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Like everything, a journal is the reflection of a journey and its form morphs with time. This archive covers my blogging from 1999-2002.


The Blogger years. It started as I began travelling and wanted a more daily journal of my life to share with my friends.
oct sept aug july
june may april march
feb jan    
dec nov oct sept
aug july june may
april      

The leap from milky white pages to glowing white screen...the start of virtual exhibitionism.
apr.17: irate
apr.08: expired
apr.07: home
apr.06: free
mar.26: bound
feb.18: inked
jan.02: lost
jan.02: dream
sep.13: high
sep.02: wander
aug.30: touched
jul.24: glow
may.11: snap
feb.29: sex
jan.11: why
jan.01: the apocolypse
dec.06: mourning
nov.01: insanity
oct.13: caged
oct.13: surrender

freeing a soul : october 2002

10.23.2002

secret journal

for those of you who haven't caught on yet, i have been cheating on my blogger. if you are missing my rambling, try here:

www.livejournal.com/users/wanderinggrrl/

as soon as i have some time to spare (<snorts>), i plan on giving belen.net a pretty big overhaul. new features will include:

  • pushing my personal site over to a subdomain of belen.net (probably inside.belen.net)

  • bringing my portfolio and biz stuff up to the main url of belen.net and snazzing up the verbage to flaunt myself a bit more

  • converting my journal a bit to shift over to the livejournal format. i think my friends really appreciate the functionality that lj offers, and i am a sucker for pleasing them ;)

its hard to conquer the world :) i need to clone myself.
posted by belen 8:45 PM

9.21.2002

randomness

mmmm....its the weekend. it is the first weekend back in my house in over 3 months. <deep sigh of contentment>

i experienced a very strange and wonderful thing yesterday on my 28th birthday. i opened a card with birthday money from a grandparent. this was not my own grandparent...it was david's grandma Schneider. and after almost 10 years of no contact (yes, friends, that includes no cute, thoughtful birthday cards) with my own remaining grandparents, i sat for a moment blinking. and then glowing...that i have a grandma again...sorta. i guess she isn't really "mine" yet, but someday...

it really touched me.

so david and i decided to get each other a joint birthday present (since his is in october) - we just ordered a pioneer 300 disc cd changer. yeeee-haaa! all those cd's that were cast aside and didnt make the "cut" will now rejoin us. and i get to write it off as office equipment. :) no, i am not lying...it *is* in our office. it plays all day as we work. :)

i have noticed in recent days that i find myself missing old friends. those people i just don't talk to anymore...and i have to say that jonathan and his mom always top that list. despite my resolve to try to emotionally distance myself from him, i still miss him. and knowing that i am about to live in the same city with him again - live within blocks of where he works...and not hear from him at all - it makes me sad.

and there is hardly a day that something doesnt remind me of his mom - making the strawberry pot in washington, eating scrambled eggs with cheese and green onions, hearing a santana song, a million little daily things. i often miss her place in my life. but somewhere along the way i felt the wall go up between us, and i just don't feel like she would want me in her life again. not that i know how to find her anymore. <shrugs> i guess its for the best. i don't think i could be a part of either of their lives without wreaking havoc...and that is unfortunate.

all in all, i find myself...deeply content. my career is fulfilling and challenging, my friendships are deep and caring, my family is growing and blooming, my partner is considerate, loving and nurturing. i am living big dreams, remedying mistakes from my past and continuing to push and learn and fly every day.

and all those annoying little problems along the way are so manageable.

and people laugh when i say i love getting older. it just keeps getting better!
posted by belen 12:24 PM

9.2.2002

olympic national park - hoh rainforest pictures

here are the pics from the weekend...it was quiet and relaxing :)

so our journey begins with dogdog donning the proper jungle attire and crawling into his dignified travelling case :)


 this tree was pretty typical of the windy roots and large trees along the trails. the roots get really crazy because trees fall over, start to decay and become "nurse
logs", which new trees grow on top of. and if they succeed, the new trees get these windy roots and stilt-like look to them bec they have to get their roots
to the ground, and eventually the nurse log decays to nothing. dogdog liked these trees a lot :)

this is a picture of one of the trees in the Hall of Mosses. its rathr hard to fathom, but the moss on that limb in the lower right corner is draping down about 6-8 feet from the tree limb!

dogdog tree-climbing
a ranger for playing in the moss. he had to promise not to remove it from the forest, which he did. but he was a very dirty dog at the end of the day :)

little dog, biiiiiiiiiig tree :)

more dog adventures

dogdog talked me into the picture so you can see how big these trees are :)

after a strentuous day of frolicking, dogdog sat down to a tasty steak dinner and a good alaskan amber beer :)





this is the coastline to the west of the olympics. amazing that in august, this is the misty cold coast.
posted by belen 9:16 AM

8.28.2002

deep satisfaction

there is something beautiful about spending 2 hours troubleshooting a network connectivity problem on david's laptop and finally winning.

was it the dongle?

was it the network card?

was it his computer's pc card slots?

no driver disks? ok. we'll download.

no floppy? ok, we'll burn them.

no win 98 disk? ok, we'll download drivers and burn.

is it the card? is it the dongle? is it the slots? (this is sounding dirty!)

in the end, it was a dongle that was bad.

and lo and behold, we had another card and corresponding dongle.

and i had the patience to get the drivers downloaded and installed.

while crashing constantly.

yup, i am a rockstar.
posted by belen 11:29 PM

8.26.2002

the newest member

meet the newest member of lish's household! he doesn't have a name yet, but we are working on it :) he is about 3-4 months old and came from the uhmane society. this should satisfy my baby kitty urges for a while :)


posted by belen 10:47 AM

8.19.2002

doing my good deed

my life is such a balancing act :)

this morning i was posting porn to newsgroups to promote our pay sites...

this afternoon, i spent $500 supporting Planned Parenthood.

why? you ask...

well, here is the deal. i have insurance. but what that guarantees me is that when i have to go for that wonderful annual gynocologist exam that women *love*, i have to wait 6 weeks to get an appointment with a dr i don't know (because i am always moving). i visit said dr and have an incredibly impersonal experience. i pay the $30 copay, and then somehow, i end up paying another $40 or so for tests that the insurance won't cover. then i pay $25 for each pack of pills, and i can't get more than 1 pack at a time without a hassle (for those of us who are not always next to their local pharmacy).

and all that joy costs me about $400.

*OR*

i could call Planned Parenthood, get an appointment for next week. i go in, fill out some forms, and meet a dr who is there donating her time because she whole-heartedly believes in what she is supporting. i talk with her about things like traditional medicine vs. homeopathic, the various new things going on in oral contraceptives, and decide that i would like to try the consecutive pills (which means i take active pills for 3 months and then give my body a break). then i go to the front, pay the $150 for her time and support of the clinic and buy 16 packs of pills (for my consecutive pill experiment) *all at once*, and wha-la! i have my entire year of feminine health taken care of, as well as having a pleasant experience at an establishment i feel good about supporting.

in addition, instead of keeping my higher insurance that covers part of my pills, i am dropping to a lower insurance (almost 1/2 the cost) since i don't have to worry about getting my pills for the next year.

the whole thing just makes me feel better about the universe :)
posted by belen 4:56 PM

8.4.2002

st. helen's pictures

here are the pics from our camping trip. if you want the description, you need to go see my livejournal (since i am a cheating whore)

Mt. St. Helens pics

the trees in our campsite:

dogdog holding our camping pass:

camping belen, a self-portrait


posted by belen 10:52 PM

8.2.2002

the agony, the joy

so much today!

first, i had to endure the agony of doing something i *swore* i would never ever do.

i put frontpage on my machine so i could work on a client's really awful site.

and the thing was so fucked up and FP was SO FUCKING BAD that i stripped the html of all tags and killed all reference to FP after fighting it for 2 hours.

i hate fontpage.

but my day had the biggest perk ever.

dre is having a rather rough time of it, so we bought him a ticket to come see us!!!

aug 10-14, dre is mine! <MWAHAHAHHAHAH>

we are gonna do some theraputic camping :)

i want to burble on, but i have work to get done before we head to mt st helens to campr for the weekend :):):)
posted by belen 3:22 PM

7.27.2002

i create life!

my sunflowers are starting to poke their little heads out of their fresh yummy soil :)

fear me, david and i have another great creative project for xmas gifts!

posted by belen 7:58 PM

7.26.2002

friday finally arrives...

i cannot even begin to express how stupid-busy i have been this week. my average days have been 8am-5pm, grabbing dinner and then back at it until 10ish.

but this has made up for the downtime last week...and i really needed to get shit done.

so all is good. lots of billable hours this week, and lots of good work done.

tomorrow i work a bit more and sunday we go into seattle to hang out.

this week's weather has been so wacky...mid-week, i was in a sundress sweating my ass off, and today we have been so cold all day that we actually lit a fire in the fireplace :) (mmmmm...roaring fire in july!!!)

i think its about time for a nap...then dinner.

perhaps i will have energy for writing later this weekend :)
posted by belen 4:04 PM