I did absolutely nothing today. Nothing at all.

I just sat on my big butt and talked to my mother on the phone.

For four and a half hours.

Heh.

A series of efforts today to try and stave off the menacing grey. It’s like a fog that has weight, the grey that steals over me sometimes. Instead of weighing me down from the outside like something real, it seeps into my limbs and deadens my fingers and makes everything ache.

It’s not depression. I’ve been depressed before, I know how it feels. Or maybe it is depression but I don’t buy into brain chemistry and the need for drugs. The medication doesn’t prevent these episodes, so it’s not the answer. Fighting it is the answer. If only it wasn’t so tiring.

So, efforts. Paying bills, sweeping the floors, doing even just one, exhausting load of laundry. Sticking to a promise to cook healthy meals at home instead of constantly ordering out – even tonight. Even tonight when it was so hard to drag myself to the kitchen and stand over the stove. Perhaps especially tonight. Handmade turkey burgers with guacamole and Monterey Jack cheese with a side of triumphant exhaustion!

Take that, $%@#$ greyness.

I once heard someone on a show about severe obesity explaining the problem with food being that it’s not like you can eat enough food for the week on Sunday. You have to eat multiple times a day and every time you eat, you confront your problem with not eating more than you need.

I’m like that with music. It’s never enough. No matter how much I love my old favourites (and by now I have thousands of them), I am constantly falling in love with new songs, new artists, whole new genres even. Ishi has no idea how lucky he is – how grateful he should be that I work so hard to keep my music lust in check and how little I spend on new CDs and MP3 downloads. If he even had the first clue that I have said “no” to a new CD at least 150 times before I finally give in and buy one, I’m sure he would be beside himself with gratitude. Right?!

But every once in a while I hear something and the notes go down inside me and awaken a deep, bottomless hunger and I know, just know I have stumbled across something that will change the very shape of the horizons of my life’s soundscape.

Tonight, at the beginning of the final scene of tonight’s episode of Flashpoint, a line from this song played and I was just agog. I can never hear the words, but I heard these: “how many more days can you hold out”. Thanks to Google and some very creative rephrasings, I found it! It’s called “The Sun Is Shining Down” by JJ Grey and Mofro. I wasn’t the only one it impressed; you can hear the whole song here.

I bought the CD within ten minutes of the show ending. I think I found my next old, old favourite.

Yesterday and today were gray and cold. The gray seeps into my bones and the cold stiffens my fingers until I am unable to do much of anything beyond making a cup of hot chocolate and retreating to my warm nest under the covers with a book. It looks like I’m going to have to declare it officially summer if the weather won’t co-operate – life is too short for nine months of winter!

Or wait… how does that go again?

I may have mentioned a few thousand times that I’ve had a hard winter. My spring has been better, by far, but I am still very much subject to the pitfalls of having not very much to do and all day to avoid doing it. Summer is looking hopeful… but I may need to make an executive decision as to when summer actually starts, if only to relieve Ishi from the burden of coming up with creative new ways to find clean underwear.

In a sort of tongue-in-cheek homage to the colossal waste of the last six months, I thought I’d share the top ten online time sinkholes I’ve grown fond of. I waste time other ways, of course, but in keeping with the nature of the blog, let’s stick with teh intertubes. At the very least, this list should help with the nagging question Ishi must ask every single night: “Just what on earth does she do all day?”

My Top 10 Time Annihilators

In ascending order (least time wasted to most).

10. Facebook This was at one time around 2 or 3, but I figured out that the only way I can f-book is from my BlackBerry. Any other attempt to have Facebook in my life results in a catastrophic loss of time. I am talking time hemorrhage. I give myself an hour every two weeks to stalk everyone’s photos and recent status updates, and that’s it, out of sheer necessity.

9. Cute Overload I find the bunnehs eemposseeble. Many’s the grey morning that has been brightened by redonkulous noses and prosh paws!

8. Disapproving Rabbits I miss the daily dose of disapproval administered to me by my Stupendous Six. They were hilarious and darling, but of course oh-so-disapproving when warranted. This site is awesome.

7. Deviant Art The talent on this site is intriguing. I’ll log on to look for something specific, like a colour palette for a site I’m working on or something and then two hours later, I’m still there, leafing through stunning portfolios with a cold cup of tea at my elbow.

6. Passive Aggressive Notes This one is embarrassing, but I vowed to be honest. I believe wars could be prevented if world leaders were allowed to slip each other notes with heart-dotted “i”s and multiple exclamation points. I find the situations people find themselves in and the notes they write to deal with them absolutely hilarious. Slight warning: The notes themselves are fairly harmless, but the comments are not. Foul and vulgar are a fairly tame way to describe them.

5. Biblical Archaeology Review On the one hand, many would consider something like this site totally out of place on a time-wasters list. I’m subscribed to the print magazine and read it from cover to cover within a week of getting it. Since it only comes out six times a year, I find myself wandering over to the website for the e-features in order to get an extra fix now and again. It seemed to me to be a fairly virtuous waste of time… until a comment calling it “candy for academics” was published in the most recent issue. Now I’m not sure how to categorize my time spent on it!

4. LOLcats / I Can Has Cheezburger? I used to spend a great deal more time on this site, but the bandwagon has been overrun with nitwits who don’t quite understand the genius behind excellent LOLcat humour. It has mostly degenerated to overly obvious and cutesy descriptions of cute cat pictures, but I still find myself combing through the dross to try and find the flakes of pure gold such as the LOLrus and bukkit running gag. I’ve made quite a few of my own and if I ever manage to remember my password, I’ll start posting them here.

3. Our Stage This is an amazing site. Independent musicians of every possible stripe and flavour upload their music here. There is a competition in every genre every month and the fans (that’s us!) judge battles between songs, determining who will be in the finals. My Dad has quite a selection of his music there and I signed up to support him – now I’m hopelessly addicted. It’s fun but it’s also such a privilege to listen to so many truly worthy artists who haven’t been overproduced into a slick, bland package for the masses.

2. Ovusoft Forums I am here way too much. Toni Weschler’s amazing book, Taking Charge of Your Fertility, now comes with a software program to take your charting to the next level. As if that wasn’t cool enough, there is a forum completely dedicated to TTC^[1] and charting. When I started charting I devoured everything I could get my hands on and learned as much as I could. Now I answer questions and help other ladies understand the process, while getting companionship and support from ladies who, like me, have been trying for a while and also, like me, have lost at least one pregnancy. I maintain that I need this support, but I also admit that I’m there for a lot longer every day than I need to be.

1. SparkPeople It’s only been in the last week that Ovusoft Forum isn’t in the number one slot! SparkPeople is the single most valuable online resource I have ever come across for people who need to manage their weight. It’s 100% free. The articles and information presented on the site come from trained and certified professionals who have a passion for healthy living. The site offers sophisticated and easy-to-use tools for setting goals and tracking progress, for tracking nutrition and exercise, and also for watching the pounds go down. There are separate sister sites such as the integrated recipe site where SparkPeople members can share their recipes. I have spent an inordinate amount of time choosing recipes to try and entering my own to get the breakdown of nutritional information in them. It’s probably one of the most eye-opening things I’ve learned in my weightloss journey – how many of my recipes were not at all conducive to my efforts! A lot of it is time well spent, but too much time well spent is still a bit of a waste, so this gets the top spot.

1. TTC stands for Trying To Conceive [↩]