My humble (snerk) little blog was nominated in the Best Personal Site or Blog category for the Best of 604 awards. If you truly think I belong there, please consider voting for me!

Some facts about Delicious Juice Dot Com:

• I’ve been posting non-stop since March of 2001
• When I say “non-stop”, I truly mean it – there are blogs that have been around longer, but I have a great deal more content. My longest period without posting to date was the week I took off for our wedding in 2002; I’ve posted a minimum of 6 times a week since Day One (and often more)
• I’m completely sponsor-free – I do not make a penny off this website
• I never ask people for anything (except for the occasional vote, like right now)
• Delicious Juice Dot Com is indeed a personal blog – there’s no corporate bullshit, I don’t sell ad space or review products in exchange for freebies (except that one time I got a Zune) and I’ve written some deeply personal things on here
• I rarely tell you what I had for lunch
• Sometimes I post pictures of my cleavage (although not intentionally; they just get in the way)
• I am nice to strangers

I’m starting to get silly, so I’ll leave it at that. Like I said, if you truly think I belong on that list, please think about tossing me a vote. Voting is open until December 10th at midnight, so have at it. There are a bunch of other categories with some truly excellent sites; check them out when you’re done voting for me (see what I did there).

I foolishly started the formatting process at 8pm. It .. hasn’t gone well, I’m afraid. I’m so very tired, but I can’t sleep – something I did caused a BSOD, then .. nothingness. My machine wouldn’t boot at all. I’d get the HP welcome screen, then an inky blackness that seemed to pierce my very soul and mock me from its depths. I’ve started again from scratch, and am watching the progress bar slowly crawl along as setup copies files. I’ve done this a thousand times before, but tonight it is ominous. I do not know how much longer I can hold out, but I must go on. Dear Elsie, please think of me fondly and do not fret. I will return to you either in body or spirit – I am in god’s hands now, and only he holds the final chapter of my life. Does it end here on these endless sands? Will I be saved and return to you, my body and mind intact? I long to see you but once more to say so many words, but it will have to suffice that I close my eyes and dream of your sweet smile. Your voice echoes in my ears, and though I am tormented by these devil reboots I am comforted.

Yours truly,

Hans

PS: please send me LAN and sound drivers for an HP dv9824ca

I am getting pretty desperate to find drivers for Banjo, my home laptop. He came pre-loaded with Vista Home, which is just fucking awful. I want to format him seven ways to Sunday, then install XP. Is that so much to ask?

Apparently, it is. There are no drivers for anything in my machine for XP, meaning I have to go Vista or go repeatedly hit my head against the wall until the OS isn’t so terrible. These are not good options. Damn you, Vista. I hate you SO HARD.

I think I’m going to live life on the edge and install XP anyway. I have other machines that I can use to look up compatible drivers online and try to get it working. If it’s an epic fail, I can at least install Vista Pro and all the HP bloatware will still be gone. It’s all just a huge pain in the ass, but I do so love the crispness of a wiped machine. It’ll be awesome. I hope.

It looks like the gang is going snowboarding this weekend, so I’ll be on my own. What better time than to do some pre-holiday cleaning and hard drive formatting? We’re putting the tree up at some point this weekend, which will be an adventure because of Lemon. He’s adorable, but he’s a right bastard. I think we’re going to decorate the top half of the tree only, in an attempt to keep him from destroying all the ornaments. Should be incredibly frustrating. I can’t wait.

I’m starting to get a little excited about the holiday season, even if the various Grinches in my life are making the usual noises. It’s hard to be cheerful about things sometimes when all you hear is moaning and groaning (the bad kind, not the good kind) – I guess I just don’t understand the thrill of pissing on someone’s cornflake parade. Regardless, I am getting right jolly about things. I’m about halfway through my holiday shopping already, and super excited about giving presents to my peoples. Yay for giving!

Also, yay for 100% acrylic! I found a fantastic sweater over the weekend that has NO WOOL in it, so I am wearing it and looking sassy and am just generally full of glee and Diet Coke. I’m either high, or really excited about my robot butler.

I totally have herpes:

I got herpes from the mailman

Here I am, covered in herpes:

my herpes are huge

I also have syphilis, but I left it at home.

I will understand if you choose not to make out with me.

The open book that is my life still holds a few secrets I’ve kept throughout the years. Some are just not that interesting, some are not wholly my secrets to share, and others I just haven’t been ready to share yet – like this one.

Yesterday’s post was truly about my feeling weird at having to defriend someone on Facebook for my own sanity, but I barely scratched the surface on WHY – so let’s start scratching!

Planned Parenthood is making gift certificates available for purchase. A great deal of women in the US go without regular checkups because of the sheer cost involved – an annual exam alone costs $58. The gift certificates, available in increments of $25, can be used for checkups, insurance co-pays, and medication such as birth control.

And yes, they can also be used towards an abortion.

The pro-life community is in an uproar over this, claiming that PP is making a “mockery” of the Christmas season. Headlines such as “Kill a Child for Christmas” and “The Perfect Gift for the Baby Killer on a Budget” are popping up, as well as charming quotes in the media from anti-abortion activists:

“The tragedy is that almost 6,000 fewer children will be celebrating a first Christmas this year because they were aborted in Planned Parenthood’s Indiana clinics,” said Mike Fichter, president and CEO of Indiana Right to Life. Planned Parenthood of Indiana operates abortion clinics in Indianapolis, Merrillville and Bloomington.

“They deserve coal in their stocking, not money for lethal gift certificates,” said Sister Diane Carollo, director of the Office for Pro-Life Ministry for the Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis.

Awesome. Just awesome.

It will come as a surprise to absolutely no one that I am fiercely pro-choice – I believe women should have the unquestioned right to choose if and when they wish to have children. I am thankful everyday that I live in a country that DOES give me that right, and it physically hurts my insides to know that this (and gay marriage) is so hotly contested by so many people. I just don’t understand how someone can claim they know what is better for me than I do – how? How can you know my situation, my life, my circumstances? Do you have so much hate in your lives that you actually see forcing women to carry unwanted children to term is a viable option and just punishment for sex, regardless of how it came to pass? I don’t understand.

I can talk pretty about choice all I want, but it’s more than just talk: when I was 18, I had an abortion.

It’s a fairly typical story: I hadn’t received enough education about birth control (I had no idea how to go about getting on the pill), and while we were strict with our condom use, there were incidents. I was 18, living with my boyfriend of less than a year in the basement of his parent’s townhouse, and in absolutely no way physically, emotionally or financially capable of having a child. We made the decision to terminate the pregnancy, and I have never regretted it.

Funny story, I found out I was pregnant by going to the ER for what turned out to be my very first bladder infection. To this day, I am abnormally paranoid of UTIs which also feeds my fear of alcohol – one of the side effects of alcohol in my system mimics the feeling of a UTI. Hilarious!

The act of terminating the pregnancy was not difficult, but dealing with other people was. I didn’t handle the news well, to say the least – even then I knew I was not destined to have children. As well, my doctor had been my doctor since I was 4 years old and being an old, old man from a completely different era, held the “very disappointed” card over my head and insisted on telling my mother. My shrieks of terror managed to dodge that spectacularly hot mess, but he was not happy about having to schedule me for the procedure. Nothing like disapproving old man guilt to make an already frightened kid almost delirious with terror – I am barely exaggerating when I say my mother would have killed me if she knew I was pregnant. Renee can vouch for me; she knows how it would have gone down.

Having an abortion at 18 was the best possible thing I could have done, given the circumstances. I had no job, no education, no real home, and no idea what I was going to do if I was forced to have that baby. While I was in a loving relationship, love alone is not enough to raise a child. I didn’t get pregnant because I slept around, or was promiscuous, or made stupid decisions. We used birth control, and it failed. We did the responsible thing for ourselves, not for the cluster of cells forming in my womb.

I’ve never mentioned the abortion on my site before, mostly because I didn’t want to deal with the backlash (real or imagined). A tiny part of me has been ashamed about it for years, but when reading the horrible things that were being posted by pro-life lunatics, I realized something important: the tiny piece of shame I once held is no longer there, and this is such a big issue that I feel so strongly about that I want my voice to be heard. Having an abortion does NOT make you a bad person, and I want every woman to have a choice beyond “choosing to not open your legs” or “choosing to wait until marriage”. Abortion is not “being lazy and using murder as the easy way out”. What kind of universe do we live in, where being forced to bring an unwanted life into this world is seen as a justified punishment for having sex? If children are as important as the pro-lifers think, wouldn’t they rather see those children cared for properly by people who love and want them instead of being stuck with it for life because of a mistake or a tragedy?

My name is Kimli, and I’ve had an abortion.

Thanks for reading.

abortions for some; miniature American flags for others