Let me sing a requiem for a place I loved and hated; hated for its pain and loved for its family memories.

Bauxite High School building in flames
by domesticat.

second photo, thirdphoto

This was the main building for a very small school. Given that my graduating class had 33 people in it, I think you can quickly understand that what you're seeing is the destruction of an entire school.

Sayonara, you old building, steeped with memories. You went down with quite a fight, it seems. There is, apparently, more truth than I expected in the statement "You can't go home again."

Well, the redesign's up. Mostly. I lack a few things getting done, such as tweaking the guestbook (which is always the last to be updated). Greymatter is about 95% set up and is waiting in the background for one last thing…I have to figure out how to hack in my old entries so that all of my journal entries will function under greymatter. I'm not terribly keen on having to maintain six months' worth of my really long entries by hand every time that I want to do a page redesign.

I prefer to write my life along the lines of a soundtrack, using music both to express emotion and evoke past memories. Movie directors intrinsically know what I have just begun to understand: that a piece of music can both stand alone and evoke memories of previous listens. I've often joked that I could probably put together a soundtrack of my life, but it would have meaning to no one else but me.

• Live's "Lightning Crashes"—my freshman year of college.
• Arrested Development's "Tennessee"—in high school, watching a talented classmate paint.
• Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue"—my grandfather.
• Blues Traveler's "Run-Around"—watching the Razorbacks lose the NCAA men's basketball championship.
• Jonatha Brooke's "Full-Fledged Strangers"—getting in the car to make the seven-hour drive home from seeing Jeff.

There's something to be said for taking time away from work. Yes, there IS something to be said, but I'm not sure what it is, and even if I was, I wouldn't be the person to say it.

This from the person who spent all day Saturday hammering on a website to make it work. It's mostly there. geek-chick.net has been waiting for a few months to see the light of day, and I think I've finally gotten tired of waiting. When I got the offer to host it for free at my ISP, I decided to take advantage of that. The DNS for geek-chick.net hasn't propagated yet, so everything's still pointed at the old site (the one that starts off with, "Houston, we have finals"). At some random point in time, differing for each ISP, everything will point to the new site (which already has posts from friends on it). Then I will be much happier—because I will finally be able to test the silly guestbook script.

My updates over the next 2-3 days are likely to be sporadic at best. I am halfway through converting my site from Blogger to Greymatter, but I've come to the part of the conversion that is most difficult—the seven months' worth of archived journal entries.

Hi. My name is Amy, and I seem to have a major problem staying well this winter.

I appear to have caught the same stomach bug that Heather caught. So much for my promise of a Wednesday night update—I spent most of Wednesday night praying to the porcelain god. It got bad enough (fever of 101, bits of blood coming up) that we got to make an emergency visit to the hospital in the wee hours of Thursday morning.

We got there, and they did some tests on me to determine how dehydrated I was. When lying down, my heart rate was very fast and my blood pressure was around 110/80. When I stood up, my heart rate accelerated even more (to somewhere around 135 bpm?), but my blood pressure dropped to 90/60.The end result: IV time.

Anyone who has spent more than ten minutes around me in the past six months has heard my phrase, "a nasty thing for…"

It can mean many things. Generally I use it to refer to something that I really like, past the point of reason or comprehension.

As in: "I've got this nasty thing for…"Common endings to that sentence are:

• brunettes (don't ask me why; I've always favored them. maybe I just don't want anything that could be construed as competition to my strawberry blondeness?)
• geekboys (ever since I encountered one at age fifteen they've made my toes curl)
• Jonatha Brooke (because she writes killer lyrics)
• John Cusack (even I can't explain this one…)

Most everyone I'm friends with will admit that at some point in their lives, a book they've read has made them cry.

This is a good thing. It's a sign of empathy.

Some quotes:"The only thing that's wrong with me is what's missing. Owen Meany is what's missing."

I am heartily sick of my site.

To the casual reader it will seem that I haven't been working on my site much this week. The lack of posts have had more to do with frustration and fraying tolerances than anything else. My attempt to port greymatter (the software that manages the journaling portion of this site) to the new machine was a clunky, dismal failure.

That was the first time. The second time was also a clunky, dismal failure.