Willo O'Brien

Ha… less than 24 hours and I’m just sick and tired of being upset about anything at all. I can’t wait to go workout tonite and SWEAT out some of these thoughts and be done with them.

In other news, I finally got a myspace account. woo. hoo.

I’m really looking forward to the Arcade Fire show in a couple weeks. I am missing hitting live shows and last Friday night’s show at Bottom of the Hill rocked my world! Funny how I didn’t post about any of that cuz I was so caught up in what happened after that.. but suffice to say it was a REALLY fun night! I met some awesome friends of Ted & Misty’s.. one girl named Heather who lives close by & I’m hoping to hang out with her again and maybe craft it up!

I also got to see my drum teacher play w/ Kelley Stoltz – and then hang with him a bit afterwards. Great to reconnect w/ him since he’s been on tour forever. We have a lesson tomorrow! woohoo!

Something else really fun is an old friend from art school (art institute in denver 1993), contacted me lastnight out of the blue! After 10 years! It was cool to catch up. I have thought of him a number of times and even thought I saw him once or twice but then it wasn’t him. Anyway – I knew our paths would cross again some day, so I was glad he found me. (not hard if you google my name – ha!) It’s been cool to see his artwork & have us both try to skim over what’s happened in our lives to bring us where we are today.

in order to offset some of this icky stuff.. i’ll post 5 things i’m grateful for:

1. I’m incredibly grateful for my friends near and far that support and love me. Some of you I have known for 20+ years, and some of you for 10 and some of you for only a little over a year, and yet it seems like I’ve known you forever. Incredibly there are a lovely handful of you whom I’ve never even met in person, but your sweet emails and connection over these wires (and wireless in most cases :) have touched my heart and created a community for me in this internet space I never thought possible. Thank you!!

For the darling friends who look out for me here in San Francisco, thank you. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. I have had a couple friends lately calling me to make sure I’m OK.. encouraging me to stop being such a hermit and getting me out, and every time I’m glad I did, and have met some really neat new people.

Thank you to my girlfriends who are calling me and sending me lovin, and even come over in the cold of night to give me a hug when I need one! Thank you!!

I sometimes feel like I don’t have the group or the friend base that I thought I would have at this age.. but when I stand back and look at all those around me sending me their love and support.. it warms my heart. Thank you guys!!!

2. Wowie, hard to top that first one (I am really needing friends right now), but there’s much to be grateful for in this rich life of mine. I feel so fortunate that I have my health. Thank goodness for the miracle of the human body to fight so hard to keep us alive every day despite some of the crazy things we put it through. Within this thanks I also must give big gratitude to the miracle of my new eyesight!!! It’s amazing!!!!

3. I am so thankful for the business I’ve cultivated over the last year, and I’m so excited for this year ahead of me. I’m so thankful for the awesome, awesome clients I have. Each and every one of them has been such a joy to work with. I couldn’t ask for a better career… I’m doing what I love and it’s truly wonderful.

4. The safety and security of my little home and all the little things within it. This weekend I had some things taken from me.. and it’s made me look around and recount and be grateful for everything I *DO* have. I love my little home and every little sweet piece of my life that it contains. It’s my favorite place to be!

5. My family.. as much as family can be so taxing sometimes… and as much as I can (unfortunately) be so short tempered and frustrated (for not being able to help more in all that they’re going through)… my family is always there for me. When I visited with my Mom & sister over the holidays.. every day – a couple times a day – my sister would come up to me and hold my hand. And I LOVED that!!! She’s so full of love and she’s got such a big heart. She gets it from my Mom, too.. who amazes me with her amazing gift of patience, overflowing love and generosity.

It’s also meant the world to me to have my step-dad invite me back up to Steamboat, and have him be so loving and sincere about wanting us to stay connected.

My brother in Santa Cruz is awesome.. but right now I miss him like crazy and need to reconnect with him. But quite a timely post this is, because it’s his bday today (1/3)!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MAX! xoxo

Overall family is an amazing thing. It’s pretty heartwarming to know there’s this small network out there who will always love you no matter what.

Friends, health, work, home, and family. Here I may have lost a few things this weekend that will cost me a couple hundred dollars to restore.. but to put it all in perspective, I send my love to all those out there who were robbed of more than 1 of these things when the Tsunami hit. My heart and thoughts are with you all every day.

2005 has already started off with a bang. One that put me in bed for most of the weekend and left me seriously needing a hug. Life sure knows how to throw some punches.

Last New Years Eve was great.. and the days that followed it were some of the first days I felt myself falling in love with Rick. Such a magical time… where time just falls away, ya know?

In general I’m not one to get all excited for these national/global type holidays (july 4, halloween, etc) but, here it is the last day of the *best* year I’ve *ever* had, and I’m a little sad.

So I suppose it’s a better time than any to get this out (now that it’s been about a month…) I’ve been a bit of a chicken spilling it, but quite a few of you are putting the clues together on your own. So here it goes:

Rick and I have split up.

dundudundun! There I spilled it! Now, for the inevitable FAQ (answers to the most common responses):

“Awww, I’m sorry… Are you OK?”

Yes, I’m fine. Thank you. It is, of course, very sad… for both of us. We had an *incredible* year together… One that I will never forget! But, without going into many details, let’s just say there were a few things we knew all along that might be a problem for the two of us to be long term. Granted, the reality and magnitude of our relationship was quite a (delightful) surprise, so it really didn’t even come to the forefront until about 6 months ago when I realized I wanted to start asking those long term questions, but since then we(I) have been trying to see if it’s something we could work out, but in the end we just couldn’t.

It sucks… relationships ending always sucks. But I swear one of the hardest things for me is telling other people. If any of you have ever had a break up with someone you love, then you know what I’m talking about. Thing is, whenever telling someone the news, you often have to deal with the myriad of their emotional fears and concerns. And honestly, that get’s exhausting and frustrating. There’s no way I can sum up everything to have it make sense for each & every one of you… it just didn’t work out.

I think I’m extra sensitive to this because I am someone who will work on a relationship and make things work to a fault. I take it very seriously and I *want* a wonderful relationship in my life, so saying goodbye to something this incredible wasn’t something I took lightly. Believe you me, if I could have just blindly enjoyed more time with him without thinking about the future then I would! My heart just wouldn’t allow it. Darn heart! :p

The best response I’ve received so far was from my darling friend Karrie, who lives in NYC. She came right out & said,

“You know, this is going to sound harsh, but I’m not sorry to hear about your break up. I hate when people say they are sorry about a decision you made for yourself. You know what it best for you and I trust that this is not what was best for you right now. I think you’re terribly brave for listening to yourself and allowing yourself to grow. So, I say congratulations and I’m here if you need me!”

AWESOME!! I love you, Karrie!!

So, bottom line is of course I’m sad… but it is what it is. Both Rick & I are not destitute or anything – we both are fully aware that we’re in such kick ass parts of our lives, that the only way is up. We were really close for each other, and that’s a great sign! We’re still friends and you may even see us at shows together still… I can’t just give up my best friend cold turkey! :)

“Do you want to talk about it?”

No, I don’t want to talk about it. What do you think I’ve been doing for the last 6 months? I’ve thought, talked and cried enough thank you very much! :) Now I just want to hole up and not have to deal with people. Just for now. Don’t worry – I’m sure I’ll be back to myself and out on the town in no time.

So, tonite has a bit of mourning in it for me.. and that’s OK. There’s plenty of New Year’s Eve’s ahead – and no doubt many will be great.

::::

Here’s a big smile and a *cheers* to all of you! To a New Year FULL of pleasant surprises! Life sure knows how to dish em, and my arms are open wide! :)

Oh – p.s. The coolest thing is: It’s 2005!! (5 is my favorite number :p)

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYBODY!! xoxoxoxo

Wanna hear something funny? Lastnight my computer crashed… and after I restarted and opened up iTunes again it was doing this whole weird resorting thing. And so I was like “wha?” and impatient me cancelled whatever (at the time insignificant and unnecessary task that was prolonging me to getting to PLAYING some tunes) task iTunes was trying to perform. And wouldn’t ya know it after finally opening it back up again… ALL my playlists were GONE.

hahahhahahhahahhaaahahahahhaaaaaa!!!!

Alright, so no biggie. But actually something cool, is in the meantime, my friend Mike (designer and operator of SketchyPadSF) emailed me to give me some tips of his own. And it came just in time!

So, ladies & gentleman – here we have Round 2 of “If you’re music library is bigger than your iPod”!! (crowd goes wild)

Mike’s method, and I’m sure many others and now MINE for the time being – is to simply use the “only update checked songs” method. aaaahHA!

At first I didn’t see why this would be the way to go, but it is pretty cool to see what music is/isn’t on your playlist just by seeing the check next to it. However, I did decide to take it a step further and make some other playlists that utilize scanning for what’s checked & what’s not checked & the newest of each, etc. Cuz I like that!

So here you go… this time, the “tip/tutorial” is in one page of screenshots & notes. Check it out:

If your music library is bigger than your iPod – (Round 2)

Very cool way to do it, actually. I like this way better than how I was doing it the first time! woohoo!

So – deal is I have more music on my hard drive than can fit on my 40GB iPod. So, I had to figure out how to put just what I wanted on there. At first I thought it was simple and I could just take the artists I don’t want on there, out of the folder I have set up as my iTunes folder.. but it doesn’t work like that. So, after searching a bit and asking my friend Tack’s advice on help – he found this note about it on Apple’s site. But I couldn’t get it to bring up that message for me, it only kept telling me it would fit as much as possible on there as it could, but I wanted more control than that – so I created my own little system and that’s what I’ve posted here. The goal being to control what’s on my iPod & still see what’s *not* on there at all times, so maybe it’ll help some of you who are looking to do the same thing.
	(you may want to skip down & read #5 first – or just note that my iPod is named “iRock” and the playlist #5 denotes is where I’ve put all the music I want on my iPod)
	Newest Music I don’t know about you, but I have quite a bit of music on my hard drive. So sometimes when I buy a new CD off iTunes or rip a CD onto it, it can get lost amongst the many gigs. So this smart playlist is set to grab anything added after a certain date (that I change often). Usually it’s set to show the last couple weeks.
	Newest Music (on iRock) My iPod is the "iRock". So what this smart playlist does is it says: Look only in the playlist "*** My iRock***" and show me the music added after a certain date. view screenshot
	NOT on iRock This smart playlist shows me everything except for what’s on "*** My iRock***" view screenshot
	Unknown Artist Smart playlist set to show what tracks have the artist & album name blank. I don’t do near good enough job weeding out all the crap I have in my collection (aka tracks that don’t have the proper info entered in), as I have about 350 songs of this nature in there now. Probably from compilations and downloaded tracks over the years. There’s also a Doug’s Applescript for this somewhere.
	*** My iRock*** Create a Playlist for all the music you would like to have on your iPod. (FYI mine has the ***’s so that it stays at the very top) I found the best thing to do was to view your library & select several artists at a time, which puts all their songs in the bottom frame where you can then go down & hit Select All & drag them to your playlist. See this example for more detail of what I mean here.
The very last crucial step is to set your iPod update settings to update only the 2 playlists. Like this: view screenshot Hopefully this helps someone else out there… it works for me! :) Comments/Feedback welcome.

UPDATE: For those of you uber intrigued… you may want to read the next post (12/29/04) for a different way to do this. “Round 2” :p

I just uploaded a ton of photos from the last month of happenings:

• Lastnight’s outing to Lucky 13 (bar) for Ted’s birthday
• Christmas Bahamas Cruise and short stay in Florida
• Random Nov/Dec photos, including some of my humble home, kazoo kitty, and a few random party photos
• Lots of SHOWS! The Kills, Neko Case and The Arcade Fire

Now let’s see if I can get around to optimizing and posting some of these videos…

And so very happy to be! (and so is my kazoobie!! purrrr)

I officially dislike cruises and vow to never go on one again. I don’t recommend them, unless; 1. You have a crew of friends that you *know* you can have a great time with, no matter what 2. You don’t care that all there is to do is go see some 2nd rate entertainment, play (expensive) bingo, EAT, or compete for a plastic trophy for being the best at limbo out on the lido deck. and/or 3. You have lots of kids and you just don’t want to have to *think* and therefore you pile all of em on a boat and do the family thing for a couple days.

So besides the fact that I wasn’t with any party peeps, nor do I have kids… here’s a few other reasons cruises are not for me:

I’m from a kick ass city where there’s so many different INCREDIBLE restaurants, so for me, eating on one boat, in the same restaurants for a span of several days was a big huge SNORE. One of them was a nice sit down restaurant, with admittably amazing food for the most part, and the other an all you can eat buffet extravaganza. They were good and all, but really I’d much rather have a choice in a town to hop around different restaurants and get a feel for the culture of a city, ya know?

It’s like Vegas, but worse. As I mentioned, there’s the 2nd rate entertainment… but on top of that it’s like a pep rally where the cruise ship personnel are trying to get everyone all pumped up. They use the crowd to entertain the rest of the crowd, and it’s slightly retarded. The worst however is that they’re constantly trying to sell you something left & right. $20 for a bingo card because you (insert fake excitement here) just might win $500! or $7 for this, $10 for that…. but it’s ON SALE! oy.

I had the impression we’d kind of be in hotel rooms, but on a ship. Little did I know the cabins were so small! No biggie really, since they cleaned the room like a hotel, but I was amazed at how horribly un-functional the bathroom was in terms of giving you space to put your stuff. No shelves anywhere! They gave us pop and water (to buy) and new ice – but no cups! weird. And the small twin beds injured all 3 of us over the span of the 4 days, because any time we went to turn over in the middle of the night we’d smack an elbow or a knee on the wall. ouch! Overall it was very cramped quarters for 3 girls. However, I will say the best part of the room service was the towel animals they made and left on my bed when they came in at night to turn down the covers – and the tasty after dinner minty chocolates. :)

Final gripe: There was not one person on that ship that I wanted to meet. There were a lot of old people, fat people, families, and even a few prize winning mullets. The cutest boy I saw was a sophmore in college. Probably no more than 22. Oh the thoughts I was having… shame on me! hahaa Anyway, I met him in the hot tub and we talked for awhile. He’ll go far with those dreamy blue eyes. I got out after about 10 minutes before all the Miami Vice’s* I’d been drinking took influence on the situation. :p

*A Miami Vice is a Strawberry Daiquiri w/ Pina Colada. mmmmm! My sister got one first (no alcohol, obviously, because she’s only 13) and got me hooked.

Other (self-medicating) drinkies enjoyed on the ship were: my ol’ standby “Gin & Ginger”, and a yummy new blender drink discovery, that they called a “BBC”: Banana, Baileys (awww yaa!) and Colada. It was SUPER YUMM!!!!!

We did however meet the sweetest old couple… married for almost 50 years, I just fell in love with them! :)

So ya, cruises: not my thang. Plus, unfortunately the weather was pretty windy & cold for the first couple days, and then we finally got sun on the last day that made it nice to lay out on the deck (something I was hoping to do a lot more of!). I got a bit of sun, but you’d have to see my faint tan lines to notice. Except hilariously I got a bit of a burn on my chest, however it wasn’t even red! All the torture of a sunburn but you couldn’t even tell by looking at it. haha! I guess that’s a good thing, though.

The highlight of the trip was our visit to Atlantis, which is this huge beautiful expensive resort in Nassau, Bahamas. Under the resort it has the largest marine habitat in the world! (read more here). It was really incredible!!! I’ll upload photos & videos in the next couple of days.

So, after our 4 day excursion, we got back onto land on Thursday and headed to Orlando’s Millenia Mall for some last minute holiday shopping. My momma got me this AWESOME sweater pullover from Rampage (a store I fell in love with for the first time) and my little sister got me these super cute Lotta Jansdotter sticky notes & labels from Anthropologie (a store I’ve liked, but just rekindled and fell in love with EVEN MORE on this trip!)

Other wonderful gifts I was sooo fortunate to receive from my incredibly generous and loving Momma, were the Altec Lansing iPod Speakers that I’d been wanting! yay! And my new home phone, which ROCKS! I needed a new one for a long time, and did a TON of research before deciding on this one. I didn’t think she was going to get it for me so it was a great surprise!!! I love it!

I truly got everything I could have asked for, and more! My Mom is so giving, and incredibly loving and patient with my sister and I. They’re going through a whole new experience being out there in Jacksonville, and it hasn’t been easy. It was the first time in both Haley & I’s lives to not be in the wintery Steamboat we grew up in, and it was all too clear my Mom was a little shook up Christmas morning, too. :( xoxoxo As hard as some *very family moments* were, it was good for us to be together. I would have to say some of the funnest family time we spent was after we got back to their condo, we worked feverishly on this 1000 piece puzzle and got pretty far! I am going to have to buy myself a puzzle – they’re so fun!

Oh, I almost forgot, in my gripes about cruises… I never realized how weird it would be to get used to that queasy boat rocking. At first I was thinking it was me, but then realized it’s not the soy latte that’s making me lose balance (i.e. I’m not used to feeling tipsy at 9am!), but even WORSE is that they never tell you that after you get off the boat you still have that swaying queasy feeling for days afterwards!! uuugg!! I have it a little right now, even. But then again – with all this insane rain we’ve been getting here, it’s quite possible that my little house has uprooted and I’m floating down the street.

We hop off this boat tomorrow and it couldn’t come fast enough for me honestly.

I did however manage to lay out in the sun all day today, get a tan and finish reading my book, “The Devil Wears Prada”. It was very entertaining and a fun quick vk read.

OK – just here at the internet cafe finishing up my minutes. (60 minutes for $24 – ug) but miraculously I haven’t turned on my laptop once. They do have wireless on the boat, but it’s about 2x as much.

I’ll post all about Atlantis in Nassau yesterday (so cool!) and more about how horrible the shows on the ship have been. YMCA anyone? Worse: Macarena. Who the hell invented that dance and why can these people not let us FORGET IT! :p

OK – so tomorrow: Shopping in Orlando – then it’s back to Jacksonville for Christmas… and then I get to go home! (San Francisco is the. best. city. on. earth! I miss home!!)

Hope you all are having a good week. I better get back to BINGO in the Universal Lounge now. oh boy!