…so I took a picture of my desk, for posterity. Sorry it’s shaky, my hands hurt too. My everything hurts.

• Mmm, beer.
• Somewhat-outdated-but-still-useful “Unofficial Guide to London,” because that’s where the scenes are right now
• Mac and cheese
• iPod with Genius mix based on Matt Nathanson’s “Come on Get Higher”
• Stack of unpaid bills
• “Real Pork Bloggers” mousepad from BlogHer.
• Laptop on cooling stand
• And pile of messy cables connecting it to new monitor (waiting on docking station to arrive) that is displaying not OneNote, but Tweet Deck.

Also on desk but not pictured:

• Unopened Netflix DVD, arrived Nov. 3
• “Telling Lies for Fun and Profit” by Lawrence Block
• Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style”
• Blackberry (is taking this shaky picture)

I have written one hundred and forty words in this post. Can I count that toward my daily total?

UPDATED 11.29.2009, 01:12 CST

I WIN I WIN I WIN!

My boyfriend and I work pretty much opposite schedules, which means it can be hard for us to find time to spend together, especially time we can spend with just each other and not the group of friends who also want to see him on his off time. Because he’s in the restaurant business, he goes into work in the late afternoon when I’m leaving my desk job, he’s coming home when I’m going to bed, and I’m leaving in the morning when he’s still snoring.

We both have off during the day on Saturday and Sunday (when he is asleep till noon) and on evenings Monday and Tuesday. It’s not a ton of time, and since we don’t live together we don’t even get to see each other for those five minutes that our paths cross during waking hours on the other days. And Monday nights are volleyball with a big group, and Sundays are football with friends, etc.

It sucks a bit.

But as much as I value the time I do get to spend with him, I no longer feel inclined to make that alone time into a big production. Yesterday is a good example:

E: What do you want to do tonight?
Me: Go to a movie?
E: There’s nothing to see.
Me: Dunno then, whatever, we could just chill.
E: No, we should Do Something.

And probably a dozen more times over the course of the evening that we spent doing nothing but watching TV, he repeated “we should go Do Something” even though we couldn’t think of anything to do.

I don’t care if we don’t Do Something every time we hang out. I like hanging out and watching TV with him, not leaving the house, not having deep, meaningful discussions, not spending a bunch of money. I like sitting on the couch and reading while he holds my feet at the other end and watches something I’m not interested in.

I can appreciate more that casual time is still important time and we don’t need to Do Something to make our limited time together into something meaningful. I think it’s sweet that he wants to do things for me and so on, but I’m tired of the push to make things into a production. Sometimes it makes me feel like we’re failing to make the best of our time, and that’s frustrating.

When we’ve been married for a zillion years, remind me of this post and I’ll long for the days when he wanted everything to be special bonding time. But for now…

Honey, can we just SIT DOWN for awhile? Just you and me? Let’s eat what’s already in the house and watch a movie one of us owns or something on TV. Let’s not do anything tonight.

I haven’t been able to get CommentLuv to find the feed on my site since I started using this Wordpress theme, so my last posts never show up when I leave comments on other people’s blogs. I emailed CommentLuv support about it and they said:

you have not got an autofind feed url in your site header , commentluv needs to see where your feed is to be able to read it.

Does anyone know how to get this autofind feed URL thinger? I emailed my theme template designer but haven’t heard back. Surely it’s just some simple line of code in header.php, right?

Help, please.

Fixed it! With a little help from the folks at CommentLuv and a good old Google search, I’m set to go.

I added these lines after the meta tags in header.php:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> RSS Feed” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>” /><meta name=”distribution” content=”global” />

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> Atom Feed” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>” /><meta name=”distribution” content=”global” />

And made sure that <?php wp_head(); ?> was right before the </head> command.

It works, everyone! Hurrah!

Even though I’ve moved to an apartment, I still can’t shake the urge to make a mess redoing things in my living space. I’ve painted everything, installed a new light switch, changed out an old fixture, put up shelving, run coax cable, you name it. I like to make a space my own, and I want everything just so.

The other day I made myself very proud.

I bought an articulating wall-mount for my little 19″ flat panel TV in my bedroom. It’s such a small screen that it does me no good to have it on the wall facing my bed because it’s so far away. So in order to make it work on the wall parallel to my bed, I needed to make it move. So I bought this guy:

It was a cinch to screw it onto the back of the TV. There was a second piece that went onto the wall directly. It even had a built-in leveler so you could mark your drill holes exactly right! Putting the wall mount piece in wasn’t HARD, but it was a little scary because I had to use a 1/4″ drill bit to put in the bolts. It may not sound like much, but that’s a BIG hole to put in your wall. Two big holes, actually. But it worked.  Then the part with the arm just slid onto it and clicked in place.

Then there were power and cable cords hanging down, looking ratty. I picked up some paintable wire covers at Lowe’s and used those to corral the cables and hide them neatly away.

Check it out!

The mounting hardware is rock-solid, and the swing arm is so cool. It doesn’t sit the TV flush against the wall, but that’s the price you pay for that articulating arm instead of a flush-mount. Well worth it, I say.

Go me!

Some of my pants fit again!

Some of them still don’t, but hey… PANTS!

I was prepared to take a little of my excess escrow refund money and hit the mall for several new pairs of dress pants, since neither my khakis, gray pants, or black pants fit me without being too bootylicious for work. I’d long outgrown my nice brown pinstripe pants and so they’ve gone to Goodwill, along with my pink and grey tweeds.

I don’t know if it’s because of carrying so many moving boxes, going up and down stairs a lot more, or what – as it sure was not my diet – but I’ve lost about five pounds and my khakis and gray pants fit once more!

WIN.