11-22-02 @ 12:13 pm EST

I will add an entry now.

I spent all morning looking for a new desktop! I finally found a nice one! :D It's so hard to find decent quality 800x600 desktops...I was looking for a nature photo, possibly beach/lake or sunset (our old one was beach), but more likely forest. I so love the forest. Mackinac Island is covered with it...*sigh* There's just a mystical feeling you get from the forest that you don't get from mountains or lakes or plains or the sky. I can't really explain it. It's as if the forest is a world unto itself.

But anyway, before I get completely stupid, I was just looking for a decent desktop. I tried DeviantArt since I've been browsing there anyway, but I couldn't browse JUST 800x600...so I went looking at Google. Had to search through some TRULY crap sites before finding just a few decent pictures. Then I found a site with a slew of nice nature pics, but most were too big. *sigh* I downloaded a few, including a big one, and tried them out. Two of them forest shots with the sunlight peeking through...one of those appears to have a river or a flooded road...one some birches in the snow...one some rocks resting beneath the water's surface...and the too-big one, a beautiful wooded path, all in green. *sigh*

I tried out the rest before settling on one with the sun peeking through the trees, but the sunlight hurt my eyes even though it was just a DESKTOP! So I went into Adobe PhotoDeluxe and tried to resize the too-big one to fit on the desktop. Would've used Print Shop, since Adobe pulls errors all the time, but Print Shop won't resize things and change the proportions; it always keeps them even if I tell it not to. Dumb thing. Anyway I resized it to 800x600 in Adobe and tried it out and...YEA! The distortion is so minimal that if you didn't see the original you could never guess. It's SO pretty! The trail leads off into the screen right between our two sets of icons...I feel like I could walk away into my desktop! So very nice! Too bad I couldn't find an autumn version, that would have been gorgeous...

Holy crap. Did I just write an entire entry about wallpapers? o_O; *cough* I need to get back to the subject...

Oh yes. The three e-mails. I'm currently worried because the Charter bill came AGAIN...yesterday...didn't we just pay that thing last month? Ma said she usually pays a month in advance so why do we keep getting the yellow notices...we got TWO things from them yesterday, a white and a yellow. Very nice of them to send both at the same time! Asses. And so I'm very worried that again our cable will end up shut off, only this time Dad will KNOW for sure that it was because of nonpayment. :( So I'm in a bit of a poor mood...Ma paid me back some of what she owed me (she thinks it was all that she owed me; I won't argue), but had to borrow some to pay the phone bill, and now what? I have yet to pay for an upgrade here...will I ever even be able to? She told me she'd buy me one for my birthday but I guess that's out of the picture. I don't even know if I can hold on to enough money until then with the way these BILLS keep coming at us!

But the e-mails...I got three e-mails that made me feel somewhat better. Probably more than three, but these are the three that I read most recently that brought a smile to my face. :) Which I needed...

Firstly, I got an e-mail about my Mackinac Island site, you know, that piece of crap on GeoCities. Ugh. I can't stand even looking at it. I really want to find my old photos so I can scan them and rebuild it at Powow. (I chose "Powow.com" because it reminds me of Indians, har.) But a woman sent me an e-mail about it and the first thing I thought on seeing it in my inbox was, "Great, ANOTHER one of those morons offering me paid webhosting." (If I could afford it, I'D ALREADY HAVE IT!) But it was an ACTUAL E-MAIL from somebody who ACTUALLY VISITED THE SITE! (The webhosting idiots, you can tell they barely even looked...they all sound like form letters, and the last one mentioned the "icy city of Michigan." Number one, Michigan's a state, not a city; and even if by "city" he meant Mackinac Island (and who calls THAT a city??), why did he mention ice? None of my pictures have a drop of snow in them!) She told me how much she enjoyed the tour, and commented that some of the areas I had pictured, she'd never even heard of before, like Devil's Kitchen. I will have to write to her and let her know I have more pics of more sites there but I need to rebuild the site...so that was a nice e-mail to receive. If only my fiction got as much notice as my island pictures!

Number two was an e-mail from a reader of mine at FanFiction.net. She (I hope it's a she) put me on her watch list so I went to see who she was. And I noticed she was writing a story about Anubis, so I left a comment. I will have to go back and read the rest, gah! But anyway, she left a comment on "I Shot An Arrow Into The Air...", then e-mailed me at my webmail to comment on how much she liked my stories. I'll have to get back to her too; it's very rare that people read my writing, much less my short stories, so it was much appreciated.

And number three was an e-mail right here at Stories.com. I received a new review on my journal, and another comment yesterday...the reader had missed there not being an entry for November 21st. Nobody's ever mentioned missing an entry before. :) That was kind of flattering. And so here I am typing an entry, and it's probably the most boring thing on Earth, but at least I'm typing something... I'm always surprised when I get good comments on my journal, as I know I'm not the most literate person, nor even remotely the most interesting...I just babbled on there about WALLPAPERS, for God's sake, that's how interesting I am.

So those three e-mails helped lift my spirits a bit, though you know how I am, always worrying...I'll just have to see about that stupid bill. Please cross your fingers for me.

Oh yes, one last thing, my random thought of the moment: "A&E rules! Bill Kurtis is GOD!" :P

Have to go now...tar.