This morning I looked in the backyard and saw Duchess (neighbor's white cat) hunched over a black feathery body. Then I noticed that there was this chaos of birds circling over our yard making all kinds of noise. Duchess is now gone as is the chaos but the body is still there. I'm tempted to go look.

[Expletive] I can't swear because I'm at work and it costs me a quarter. I just typed a whole huge thing and then resized my window because I can't friggin scroll and now my words have gone. What a world.

My story was a complaint about how I wanted to go to this lecture at a bookstore and they expected me to pay right this second to reserve my seat and this basically rubbed me the wrong way. It's not like it's the Crown Prince of Swaziland giving the lecture. I told them to forget it.

Also some charming guy called the office today to sell us DSL and I explained that with our current setup DSL isn't going to work and he was like, shouting and arguing with me. He keeps telling me that his tech will come in and install the new modem to our network. I say, "What is it about 'we don't have a network' that you're not understanding?" "Ma'am," he shouts, "That's what I'm telling you. My tech will come in and install it." His tech is going to install our network? How much you want to bet that his tech gets here and either (a) can't do it; or (b) can do it but it will cost about a million dollars? I finally told him I was working on a time sensitive project and didn't have time to argue with him.

I guess I am a little irritable today.

I could think of a lot more things to say every day before I started the blog. I'm not sure what that means.

Weds was my last belly dancing class and we ended doing this thing where you had to do a solo in front of the class. I was completely mortified. The teacher said she didn't care what we did, we would just hip bump across the room but all these gals were stopping in the middle of the room and twirling and shimmying. I was thinking of any way to get out of it including taking a 10 minute pee break but they still hadn't gotten to my turn when I got back so I just did these huge steps across the floor and finished my "solo" in about 6 seconds. Yay me. A night of immense personal growth.

Today something on my work computer melted down and wouldn't let me get on the web. Every URL I typed in, it said "can't find that server" and I tried all these tricks and basically my whole computer at work is now screwed up for anything on Netscape. It was totally aggravating and I said the f-word 7 times and now I owe the potty mouth jar $1.75. I couldn't even pay up because I used all my cash to pay for lunch.

This has been a good weekend with decent weather. I finished reading Cruddy and I'd have a hard time recommending it. It's not that it isn't a good book, but it's very dark and joyless, so if you're going to read it, be prepared.

Since the sun is out I am trying to talk myself into getting out in the yard and doing something. Any work I do now I will be grateful for later. I haven't completely convinced myself yet.

Maybe the PamBlog will be about cooking.

Tonight I made this deep dish pizza recipe from Cooks Illustrated. I used another Cooks Ill recipe for BBQ sauce and then baked chicken in the BBQ sauce. Then I added some BBQ sauce to pizza sauce and put the whole shmrere on the pizza. It was pretty damn good. I made an apple pie too.

I want my own cooking show.

I keep thinking of things I want to post here and then never do it.

My belly dancing class on Valentine's Day was pretty fun. We did a partner thing and of course the class has an odd number of people and guess who is the odd man out? Do we ever outgrow the humiliation of our youth?

So I ended up being partners with the teacher which would be fine except for the part where I have to be at the front of the class and where I worry that the teacher will go home and brain herself after watching my poor moves and wondering if she's cut out for teaching.

Today I am making bbq pizza and I think I will get a medal when I'm done.

I'm starting to think the potato bread bread wasn't as big a mistake as I first thought. I opened the oven to peek about 20 minutes after I put them in and they looked like they rose so fast they burst. They came out okay -- not super pretty, but decent and they taste great. Maybe my expectations were too high.

I've been irritable today. I think I'll go to bed early and read my book: Cruddy by Lynda Barry.

Today I'm making potato bread. I just finished the kneading - what a workout. My arms are all trembly. There's a certain amount of courage involved in bread baking. I get psyched out every time that it won't rise or that I'll do something else wrong. I haven't baked enough to have any sort of instinct in the process. I just knead as long as the cookbook says and do the rising as long as the cookbook says and then the baking part gets me too. I can't tell if it's done. If the top looks pretty that's usually my cue to pull it. I can't tell whether I've blown it until I slice into it.

I bought a baking stone on Friday so I'm throwing these loaves onto that freeform. We'll see what I end up with.

I went to the dentist on Weds. I have had progressively worse problems with being excruciatingly bothered by cold on my teeth. Like brushing my teeth with cold tap water sends me into a spin. We finally realized, after all these few years, that my switch to all natural toothpastes without flouride might be the problem. I have this flouride rinse to try. Hope that's it.

I'm getting ready to go to Belly Dancing class #4. I had a lot of fun the first two classes but last week just got too out of hand and I don't have a real aptitude for dance steps. Who knew that belly dancing wasn't just undulating about to exotic music? There are actual steps and coordinating arm movements and last week was too much and I just felt like crying.

I feel like I can't find anything in this house. I was looking for this silver polish I bought and looked in the 4 most likely places and it's not there. I also was looking for an old box of pictures and had no luck although I did find some other old pictures that I wouldn't mind burning if they didn't preserve some key life history. Are we doomed to always regret how we looked 10 years + earlier?

Now that I have this thing set up I can't think of one interesting thing to say. The drive home from work was at speed. Took me about 15 minutes. Too bad it can't be like that more often.

omigod. Obviously there is something I am not getting about this blog process because I just spent like, 4 hours, twiddling with my pages and adding pictures and indexes and stuff and NOW THEY'RE ALL GONE. (shrill voice).

I guess there is no point in crying and I'm not in the mood to read all the support files at the moment so I guess I am going to live with it until further notice.

I've just spent half the day frickin with the blog pages and trying to make them look just a teeny bit different from the templates and since I'm so endlessly "challenged" when it comes to web stuff, I'm slow.

We saw TRAFFIC yesterday and wow, intense. Run out and see it now. Benicio Del Toro, my new man. Bob kept saying, "I don't see the attraction" and y'know what? I don't get it either but I want him to show up at my door on a motorcycle and we'll go for a ride.

It's taken me forever to figure out how to make the blog work. I had my userID wrong on my FTP thing which probably sounds a lot stupider than it was but I'm not going to explain it here.

Now I will kill half the day listening to cds and fixing up my pages so they link up to this.

Okay, I am finally, after about 100 years, getting my blog started. I haven't been able to get yoda (my iMac) to accept cookies and it's a long story and yes I have had "accept cookies" selected in my browser, it's a bigger problem than that.

Today I went through my entire harddrive and examined all the little things I've installed from the MacAddict disks and I found two likely culprits and deleted them in their entirety and now I think I'm back in business.

But then, I couldn't get into egroups which is now yahooclubs or some such nonsense. Another rant for another day.