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BlogYear in Review 2005

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Monday, October 31, 2005
Question of the Day: Re-love.
Think back to the first person you fell in love with who reciprocated that love. I'm speaking here not of the girl whose pigtails you pulled in 3rd grade and who kissed you on the playground by the jungle gym. I'm talking about the first time you really thought you were in love and were old enough to know what that meant, with the good and bad that goes along with a relationship.

If you had the the opportunity, would you give that relationship another chance? Not to go back and live it over again, but to start it again new from where you both are now. Would you try again? Why or why not? I'm really interested in your answer, comment and get your friends to comment. . .please?
posted by LoRi~fLoWer
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Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Confession

Yes, that's right, I have a confession to make. I, Lori, the girl who "doesn't like movies," have become addicted to Hollywood Gossip Blogs. Me: The one who thinks paparazzi are cruel invasive demons and who doesn't blame stars who punch or otherwise beleaguer privacy-stealing photographers. I'm obsessed.

It started small with just one blog, after a search to find out a bit more about Alexis Bledel. That was my gateway blog. Then I started looking at that evil blog's links and adding more and more of them to my private blogroll. You'll never see them, no, I'm much too embarrassed about this addiction to link to them on my site.

But I can tell you things now like Pink just got secretly married and that Paris Hilton's new pet is a ferret, not a tiny shivering dog anymore.

Why? Why me? Is there some sort of rehab I can attend? I certainly can't quit cold turkey. Is there help out there? Because I'm afraid if I don't get some sort of intervention soon, this could get out of control.
posted by LoRi~fLoWer
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Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Randomly Placed "Eugh!" Story
A little over a year ago I had all four of my wisdom teeth removed under general anesthesia. It all went off without a hitch. Yes, it hurt, but I didn't have any of those horrible after-effects that they warn you about, like dry socket. I did everything they said: iced it, didn't drink through straws, didn't eat the forbidden foods.

Still, the four holes in the back of my mouth were rather interesting things to have. I can still just barely feel them now, but they felt like craters at the time. And they took a really long time to heal. My first follow up visit, I was fairly confident that they would praise my diligence and due care, but when they cleaned them out for me and I spit into the cup it kind of looked like a chunky brown soup. Which was quite shocking, but also fascinating at the same time.

They gave me this contraption (it resembled a hypodermic syringe only the pointy end was wider) with instructions to suck water into the the syringe and then stick the pointy end in each hole and depress, flushing the contents of the gaping black holes in my mouth after every meal. This had a certain appeal to it, I will admit. Firstly, after I was done, my mouth felt so clean. And secondly, spitting the backwash into the sink and trying to guess what the pieces were from was an interesting diversion. Thirdly, I got to carry around a syringe.

I kinda miss my black holes.
posted by LoRi~fLoWer
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Monday, October 24, 2005
You make me wanna comment
But I think Haloscan is kaput. So Becky, Sarah, etc. I did comment, I really did. Maybe blogger is kaput too? Maybe I'm the only blogger left and I'm being kept in this artificial blog world just to see what will happen. AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!
posted by LoRi~fLoWer
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Friday, October 21, 2005
Utter Darkness

I'm officially in a Blue Funk. A Big Blue Funk. Nothing is really fun at the moment. Work is monotonous. Home is monotonous. The sky is gray. The leaves aren't even that pretty. I don't have any hobbies. All I want to do when I get home from work is put on my pajamas and get under the covers. Only CSI reruns interest me.

Should I be worried about this? Maybe. But it's happened to me before. It's different than depression. I can shake it off for some parts of the day. I still enjoy being with my friends when I have plans. It's my typical Blue Funk. It's cyclical and it will go away. My solution is to just give into it for a while. If the Blue Funk wants pajamas, bed, and CSI at 7pm, that's what it gets. Eventually the Blue Funk will want to venture outside again. Eventually the Blue Funk will dissipate. It'll be fine.

I think part of it has to do with the fact that it's still dark now when my alarm goes off. This is utterly depressing. Get up, get showered, put on clothes, brush teeth, put on make-up and trudge out to the car...still dark. Drive to work with the headlights on, thinking, "I could really still be sleeping. Sleep is nice." And soon we'll be turning the clocks back, which means that not only will I leave for work in the dark, but I'll leave for home in the dark too.

Sigh. Any suggestions for the Blue Funk that are better than riding it out?
posted by LoRi~fLoWer
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Wednesday, October 19, 2005
A Solution
I'm sure you are all sitting on the edge of your seats wondering how I handled the noisy neighbors situation. Well, because it wasn't loud music or TV, it didn't seem fair to go to the apartment managers for a noise the neighbors might not even have been conscious of. However, both my roommate and I are big chickens and we really don't want to approach the folks next door ourselves. My roommate is mostly annoyed with the occasional, yet all too frequent, thumps and bumps; but my biggest beef, as you might remember was the vibration I could feel through the wall my room shares with their apartment.

So I'm not sure what she's going to do. But I took action.

I rearranged my room. Now my bed doesn't touch that wall and I hardly notice it at all.

That'll show'em.
posted by LoRi~fLoWer
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Thursday, October 13, 2005
Welcome to my plagerized post
Well, not plagerized exactly. It's just that I'm not feeling remotely creative, and I haven't posted anything since Tuesday. So I figured I'd steal other people's ideas. But it's cool, because Big Dipper stole it from someone too.

You Google search images for
1. Place you grew up
2. Place you live now
3. Your name
4. Favourite drink
5. Favourite smell

Then you choose the first or your favourite image and post it.

1.














2.














3.



















4.



















5.
posted by LoRi~fLoWer
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Tuesday, October 11, 2005
More on Apartment Living

So I'm rather cranky today. Last night at around 9.30, while I was watching CSI in my room I started to hear this low humming noise coming through the wall my bedroom shares with our right-hand neighbors. At first I thought that they must be doing some laundry, yet I'd never heard their washing machine before except for the time last week when it went off balance, but they quickly fixed that. When the noise was still going on at 10.30 when I was reading and getting ready for sleep, I started to get annoyed. At 11pm when I put a pillow over my head, the noise didn't stop, and I realized that it was more of a vibration and that my whole bed (and self) was vibrating. At midnight I went downstairs to sleep on the couch. When my roommate came home a few minutes later, she went up to my room and heard the noise and felt the vibration. Neither of us have any idea what that noise is, but we do know that it's not just a fluke, we officially have noisy neighbors.

They're fairly new to the neighboorhood and they have kids. So we gave them what we felt was an appropriate amount of time to get furniture placement and wall-hangings settled (like 3 or 4 weeks) and even give them a little extra slack because kids are noisy in general. But kids aren't thumping or vibrating at 2am (one would hope).

We wanted to go to the building manager, but from what I've been hearing from people, they think that we should go to the neighbors directly first. This is a terrifying prospect to both of us, as we hate confrontation and have never even met the neighbors in the first place. I can understand, though, how going to them at least once before reporting them is probably a good idea. So what's to be done? What about a letter? Something like this:

Dear Neighbors,

First we’d like to welcome you to the neighborhood. Please let us know if you need anything or need to know where anything around town is.

We’re sure you’ve noticed how thin the walls are. We do our best to keep our noise down, especially after 10 at night. We do have a problem with our washing machine going off balance, but we’ve been in contact with the building office to try to get something done about that, I hope it hasn’t been a problem for you.

We do have a bit of problem. For some reason, at certain times of the night we can hear some very loud thumping and other noises coming from your apartment. We do understand that some of that is simply because we live close together in an apartment complex, but late at night it becomes disruptive to our sleep schedule. Last night one of us had to sleep on the couch because there was a humming noise vibrating through the wall her bedroom shares with your apartment. It began at around 9:30 and she went downstairs to sleep at around midnight, so we’re not sure when it stopped. Perhaps you could move whatever piece of machinery that is away from the wall a bit?

Attached living isn’t easy, that’s for sure! Thanks for your cooperation.

The Girls at Apartment 6

What do you think? Too passive-agressive? It has to stop. It's not fair for me to have to sleep on the couch in my own house, when I have a perfect good bed upstairs. Help.
posted by LoRi~fLoWer
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Monday, October 10, 2005
Life on the Fringe
My roofmate is a couple years younger than I am. She has a large circle of friends and goes out about 10 times more frequently than I do. This might have worried me a few years ago but it doesn't bother me often at this point in my life. We get along great, probably because we don't often hang out socially. And because I stay at my mom's most weekends, so as to be closer to my friends and my familiar haunts, she and her friends often have the house to themselves on the weekends. She never leaves a mess, and she always lets me know what's going down. It's quite a lovely arrangement.

This weekend, though, she made a point of asking me if I wanted to join them for their end-of-summer lets-watch-the-Eagles-play-Dallas bash. So I thought, sure why not, her friends probably either think I live up in my room or doubt my existence altogether. So I made some themed cupcakes and joined the festivities.

It was pretty fun. The thing I like about "growing up" is that what you choose to do or not do does not necessarily determine the kind of people who you hang out with or the kind of people you can have a good time with. I chose, along with Jen's friends, to eat much chili, do too many jello shots (did you know they make Margarita flavored jello--that can't be for kids!) and yell loudly at the depressingly bad Eagles. They chose to do all this and something slightly more illegal, which just got passed over me. No big deal. Maybe I'm too old to be just discovering the phenomenon that is tolerance, or lack of peer pressure. But I have to say I felt neither offended nor shunned. Which was nice.

So it wasn't a bad weekend all in all. I still probably won't hang out with that crowd very often. But my roofmate and I both seem OK with that.
posted by LoRi~fLoWer
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Friday, October 07, 2005
Because it's my Blog and I Can
I'm going to post some more pictures of me and my bestie:


This is Meg's first visit to Austin, so of course I had to take her on the tour of the state capital building. You know it had to be really hot if I was wearing a tank top.

And here we are about to go off to some Christmas shindig. Was Meg laughing because she knew I'd have the devil eyes?

Ah, our famous meet and greet with Collective Soul, one of my favorite bands. You should have seen us when we won those tickets. Ed Rolland had his hand on my back in this picuture...haven't washed that spot yet! I guess light-eyed people are doomed to red eye in flash photos.

And one more...


Here we are in our friend Chad's large white pickup truck about to go snow tubing in the Poconos. Like the hat? Not sure about the face I'm making either...

So that's it. No meaningful post, just gratuitous Lori and Meg pictures.
posted by LoRi~fLoWer
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Thursday, October 06, 2005
An Alleged Rant on my Alleged Blog
About a week ago, at the hospital down the street from my house, a man who was pulled over for driving erractically and assulting his wife was being escorted by police to get a DUI (driving under the influence) test. He seemed calm at the emergency room, but then he grabbed the gun of one of the officers and started shooting. The bullet that killed one officer went through the intoxicated man's hand first. A medical technician and the other officer were also shot. One news story about it is here.

I do understand, and I am thankful for, our justice system's policy of "innocent until proven guilty." I understand that this drunken sot deserves his day in court, in the same way that I would deserve and desire my day in court. I understand that it is not the job of the news media to try and convict someone in the news (although I'm not sure if they understand that sometimes).

Yet it still really rubbed me the wrong way to turn on the news this morning and hear him called "the alleged shooter." I'm sorry. It just did.
posted by LoRi~fLoWer
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Tuesday, October 04, 2005
It's like that episode of Sex and the City where....


(At least Becky and Wes will think the title of this post is funny...)

. . .Carrie has just had her 35th birthday and the the four friends are at the coffee shop talking about soulmates. Charlotte says, "Maybe we can be each other's soul mates. And then we can let men be just these great, nice guys to have fun with."

That's the thing I liked Best about SATC, the solid friendship between those four very different women. I've had friendships like that and they are irreplaceable. But they do change. And sometimes it's just really hard to accept that.

My best friend, Megan, is getting married. Married. I wish her all the happiness in the world, and I will do everything in my power to make that wish come true. But my best friend is getting married. She doesn't need me to be her soulmate anymore. She's found her great, nice guy to have fun with.

This changes everything, you know. It is different than when I moved to Texas and we didn't get that apartment together like we had planned for years and we had to make due with phone calls and infrequent visits. It's different than when I came home to Pennsylvania and Meg was living with her then boyfriend and now future husband, Dave. It's even different than when we were working completely opposite schedules and it was a challenge to find some time to spend together.

It's been a long time since her first day at our high school when I said, "you're new? I'm sure I've seen you around here before". . .since the day I wanted to show the city girl what the country girl knew and fell off a tractor in front of 50 people. . .since the summer of Zen and the Jeep, when we were both probably at our most free, and we inhaled that freedom like it was the last breath we would ever take. . .since that Christmas after we'd both lost a grandparent. . .since Meg and I and her now fiance were all just friends dancing on top of a speaker box at the cheesiest club Eastern Pennsylvania had to offer.

So yes, in a way, the news of her engagment made me a little bit sad for our friendship, even though I am so happy for her and Dave. But I do not fear for our friendship. Because the thing that I know about Megan (and I hope she knows about me) is that whenever I need her, wherever she is, whatever she is doing, she will be there for me. We'll have matching rocking chairs at Sunset Meadows.


Megan, I love you, you silly girl! And I can't wait to stand up with you at your wedding.

posted by LoRi~fLoWer
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Lori~Flower

Home: Eastern PA, United States

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