Gmail sucks

Does anyone know how to properly use gmail? Tell me, does this make any sense:

I send an email to Person A. A copy of the sent email goes into the sent folder. Now, say I sent Person A something and I've used the label option in Gmail to call it "Person A emails." So I put archive that email. Now there is a copy of it in both the Sent box and the Archive "Person A emails." Two emails.

So now say I'm the efficient, ordered type. And I want to have an empty Sent box, but keep the email I sent to Person A. If I delete it from the Sent box, and then empty the Trash, the email goes away completely from both the "Person A emails" archive and the Sent box.

What the hell? It's like if I had a stack of folders marked A to Z and I put a copy of something in both Folder A and Folder B, then go back a year later and want to put those in Folder Z, what I would do is throw away one, and keep the other copy and put it in the Z folder. One copy, in one folder. Just like one email in one archive. Not a folder of sent crap, and an archive full of crap. That's TWO crap piles.

Are you telling me this is the best Gmail could come up with? Even hotmail didn't do it that way. But hotmail was starting to reject emails from friends of mine, counting them as Spam. Can anyone say "AOL nightmare?"

Seriously, can anyone give me a quick lesson in gmail?

Why there will never be world peace (Or: The theory that cubicles make people crazy is actually true.)

I found myself laughing out loud at some of these notes on this website.

(http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/)

It reminds me of all the notes I've ever left and complaint letters I've written over the years.

Flower Power

Just before I left for work today, I took the seeds I bought at the craft store yesterday and threw them all over the place at the edge of the woods behind our house, in the mulch in front of our house, and near the mulch near the power box between our house and our neighbor's.

Hopefully, at some point, there will be snapdragons, shasta daisies, and sunflowers sprouting in different places. There are already daffodils that come up in the woods, just beyond the killer raspberry plant (1 inch thorns, with a curve to the tip, like a fishhook) in the woods-those have been coming up ever since I've lived here. And there are some tulips beside our neighbor's house, along with the crocuses and pansies that grow in various places. If nothing grows, at least there are seeds out for the animals to eat (the sunflowers were the biggest seeds, followed by the daisies which looked like grass seed, only about as big as a comma: , and then followed by the snapdragon seeds which were as small as the period at the end of this sentence.

Fish Dreams

I dream vividly. I usually remember my dreams through the morning, and the more memorable ones stick around longer than that. Then there is the all-time classic list of dreams you never forget.

When I have dark dreams-not quite nightmares, but definitely not the joyful ones-it always seems to involve the ocean, or bodies of dark water, faintly foreboding. And the animals-sometimes it's sharks, sometimes it's fish that can't be trusted-they are darting in and out of the gray/green brackish water, come at high tide, or just look/feel vaguely threatening.

Take last night's water dream: I dreamt that my mother, father and I were going to visit a friend of my mother's. I didn't want to go. I was told I had to come with the family, and my brother was in the front seat (I don't have a brother in waking life) of the minivan (we never owned a minivan in waking life). I kept trying to shut my sliding door but it wouldn't shut because the brother kept closing his door first, but I was the one getting yelled at for not closing my door. I was so angry-I think I had been fooled into coming on this trip and I was threatening to jump out at the next red light and go to the mall to spend the day-I had a backpack of clothes and books.

We ended up at the friend's house, and I remember I was finally able to tell my mother how much I hated her, that I had always hated her, and I was leaving. I remember I was so angry in the dream, and it felt so good to be finally telling her how I felt. I picked up my stuff and tried to leave the house, but it was full of confusing hallways and doors that led to mudrooms, or living rooms, kitchen after kitchen. I finally found my way out and headed downhill (here the neighborhood was a conglomeration of trailers and low-income housing, old houses mixed with new, all from my memories). There was some sort of aquarium type restaurant at the bottom of the hill and I thought I would be able to lose any pursuers in there.

Again, more confusing hallways and doors and things to see-all dark furniture and people eating at tables, waitresses rushing by with plates, etc. I found a place to settle where the room was surrounded on all four sides by giant aquariums that made up the walls. In essence, we were in the fishbowl, and the fish were all swimming around looking in at us. It was dark, green, gray, with monstrous shapes moving in and out of view. The kids there seemed to love it. I found a place on the floor in a corner.

I decided to move around, see what I could see. So more hallways and doorways, and I ended up in a tiny room I had to crawl on my hands and knees to get into (I think it was like a kids' playroom.) and there was an aquarium right in front of me. Suddenly, the shark from "Finding Nemo" was swimming up to the tank and began to smash his face against the glass. The glass cracked and I realized it was a projection-not real-but I covered my face anyway and the room shook and mist blew in my face so I crawled out. I ended up in a spare room that had sand all over the floor, like a beach, and periwinkles all over it along with broken shells. I laid on the floor. There was a trash bag curtain and I could hear people talking on the other side. They were employees on break, talking about me, how a poster had been sent to show people who I was, in order to find me. I looked right at the people but they didn't seem to notice me. I felt like something was behind me and there were jellyfish on the floor nearby, oozing and trembling. I knew they were dead, or dying, but I didn't want to get too close, so I decided to crawl out, right past the workers.

That's when I woke up. I woke up this morning feeling like I was having an anxiety attack, so I went outside to settle down, feel the sun on my face and trying to breathe deeply.

Monday, 33

I'm 33 as of 1:10, April 14, 1975. According to the poem, I am fair of face. This year, I turn 33 (itself a cosmic number), and my birthday happens to fall on the day I was also born on. For good or bad, here is some trivia about 33 according to Wikipedia. My favorite part is this from the entry:

This number has the meaning that good will always triumph over evil.

I'd like to think this applies to me, always.

Snow and Butterflies

Click on any image to make larger.

Since it looked like this on Saturday: and please note the snow in the upper left corner actually falling.

We went to here:

It was about 80 degrees and we got to see these:

The Atlas Moth was about the size of two adult hands:


Koi pond:


This guy was just sitting still:


Chinese Painted Quail ran around freely:


This one landed on my shirt:


This one had a ragged wing but still flew:


My new desktop image:


These are actually two butterflies possibly mating or just sharing the same flower from different angles. Either way, it was a cool mirror image:


Warm air and a plate of rotten bananas-how much more could butterflies want?

Talking Stain commercial

Check out this Tide Commercial on YouTube. I would have just given you the link directly, but I'm so sick of filling out a membership thingy to various websites just to use their services once to show others. If the link doesn't work, go to YouTube and type in "Tide Commercial Stain" to get the video. I can't help laughing every time I see it.

Greetings from 4:30am...

I'm awake. Wide awake. I thought to myself that it would be a novel idea to leave a blog post. I tried to talk myself out of it, hoping that if I laid on the couch and watched a little TV, I would settle down into that narrow place between night and dawn and drift off into the deep.

Nope. I was starving and I had a headache. No, really, I know what they say about eating in the middle of the night; but my stomach was growling and gnawing at me, and my brains were leaking out my right ear, so I took some aspirin and ate a small Rice Krispie treat. I'm waiting for things to settle in. This doesn't happen too often.

Dan's asleep. He gets up in about three hours. So, in the interest of letting him sleep, I took my pillow and am currently wrapped in an afghan. I'll lay down soon. Maybe read a tiny bit.

Yeah, I know I haven't written in awhile, sorry about that. I just haven't had much to write about. I'm happy. I'm learning how to be creative and happy at the same time. It's surprisingly harder than I thought...or I'm just making it harder on myself like I do with new things.