I wrote about how I moved some of our accounts over to a new financial institution. Because, as I said, “I decided that I was tired of paying the old bank every month just for the privilege of keeping my money there.” More and more our monthly statements were starting to look like this:

Monthly Service Fees:

Driving past our building on the way to the grocery store: $3.00

Breathing air: $5.00

I have been ready to leave them for a while now, but my husband was not quite ready to pull the plug on this banking relationship. (“I’ve been with them longer than I’ve been with you.”) Until we received a letter from our bank informing us that it was time to pay the annual rental fee for our safety deposit box. It was the same old stuff, until we got to the part explaining that, seeing as how this fee was no longer going to be automatically paid to the bank (since the account that used to pay it has since been closed), it was now going to cost us an extra $25 to rent this box because we were going to be sending the payment in manually.

I can only imagine that this new fee breaks down something like this:

Having to take time out from sucking away all our clients’ money by opening an envelope: $2.00

Possibility of getting a paper cut from opening said envelope: $2.00

Expensive bottled water transported directly from clear mountain springs on the back of tiny, beribboned poodles in order to replace the saliva lost when we said, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, we figured out how to get extra money out of you even though you’re no longer sending us payments automatically! Neener, neener, pppffbbtt!”

Manicure for poodles: $1.00

I really, really REALLY hate this bank! (Also? Not that fond of poodles.) And we need to get out now while we can, because I know it’s only a matter of time before our bank statements start to look like this:

Medicine needed to relieve headache brought on by excessive meditation on the question, “How can we suck away even more of our customers’ money?”: $10.00

Expensive, hand-woven towels and personal manservants needed to delicately mop the sweat off of our furrowed brows: $250.00

Bonbons needed to stimulate the rush of endorphins that will cause us to have the brilliant revelation that actually, our clients should just be automatically turning over every single cent they ever make to us, and hey, why aren’t they doing that already?!: $1,000.00

Penalty for failure to automatically sign over to bank all paychecks and personal assets: $100 katrillion dollars, + 1 kidney + firstborn child.

Needless to say, I am VERY excited about tomorrow. Because,

monthly payment to host website: $19.95

electricity: $15.00

hating: FREE!

The opportunity to snark about my bank online so as to milk every possible drop of enjoyment out of breaking up with them: priceless

Lightly Nerdy

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About two years ago my husband and I went to the electronics store to purchase a DVD burner and an iPod. He sent me to find the iPod, and went off in search of the DVD burner himself. I personally know nothing about electronics, but I memorized everything he told me to ask for, and I figured that I could lean heavily on the approach to male salespeople known as ” The Damsel In Distress.”

Unfortunately, I was in for a very rude awakening. Apparently guys who work in electronic stores are completely oblivious to damsels in distress.

(Important Side Note: The other group this doesn’t work on is Other Women. Say, for example, that you go to a dinner party at a friend’s house. And say that once you’re there you locate a guy and decide to focus your “Please rescue me!” energy on him. The guy may very well want to ride to your rescue, but he won’t have the chance to do anything about it. Because you will be dead. Because the woman to whom the guy belongs will have stabbed you in the face with her salad fork. But, I digress.)

So one day I was recounting this story to a friend of ours, with special emphasis on the fact that while I, personally, was passed over by at least three salespeople, the moment that my husband began walking towards me clerks flew over from all corners of the store, and were falling all over themselves to help him. (And yes, I am bitter.)

When I was done with my story our friend replied, “Well I know exactly why that happened. It’s because you don’t have enough nerd points.”

(Another Important Side Note: This is the same friend who, when told that I had become a Certified Life Coach responded by declaring that the entire profession of coaching is a made-up job.

My husband tried to mediate this little “misunderstanding” one day, and so he asked our friend, “Well, didn’t you ever wonder who you are, or why you’re here, or what you’re supposed to do with your life?”

And our friend replied, “Well, yeah. But then I turned ten, and I decided to become an engineer, and I was fine.”) [Read more…] about Lightly Nerdy

Apparently, My Powers Have Some Limits

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Because today, I broke my website. And you know what did me in? Pride.

Last week I took a quiz to determine just exactly where I fell among all of the deadly sins, and here were my results:

Greed: High
Gluttony: High
Wrath: Medium
Sloth: Medium
Envy: Medium
Lust: Very Low
Pride: Very High

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

This will of course come as no surprise to anyone who is married to me, is related to me, went to school with me, is friends with me, was friends with me, has ever worked with me, or has ever passed by me on the street.

And if there is anything about which I am prideful, it is the correct use of grammar, and my own personal correct-grammar-using-abilities. In other words, I am a Grammar Snob.

Just two weeks ago on vacation (VACATION!) I declared to my husband that I could not bring myself to eat at the Western Sizzlin’ because its name is composed entirely of adjectives and contains no nouns. (Fortunately for him, he packed lots of tequila.)

So today I asked him to install a new plug in on my blog that would change the way that the comments appear on each post. He did, and everything was fine until I saw that for some reason, it generated the following sentences: “[x] and [y] have already leave comments. Why don’ you?”

Well, there’s not enough tequila in the world to make that acceptable to a grammar snob, so I took it upon myself to just go in and “correct” the grammar written in the HTML code. Because everyone knows that having a Master’s Degree in Spanish and being able to write beautiful, densely packed, grammatically correct paragraphs in two languages means that you are also an expert in computer code.

Not.

Fortunately my husband, the person who actually knows how to write computer code and who has pretty much built this entire website for me, was able to fix it, with only a minimum of eye-rolling, whistling, and use of the phrase “screwed the pooch.”

And because he loves me very very much, and because there is some tequila left over from vacation, he also fixed the grammar for me too.

Better Blogs And Gardens

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OK, so there aren’t any actual gardens here, but I was having trouble thinking up a clever way to introduce the new additions I’ve made lately to my cyber-home. (And by “I’ve made here”, I mean, “that my amazing techno-god husband has so kindly and lovingly added for me”).

If you look over to the right sidebar, you can see there’s a new section for quotes that I like entitled, “Good Words.”

Also on the right sidebar, you can see the spiffy graphics for all the books I’m currently reading. (ETA: I had to remove this plug-in as it was somehow related to my blog continually being hacked. Not sure if I’ll be able to put it back or not.)

And if you look at the tabs on the top, you will see that there is now a tab for Podcasts. My first podcast is a speech I gave earlier this month entitled, “Black Sheep Girl In A White Sheep World”.

Enjoy!