Illness makes the Herbalist

So my Dad has been sick with a cough all week and for the last two nights his coughing (and his TV) have kept me awake. This is partly to do with the noise, but mostly to do with my own guilty conscience. I mean I am an herbalist the ones closest to me should be getting the best and fastest treatment right? But noooo I have to wait till 5am on day three of the cough to get up and make up some medicine for him (which consisted of a facial steam with sage, peppermint, rose petals, lavender and calendula, and a cup of gypsy cold care tea from Traditional Medicinals, it worked too cause he stopped coughing after that).

So I find that my family gets treatment in a sporadic and untimely fashion hinging mostly on how much it is affecting me. This is partly due to the fact that I am extremely lazy, and partly because I have been giving them advice for years and somehow expect them to know everything that I do about their current illness (which of course they don't! Duh). Perhaps this weeks escapades into letting my Dad suffer longer than necessary will straighten me up so I can become a better healer. Let's hope so.

Traveling Like A True American

So my husband and I are going to France. This in and of itself is amazing and I am excited and nothing could get me down... except the more we look around the more this trip is going to cost a fortune. Yes I already knew that, but its going to cost a fortune just outside of our actual money in the bank. Though it is looking like we have a choice. Spend all of our money and stay in Paris and not travel anywhere else, but maybe get closer to actually seeing a large proportion of things on our Paris sites list. Or spend all of our money, and about half again as much again, that we don't have (yes I mean credit card debt!) and stay in Paris half the time and in a little village near Dijon (that is so small it doesn't have a store!) for the other half. We would have already made the sane choice to stay in Paris alone except we got ourselves so excited about the Dijon area now we are torn.

I have a feeling I am going to be paying back this trip to France for a long time...
I also have the feeling that I wont care :)

Apple or Sour Cream Lemon?

Well it only happens once a year, but todays the day! That's right it's Pi day! By that token I am going to spend the afternoon making an actual pie, just don't know which kind yet. I just have to get through the problem of figuring out whether pie are square or if pie are round....

Spokane Hot Zone

So I went down to Aunties bookstore this morning and browsed around then decided to sit and have some coffee at Liberty Cafe. I pulled out my computer and my maps and books on France was ready to dive into making up our itinerary. I never got to even start, because long ago in a Spokane before I moved away I signed up for Spokane Hot Zone and have long since lost track of my password. Now on the surface this may seem trivial, however, in this case it is not. Spokane Hot zone has no "I forgot my password" button and even if it did you could never retrieve the damned thing anyway because you have to have internet access to get the new one from your e-mail account. So I went the other route and tried to register a new account. This turned into a whole new lesson on betrayal, annoyance and general homicidal urgings that started with "your password choice does not follow indicated format or contains illegal characters" and ended with "Our database indicates you already have an account please login using your password." I tried signing myslef up again, I tried signing up my husband I tried signing up with my old address, and nothing. Obviously they use the computers ISP address so it has nothing to do with e-mail address, name, or actual address.

I have never seen such tight security! My bank doesn't have this kind of crazy clearance. Defeated I looked on the Spokane Hot Zone website (the only one I can access without logging in) and tried to find a missing password link or a technical support number, all I could find was a contact page filled with names of the marketers, presidents and vice presidents of the company and not a single helpful job title among them.

I finally gave up shut my computer and went home feeling crabby and muttering curse words at a "Free Wireless" set up that is completely unusable. I appreciate the offer of free wireless Spokane, but could you please, when I forget my password that you require to be case sensitive, have one capital letter, one lowercase letter and one digit (not two or you wont accept the password as 'legal'), give me some more options for getting online? I would appreciate it.

I'm Going To Paris!

Well we did it. We pushed the little virtual "confirm" button and we are now officially going to Paris!
Oh my gosh I can hardly believe it! I can't believe we can afford this...

I feel tres mal.... i think I am going to be sick....

Jonathan Coulton and the T-shirt Contest

Ok, so I entered a t-shirt design contest over on pixish for this guy whose kinda famous in a big way on the internets even if he will probably never be played on the radio. I suggest you go check him out and while your at it vote for my t-shirt design, its called I Crush Everything by Amanda :) Thanks!