::aujourd'hui::

i killed 2 black widow spiders tonight in the garage. a careful & frightening battle involving a broom and a shovel. that'll be 3 in one month. all i wanted was the bubble wrap and an empty box....

yeah, me!

::can you still feel?::

...the name of the jason falkner album i am listening to. feeling goofy. lunch was serious. i had some seriously delicious chicken tortilla soup @ corner bakery with josh. i shall be returning to work shortly. it is SO humid outside. it actually reminds me of the weather in sydney, australia, when josh & i deplaned our 13 hour honeymoon flight. that is the only trip i have made without my feet swelling up & i will never take off my shoes again!!!

radiohead at the hollywood bowl is, sadly, sold out. i'm sure it did so in the blink of an eye. the new album, hail to the thief, is awesome. they are by far the most innovative rock band out there these days and i believe they are doing a great deal (whether or not they know it) to shape the modern story of music history/theory. brilliant.

urrr... get back to work!

::funding contentment::

ha ha. commonly feeling uncreative with my titles for the various blogging entries. no, i won't go into how much it's going to cost to be content here, but after the last post, I figure we all had it coming to us. besides, other things fund my contentment these days than money and i am thankful for that. josh, friends, family, music, movies, lounging around the house (especially since josh cleaned it on friday. ohmygosh it's AMAZING. and i haven't been able to tackle anything at all this week). that sums up most of my activities in a non-stop week. josh's parents are off to england for 2 weeks and we spent time with them. then attended a phil keaggy concert at saddleback church with josh's aunt & uncle. as i sit here on a sunny sunday morning collecting my thoughts, i am amazed at how quickly time passes & how precious every second is. ok, i'll admit i barely have a grasp on this, but i wish i could slow things down and that's enough, isn't it?

i also just noticed how i didn't list God in the list from above and i can so totally see why contentment has been so difficult to achieve. it really has to start here. appreciating all that we've been blessed with (and the list is infinite). yet again the locale i reside in is not conducive with "not wanting more" and i feel invariably like veruca salt: "i want an oompaloompa NOW, daddy!" suffice to say that a trip to ikea is highly desirable at this point in time as everything else seems so ghastly overpriced on furniture row. (that thought came from the far-reaches of my consciousness, forgive me!)

::finding contentment::

i know i don't write often enough on my blog. it reflects on how rarely i write to my family & friends. in an effort to better myself, i am trying to balance out all the responsibilities that weigh heavily on my brain lately. as i know the wear & tear of my job will continue to get worse before it gets better, i am also in a state of evaluation. all of this to be summed up in the query "What next?" while i realize that modern culture doesn't teach us much about contentment, i find it is something i am building towards and i'm also not quite sure how to do it....

work is not the be all and end all of my life: particularly the position i am currently holding. it is a means to an ends, it helps pay the bills, it offers... {thinking} ... a sense of accomplishment? i'm not quite sure. i know that i heartily enjoy the group that i work with: a hard-working class act of women & men who are all at times underpaid and overworked. such is life when you are employed at a new company. these are growing pains that we are experiencing and that's fine & i'm not against that entirely. but i may be against it for me. the stress that builds up at the end of the month this last time left me in tears as i battled against a cold, nearly lost my voice, and spent my days hanging by a thread of tylenol and sudafed. didn't i come here because i needed a break? wasn't it supposed to be less stressful? (as my parents so aptly reminded me recently) well, yes! absolutely! and it was a relatively easy job until we started to take off. and now there's more work than i can shake a stick at (i'll have you know stick shaking accomplishes very little at my desk these days). so where does this leave me??? oh yes, my quest for contentment, of course....

so i'm still working out that plan. i've been stewing on it for quite some time now. i debate about returning to school but i really think if i were being honest with myself that i simply want to shove my workload onto someone else. my partner in crime is soon to be promoted to another position and i'm not sure how i'm going to cope with that. my position and workload is difficult enough without the dread of training another individual and then there's that OTHER work that i've been shifting around in piles & hiding in various drawers that constantly nags at me. but honestly, the reason it's there is because i'm contantly getting pulled from my work to do other work and really it's not entirely my fault that it's like that. i really feel like i'm giving as much as i can most of the time. and, when i'm not, it's because i just don't know where to start with all of it.

so there's my rant. and now that i've got that off my chest, i'm going to throw a load of laundry in the wash & get ready for bed. and maybe, in some parallel universe, we'll all get a raise & andrew won't feel like going to that position in the IT department. oh! and all the work that i've needed to play catch-up on will take care of itself. yeah. i can dream, can't i???