And now I will answer all your life’s most important and hitherto unanswerable questions:

Q. What is the purpose of life?

A. To spawn more life.  That is the very nature of life – it begets more life.  Go have some kids.  You’ll be glad when you’re old and still relevant to someone.

Q.  Is that a debt collector or a possibly important business contact calling me?

A. It’s a debt collector.  Answer the phone and tell them you’re not your own self and they have reached the wrong number and would they take it off their calling list.

Q. Why can’t I find the right partner?

A. The right partner is a tolerable one.  Anyone you live with will drive you crazy in short order.

Q. Why is it that my hair is dull, dry, unremarkable and I can’t seem to stay thin?

A. Because you’re eating too much sugar.

Q. Why aren’t human babies as cute as animal babies?

A. It’s easy to be objective about animal babies, they obviously aren’t our offspring, so it’s easy to love them for the cute things they are – human babies on the other hand are only really lovable to their own parents and not so much for you as they are competition for your own genetic carriers.

Q. Why are the tastiest foods the worst for me?

A. To maintain the balance of the universe.  Only by keeping us from eating non-stop can existence continue with any kind of order.

I hope that was helpful and now your life seems more organized and less arbitrary.  Animal babies ARE so much cuter aren’t they?  Just looking at my fluffy white standard poodle, Adelle, causes me to hug her and pinch her cheeks and smoosh her foofy head all day long.  Really, it’s hard to get work done.  I challenge any child I have to be that cute.

So, yesterday I went shopping and bought all the ingredients for the New York Cheesecake that I’m going to make tomorrow – yum, num, num.  I researched and found by all accounts the best possible cheesecake recipe in existence.  It calls for 5 packages of cream cheese, 1 lemon, some sour cream, lotsa eggs, a titch of salt, and of course sugar, ew, I’m substituting that with stevia.  I’ll let you know how that turns out.  I’m making a crushed pecan nut crust instead of graham cracker to keep things low carb.  I’m hoping it’s not too time consuming so that I can make and eat my cheesecakes regularly.

Tonight I went to my CSS class and we’ve all decided, the prof included, that this textbook is terrible.  It’s written in such confusing language that what should be a simple task turns into a headache-inducing day long epic drama.  Dude, it’s just CSS.  My PHP class is WAY easier thanks to the power of clear intelligible English in the textbook.  However, I ‘am’ learning and also, I’m getting straight A’s.  Hurray!  Guitar is going well too, my teacher says that I play everything perfectly.  That is very encouraging.  I’m on the right path towards being a legitimate guitar player.  During moments of grandeur I even imagine myself being in a band or at least an ensemble.

I serenaded the sunset below the horizon tonight with descending arpeggios – it was lovely and I’ve been wanting do it for such a long time now – I sat on my balcony and played my guitar as the world went to sleep and the night came alive and I had to get up and turn on the balcony light.

Taking deep breathes of fresh ocean air I watched as the sky changed from red to turquoise to purple and the planes landed and took off from John Wayne airport like brightly twinkling stars in the dusk.  All the while trying to keep up the timing and play the right string and fret.  I’m not really at the stage yet where I’m worrying about which fingers I’m using on certain strings and frets, as long as my timing’s decent and I play the right notes then I’m happy.

I went to a flamenco guitar performance this weekend and there were also flamenco dancers, which was very cool and I had trouble focusing on the guitar playing at times because I just wanted to watch the dancing, because let’s admit it: it’s more fun to watch.  Whenever I could pull myself away from watching the dancers I watched the guitarists’ hands and how their fingers were moving, but I don’t think I was able to take a lot away from the experience.  Maybe when I’m more accomplished I can gather more info from watching someone play, at this point it’s all very similar to me.

The dancers had great swirly dresses all red and satiny and polka-dotty with tiers and tiers of large ruffles around the hem and sometimes to my enormous delight they would use castanets! I dunno, I’ve just had a fascination with them since I was a kid.  The performance gave me the idea of being a flamenco dancer for Halloween.  I’m not positive yet though, but I better figure my costume out soon – Halloween’s coming!!! Next weekend I’m gonna put up little Halloween lights, purple, green, & orange, around the balcony and windows and put up some Autumnal decorations.  I LOVE decorating for the holidays.

Or at least that’s what I thought my horoscope said the other day and I was so excited about that.  I do think I’m ready for a unicorn, whatever that may entail I’m sure that I have what’s necessary.

Hope everyone had a good long weekend.  Sunday I went to the LA County Fair and had a lot of fun.  My favorite thing to do is pet the farm animals.  The sheep are my favorite, they’re softer and more cuddly than the goats and a sign at the fair said that they make good pets.  I plan on getting one.  The piglets were adorable too, but I eat a lot of pork, so I think that would make me feel a bit uncomfortable.  I think meat is the optimal food for humans to eat, but I wish it didn’t come from animals.  I try to separate the two objects in my mind.

Another thing I did a lot of this weekend was practice my guitar.  I am amazed that I can play simple songs now, that is so super cool to me because for many years I just stared at my guitar with a few lackluster attempts to learn to play which would last no more than a few weeks.  I think I’ve broken some kind of mental barrier between ‘I can’t play guitar’ and ‘I can play guitar’. I feel extraordinarily jubilant!  Quite a lot of the time in life after completing a task I think ‘If I’d known how easy that would be I would have done it long ago’.  We really are our own biggest obstacles in life.  I’m still waiting for some calluses to form to protect my left hand fingers against the metal strings, they are super resistant to being anything but soft, squashy, and vulnerable.  I understand where they are coming from though.  My guitar is a electric hollow body, she’s very pretty with yummy brown and amber colors, mother-of-pearl inlays, and gold-colored hardware.  I will post a pic as soon as I have a good one.  To go with my guitar I also have an fairly big amp and a processor that gives my hollow-body a fat acoustic guitar sound – awesome!!!  My gift to myself once I get to a certain level of proficiency is a nice acoustic guitar so I can play more mobiley.  I’m thinking campfires, picnics, that sort of thing.

I have my CSS class tonight, so hopefully that goes well, since that prof was such a poop last week, but I’m not worried, she probably feels bad about the incident too.  So far, I have actually learned more about CSS in my Dynamic Web Database online class – I guess between the two I’ll be pretty proficient at CSS by Chrismastime.  I can’t get over how into coding I am – weird.  Never in a million years would I have thought I had a predilection towards that.

Pacifica is moving along slooooooowly, but what can you do?  Some things, especially big things, just cannot be rushed.  All I can say about it is that our business plan is extremely fluid, but it has to be in this economy.  We are considering, right now, moving the operation to Hawaii because there just seems to be more flying opportunities there.  Hopefully next week I will have some more concrete information for you.

Ryan got up at 4:00 this morning to fly some people to Monterey, CA. Quelle horreur! I compensated by getting up at 1:00 this afternoon. Between the two of us we woke up at 8:30, which I would say is fair. Right now I’m steeling myself to stand in line at Admissions at a College for a good long time. For the second time I have to prove to them that I’ve lived in California for more than a year. The last time I did this was two months ago! That’s okay I like standing in line. I LOVE it. It’s my favorite. Even though I moved to California in 2000 I have a little trouble proving that I’ve been here more than a year because my car is not registered in my name, my bank account and phone bills are way up in Los Angeles, I just got a new driver’s license, I cut my old driver’s license up, I just moved to my new home, and my old one my ex-husband owned so there was no paperwork to show I lived there. I am truly a persona non grata.

For courses I’m taking classical guitar, woo hoooo! Also, CSS(cascading style sheets) because it’s not enough to know how to use Adobe Dreamweaver to create a website, if you don’t have a good understanding of CSS then you’ve only got a very rudimentary ability to create webpages. I am not okay with that. Both these courses combined will only take up two nights of my week, so I think I can handle it with my workflow for Pacifica. At least I hope so, I feel so defeated when I have to drop a course.

The above photo is from three years ago, but it seems so much longer than that in my memory. I was in Miami and I remember thinking I was fat. Ha! I’m on the steps of the Vizcaya mansion, which if you’re in Miami is worth seeing and not much is.