Monday was hard for more than just that, though--work aside, there's always family to deal with. See, since my parents left on The Trip, my mother's sister has been...problematic. We've never been particularly close, the two of us, but we've gotten along just fine until now. She's stopped returning my calls, which was irksome but easily overlooked--but last weekend was my grandmother's 94th birthday party, and she didn't invite me.

It sounds whiny and childish, but what's wrong with her? She was supposed to pick up some sails the 'rents left at my house and take them to the storage unit--she won't. She was supposed to return my mom's car to the dealer when the lease was up this month--she hasn't. Where exactly have I gone wrong? And why am I feeling like this is my fault? It's like we got in an argument and nobody told me.

So Monday (my grandmother's actual birthday, the party was on Sunday) I head up to Gram's to bring her some dinner and flowers and listen to stories--and she doesn't recognize me when I get there. It comes to her soon enough, even though she keeps calling me Mabel, but it was horrifying--she kept asking me when my parents were coming home, when are they coming home when are they coming home until I wanted to scream. But there is no screaming allowed, not when you've got this crushing responsibility to deal with, so I do the only thing I can think of: I call my mom.

"We're driving back to the boat! We just visited the Redwoods!" she says, handing the phone to Kid sis. They're in Crescent City, waiting for a part to be repaired before they head to San Fransisco. She hadn't even called my grandmother yet! On her birthday! I feel like everyone has gone crazy except me.

Only I don't, really.

I realize that not everyone has relationships like this with their families; most people don't live within fifteen minutes of their entire immediate family, don't have to deal with this stuff all the time. I do, and there's no one to tell me how to do it. Don't they make books about this kind of thing? Family Relations For Complete Idiots, something like that.

...

Then the Psd to HTML or PSD to CSS conversion is carried out by hard coding the image to fit into HTML frames or layers

Yesterday was ten-thousand times better than the day before, and do you know why? She's back! After three months apart, shopping and noshes were in order, so off to U Village we went. Here is a scary realization I had in Sephora: I just don't care about shopping for myself anymore. We were in one of my favorite stores of all time, and I couldn't find a single thing to purchase. Not a gloss, a blush, lipstick or brush! Nothing. We walked over to Nine West (I used to fucking LIVE there. No joke. Check out my shoe racks.) and I faced the same disappointment. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?

Perhaps I'm overreacting. In my panicked haze, I theorized that maybe I just value my money more now, since there seems to be a great deal less of it to spend on self-indulgent crap.

Perhaps I just need to work harder at shopping.