As soon as I have time to play with all the new bells and whistles (not tonight, my nose is buried in Romantic Poetry) I will be sure to put together a post entitled “Why Firefox is the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread.”

And if you haven’t upgraded to a REAL browser yet, do it today! What are you waiting for?!

Well, I think I can say that my birthday is officially over.

Today I got the last birthday cards in the mail that I was expecting and the rest of the presents I bought myself arrived. (Can you believe it? I bought myself NO cross stitch stash for my birthday this year!) It’s been a good birthday if I do say so myself. If the rest of the year is half as enjoyable as the past two weeks have been, it will be a hell of a year.

Of course, one of the highlights of my birthday weekend was going to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with Him yesterday. (I have decided to drop the He-Who-Must-Not-Yet-Be-Named for something shorter… albeit much less creative.) I am not going to write a movie review, but I will say this: I liked and didn’t like the movie. As a stand-alone action movie with Harrison Ford it was fun. As an addition to the Indiana Jones franchise, it wasn’t really what I was hoping for and frankly I was a little disappointed.

However, after the movie yesterday He and I went shopping for bedding for my new bed. (Yes! He went shopping with me! Could He be a keeper?) As usual, I wanted something nice, but was feeling too cheap to pay the big bucks for what I wanted so I hit the sale rack. And I wasn’t disappointed either. There was a “bed in a bag” set that I liked, but I found a comforter/sham set that I was partial to as well.

The “bed in a bag” was a very pretty set with purple flowers on it, but when I showed it to Him and asked his opinion he did that man-stutter thing that means he didn’t want to disagree but he clearly didn’t have too high of an opinion of what was being presented to him. Lucky for Him, I agreed: The “bed in a bag” was kind of girly!

In the end, I decided on the comforter/sham set in a pattern called “Summer Rain” and bought some 350 count Pima cotton sheets in a bluish-green-gray to match.

He must not have minded that set too much: After all, he did help me make the bed when I got home!

Of course, two weeks later when I finally did decide to make an appearance I did it in literally the most ass-backwards way. You see, I was a breech baby. My mother always jokes that I presented my best side to the world first, but I suspect I was just being cheeky.

Anyway…

This morning I received a visit from someone who, at this point, shall remain nameless. After an encounter we had last weekend, I had been waiting for (and looking forward to) this visit all week. During my discussion with He-Who-Must-Not-Yet-Be-Named the subject of my birthday, which this year falls the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend and on the opening day of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, came up.

When I mentioned to He-Who-Must-Not-Yet-Be-Named that my plans for my birthday included a long holiday weekend in which I planned drive to The Big City to see the long-awaited fourth installment of the Indiana Jones movies in a fancy cinemaplex, his response was that he would hate for me to be alone while celebrating these two important milestones. In that case, I told him, he was welcome to come with me and after he confirmed he would love to do just that, we made plans for… dare I call it a date?

I just hope he doesn’t mind too much when I drool over Harrison Ford/Indiana Jones for the entire two hours!

What is your favorite past time while stitching? Do you just enjoy silence, listen to music/audiobooks or do you “watch” TV/movies? Do you have specific favorites you listen to/watch while stitching?

Honestly speaking, I like to do all of the above while stitching. Depending on my mood, sometimes I enjoy the silence, other times I listen to my last.fm station or my music collection, and sometimes I “watch” television shows or movies. Since I don’t own a television, I only watch a few select programs like House or Heroes on my laptop so obviously they are some of my favorites to “watch” while stitching.

However, I recently discovered the joy of listening to audiobooks while stitching.

I quite enjoyed listening to Harry Potter 1 and 2 during my drive over Christmas break a few weeks ago, which made me wonder if I would like to listen to them while stitching.

After all, if one can entertain his or her brain by listening to an audiobook while performing a mechanical task like driving, wouldn’t another mechanical task (like stitching* ) work just as well? So I set up a somewhat odd corner in my living room consisting of my stitching, my chair, and what I have dubbed my “all-purpose entertainment center” (aka my laptop) and started to listening to Harry Potter 3…

… And 4.
… And 5.

* Before anyone gets up in arms, as a stitcher I know that cross stitching is a creative outlet, but the fact is inserting a needle and thread into a piece of fabric over and over again is a pretty mechanical task… I think we all know what I mean.

However…

The blatant bastardization of the English language that can be referred to as Internet speak has begun to bother me more and more every time that I run across it. I don’t notice it so much on the blogs that I visit, but it creeps up with ever more frequency on places like MySpace, Facebook, and the like.

I know it comes partly from the abbreviations that are semi-necessary when one uses text-messaging, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying. In particular, I am aggravated by im for I’m, ur for your, the idea that vowels are no longer necessary in words, this seemingly incessant need to add z instead of s to words to create the plural, the obvious misspelling of simple words such as the, and deliberately bad grammar such as i iz.

It isn’t that I can’t understand this pidgin language, I can. In fact, I am as guilty as the rest of us and readily admit that I (over)use lol, rotfl, btw and omg (to name just a few) when chatting with friends or posting to bulletin boards.

However, the point is when I write something of substance for the entire world to see, I (mostly) follow those maddening rules of English grammar and spelling that I learned in eighth grade English class and don’t understand why everyone else can’t do the same.

It really isn’t too much to ask, iz it?!