A big happy shout-out to the fax machine that just called to wake me up at 3:45 AM. I have nothing but love for you and your owner right now, little fax machine.

I was asked recently what the sound I hated most in the world is, and I opted for the sound of an air raid siren (childhood in the last throes of the Cold War and all), but I think I need to amend that to include phone calls in the dead of the night. There is never any good reason for the phone to ring at 4 AM, and my mind - warped as it is by a lifetime of scary movies and books - always leaps to the worst possible outcome right as I'm picking up the phone against my best interests. Something at work? Nah... Problems with a loved one? No, they're fine. Some creature spawned from hell itself or pure and total evil calling from beyond the grave to suck my eternal soul through the telephone the moment I say hello, leaving me a lifeless and vacant shell for the rest of my days? Mind-gobbling aliens from an alternate dimension waiting for me to open a time/space portal through my Southwestern Bell line so they can invade the earth from my living room? Oh hell yes!

Sure, I know better. But this is the way my mind works - and it's the only one I have. And if that fax machine is true to form, in another five minutes my phone will ring again when it tries to redial, and I get to go through the whole scenario again.

Ahh well - at least I needed to get up early today.

Alright. Simple enough. Nothing, and I do mean nothing could have made me appreciate my cable modem more than the fact that it's been out for two hours now and I just remembered I still have the dialup hooked up.

The first thing I've learned is that I survived on a painful, awful, slow connection for many years.

The second thing I've learned is that it I'm far too addicted to my Internet connection. It's been two hours! Do you realize how many web pages I could have surfed and how many times I could have checked my email in two hours! Aaaaah!!!

Sometimes my job can be exceptionally surreal. While other people may have spent their afternoon peering over accounts payable, or calculating mortgages, building business deals, or building businesses, my afternoon was spent thinking of swear words. In helping set up some new message boards on the company site, I discovered that the 'bad word' filter came with only six default words. And so I had to flesh them out - for lack of a better term.

Oh, alright - I didn't spend all of that time thinking up swear words. I was working on two other projects at the same time. Multi-tasking. In a very strange way.

"Alright, I'll put this in the schedule here, and email this person to remind them about it. Oh, and I need to finish off that spreadsheet, and... cocksucker! I forgot cocksucker! How could I have forgotten that? Now. Where was I? Oh yeah - spreadsheets..."

Figured out why there was a wasp in my bathroom yesterday. Because there is a mud wasp nest in my bathroom behind the mini-blind, next to the loose-fitting screen on the window. (Occom's Razor in effect here, folks.) Have I figured out how to remove said wasp nest from my bathroom? Of course not. So far my options seem to be living in fear of my bathroom, closing the window and door and hoping they die of starvation while trying to figure out how to eat my toothpaste, or accosting a big, strong, manly neighbor or friend to go get the damn thing out of there.

Hey - I may be a strong and independent woman, but I'm not touching a wasp nest.

So there I was, bleary-eyed, freshly showered, brushing my teeth. Brush, brush, brush - makeup next. And then, suddenly between me and the mirror, roughly six inches from my face was something huge and flying with long trailing yellow and black legs and a look that said, 'If you piss me off, I'm going to sting you up real bad." I screamed. And then I ran. And slammed the bathroom door.

So here I am at work. No makeup. And a wasp/hornet/yellowjacket/minister of death trapped in my bathroom at home, and I pray he's freaking dead by the time I get home.

Sometimes I miss having a big strong man around the house who isn't afraid of killing things for me.

For those playing at home - it's coming up on two weeks without a cigarette.

For those playing at home - I've taken up working out and walking for an hour every night.

For those playing at home - Yes. I have been kidnapped by aliens and replaced with the anti-Susan.

Wow! What a great thing to read when I'm sleeplessly surfing!

Congratulations Melissa and Matt! May you find the world in each other for the rest of your lives.

Oh yes. I feel the power of broadband.

Now I'm gonna need a bigger hard drive...

-Note to the guy with the "Jesus loves men who love Jesus" bumpersticker driving in front of me in the parking garage this morning.

If the three cars in front of you aren't pulling into those empty parking spaces, it's probably not because they just want to park on the top level. So, you know, you don't have to halfway pull your mini-van into every empty space on the first and second floors, blocking the rest of us while you decipher the big "Reserved" sign on each empty space.

I'm just sayin'...

So. I've discovered two side effects, as we approach the end of week one.

The first side effect, while pleasant, probably isn't a good one in the long term. I knew on a certain level that food tastes different when you don't smoke. However, I wasn't quite prepared for the pure, sweet-lovin' goodness of the pizza I had last night. I'm pretty certain that I couldn't have noticed a difference in taste that quickly, so I'm guessing it was a combination of a few other factors (like the fact that I hadn't ordered out for pizza in months.) Whatever the reason, if the neighbors looked in my front window last night at around 8 PM, they might have worried at the sight of the woman sitting at her desk, cramming pizza into her mouth, whimpering and moaning and making smacking noises in this strange orgiastic pizza fest. Hell, I don't even like Papa John's pizza, but if it had given the slightest inclination of sentience, I would have run away to the ends of the earth with that sweet honey-baby bundle of dough and tomato.

Second side effect is the good one, and just may offset the first. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with quitting, actually. It could be the vitamins I've been taking, the time of year, some strange effect of the sleeplessness I've been feeling lately, or a number of other reasons, but I have this insane amount of energy lately. After cleaning the bathroom a second time (see yesterday's entry), today I went through a mad-paced, raging cleaning binge on the kitchen. I ended up scrubbing the cupboards. I don't think I've ever scrubbed cupboards when I wasn't moving in or out of an apartment.

The cat is afraid. I may scrub him next.

Oh yeah - and at about 1 AM tomorrow morning, smokeless week one doth end.

W00t!