Back to Real Life, hehe

So last night Mom came into town and took Brian & I to Red Lobster, and we got to chow on some tasty sea food!

And that was really cool, but just before we had to leave I got some Wendy Time! She actually figured out how to get (and stay) in SecondLife for a while! (Her computer and SL haven't been getting along for months now.)

It was monumental!!! :D

But then the conversation got confusing for me, and then suddenly she's going out of town until Tuesday, and so I won't be able to figure out what happened until next week. (If something did happen, still not sure, lol.)

But I got some quality Gnomey Time for a bit there! :D That's always cool.

And since my baby isn't going to be online for the rest of the week, I can watch movies and stuff. I mean, I watch movies anyway, but I try to stay close to the computer when there's a chance she'll be online, natch, hehe.

OH! I haven't blogged since Monday: Tisha turned 17 Tuesday!!! :D

It was cool; I was crashed -- still catching up on sleep -- and my phone awoke me with a text message: "Happy Birthday to me." I look at the time and it's 12:01 am, lol. In the past I've called her at midnight on her birthday. I think she waited a minute, then texted me to remind me, lol.

So I called her and we chatted and caught up with each other's lives.

She reminded me that I HAVE TO be there in May... She's graduating A YEAR EARLY!!! My daughter! Graduating a whole year early!!!

I was never very academic, you see. I made the best grades I could (a) continue acting with while (b) exerting the LEAST amount of effort.

See, the theatre troop I was a member of for 8 1/2 years was affiliated with the school. Twice a year we would have "School Shows" wherein an entire class (like, say, 7th Grade) would be bussed in from all of Odessa to see one of our plays. The kids got a taste of culture, and we usually got 3 days off from school.

As a result of this, we had to maintain passing grades to do the plays.

I am not proud to admit that in the latter part of my high school career I flunked out of a couple of plays, and had to teach my role to someone else. :(

Because it interfered with "b" above: In the last couple of years I had to actually do some school work to pass. I was used to just sort of absorbing the knowledge without putting forth much effort. But after my Freshman year of high school they started assigning more work and spoon-feeding us less. (Something about getting us ready for college or something, I dunno, lol.) ;)

After getting replaced on 2 shows, you can bet I started putting in any and all work needed to stay in the last few plays I had left before I graduated!!!

And when I started doing the work, a strange thing happened: Instead of Bs and Cs, I started making As, lol!

Tisha, however, has NEVER had this problem!!! She's ALWAYS been a A-Student!

We do, apparently, have one academic trait in common, though. This last year she admitted that her school work was getting harder. She didn't used to really feel like she was making much of an effort to get her As. But last year she discovered she was working harder to maintain her A grade-point average.

I thought that was interesting. That an A student and a C student, going through the school process 20 years apart, would experience a similar phenomena.

Still, that's got to be the ONLY place where I can compare myself to Tisha as far as school is concerned, lol.

So, as you can imagine, I am SO INCREDIBLY PROUD of Tisha and her accomplishments!!!

Also, allow me to emphasize that I LOVE learning new stuff now!!! When I got out of school and into "real life" I finally understood what was meant by "knowledge is power"! The Internet is this vast, free library and every time I have a question about ANYTHING I hop on the Net and grab some answers.

Granted, you have to be very, very careful about where you seek those answers on the Net, lol. It's easy to Google, say, "mind control" and stumble onto some badly constructed, 20,000-word essay by some dude living in his parents' basement holding court on how the government is using the fluoride in municipal water as a conductor to channel subliminal messages through the population's skulls.

I'm not saying this guy isn't right (the hyper-intelligent squirrels are the REAL ring-masters of this insidious conspiracy, I have discovered!) but such information isn't really useful in any day-to-day context. (We simply can't fight the squirrels.)

Still, there are enough legit sites out there, and sites that offer opposing viewpoints that one can generally get a decent idea of what the truth on any given subject might be. Then after that: BOOKS!

But for whatever reason -- probably because it felt like work -- while I was in school I just never had an interest in anything outside dating and filmmaking. I want to blame the educational system... But that's kind of been done before, lol. (Plus, I do know for a fact that I wasn't trying my hardest, even when I was making As, lol.)

Dude! The first job she takes out of college, she will probably be making TWICE what I'm making now, lol!!! Within 2 years it'll probably be 4-times what I make.

Now, with any luck, by that time I will have figured out how to make money at my passions... Then we'll be making the same, lol.

Anyway...

Okay, so I'm kind of killing time now. It's 5:22 am, and I just woke up from a LONG "nap". I need to be asleep in 3 hours for a full 8 hours before I head back to work.

After dinner last night Brian & I came home and watched FINDING NEMO again...

There was this unintentional theme going on yesterday...

I woke up and Brian was in SL fishing with our new fishing rods. He had made all these cool adjustments to our Pirate Hideout, and the place is like a kid's fantasy of a pirate hide-away!!!

So I joined him fishing, checking out his cool additions to the place, and we fished for HOURS until my baby came online and we started chatting in IM. She tried to get SL to cooperate with her computer for the longest time, and EVENTUALLY DID! So then she and I chatted in there for a bit until it crashed her out and she needed to get to bed (LONG day at work today :( ).

Then we chatted on IM for a bit longer until Brian & I had to go.

So what were we hungry for when Mom asks us where we want to go?

You got it! (Luckily, Mom was down, too, hehe.)

So then when we get home, stuffed to the gills (pardon the vaguely cannibalistic-sounding pun), I had this overwhelming urge to be in the ocean for 90 minutes.

After NEMO I just HAD TO lay down and allow myself to fall asleep, if that's the way things went.

After 2 episodes of FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS on my iPod, that's EXACTLY how things played out, lol.

Then I woke up.

I checked my IM to see if maybe I could catch Gnomey before work, but (1) she had to go in early today and (2) she had said last night that she would talk to me next week 'cause she had to pack for her trip. So I wasn't surprised not to see her.

And then here we are.

If I don't blog for the rest of the week, it's because I'm not at my computer as much, with My Gnomey-Goddess being away and all.

Then again, you know me... If a thought pops into my head -- just any random thought, lol -- I'll very likely hop on the keyboard long enough to jot it down and bore you with it, hehe. ;)

So between now and then: PEACE!!!

:D