February 28, 2005.

1. What time did you get up this morning? Around 7:15 – I meant to get up at 6:40 when Fred left for work, but I stayed up late last night, and wanted to snooze for a while before getting up and getting ready to hit the pet store. 2. Diamonds or pearls? Diamonds, I suppose, though I don’t really wear any jewelry at all. 3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema? It was in Maine after Christmas, so I’m thinking… National Treasure? 4. What is your favorite TV show? Desperate Housewives, Lost, The Bachelorette, 24, The Shield. I can’t choose just one! 5. What did you have for breakfast? Half a blueberry bagel with a smear of peanut butter, and a scrambled egg. 6. What is your middle name? Leslie. 7. What is your favorite cuisine? I’m partial to Chinese food, though I do get cravings for Italian from time to time. 8. What foods do you dislike? Anything with green peppers or deer meat in it. 9. What is your favorite chip flavor? I don’t eat chips all that often, but when I do, I like sour cream and onion. 10. What is your favorite CD at the moment? The Cold Mountain soundtrack. 11. What kind of car do you drive? I’ll pass on this one for the time being, but there should be news in a week or so. 🙂 12. Favorite sandwich? If made at home, I like a ham and cheese sandwich. At Subway, I like the BMT on white with mayo. 13. What characteristic do you despise? What do you call the characteristic where someone sees a snapshot of an instant of your life and judges everything about every second of your life from that moment they see? 14. Favorite item of clothing? My nightgown. My poor, bedraggled nightgown. It’s ugly and it’s been washed so many times you can pretty much see through it, but it’s the most comfortable nightgown I’ve ever owned. It needs to be tossed, because it’s started to tear in places, but I can’t seem to make myself get rid of it. If I had the sewing skills, I’d use the nightgown as a pattern to make another one (or more!) of the same nightgown, but I am woefully unskilled when it comes to sewing. I’ve bought a thousand nightgowns, but none of them even come close. 15. If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation where would you go? If I could get to Hawaii without the 12 hours on the plane, I’d go in an instant. 16. What color is your bathroom ? Our entire house is painted the same color – a slightly pinkish warm cream color. The master bathroom has blue-gray towels and a matching bathmat. The spud’s bathroom has a cat-themed shower curtain and towels. 17. Favorite brand of clothing? As long as it’s comfortable and I like the color, I don’t care about the brand. 18. Where would you retire to? Maine in the summer, Hawaii in the winter. Except that that would reallllly freak out the cats, that 12-hour plane trip. I’ll say Maine in the summer, Florida in the winter. Money being no object, of course. If I had to choose between the two, I’d say Florida, since it’s warm year-round. 19. Favorite time of the day? Dusk, when my family is in the house and we’re all doing our own thing but I know where they are and don’t have to worry. 20. What was your most memorable birthday? They all kind of blend together, really. Maybe the birthday when I turned 21 and could legally drink and got looped on one single strawberry dacquiri. Heh. 21. Where were you born? Bangor, Maine. 22. Favorite sport to watch? Ice skating. I’ll watch poker if I know the people who are playing. Especially Annie Duke and Howard Lederer. Although Annie Duke annoyed me when she was playing some all-stars poker tournament (I don’t remember exactly what it was called) and she knocked her brother out of the game and apologized profusely to him. DON’T APOLOGIZE, ANNIE. YOU’RE JUST PLAYING THE GAME. 23. What fabric detergent do you use? Tide. Every now and then I’ll give something else a try, but I always come back to Tide. 24. Coke or Pepsi? Diet Coke, preferably from McDonald’s. 25. Are you a morning person or a night owl? More of a night owl, I’d say. 26. What is your shoe size? 9 wide. 27. Do you have any pets? I have four cranky cats and you can see them here, here, here, and here. 28. How old are you now? 37. 29. What did you want to be when you were little? It changed pretty frequently. I remember wanting to be a vet (’til I realized how much school was involved), a teacher, an orthopedic surgeon, and a psychiatrist. 30. What are you meant to be doing today? Aside from doing laundry and vacuuming the upstairs, my day’s pretty much open. I need to watch some stuff I’ve DVR’d lately to clear some space.

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From my comments: The picture of Hawaii is so beautiful. Would you consider offering it as wallpaper? And since I’m about to experience my first 8+ -hour flight, can you offer any suggestions for how to best cope? The full-sized picture of Hawaii is here – you’ll probably have to size it down to use it as wallpaper, I wasn’t sure what size to make it. As for the 8+ hour flight, when I was getting ready to leave for Hawaii someone suggested that I get some Ambien from my doctor. She said it’ll knock you out and you’ll sleep deeply and wake up feeling really refreshed. I wasn’t able to give that a try myself, because I didn’t get a chance to see my doctor before I left, but believe you me – I wished like hell I had! If anyone else has advice for someone going on a long flight (and 8+ hours? My heart goes out to you!), leave it in the comments, eh?
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Okay, a lot of you don’t know what hotlinking is, so I’m going to explain it the way I’d want it explained to me. Say you look at this page, and you say to yourself “Oh my god, that look that Yo Boogity has on his face EXACTLY describes the mood I’m in today. I must put that picture up on my page!” What you should do (we won’t get into the fact that you shouldn’t be stealing pictures of other peoples’ cats for your own use without asking permission; that’s a whole ‘nother topic.) is right-click and save the picture to your hard-drive, then upload it somewhere, whether to tinypic or another free image hosting site, or if you have your own domain, somewhere on your domain. Then, when you’re ready to put the picture on your page, you would link to the picture where you saved it – whether it be one of the free image hosting sites or your domain. But if you’re a hotlinker, what you would do is right-click on the picture, see that the image is located at http://cats.robynand3rson.com/graphics/StanleyOne.jpg, and you would put that address in your image tag. That way, the picture shows up on your page when people check it out, but every time your page loads, it steals bandwidth from me, because I host the image, which is located at the cat.robynanderson.com address. I hope that clears it up for you. Have I mentioned that finding someone is hotlinking an image on my site really pisses me off? I spent all weekend obsessively checking my stats and changing image names so that someone who, say, intends to wish their friend a happy birthday by hotlinking to an image of a cake on my site might come back to find that they’re actually wishing their friend a happy birthday in a whole new way.
If that ain’t the face of a bandwidth thief, I don’t know what is.
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20 thoughts on “February 28, 2005.”

  1. This is the first time in ages I have spewed diet coke on my monitor screen!
    I LOVE your bandwidth theft thingy!!
    go on wit your bad self, girl (lol)

  2. The hell it is to fly 8 plus hours. I tried to sleep, but could not. I just read and watched those stupid shows and movies. My doctor gave me xanax and why I didn’t pop any is because of the time changes and flight schedules I would have been needin’ someone to carry me off and on da planes. I found not a soul willing, not even the DH LOL! The flight back was easier tolerated as we flew from Kona to LAX to Ft Lauderdale. I can handle 51/2 hours, but that 8 hour fron Dallas to Honolulu not only SUCKED, it made my butt numb. Ask the doc for some xanax and take them.

  3. I’m one of those morons who love long flights.
    The pills are a good idea, but if you think you will have trouble with jet lag they may do more harm than good.
    Make sure you get up every hour to walk around.
    On the other hand you can drink heavily and then you won’t care if you are on the plane and you will have to get up to go to the bathroom.
    Bring a pair of walkman headphones to use for the movie on the plane. You don’t have to pay the stupid fee for the headphones that way.

  4. As a frequent flyer to Europe (10+ hours from Seattle), I found the following helpful: Drink lots and lots of water (no alcohol; it dehydrates you), wear COMFORTABLE shoes and don’t take them off during the flight. Your feet will swell from the long periods of sitting and it might be impossible to get your shoes back on. Also, walk around every hour or so. Be prepared that you might feel like jumping out of your skin after about 5 hours. The last time I went I got a prescription for a sleeping pill called Sonata. It’s only effective for about four hours and there are no groggy feelings afterwards. You might want to try that.
    Hope this helps.

  5. Thanks for all the suggestions everyone! And Robyn, thank you for letting me use your comments to get this info. I won’t have time to get a perscription but I may take a benedryl (or two) at the start of the long flight, and I’ll definitely heed everyone’s advice about water and walking around. Thanks!

  6. Annie Duke won that tournament…just FYI.
    For long flights (since Im IN hawaii, and everywhere is a long flight) be prepared to sleep. Have 5 billion different things to do so you are occupied if the movies suck. Definitely walk around and no alcohol, since that will make the jet lag way worse.
    Long flights dont bother me so I may be off on the above..

  7. I’m dying to ask you what kind of night gown you own! Me? I’m partial to the Landsend t-shirt material jammies. They have them in both short and long “gowns” and in pant/shirt/short combos. I prefer the long pants. Comfy!
    I am also one of the freaks who doesn’t mind long flights. My husband flies very frequently for work – including at least one overseas flight per year – so we invested in some of the Bose noise reducing headphones. If you fly a lot, they are VERY much worth the money. The best part is, you can plug them into your music or the movie and you still get the benefits of the noise reduction.
    I, like you, read a lot, so I find that if I have a good no-brainer book, the time flies (HA!) much faster. I can usually polish off a Mary Higgins Clark mystery during a two hour flight. People magazine also helps a lot. Flying is not the time to start reading great Lit-ra-sure, however.

  8. Andrea: That’s his collar; the one that zaps him if he gets too close to the fence.
    Fred: Hush up, you.
    Marcia: My pleasure – I hope you have an awesome trip! 🙂
    Katy: Yeah, I remember that – and the first thing she did was call Howard to tell him, and THEN APOLOGIZED. I love that Annie Duke, though.
    Laurie(inOly): I can’t for the life of me remember where I got the nightgown – maybe the Lane Bryant catalog? I’ll have to take a picture of it for y’all! Good idea with the light reading suggestion, too – I think I finished off four or five chick lit books when I went to Hawaii last year, and I registered them with Bookcrossing.com and just left them wherever I was when I finished reading them. 🙂

  9. Definately drink water, bring a washcloth in a ziplock bag you can use to freshen up with, wear comfy shoes, and do some sort of exercise before getting on the plane because there is nothing worse than jumpy legs! Bring a change of clothes in your carry on so if/when they lose your luggage you have something to change into while you wait for them to find it.
    Also if you’re vegetarian, bring a snack because the airline’s definition of vegetarian and your definition are probably two different things.

  10. oh by the way… the bandwidth theivery solution? bwah-hahahahaha…. Serves ’em right! 🙂

  11. Whenever I see that collar on Stanley (and I know it’s totally necessary, so don’t think I’m giving you a hard time or anything), it totally makes me think of those house arrest ankle bracelets, and I start giggling like an idiot.

  12. I’m sure you’ve been asked this before, but, having grown up in Bangor, Maine, did you ever see or meet Stephen King? If so, what was he like?

  13. Hey, Robyn, is the word you’re thinking of presuptuous?
    presumptuous: overstepping due bounds (as of propriety or courtesy)
    propriety: conformity to what is socially acceptable in conduct or speech.
    Another thing along the same lines that bugs me is when somone assumes something and then spouts that off as gospel without bothering to find out if it’s true or not.

  14. Ah-huh, thanks for the explanation on what constitutes stealing bandwith.
    The only thing that I have found good for getting used to say 8 hour flights is to get used to say 12 hour flights, then the 8 hour flights don’t seem so long. The “problem” of course is the best way to fly is direct, which means flights are long. Even if direct costs more because the only thing worse than a long flight is missing your connector flight or getting caught in US customs and being treated like a criminal even when you’re just transitting and you just want to get to your next plane.

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