I caught Leroy online for just a short while just now. It occurs to me that this may be one of the last times I talk to him real-time in quite some time. Kind of bittersweet.

I think I am going to make a point to call home tomorrow and see if I can catch everyone while he's there.

Blah.

Brian was apparently inspired by me and started up his own blog. Tres cool.

I'm really happy that he and I have been talking again. I feel bad for letting our email threads die. I keep meaning to pick up and respond to the mails again, but have been holding myself back for a little while here; too much emotion for me to deal with at the moment, or something like that. We are talking right now on ICQ, though. Happiness.

---

On the subject of Happiness, ever see that movie? I saw it quite a while ago - I don't remember much about it except that I thought it was pretty good despite its being quite disturbing. I should watch it again someday.

Loneliness and depression suck.

---

I went out to dinner and then to The Producers with Mike, Jared, and Tiffany tonight. They've been going out to shows at The Paramount for a while now, the three of them and Tim, but Tim's gone down south somewhere to stay with an ex-boyfriend who is dying of aids. Sad for Tim. Sigh. Anyhow, they didn't want Tim's ticket to go to waste, so they gave it to me.

We had a really nice time. I miss seeing Broadway shows. I miss musical theatre. It was a really nice evening.

I wasn't floored by the two leads in the show - they were good, but not great. But wow, some of the supporting cast was amazing! The man who played Carmen Ghia kicked ass, and the woman who played Ulla was awesome, as well. During the stage bows at the end, Mike, Jared, Tiff and I all stood up to applaud them when they took their bows. Maybe 10-20 people in the audience did the same. Everyone else waited until the two leads took their bows to stand. I don't get it. Seattlites. Give credit where it's due, already.

We went out to Dilettante Chocolates for desert after the show. Really yummy, but oh, so rich.

The company was really nice this evening. Mike and Jared are so good together; I don't know many couples who fit as well as they do. And I adore Tiffany; I've really missed hanging out with her. I've just been too busy with dance, and then she was off on her cruise, and then I was busy with dance... anyhow, she and I are going to hang out again on Sunday. The Century's having live music Sunday night, which means the dance will be more expensive. I don't know anything about the band, so it could go either way -- good or bad. I figure instead of spending the extra money and gambling on the night of dancing, I'll just take Sunday off and make it into Tiffany-time. It should be good. I'm excited.

---

I guess it's good that I signed up for the Denver Exchange when I did; they closed out registration the next day.

---

So I called Mike when I got home. He didn't answer and wasn't around online so I resigned myself to not talking to him tonight, but he called back a few minutes later. Yay! I was so happy. It's been a while since we really talked. His phone was dying and he was pretty tired, though, so we didn't get to talk long. Bummer. There's always tomorrow, I guess.

The sun'll come out, tomorrow;
bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun.
Just thinking about tomorrow
clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow
'til there's none -
Tomorrow, tomorrow,
I'll love ya, tomorrow -
you're only a day away.

Chris thinks I seek out relationships with people that either live far away or are going to move, because I want the comfort of distance sitting between us. He says he thinks he can see this in me because he's that way, himself.

Hmm. Food for thought, I guess. I don't think that's the case, but I guess it could be.

Harry, one of my "non-dance friends" randomly showed up at the Russian Center last night. He's performing in A Chorus Line right now, and apparently one of the cast members swing dances and dragged some of the rest of them out after the show.

It's silly, but it threw me for a mental loop. I'd been having an awesome dance night, and all of a sudden I was tripping all over myself because here was this acquaintance, in this place I wasn't used to seeing him, watching me. I didn't freeze up as badly as I did at the SONW level challenge (bah!), but it was still pretty silly how mentally thrown I was.

I did get back into my groove. I had an awesome, awesome dance with cute-Michael. He was throwing me around a bit, lots of dips thrown in at breaks in the song, and everything was just clicking. One of Harry's friends thought that cute-Michael and I had to have been partners for a while to be dancing like that. Hee hee.

It really was the best dancing night I've had in weeks, though. I love nights like that, where you just get into it and everything starts working, where I get into a groove enough that I can follow just about anyone and anything. Crazy fun.

Good news on the pension protection front. My mother sounds pleased with the way things went last week while she was in DC.

One of my parakeets died today. Sad.

I bagged him up and put him in the freezer, making for a grand total of four rats and three birds stashed away in there. I really need to find someplace to bury these poor critters.

---

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

(- David Dixon, Windows Error Haikus)

Windows XP blue-screened just a bit ago. It automatically rebooted itself after the blue-screen, so I didn't get a chance to see what went wrong. Boo.

---

I was washing dishes barefoot this afternoon, when I dropped and broke a bowl. Ended up with all these little glass splinters stuck in my feet -- not cool.

---

So I was driving on I-5 this morning, looked over to my left, and there was Phil waving at me! I love that. It makes the world seem so pleasantly small and connected. Living someplace as big as the Seattle Metro area, I almost never randomly see people I know driving next to me; I think it's happened maybe twice over the course of the last year. Chalk that up to something I miss about living in a smaller city, I guess.

I just found a my Tango instructors' web page! Awesome. I love them.

From the page:

Tango is a dance.
Dance is an art.
Art is a connection of the part to the whole.
This connection is our salvation.
Our salvation is Tango.

Not only are they dancers, but they are poets, as well. Kick ass.

Yummy!

I just mixed this mass of cooked zucchini, onions, and mushrooms leftover from the weeken with some leftover stroganoff and with some shredded cheddar cheese, and tossed it all together into a tortilla. It tastes really good. I like it when kitchen experiments work out this well.

My baby brother has been activated and is being shipped off to Kuwait on Monday. Well, actually he's heading out to his unit for a few days, and then possibly off to Ft. McCoy for a week or so, and then off to Kuwait. But Kuwait is still the ultimate destination.

One of the guys in Leroy's unit has been out there since November and has been posting pictures on the web.

I am not excited about this news. Mary, my little sister, is not excited about her big brother being shipped off, either, as evidenced from her blogging today.

Bah.

Girls and young women are more easily addicted to drugs and alcohol, have different reasons than boys for abusing substances and may need single-sex treatment programs to beat back their addictions, according to a study released Wednesday.
...

While boys often experiment with cigarettes, alcohol and drugs in a search for thrills or heightened social status, girls are motivated by a desire to reduce stress or alleviate depression, the study found.

Girls are also more likely to abuse substances if they reached puberty early, had eating disorders or were ever physically or sexually abused, researchers said.
...

- CBS News, Girls Get Addicted Quickly

Interesting stuff, that.

Google News has a cluster of articles posted on that right now. (I love Google News, by the way. Great resource.) Anyhow, it certainly strikes a chord with me, with the problems I've had, and with the driving motivations behind those problems. They're looking into making more effective treatment programs aimed specifically at females now. Good for them.

I don't know that anybody will ever search for me, but I thought I'd make it a little easier just in case they ever do. There are so many Kathryn Krueger's in the world, and so many even just on the web. I figure that if I give a bit of a personal history people who know me well enough to insert a few keywords might actually have a shot at finding my blog. Those of you who are already here can just skip the bio if you want. :)

---

My full name, as seen on my birth certificate, is Kathryn Anisette Krueger, and I sometimes go by Kathy or Kat. I grew up in Rochester, Minnesota. I attended Benjamin Franklin Elementary School, Willow Creek Junior High School, Lourdes High School, and Mayo High School, and I graduated from Mayo. Throughout much of my younger life I had a crush on a cute redhead named Dean Ingram, and I've had a soft spot for redheads ever since. That's probably part of why I fell so hard for Jeremy.

I discovered the internet when I was 15 or so, and I've been hooked ever since. My first email address was krueger@sparc.isl.net. I spent horrendous amounts of time on IRC, generally bumming around the undernet in #forest and #vampcafe with JaNdeR as my primary handle. I also played around on the local BBS's during that period of my life. There was a nifty little one called This Broken Machine, or TBS, that a bunch of the little geek boys in town hung out on. I met Sean, mentioned in a previous post, on TBS. My handle on the boards was Sunshine, and I was perky-happy despite emotionally-troublesome, messy stuff going on in my life. The year before I went off to college, I started mudding on ROM as Skuld. Years later I mudded quite a bit as Mircalla. These days I don't mud at all.

Upon graduating from high school, I headed off to the big city - New York. I attended New York University (email address kak203@is5.nyu.edu) for one year before transferring back to the University of Minnesota - TC (email address krue0136@tc.umn.edu). In college, I studied Computer Science. In 1999, I took 9 months off from UMN to work a Co-Op at IBM, Rochester (email address kakruege@us.ibm.com). It was interesting being back in the home town, and even stranger working at the plant my mother had spent 23 years working at. So many people that I worked with and/or for knew her or knew of her, and I felt that they all expected me to live up to her reputation.

Within a year, I ran off to work for Microsoft in Redmond, WA (email address kkrueger@microsoft.com). I worked at MS for a few years, and left last April. I've been on an extended vacation since, learning to dance and learning to play classical guitar from Peter Caruso, whom I absolutely adore. I still live in Redmond at the same apartment complex with my dog, Louie, and with my birds. I keep cockatiels, parakeets, and a lovebird. At some point I plan on going back to work, although I've been taking my time. I'm also considering going back to school.

Other hobbies, then and now:

• Music. I played the piano as a child and I played the cello in junior high and part of high school. I was in a girl's choir in my younger years, and sang in a gospel choir in New York. I played bass guitar just well enough at Lourdes to play in the school jazz band, and alto sax just well enough to play in the marching band. These days I'm learning classical guitar; I'd do much better with it if I put a bit more time into practicing.


• Drama. I made it into "A Fifteen Minute Hamlet" my freshman year at Lourdes and have been hooked ever since. I did drama all through high school, did Mantorville Melodramas at an historic opera house in Mantorville, Minnesota during my summers, did a bit of community theatre, and most recently played Mariana in the Microsoft Theatre Troupe's 2002 production of Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure". I also did speech team all throughout high school.


• Games. I love board games, card games. I started playing on the Zone long before MS ever discovered it; my handle there is Katthryn. I also played in a spades group on the zone for a while as Kitty_Dawg. These days I get together every Tuesday night with a group of friends in Capitol Hill to play games in person. I'm also addicted to the Sims, although I haven't allowed myself to play at all since last November.


• Art. I love oil painting, although I haven't done it for years. I mean to get started again, but it's expensive. I also enjoy sketching, sculpting, drawing, water color, - it's all good. I've recently started up with a bit of small sculpture and with water colors again.


• Literature. I love to read. Wuthering Heights is still probably my favorite book. One of the best things about not working is that I've got time to read; I'm loathe to give that up.


• Animals, birds in particular. As mentioned above, I keep cockatiels, parakeets, and a lovebird. I'd like to have a bigger bird or two someday, an amazon, maybe, or perhaps a macaw, but I'm not even going to consider that until I own my own home. I used to post religiously to several avian newsgroups, and have been meaning to get back into that.


• Dance. Swing! I'm way into Lindy Hop right now. I'm also on a bit of a Balboa kick. More recently I've started learning Argentine Tango, and I could see myself getting into that pretty heavily, too. I go dancing in Seattle 5-7 nights a week these days. I'll probably have to cut that down a bit when I get a job again, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.


• Ultimate Frisbee. I first got into this while working at IBM, and played all the time while I was working at Microsoft. I haven't played all that much since I got into dance, but I'd like to get back into it someday.

So that's my life in a nutshell. Lots has been left out, but hopefully it will be enough for anyone who might really want to search me out.

---

We now return you to your originally scheduled program.

Note: All email addresses mentioned above are now defunct, and have only been included for searching purposes. These days if you want to reach me, you should try kkrueger@[REMOVE_CAP_TEXT_AND_BRACKETS]exmsft.com.

I took a nap this afternoon and dreampt about Sean Biren. He was playing the same old games in my dream that he always used to play in real life, hot and cold. And I still cared. I don't know why that came up in my dreams -- sure, we exchanged an email or two at Christmas, but I haven't seen him in over 4 years, and we've only emailed two or three times in all that time.

I hate that. You spend so much time getting over something or something, and then it comes up again in some random dream. You can never really get away from it.

This was playing in the rotation in the background while I slept:

They can come true,
yeah, they can come true.

Move a step closer -
you know that I want you.
I can tell by your eyes
that you want me, too.
Just a question of time;
I knew we'd be together
and that you'd be mine.
I want you here forever!

Do you hear what I'm saying?
Gotta say how I feel.
I can't believe you're here,
but I know that you're real.
I know what I want
and baby it's you -
I can't deny my feelings
beacause they are true, yeah.

Dreams can come true -
look at me babe; I'm with you.
You know you got to have hope,
you know you've got to be strong.

...

(- Gabrielle, "Dreams")

Maybe there's still some of that latent somewhere. Who knows. Knowing what he is, though, I'd like to think that I don't want him, haven't wanted him for a long time, and I'd like to stop dreaming about him.

I also dreamed about painting. I'd been planning a specific painting, drawing inspiration from other paintings in the dream. It involved a mirror -- lots of black in the mirror, almost embracing everything in the reflection, and a woman in front of the mirror, her back visibly reflected behind her. There were a few books I was going to draw inspiration from, too, actual books I think, but I can't remember what they were. It was all the same dream, and Sean sort of became the dominating factor in my memory when I woke up.

---

Somewhere along the way, I've taken to using my answering machine to screen my calls. I never used to do that, but there are so many people right now I just don't feel like talking to. I wonder if I've picked up some of Jeremy's antisocial tendancies, or if this is all me.

Somebody called just now and didn't leave a message; that means that I missed them, and I'll never know who it was. That bugs me. But on the bright side, the two or three people I generally always want to talk to always leave messages. I think. Maybe it was just a telemarketer on the phone just now; they always seem to call at night these days.

---

I've been feeling the depression again a bit. It's not so bad - right now, I'm just wading in the pool; not even forced to tread water yet, can still touch ground, no worries at all of drowning. Hopefully this is as bad as it gets this time 'round. I think dancing helps.

---

Again with the phone, no message. Arrgh.

---

I feel a little out of it. That's what I get for sleeping too much. And when I feel this way, the urge is to sleep more - bah. Won't sleep. Don't do it, Kathy. Perhaps I'll clean until it's time to head out; my kitchen is still a mess from this weekend. The sink is overflowing with dishes.

I consume raw egg.

I feel guilty about consuming raw egg.

I'm consuming it right now, eating leftover sukiyaki heated into a soup base, dipping the noodles and meat in scrambled raw egg. (Fresh sukiyaki is also dipped in raw egg, at least the way Jon taught me to cook it.)

[02-05-2003/15:04] Nettika: It makes me feel guilty, though.
[02-05-2003/15:05] Nettika: Eating raw egg.
[02-05-2003/15:05] Icktharus: why?
[02-05-2003/15:05] Nettika: "raw egg is bad for you".
[02-05-2003/15:05] Icktharus: not really.
[02-05-2003/15:05] Nettika: my father would be aghast, and would lecture me on the dangers of salmonella.
[02-05-2003/15:05] Icktharus: unless you're pregnant.
[02-05-2003/15:05] Icktharus: salmonella isn't that dangerous unless you have a weakened immune system.
[02-05-2003/15:05] Nettika: hmm.
[02-05-2003/15:05] Icktharus: but caeser salad, fried egg, mayonnaise, that kind of thing all has raw egg in it.

I like Alex. He makes me feel better. Yay for Alex.

Hey, Mike - you know you like the rainy, drizzly, miserable, nasty-ass typical Seattle weather better, anyhow.

So when Mike left, the sun came out. Hmm.

My last rat died this weekend at the ripe old age of three and a half. This is the first time in almost four years that I've not had one or more rats; it feels kind of strange. A little sad. I thought about getting another, but I think I'm just going to stick to birds and the dog for now. That's almost more than I can handle right there.

I feel like my dancing's lost something. Saturday night was frustrating. My dancing tonight at Sonny's was a bit better, but it still felt really off. I'm not even sure what I'm doing differently, but as a result I'm moving more awkwardly, I'm just not picking up on leads, I'm not feeling the music, and I'm not able to really get into it or play around. Tomorrow I'm practicing a bunch with three different people; hopefully that will help me iron out whatever it is that is going wrong.

Sigh.

It's one of those nights. I'm feeling a little lonely, I'm feeling a little frustrated. I tripped on the stairs coming up to my apartment tonight, and now my hand is bleeding. Seemed like a poetic end to the evening.

On that note, I'm going to head to bed. I'll wake up tomorrow and it will be a new day; hopefully it will be a better day, as well.

Ever say something and really, really wish you could just take it back?

I tend to push for complete honesty in relationships. For whatever reason, I want relationships where I can always say whatever's on my mind, where I can always be absolutely honest about whatever I do and think, and where the other person will be completely honest with me about what they think and do, as well.

I forget that some things are better left unsaid, and that timing matters a lot in the saying of others.