My friend, Shawn Powers has been nominated for the “Hot Blogger Calendar“. At the moment, he’s in second place, beating the likes of Wil Wheaton!

Go to this link and vote for Shawn and lets help propel his royal hawtness to victory!!!

Just to show you how cute he can be, watch this video.

This is Shawn in glasses too. Meerowr. Eat your heart out, Wil (and the others in that contest)!

I’m getting married!!!

Kate,
I wanted to thank you for stopping by the booth at the Weddings Bridal Show yesterday. It was a pleasure to speak with you, and I look forward to speaking with you more about the services we provide.

To someone in Tennessee!!

I have no idea to whom, or why, but apparently, I’m already making plans!

The other Kate strikes again, and sadly to say, has a better gig at this life thing than I do at the moment.

I graduated from high school with honors back in 1995 and decided that I would pursue my life-long dream of becoming a pediatrician. Accepted into the University of Hartford, I started the year only to drop out due to a medical condition.

Almost 13 years later, I’ve decided to take some baby steps in obtaining that ever elusive degree. I was originally accepted into an accelerated Saturday program at Bay Path Women’s College, but upon receiving a rather small financial award, I was unhappy that I would sink farther into debt with low interest loans.

Unwilling to be defeated, I went down to my local community college, applied and was accepted.

So as of Wednesday, I will be starting two online credit courses, and was able to put the classes on a payment plan. It’s not necessarily a loan, and this way will be much cheaper than the above mentioned institution. I will probably save myself around $20,000 doing it this way, and I will have my Saturdays to spend with my children. There is the added benefit of taking as little or as many classes as I can afford at a given time and the community college also offers online credit courses in addition to traditional classroom format, which is highly convenient for a single mother of three. I will definitely be playing with my options. The flexibility will be wonderful me as well, as ultimately, I would like to market myself as someone who had the fortitude and strength to keep going, albeit 13 years late.

I’ll be taking online writing comp and general psych. As of now, I’m trying to get my feet wet and I would consider myself pretty directionless. Hopefully that will change as time progresses. I am happy where I am right now, but it’s always nice to have the proverbial ace in the hole as I travel through life

Wish me luck.

Nice to know that I would suffer incredibly. Bleh.

Go ahead and see how long you’d live!

But I really don’t care. I thought it was funny.

I had the opportunity to visit a full lighting of Waterfire in Providence, RI over this past weekend. At first, I was quite skeptical; How much fun could you possibly have watching bowls filled with wood, burn? Hundreds of people showed up to see the lighting and take in the music and it ended up being quite a lovely night.

If you are on the lookout for something romantic to which to take a loved one, this would definitely be on my list of really romantic and neat things to do. Throughout the night, there is also Latin dancing, and the fires serve as a backdrop to the performers. There were a couple points in the night, I had to shake feeling I was walking around a castle during a King’s festival of sorts. There is nothing high-tech about the evening and that is what makes it all the more magical.

Here’s a short video and some pictures. I particularly like the one of the two dancers, where he is out of focus and it looks like she is tearing herself away.

There is something relieving about facing a fear. You can’t help but take in a deep breath and wonder the outcome, but I firmly believe that life is about plunging into the deepest waters of trust and love. This probably will not make sense to most of you out there without the back story, but I had an opportunity to right the wrongs, to re-live the past and to finally forgive before time ran out. If only I had the courage to do it sooner.

I have to say, it is one of the most freeing and emotionally intense situations you will ever experience. To forgive someone, is to live that moment  or moments that most wounded you in every way possible, once more, to make peace with the situation. To overcome it’s incredible power over you. It leaves you completely exhausted. Mentally tired and with the worst hangover that even a night settling in with a bottle of Jack Daniels can not match. You want to sleep, and yet, at the same time, you want to soar.

Think of a dove carrying such a weighted rock that she can not fly. Once she shakes that burden, her wings become unfurled and she takes off, finally free of the chains that once kept her tethered.

You know who you are…

Thank you. Thank you for finally uttering the words that set me free.

To the rest of you who read this with incredulous mirth… If time has afforded you the ability to right a wrong, or to dig deep into the consciousness that has held you back, take the opportunity and try to set things right. It is the most spiritual, relieving and wonderful thing you will ever experience. We are not meant to be caged in this life, so fly free.

Dear Gmail,

Look, I understand that you had a relatively large e-mail outage yesterday, and you have my sympathies as you piece together the broken consumer confidence of angry technophiles who once viewed you as a deity. However, I have a simple request to make…

…again.

I once again received an e-mail that was clearly meant for someone else. Although I’ve politely responded to this other Kate Baker by means of informing her family, her personal lawyers and members of some odd college foundation that I am indeed, not the Kate they are looking for, she seems to keep giving out the address in question.

Just a minute ago, I was personally invited to a tequila dinner.

“Born of European parentage, Pepe was raised by the tradition that a word and an asshole meant a promise would be kept. Pepe has been in the asshole business for over 30 years, and as an asshole expert, his name on the bottle represents his personal commitment that this product contains all of the characteristics an excellent asshole should possess.”**

**Just because I’m really incensed over the way this has been mishandled, I’ve replaced random words in the above paragraph with the word ‘asshole’. I’m sure Pepe is a fine asshole, err I mean tequila maker.

Now, I have two options here as I see them. Consistently beg you to do something that blocks any mail coming from her address, from reaching me, or post every single email meant for this other impostor up on my blog and randomly replace words with expletives, all the while blaming her stupidity and your lethargy to accomplish anything of note.

I can handle spam. I really can. It goes into a nice spam filter which then gets deleted. Nice feature, it really is. However, the way you route her email address, (if that even is her e-mail address and she isn’t some stupid idiot who read it wrong upon initial creation and then proceeded to send it along to Pepe and everyone else on the planet), anything anyone sends to that address mentioned above, comes sailing over to me to rest in my inbox.

Houston, we have a problem here. I can’t even send her an e-mail asking her to stop using the address or to find another or come to any sort of compromise because anytime I send it, it bounces right back to my inbox.

So really, please, help me with this. Not only do I feel like I’m living a double life, but apparently my other self loves tequila dinners, shops on Scholastic.com (Oh yes, I have her password now) and uses Delta as her preferred airline of choice.

Can you see where this has become a bit of an issue?

Most sincerely,

Kate Baker (The real one, with the period)

Okay, that came out wrong. (The real one with the punctuation in the middle.)

—–

Seriously, I have no idea what to do here.

How did you like that for a title, eh?

First things first, the article on WoW is forthcoming. I’ve been busy like, playing WoW and stuff. Jeebus.

Secondly, my CD writer shit the bed. Purchased a new one through Newegg. Got it yesterday and was surprised to see it was a SATA drive. Did not come with SATA cable. Irked. Went to Best Buy and purchased an overly expensive cable. Double dog irked. Power supply has SATA power, but computer as originally set-up does not meet length requirements for installation of aforementioned CD writer. Triple Lindy irked. Take entire computer apart, redo configuration, finally get everything where it all fits, turn it on and get the error: Can not find OS. Shit pants. Remember switching HDD Sata cable, switch a cable, everything works.

Whew.

How is your day going? Mmmm?

PS. I am now a college student. Woo! More on that later.