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Maridee

Georgia Ball


Last Updated: 4/5/2009

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Gender: Female
Status: Married
Age: 33
Sign: Aries

City: Orlando
State: Florida
Country: US
Signup Date: 8/3/2006

Blog Archive
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Tuesday, September 26, 2006 

Category: Life
As I'm moving in the near future, some decisions were made about our furniture. Some of it is just too big or just the wrong style for the new condo. The office has a bed in it that Scott has had since he was a kid growing up and keeping it just didn't make any sense. The couches have this Northwestern cabin style I haven't bought anything to match in ages and they take up a monstrous amount of space. And I bought this glass table when I first moved up here... I was living with a girl who had a friend that was downsizing to a houseboat, and to make everyone happy I bought a few items. The glass table was one of them and I've never used it. The top is one big massive glass oval and it stands on a huge black bear made of resin. He's lying on his back and he holds the glass up with his paws. No kidding. They needed to go so I decided I'd better get them up soon on Craig's List, this classified ad website everyone in Seattle uses religiously. I thought it would take awhile to sell this stuff so I'd better hurry and get it up. I put the items up around 2 in the afternoon, within 10 minutes I got my first phone call. By 6 pm everything had been sold and removed from the house. I had no idea it was going to work that fast! I got lucky with the table, the woman who bought the couches took one look at that bear and said she had to have it. I'm happy about that, because couches and bear will be going to a cabin being built on the penninsula and that seems like the absolute best place for them. It was interesting getting the couches out, the big one was brought into the apartment through the second story back porch door and it had to go out the same way, but with help we made it work. Of course, now the apartment is without couch for awhile. Hope the inspection today goes well.
5:31 AM 
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Monday, August 28, 2006 

I spent the entire weekend on a special project. I know I've been hinting around that the strip is in for some big changes, and part of the includes an update of the website. When I wrote the first comic website I didn't know what I was doing. I updated the site sometime around February so it was a little easier to work with, but it was still a patch. Since then I've learned how to write HTML without having to think much about it, and I've learned a whole lot more about CSS. The new site has clean code and CSS dominates. But unlike the last update, where the changes mainly happened on the backend and no one noticed, everybody is going to notice the new look. And this time the strip is going to be displayed a LOT bigger.

6:42 AM 
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Saturday, August 26, 2006 

Category: Life
On my way to work this morning I passed a breast cancer walk-a-thon. It was an enormous crowd of people, mostly women, forming a long, thick trail that snaked its way around the park on 148th down the street from Microsoft. Its a sunny day today, just warm enough for shorts without being too hot to be outside. As everyone knows, pink is the color associated with breast cancer charities and it gave the procession a dominant color scheme. Some of the women sported sparkling pink deely-boppers. I hadnt heard there was going to be a walk, I might not have even seen it at all if Id taken my regular route to work. But something about seeing it was comforting. Not especially because they were walking for breast cancer, as important as that is, but because there were so very, very many of them, in all shapes, ages and sizes, all together for one reason, even wearing the same color. The Seattle sunshine made all that marching humanity oddly beautiful. It reminds me of the time I turned a corner on a trail in the woods and came face to face with a stag just a few yards away. You didnt know it would be there, you werent out looking for it, you dont know where it came from or where its going when you leave it. Maybe Im glad I saw the walk just because I was thinking hard about work, and for a few moments, it made me think about something else bigger than my problems.
8:21 PM 
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Monday, August 07, 2006 

Category: Life
So I went to see Talladega Nights this weekend and died laughing. I have a hard time finding a comedy  I'll enjoy in the movie theaters these days, but I do go to Will Ferrell movies. I saw Anchorman in the drive-in and I was completely won over by the rumble between the various news anchors in the streets, and by Steve Carell, who I now watch regularly in The Office. Will Ferrell's NASCAR movie starts out right with a really solid cast; I'd give anything John C. Reilly signed up for at least a glance, and he's hysterical as dumb cowboy Ricky Bobby's even dumber best friend. I would never have thought I'd see two NASCAR movies in one year and enjoy them both, but I'm open minded. Then I spent most of Saturday fixing my laptop. It's been dead for nearly a year, until I recently got a new copy of Windows, but installing that fixed my virus problems while uninstalling half my drivers. But fortunately the recovery disk turned up, so a couple of hours went to reinstalling those. Plus a new anti-virus program because no way am I letting that get out of date again. However the reinstalled Toshiba console now tells me that my hard drive will probably fail soon, so perhaps all for naught. Today we packed up the Mazda and attempted to get a little sun over at Dash Point, because no one should spend an entire sunny weekend in Washington indoors. Got a little sun, burned slightly, grilled a lot of meat that should make several days of leftovers and admired the many, many dogs that were out on leashes. Not bad.
5:38 AM 
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Friday, August 04, 2006 

Category: Games
I've never gotten into video games in this space before, but I thought I would take a moment to promote the game I've been playing into the ground lately, Kingdom Hearts II. Just recently I gave the first Kingdom Hearts to a friend so he could see what all the excitement is about. He came back with a lot of questions: Why are the kids on that island? Where are there parents? And if they don't have parents, where did they get all those funky-chunky accessories? I had those same questions. They were never really answered in the first game but now that I've played the second, here's the facts: the kids are on an island offshore of their hometown. They do have parents, but you don't really see them. The second game shows the town and shots of the island off in the distance. That's out of the way. The Kingdom Hearts series pairs Disney characters like Alice, Mickey and Snow White with Final Fantasy characters like Sepheroth and Cloud. It's a weird combo. Sometimes its not hard to tell where the Japanese storytelling doesn't make sense to an American audience. The characters spend a lot of time talking about the importance of their hearts, to the point of nausea. The new game made some especially odd choices; you spend an awfully long time hanging out with Tron, who couldn't be duller if he was reading the phone book. But then there's some really great quirks too. Go through a door in the Disney castle and Donald and Goofy revert to their 1930s cartoon versions. Land on the Lion King planet and you become a lion yourself. And just like the last game you get to whack things with a series of big swords, but better than the last game, you can take on multiple forms, use two swords at once and REALLY open up a can of whoopie. I'm pretty sure I play these games mainly to wail on things.
5:52 AM 
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Tuesday, August 01, 2006 

Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
Champions on Ice was a real event for me. Disregarding for a moment how incredibly geeky it may be to follow ice skating, I loved every minute of it and cheered like a schoolgirl. He wasnt on the list to be there, so I nearly fell over when Evgeni Plushenko was announced during the opening number. The best way I can explain this is, imagine youre a golf fan and Tiger Woods made a surprise appearance at the one golf event you had ever gotten out to see in person. There is something truly unique and mesmerizing about Plushenko that tells me Im seeing something historical every time he performs. That said, he fell down after a jump during the opening number and I somehow felt relieved, because now I know he IS human. Tanith and Ben are just as smoldering in person as they are in their close-ups. I reluctantly admit Sasha Cohen is exquisite when she isnt nervous. After having watched them perform for so long, it was a thrill to see Surya Bonaly (in her trademark goofy costumes doing her trademark backflips) and Irina Slutskaya (who also fell on a jump during her solo, it seemed like she was having an off night). Victor Petrenko proved that though his career has been long, he hasnt lost a bit of his edge. And I was highly entertained by something I never seen before, trick skating. Irina Grigorian the hula hoop skater and the comedy/acrobatic team were doing things with their bodies that just didnt seem real. But I have to wrap this up with a mention of Alligator Soul, the Everett restaurant specializing in Cajun cuisine. It was a mixed blessing, but mostly very good. Scott got the ham hock plate and from the tender meat to the collard greens and black eyed peas, it was top notch. Also good were the bananas foster beignets (though they werent really beignets, more like Dutch pastry puffs) and the homemade moon pies. I liked the fried green tomatoes and the hush puppies. The gumbo was very disappointing, making the unforgivable mistake of pairing brown broth with sausage (brown is for seafood!), putting the rice in ahead of time, leaving out the file (pronounced fee-lay) and including okra that was not all that cooked, but if you dont know the difference it didnt taste half-bad. But the thing to avoid is the boudin. I knew I might be in for it when the waiter pronounced it boo-don (its more like boo-dan), but what came out didnt even slightly resemble the real thing. Get anything but that and its a really tasty place.
5:47 AM 
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Saturday, July 29, 2006 

Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

I work for a company thats into team building. But being kind of an old-fashioned place, most of the people in charge of our team building exercises are men. Men that like sports. And so it happens the entire marketing department will be carting their fragile bodies over to a diamond today to attempt to play softball. Most of us havent played since middle school. For me at least, the goal is to make it through the day without needing an ambulance. And without looking too stupid in my team T-shirt and shorts. When the torture ends, tomorrow Ill be up in Everett enjoying my tickets to Champions on Ice. I know, I usually have a rule about avoiding things with on ice in the title, but as some of you may remember from the Olympics, I love figure skating in all of its forms. And this show is going to be exhibition performances by some of my favorite competitors, including the exciting up and comers Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto, veteran Victor Petrenko and the incomparable Michelle Kwan. The real highlight will be seeing my eerily similar look-alike Irina Slutskaya, who Ive just learned collect stuffed animals. Weird. This was a really nice gift from Scott, and were making a whole day of the outing by adding in dinner at Alligator Soul. They have a chef from New Orleans and a menu that features beignets and boudin, so Im really looking forward to eating food that reminds me of home.

5:45 AM 
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