- Weekend plans: Carpooling up to housewarming in NewYorkNewYork by way of Swarthmore. Friday I have a doctor's appointment and then alexpshenichkin, arctangent and I drive to Philly. There I'm assuming hanging out will happen (at least of a Jamisonian persuasion) and crash space will be found. Saturday we ditch Alex's car in Swat for 24 hours and zip up to NYC with Jamison for house(mumbly_joe)warming, and crashing happens once again. Sunday we Megabus back to Philly, find the car and drive home.

- arctangent is even now on his long and perilous way to the East Coast, yay! Example of peril: mechanical trouble*, meaning a switched flight, meaning now he's coming into the airport that's 40 minutes away by car, at night, instead of the one that's 15 minutes away by train, in the evening. Am being bad and skipping karate again tonight, since I won't have the energy for both an hour of strenuous exercise AND an airport run. Though I was already considering it because I am freaking exhausted. Also almost my entire morning tomorrow is booked solid with meetings and such so I have to get to bed as early as possible. Bleh.

- Need another worksnack because I am ridiculously sick of cereal bars. They're either solid granola (a texture I dislike) or so cloyingly sweet I almost gag when I eat them now. I'm thinking almonds.

- Thinking about registering [my name].net (.com has been camped since 2000 and damn if I'm going to give some camptard money) and making, like, a real website, even a bare-bones one. It doesn't cost that much and I've been itching to get back into web-design dabblery.

- Have started carrying a notebook again thanks to, of all people, David Sedaris. It's mostly shopping lists ("ibuprofen, flashlight batteries") and crazy ideas ("INVEST IN ZEPPELINS") but I find I actually enjoy having it around now that I don't feel like I have to keep a journal in it all the time. Bonus!Creative!Ideas need lots of cruft in which to nest.

*EDIT: There was no mechanical trouble, he was just faking me out so he could surprise me. Jerk. :P At least I didn't have to drive to Dulles.

Okay, so when I joined a local CSA a couple weeks ago I was envisioning a big cardboard box of veggies to take home every week, something actually worth the $23.30/wk I was shelling out for the experience. Instead the first "box" I got was a small Rubbermaid tub with about $8 worth of produce. Delicious produce, sure, but all the "supporting local agriculture" and "99% organic" in the world can't change the realities of a skimpy grocery budget, so last week I called the farm, canceled my membership, and got a refund (less the first delivery). I know production picks up later in the summer, but all I was ever going to get was stuff that fit into that little container, so I decided to get my produce from the grocery store like everyone else.

That said, I got home from Alumni Weekend yesterday, crashed for two hours, and then made roasted kale with my farm-fresh 99%-organic kale and cheapo olive oil, and it is CRACK, I tell you, CRACK. I only used about half the kale, so I might make it again tonight. The rest of dinner was mostly chili-from-a-can (NEEED grocery shopping), but you can't say I didn't try to be healthy. Then there was more crashing and I was half an hour late to work today.

Sleep deficit is still painfully apparent, but I foresee no more crazy weekends for a long while, so maybe I'll finally have some time to recover. It was great to see people and hang out, even if I did have to be bitchy and drag arctangent and appending_doom back to DC before hanging out was complete. I feel like I cut it too close anyway, but those beds were so awful, I couldn't have gotten up any earlier...Blergh. Anyway, I survived and probably won't die of exhaustion before Friday, which is the important bit.

In not entirely surprising news, McCain = kind of a toolbox. He would have earned an awful lot of Eliza Respect Points had he stuck with her, and I'm not just speaking as a woman suddenly disabled in the flower of her youth. The real question is, why the hell did I learn this from a British news outlet instead of our own supposedly "liberal" media? *grumble*

( Edit with more bloviating )

( Food inventory )

Wow. There's a "leftovers" potluck in the dorm tonight, and I just realized that I actually have nothing to bring, except maybe the salad dressing. There's no point in taking two hours to go buy more food when I'm leaving so soon, so...*shrug* guess I'll do that "writing-is-like-eating" thing some more. :P Laziness beats gluttony every time! The food situation isn't as desperate as it looks - I don't eat breakfast, and we're going out to lunch tomorrow to celebrate a summer well (mis)spent. It's going to be cereal and orange juice for dinner for a bit, that's all...

Theremin's almost done. Jim has been a huge help - he even built and painted a little box for all the circuitry to go in. Now it looks less like a home electronics project and more like an actual instrument. I'm hoping to finish the wiring today so that we can test it - if it doesn't work right off the bat, I know Jim will move heaven and earth to find the flaw and fix it in time for me to take the whole thing home and practice before school starts. Awww. It's nice to have friends.

I'm playing around with an extremely bare-bones animation program called Easytoon. It took me forever to figure out the controls, as I did not have access to an English help file, but now that I've messed around with it for a few hours and made a couple of test animations, I think I'm ready to tackle a larger project. I'll post my favorite test animation once I work out all the bugs.

I don't know what the hell it is with me and Nightwish. Listening to their music makes me euphoric for no clear reason - they're all like, "Death! Destruction! Hope is lost! Everyone is sad and filed with angst!" and I'm like, "Wooohoooo!"

I think the occasionally-nonsensical lyrics have a lot to do with it. Take someone who thinks they know English a lot better than they do and have them write dozens of goth-tastic songs; hilarity shall invariably ensue.

[[4/17/09 - I eat a lot better these days now that I have a real paycheck. I did lose some weight that summer and a lot more the next due to crushing depression and impending nervous breakdown, but I'd never want to go through that again.]]

nautiluspq just played some interesting/horrifying sound clips. One was Shatner doing Hamlet. Blech. The other was Shatner talking about his Montreal heritage and trash-talking Star Trek.

"The Tribbles were just puppets!" -- Damn, another of my childhood dreams shattered.

"I have never had green alien sex!" -- Damn, another - wait, I already said that.

Felt sorta lightheaded in karate, but I'm fine now. This lab report is like pulling teeth, except less physical pain and more mental anguish.

I wasn't very hungry for dinner, so I used my meal credit to get two 2-liters of root beer and had some apricots and oatmeal back at the room. I've decided that I must be battling a Potassium and/or Vitamin A deficiency that makes me crave apricots like nobody's business. I went through that whole bag in two sittings, and I was sad to run out. I'll have to get some more at the co-op or somewhere.

Well, *sigh* work, then.

bright eyes, blinded for fear of light

So I had a rather crazy day, filled with random associations and muddled memories, everything touched with that ever-so-slightly surreal tinge of severe sleep deprivation.

( Click on this. It's really long. Hooray, I can use cuts now! )

I never put you down

QotD: "In case you didn't notice, we're chained together." --Apocalypse, who seemed quite anxious that we note this fact, as she mentioned it several times per minute.

[[10/30/07 - This story still cracks me up.]]

So we had our Physics Student Potluck today. I brought fruit salad instead of sushi because my mom had all this fruit lying around and it was easier to chop everything up and mix it in a bowl than to drive to Heinen's and try to find anything in that giant store.

So we had fruit salad, curry, cucumber salad, jambalaya, burritos, black rice, doughnuts, white rice, cake, rice and cheese...You will notice the incredible amount of delicious rice in my meal. So many different flavors and spices and things mixed in...sausage and poppyseed and butter and pepper, the list could go on for days...sheer joy.

I think this is what Heaven tastes like. You know, if heaven had a taste...and I wasn't an atheist.

Sooo good. It's also my coworker Steve's last day. He graduated from Case in the spring and has stuck around to do extra work on his senior project, but this weekend he's packing up and moving with his fiance to Hawaii for grad school. I would be sad that he's leaving (he's really cute and nice) except that any lachrymose tendencies that begin to manifest are instantly incinerated in the furious raging inferno that is my jealousy at his intended destination. |^_^| I wanna live in Hawaii!

This evening is my boss/professor's backyard cookout. I have not come unprepared - even now two liters of dark syrupy cola goodness lie slumbering in the minivan. He has promised us turkey-burgers, and turkey-burgers we shall have...if I can find his house. We shall have to see. I spent many a day last year navigating the twisting and poorly-marked labyrinth that is Cleveland's residential network.

just an old-fashioned love song

[[10/29/07 - Fixed a typo. Whoo, Xelloss smiley and l33t in the same post. I'm sure it gets worse.]]