I fell out of the habit of posting for a while because I've been both very tired and very busy with nothing much of interest. I post incredibly minor stuff on Twitter all the time, but it's not very interesting, and obsessive chronicling of my daily activities is one of the first things to go out the window when I'm trying to work, exercise, and feed myself and the obligatory cat on a tiny reservoir of energy.

Charlotte got adopted (!!!) and went to a great new home on Thursday, and I got my new foster, a flighty little girl named Luna. Luna is a stunningly gorgeous brown tabby with white markings; I will prove it just as soon as I get the old-new camera working and give Flickr more money to let me post pics again.

I made a huge pot of chicken soup over the weekend and froze most of it for future consumption. In lieu of purchased gifts for most of the family I am making homemade consumables to bring to Florida. I haven't decided which recipes to use, yet, so it'll be a surprise.

Last night it was absolutely freezing out and I really didn't want to go to karate, but as is usually the case when I really don't want to go, I'm glad I did. We practiced sparring some more, and somehow my legs warmed up much faster than usual - I got off several beautiful side kicks, so perfect in form and power that the substitute sensei stopped me and asked me to do that again. For a little while it was like being seventeen again. (Then the sparring bruises triggered a small storm of fibromyalgia pain, but whattayagonnado.)

I'm flying to Florida on Christmas to spend a few days with the grandparents, then flying home to work a couple more days next week (need to conserve vacation hours whenever possible), then flying to Cleveland for a traditional New Year's Eve celebration with the Goddard family. In Florida I will probably have little to no internet, so Christmas blogging will be nil. I do, however, have some creative ideas coming up that I hope I'll be able to work on over my two mini-vacations, so stay tuned.

Charlotte (AKA Princess Grumblypants) is getting adopted tonight. She's going to live with a nice techie in Fairfax. For all I've grumped about her being a little princess with an enormous sense of entitlement, I'm going to miss her a lot. She's gotten very cuddly as the weather's turned cold.

I'm picking up my next foster in the same trip - Luna, a shy adolescent who is not doing well surrounded by six other cats in her current foster home. I've resigned myself to the fact that while I have a quiet studio I'm going to get the more difficult cases. I've heard that this one doesn't turn into a snarling monster at adoption fairs, though, and she's little and adorable and good with dogs, so maybe she'll go quickly given some time to herself and plenty of TLC.

Now, I have a final work document to upload and a holiday party to help set up for.

"Terrifying things, steel things, metal things, things with cylindrical bodies and multitudinous jointed limbs. Things without flesh and blood. Things that were made of metal and plastic and transistors and relays, and wires. Metal things. Metal things that could think. Thinking metal things. Terrifying in their strangeness, in their peculiar metal efficiency. Things the like of which had never been seen on the earth before. Things that were sliding back panels...Robots! Robots were marching..."
("Curiosities", F&SF, Oct/Nov 2004)

I'm still intermittently going over and annotating old LJ entries. It started as a quick skim-through to make sure I wasn't saying anything offensive to prospective employers, but I think I've only had to edit one or two entries for content, and iirc those were to remove mean comments about specific professors. All I'm really finding is a late high school/college student baring 90% of her real life to the world, ups and downs and cussing and rants and all, which is pretty much what I was going for.

( Life update of banality )

Saturday was a very, very slow adoption fair. Almost no apps on anyone, though Zippy got some interest for being a freakin' beautiful cat. Still need to pimp him at work. Lack of working printer complicates this only slightly.

Sunday I slept until almost noon but woke somewhat revitalized. The first thing I discovered while watering my plants was ( OMGWTF HUNDREDS OF BABY SPIDERS AAAAGH )

Cue massive apartment-cleaning! I moved some furniture around, took 99% of everything out of boxes and put it away, and carried my month-old stack of newspapers down to recycling. Where I found a beautiful ginormous dresser with a big "FREE" sign taped to it.

I probably looked like one of those cartoon characters trying to move something obviously too heavy for her, but eventually I inched it into the freight elevator, then inched it into my apartment, then inched it into the spot where the old beat-up dresser lived until now. I'll hang onto the old one until Saturday so it has all weekend to be snatched up.

Then, though my feet were pow'rful sore, Alex came and picked me up so we could go sneak Chipotle-to-go into Kung Fu Panda and make room for imminent George by moving some of my leftover crap out of the spare room. George gets a free Uncomfortable!Futon (TM) and Spinny!Chair (TM) because, well, because nobody wants to move them. Watched some Season3 Venture Brothers (the deconstruction, it will brainfuck you) and then schlepped some bookstacks and a pickanick basket (Hey, Booboo!) back to my place. Place is mildly cluttered until books go on shelf and old!dresser goes away.

Kung Fu Panda was awesome, by the way. Jack Black is still one of my many heroes. It made me miss martial arts so strongly that I looked up Kenpo dojos in my area. If I spell it "Kempo" instead (transliteration from the Japanese can sometimes be an inexact process) I get a hit right in Alexandria, which would be fantastic...I have to get back in some semblance of shape before I try anything, though, and I'm not looking forward to fighting my pain response every step of the way.

It happened very quickly, in the first hour I was there. A woman about my age and her boyfriend came right up and said she'd seen the guys on the website. She'd faxed her application in yesterday. She petted them for a while, and I told her about them, and she said she wanted two cats so they could keep each other company while she was at work. She didn't waste much time deciding - she said she'd sort of fallen in love with them just from the picture and the description online.

She talked to B (the head of the organization) for a while, and then she and her boyfriend went around buying the various supplies she would need. I called Alex, who was at the grocery store, and told him to come right back to say goodbye. He made it, barely, and then we put them in their new carrier and waved goodbye.

Oh, my boys. I'll miss you.

I came home with Alex and the groceries so I could clean the litterboxes and such in preparation for our new foster, whom we're getting either tonight or tomorrow. I'll call B in less than an hour and find out how the rest of the adoption fair went, and whether my new foster will come from there or one of the several cats being boarded right now.

I wrote an LJ post at home and forgot to post it, so for now you're going to have to be satisfied with the 40 kajillion pictures I took at the event.

Teaser:


I actually took 130 kajillion pictures, but a lot of them were blurry and crap, so these are the best, cleaned up and resized for your web-viewing convenience.

[[4/17/09 - I changed the link to go to the appropriate album in my flickr account instead of the sccs one, since that's what flickr's for.]]

I know I've said mildly disparaging things about the general organization and naive outlook of my local foster group, but I'll say this in their favor: they are fast. I sent an email saying that I could help out with this weekend's "Kitty Extravaganza", but that I would need a ride, around 10:15 this morning. I got a confirming response from one of the organizers about seven minutes later, and twenty minutes after that my inbox received a notice from a fellow volunteer that she would be driving through my area and could pick me up on Sunday.

Jesus. I didn't think any group founded in the heat of the moment through anger at a local shithole/shelter, run part-time by a core group of already-busy people, and funded entirely with rainbows and good intentions could ever last more than a month - and yet these folks have been operating for just over a year now, with no signs of slowing down. Just goes to show, I guess, that with enough boredom, righteous indignation, and sheer bullheadedness, one can accomplish anything.[*]

---------------
It's linktastic!
This is a really weird-but-awesome picture gallery of the artist defying gravity. Mild nudity.
This is a cool article about musical hallucinations.

This is the main page for the Deep Impact comet-sploding mission. Check out the impactor and flyby movies linked underneath the main photo - they're amazing.

There's something about looking at the accomplishments of thousands of dedicated spaceflight professionals that fills me with good cheer for the rest of the day.

party party join us join us

[[4/17/09 - * I have seen a few shoestring activisty operations now, and their ground-up organization never fails to amaze. If only it didn't scale up through Communism and directly into Stupidland.]]

I finished reading the Sandman graphic novel series, by Gaiman et al, last night. There's a lot I could say - fantastic, brilliant, touching, amazing - but I'll simply note that I have never read a Gaiman work that didn't immediately inspire me to push my own creative boundaries. And the art, oh, the art...I want to be able to do that. I need to take an art class.

Not much to do in the lab. Everything goes slowly in an institution of any size, and there's a lot of dumbfuckery involved. Por ejemplo: We wanted to take spectra of three dye samples - Rhodium 101, Nile Blue, and Steryl 7 - a procedure which takes approximately ten minutes under normal conditions. All of the spectrometers are in the chemistry wing, including the one which technically belongs to the physics department. We tried to do this yesterday, but a chemist was running some experiment that monopolized all the spectrometers in the building. We asked when we could come back, and were told that tomorrow (today) Prof. Pasternack would be using all of them. Pasternack told us we had to sign up for the privilege of using any of the spectrometers. We gave up and went home early.

Today Carl (t3h b0ss) talked to a guy whose spectrometer was simply sitting in his lab, not being used. We went over and tried to use it, but apparently it was the only model ever made that forces you to turn on the machine's lights manually, and neither Carl nor Richard nor I knew this, so we screwed around for a while getting nothing but noise. Then we gave up and went back upstairs to sign up for a time to use a regular spectrometer. At this point Prof. Pasternack says, "Oh, well, I'm not using any of the spectrometers in THIS room, why don't you use one of them?" WTF?!? How many of these things does the college own? More importantly, how come there's a whole room of them and nobody suggested that we use one until we'd been running all over the science building for a day and a half? This brings to mind the stories of public schools where all of the necessary materials and books are purchased, but the students never see them for what appears to be no good reason. The shiny new computers are stacked in a closet. The textbooks remain on some office bookshelf and are never issued. There is a fundamental disconnect between materials and science, one which I don't understand at all. Perhaps it will take years in the working world to really understand. My current hypothesis, and I've been wrong before, but probably not this time, is that it has something to do with the very real and compelling tendency of all humans toward being a dumbfuck.

I'm not really complaining. Work is quiet, mostly a lot of sitting around and waiting for samples to dry, or waiting for data sets to finish scanning, or waiting for dyes to finish mixing, punctuated by brief bursts of really cool science. I could wish for a workplace with windows, or one that let me go outside more than once or twice a day, but eh. Air conditioning is nice, and it's nicest in the basement. :)

I'm done being bitter about the whole cat business. I was rereading yesterday's rant and actually winced when I got to the part about "modern society". I generally have to resist the urge to throttle people who whine on and on about "modern society", "Western mores", etc, but every once in a while I just get so fed up with all the unnecessary crap and angst that goes into a decision as small as whether two caring and dedicated twentysomethings should be allowed to take care of one anonymous cat for eight weeks or less, if the cat is going to be euthanized in its current situation. So, mental *slaps self* for yesterday. The story, by the way, is absolutely true.

I will try to be more active in the foster group, and perhaps someday we will come to an understanding.

Doesn't look like much else is going to happen today. Guess I'll go home in a few minutes.

[[4/5/09 - Having now spent a solid year in the government, I think my dumbfuck theory is still the most likely to be correct.]]

( Fast and incoherent, but it's been building for eighteen years. )

[[4/5/09 - Yeah, so I ended up taking matters into my own hands the next summer, which worked out all right, but man, did this piss me off.]]

1) My pocketwatch died. :( I think it's just the battery, though I have dropped it more times in the last year and a half than a cheapo watch should feasibly be able to handle. I'm debating whether to get the battery replaced, which will probably cost as much as the original device, or just get another one. One of these days I'm going to get a really nice pocketwatch that lasts me more than fifteen months, and promptly lose it due to the Law of Your Most Treasured Possessions Vanish First.

2) Went to an official meeting for the Animal Coalition of Delaware County (ACDC) last night. As far as I can tell from listening to these people talk for an hour and eating their free pizza, it appears to be a case of gross incompetence battling slightly gross-er incompetence in the hope that the two will somehow cancel out and things will actually get done.

The sitch: the Delaware County SPCA Board of Directors is sitting on $8 million in endowment money while the actual animal shelter sinks further and further into the depths of hell. The building is falling down, the veterinary care is seldom and rarely qualified, the euthanasia rate is something like 80%, and critics agree that the place is one of the biggest shitholes in the country. The ACDC is a rescue group founded by former employees, volunteers and board members who apparently attempted to institute changes in shelter policy and were summarily fired (even the volunteers...didn't know that was possible...). The Board was characterized as a group of disconnected, apathetic worms who, fifteen years ago, may have been decent human beings, but have since ignored every aspect of the original charter and refused to leave at the end of their terms. According to our beloved spokeswoman, ACDC brought in an expert who recommended various changes and was roundly applauded, then ignored. ACDC is now in the process of getting the media interested. They hope that a combination of class-action lawsuits and public outcry will force the Board members to step down and cede control to a court-appointed group of people with a fucking clue of how to run a shelter.

The only problem I see is that they are absolutely the most disorganized, uncharismatic, whiny group of people I have ever met. The meeting would have taken fifteen minutes had they simply presented the facts instead of constantly repeating themselves, forgetting what they were going to say, forgetting where they put the sign-up sheets, and telling tear-jerker stories about Spirit, the collie mix who was narrowly rescued from euthanasia because the shelter wouldn't pay for a hundred-dollar operation. If it had lasted even ten more minutes, I would have stood up and walked out. They honestly want to help the animals, though, which is why this situation is so sad. I signed up to help out at public events, because honestly, these people need all the help they can get. I'm pretty sure I'm on the right side.

3) I have a lab report due in approximately 48 hours, and I'm fully planning to put off all my other homework until it's done, but I'm still fairly sure that I'm going to have to turn it in before I feel properly finished.

EDIT: 4) They Might Be Giants are awesome. I was just listening to a recording of their Philly concert from September...now I really, really, really, really, really want to make an anime music video to their live version of "Robot Parade", which had a bunch of random "technology" noises and serious ska on the voice synthesizer. I played it for deathbysnusnu, who did not agree with me that it is the best song evar. *pout* Though he did mention that repeated listenings to that song appeared to have made me "high on everything".

5) More later when I remember what the hell I was going to write here.

which describes how you're feeling all the time, all the time

So I've actually been home for almost seven full days. I feel sort of silly for not posting until now, but there was a lot to do, there's a lot still left to do, and there were extenuating circumstances. Long story short - I'm going to miss Vermont, but...it's great to be home.

Slacked off for a while, worked on my paper for the KNAC symposium for a while. It's almost finished. Going to spend about 24 hours starting tomorrow at a lake house belonging to a friend of sorcerygenius' family. thrillho47, ephoenix, and sakusha will of course be there, and sorcerygenius will put in an appearance after a short stint in Pittsburgh. Afterward, intensive paper-finishing and packing to follow. My little brother's birthday is on Monday, so I have to budget some time for that. Jeez, school hasn't even started yet and my life's already speeding up incredibly.

( Unidentified maladies suck. )This evening, dragging slowly up to bed after staring blankly at the Olympics for several hours, I remembered that I used to check email quite a lot, and it might be a good idea to do so once again. Running my eyes down the list of new messages, I found one from Myrt Westphal, the college housing coordinator.

We got the Barn Double.

The barn double is this ridiculously large room on the second floor. Through a bizarre set of circumstances involving some people spontaneously transferring to other schools, the two people with perhaps the WORST housing lottery numbers in our entire school have ended up with the BEST room in our FAVORITE dorm at the LAST minute. I mean, ONE WEEK before school starts. IS that not NIFTY? :) So now I'm on the same floor as deathbysnusnu and too many other LJ/SWILfolk to list. This was, needless to say, enough to spring me straight from depressive to manic. I've been organizing, packing, and taking an actual interest in the Olympics ever since.

Incidentally, Diana Munz, a girl from my hometown who goes to my family's church and trains at my high school's pool with my eighth grade swimming instructor, won a bronze in the Insanely Long Swimming Event in which the participants traverse the pool about 16 kajillion times. Yeah, try taking a basic swimming course with an Olympic-level trainer and you'll know the full exent of PhysEd hell. There's a reason why my high school swim team is the best in about fifteen states. Anyway, GO DIANA! Whoo!

My family's fostering a new batch of kittens with their mother, Mia, a beautiful and personable Maine Coon-type with whiskers the length of my hand. We named the kittens last night - Zeus, Phoebe, Apollo, and Hermes. Hermes is my favorite because he looks like some kind of weird throwback - the other three have wide, cute little kitten faces, but he has this tiny hatchet-face alternately reminiscent of a rat's head or a skull. He looks a bit like a pure-white Siamese. He has a very penetrating stare even at four weeks, loves people, and is very curious and interested in everything. I think the other three are going to be great cats, but I think he's going to be one of those cool, eccentric "characters" - the kind I want to adopt when I have a home of my own to populate with furry creatures. Pictures to follow.

It occurs to me that I'm supposed to be getting up in about five hours. Come on, stupid internal clock - I've hardly slept in days, shouldn't I be tired?

Random Funny Thing: This is hilarious.

[[3/25/08 - Oh, Hermes. I still miss him, years later. I hope he went to a wonderful family and is even now sleeping on someone's face.]]

Five indistinguishable but adorable kittens and their mom, being adorable and tearing up thrillho47's room.

I can show you the world

[[2/29/08 - It's a testament to my unwillingness to change anything about my online presence that this link still works. As does, I believe, just about every other image link on this LJ.]]

So the really boring school function was, in fact, really boring. I was exhausted and starving and zoned out for most of it, and I kept getting weird looks from people when I didn't join in the praying (it's a Catholic school, it's a Sunday, there was Mass). However, if you ever want to see three elderly nuns dancing to the roundly talentless shrieking of over a hundred children aged five to thirteen, I suggest that you build a time machine and relieve my boredom about, oh, five hours ago.

Now I'm finally home and out of those stupid high heels and falling asleep in my own amazingly comfortable bed. But! Before I do so, I must announce to the world that I FINALLY FIGURED OUT HOW THE HELL TO TYPE JAPANESE IN WINDOWS. Turns out all I needed was the Word install CD that came with the computer, which I with unbelievable foresight left at home and inaccessible for months.

Oh, and my house currently contains nine cats, six gerbils and one dog. If that's not a cause for celebration, I don't know what is. Now before anyone gets on my case about "collecting" animals, I will clarify that five of the felines are kittens; they and their mother are on loan from the local animal shelter until the kittens are old enough to adopt out to families of their own. It's a fairly heartwrenching business, fostering, but I wouldn't give it up for the world. Just watching those little hellraisers toddle around, urinate on the carpet, and bite each other savagely on the ass warms my heart in a way that the burning homes of my enemies never could.

I'll try to get the D&D summary up tonight. If it's not out by 1 AM, I probably fell asleep somewhere between "Death by Bear Sandwich" and "Hey, I'm getting a page..."

[[2/7/08 - Fostering is hard.]]

Along with about two million other girls between the ages of twelve and thirty.

He sang a special rendition of "The Remedy" for our local rock station when he was in Cleveland a couple weeks ago, and it was just so transcendently beautiful that I can't stop thinking about it. There's a version circulating on KaZaA that approximates it (the live acoustic one) but doesn't even come close in terms of absolute inspired beauty. So maybe I'm not as attracted to the man as I am to that goddamn song that keeps circulating through my head like a solo rendition in some heavenly choir, all the other voices stilled to awed silence as the notes roll like glittering, mellifluous jewels from a liquid golden tongue. It's stuck in my head and I know it's stuck and usually when something's trapped like that you do your best to get rid of it before you get tired, but who could ever get tired of such exuberance, such soaring heights of fancy? Yes, I'll admit it. I HAVE A CRUSH ON A POPULAR SINGER. Laugh all you want, but I haven't had a really good crush in several months and frankly I'm savoring the feeling.

Had my last volunteering session yesterday. Pumpkin's still living in the Director's office because she got sick. They had to give her fluids a few days ago, but now she's fine again. Everyone in the whole shelter just fawns over her. She's going to be the best cat ever and I wish with all my heart that we could have kept her. Unfortunately, my cats would literally eat her. They barely get along as it is, and with a new dog in the family...too stressful. I'll miss her, though. I stroked her and said goodbye and she just sat by the door as I walked away, head cocked to one side, happy but confused as to why her "mommy" was leaving again...My fellow volunteer, Marilyn, who is the nicest person in the entire world, gave me a book entitled, A Cat Named Darwin: How A Stray Cat Changed a Man Into a Human Being. She really liked it, so I started it...it's full of a lonely fortysomething scientist's ruminations on life, the universe and everything, and despite boring bits is heartwarming and cute. |^_^|

Yesterday's shopping trip was quite fruitful. I picked up a pile of books, some art supplies and toiletries, plus an armload of sleep shirts (random XXL thrift-store finds) with logos like X-Files, Coffee, Timberland, and Mr. Potato Head. I'm especially proud of my Potato Head shirt. Reminds me of Topato Potato, who as you may know is made entirely of POISON!!! |^_^|

I also bought Master of Orion III, which I'm very excited about but haven't actually installed yet. I'm trying to read a bunch of stuff before I leave so that I don't have to take it along...all those comics, plus the Darwin one, plus a YA series by Diane Duane - yes I know I'm supposed to be too old for the YA stuff, but it ties into some other books of hers that I read a year or so ago. She sets a lot of her stuff in the same universe, and I finally got curious enough that when I discovered that we had two-thirds of the series in storage (possible birthday gifts that never happened) I promptly stole them and sat down for some serious immersion. I like to think of them as cotton candy for the brain - light, fluffy, enjoyable, gone all too fast. |^_^|

Oh yeah, finally set up the printer that I bought with this kickass laptop...turns out that it's a combo - it scans, copies, faxes, what have you. It's also about twice as big as I imagined. This could be bad, considering the amount of space I'm going to have to work with, but on the bright side I have my own scanner, which I was not expecting. Silver lining, my friends, silver lining.

I'm finally getting some writing done, too - reworking whole chapters and finishing a new one. The manuscript's up to about 200 pages and there's plenty more where that came from...I'd better figure out what to cut eventually or this is going to be one LONG book. I'm also having originality paranoia...it seems to me that some of the issues confronted in my novel were pretty well hashed out in previous decades. I believe that my approach opens new doors, but I can't be positive without extensive research. Well, no matter what, this story must be told. I can't explain the obsessive need which drags me back to the keyboard and keeps me there for up to nine hours at a time - I can only approximate: salmon spawn, writers write. It's like my life would be for naught if I didn't make these characters known to the rest of the world. It's like...if I was unable to tell their story in some form, whether through writing or music or art or goddamn interpretive dance, I would just plain shrivel up and die.

And that, kids, is why writers write. Not because it's fun, because it often isn't. Because it's as important as air, or food. Because we would, quite literally, cease to exist in its absence.

you're falling back to me

Okies...lots has happened in recent days so I'll just sorta throw things out 'til I'm done.

We got a new foster kitten. She only lasted three days. I don't really want to talk about it.

I was at work when The Great Blackout started. I managed to get out of Cleveland before the major gridlocks. Our house was without power for twenty hours, but we saved all the ice cream and stuff thanks to a ton of ice and some coolers. Now they're saying that it was Cleveland's fault the whole thing occurred. First the Davis-Besse plant fiascos and now this...I swear, we are really the cesspool of American power generation.

And stuff...finished work. Made some money, got some more job experience. It was okay. Plus, I got to take one of the busted antennas home and take it apart. Heheheh...Proprietary technology my ass.

Last weekend my aunt gave me a stack of comic books. Apparently a former boyfriend was storing them in her basement and never came back for them. I have suddenly become a comic collector. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I now have Fallen Angels, Star Trek, Nightcrawler, etc. This is one enormous section of geekdom which I have never explored; the adventure promises to be an interesting one. Tally ho!

Went to Blossom again last night, listened to famous Russian composers through the ages. It was very, very wet. In spite of this, I had some fun. sorcerygenius slept over...unfortunately we were so tired when we got home that we just went straight to sleep without hanging out or, you know, talking or anything. |^_^|

Today we went to Cedar Point. You know the place. Best rollercoaster park in the world, as voted by supposed authorites on the subject. I'll admit that the coasters rock, but the four-hour wait for a ride that lasts all of twenty seconds is just too much. I've sort of lost my taste for amusement parks, due to overexposure I guess...once or twice a year still feels like too much of a good thing. Don't get me wrong, I love rollercoasters...but that's all I love. The dense, muggy park atmosphere, the huge sweaty guy who rode just before you, the anorexic fifty-year-old blowing smoke in your face for two hours in the hot sun, the disgusting, overpriced, low-quality, high-carcinogen food, the people walking around in g-strings and speedos, the noise..........bleh.

Tomorrow I'm going on a massive shopping spree before college. I'm hitting a thrift store, a used-book store, Babbage's, the CD & Game Exchange, and a comic store. Good times.

Mmmmm. Pretzels.

I am sooooo tired.

for always and forever

Nothing much to say today. This post will only be, oh, six or seven paragraphs long.

Made a new icon today. See him up there? Soooo cute! It's Ian's Conscience from Mac Hall. I want to make this plug very clear because otherwise I might be stealing from a webcomic artist whom I respect immensely and that would suck. Anyway, if you haven't been over there yet then shame on you. Cthulhu will have to come over and bite your kneecaps off.

I bought a book of crazy and outdated U.S. laws on my garage sale trip yesterday. Worth all ten cents. Listen to this: "In Cleveland, Ohio, it is illegal to get married in a bathing suit." Yep. Good to know. I'll have to keep that in mind at my hypothetical wedding, which by the way will NOT occur in Cleveland if at ALL possible according to the basic LAWS of PHYSICS in this particular UNIVERSE.

Man, you can just see the city loyalty oozing out my ears.

At least I don't live in Trenton, New Jersey, where it is illegal to throw spoiled pickles at people. I mean, you know that town - cop turns his back and the cucumbers just start flyin'. It must be a madhouse over there.

Saw Seabiscuit last night with my dad while my sister was at a manicure party (yuck!). No matter what ephoenix may say, I thought it was perfect, and the beginning was just the right length to set the story. I've always been mildly excited by horseracing, but this was INTENSE. I think I learned a chunk about racing, too, just by way of watching that movie. I wouldn't mind seeing it again in theaters before the DVD release.

Finally started a game of FF7 today...I've owned it for a while, but I didn't want to start it until I'd beaten FF8, which by the way was pretty cool for all that it was SO FREAKIN' LONG I PRACTICALLY DIED OF BOREDOM. So anyway, Cloud is a veritable pillar of angst but I can't decide whether I like him or not. Darn, I guess I'll have to play some more before I can make up my mind. |^_^|

Read a cool article about how the Temple of Apollo at Delphi (home to the famous Delphic Oracle) was actually located over a fault line that periodically released toxic gases, and that this was apparently what caused the Oracle's fits and trances. Poor gals were breathing pure ethylene. According to Plutarch, one of them actually died after a violent fit. It's cool that the old guy's accounts have actually been validated, but at the same time what the hell? I guess if you were a woman back then career choices were limited, and Delphic Oracle was about the best you could possibly get. They certainly had no lack of volunteers for all the training and fasting they had to go through.

Pumpkin is growing like mad and eating like a starving sailor, if said sailor could only have fluids and drank nothing but kitten formula. She's started chewing on the bottle, which is probably a sign that we should introduce her to solid foods. I'm thinking tomorrow after all the craziness of leaving work early for volunteering and then leaving volunteering early to drive my sister to voice lessons and then coming home and collapsing in a sobbing heap which feels that it will never ever sleep again.

Oh yeah, forgot. My mother and brother are in Virginia helping my grandmother go through all my grandfather's stuff. He died just this spring, a few weeks before I started this journal. He was a packrat to the point of obsession, saving ketchup packets from McDonald's in a special drawer, miscellaneous stuff in the attic, plus probably every letter he ever received from anywhere. It should make for interesting digging, and I would have liked to have gone along to share the memories had I not had this pesky job thing.

I'm starting to get seriously disillusioned with this job. I mean, it was okay last year when I wasn't getting paid - then I could do whatever I wanted. This year with the boss in Japan and all the noise in the new lab I'm having serious difficulty concentrating on anything. It's a matter of constant stress - I can't work like this, the talking and hammering and oven rattling and metal screaming are driving me nuts but I'm getting paid to sit here and stare at a computer screen and I'll feel guilty if I'm not working so I'd better get to what the hell is this C or C++ oh it's C but it's really goddamn complex what the hell do I know about pointers or classes how the freak am I supposed to hack this thing when it's written by a master who actually knew what he was doing but at least it's a job at least you're not flipping burgers RR gotta hang in there one more month then you're home free gotta keep trying to work or at least looking like you're working but if at all possible actually get the job done holy flying fuck I can't work like this... Et celery. I really need this money - this is, literally, RR's Food and Textbook Fund. I can't just walk away, I'd never find something else this late and I'm so lucky to have this job anyway. And so it goes. Who was it - Thoreau, perhaps - who said that most people live lives of quiet desperation? Well, that's me right now. If I wasn't going to college in a month I think I'd quit and move to Seattle.

Porquoi Seattle, you ask? Why, only because it's the coolest place in teh w0rld. As you walk down those potholed brick streets and draw a big lungful of sewagey Tacoma air, you can think to yourself, "I'm so glad my city has outlawed the carrying of concealed weapons over six feet in length."

Because you can never be too careful.

stood on the edge, tied to a noose

[[10/29/07 - All of these laws are true. Ian's conscience is likely the first LJ icon I ever made.]]

And what a crazy week it's been.

So the Case network was down for almost a full day and nobody could do any work. We watched some ripped episodes of Futurama, went on a food-shopping trip, and played cards while eating salt & vinegar potato chips. I didn't think I'd like them but they're surprisingly good once you get used to the almighty taste explosion every time one hits your tongue. I learned a new card game call Oh Hell. It's fun and quite addictive. Josh won, but of course he's been playing it for years. Yours Truly came in a close second. |^_^|

Pumpkin is growing quickly and is quite precocious. Or maybe Debbie, our previous foster kitten, was just slow. Anyway, Pumpkin is almost a week younger than Debbie was when we got her, but the new kitten is already doing things that it took Debbie a while to learn. Like jumping, for example. At this age, Debbie couldn't manage a four-inch drop without landing on her face. Pumpkin is flying with reckless abandon off of whatever she sees and always landing on her feet. As you may imagine, it's quite adorable.

Another thing - Pumpkin doesn't know how to nurse. I mean, can you imagine such a thing? She won't suck on the bottle when we feed her. She just licks the end and we have to sort of pour the stuff into her mouth while she sits there. Her personality is also quite different from Debbie's - she's more alert, more cunning. We think that being born in the wild makes you grow up very quickly.

Well, the network came back up eventually, but ever since then my work computer's been on the fritz. It freezes, won't go online, won't copy files from the network...so I haven't been able to update much.

This weekend I finally got some spare time and went sale-ing. No, I didn't misspell "sailing" - I'm not a boating fan and can hardly tell bow from stern. What I mean is that I visited a bunch of garage sales at once and shopped like mad. I spent two dollars on a pair of Old Navy pants, three books, a Pokemon card, a hot dog and two cups of lemonade. The card and one of the lemonades were pity purchases - I came upon a little boy running a garage sale all by himself. He was trying to sell all his childhood toys, Little Tykes stuff, that sort of thing. Little Tykes is actually pretty valuable and I think he would have made some great sales had anyone bothered to stop for him.

You see, his sign kept falling off the mailbox. So eventually he ended up parading up and down the yard with it in the hot sun. I bought an Evee card because it's my sister's favorite kind, and a cup of the kid's vile lemonade, while we chatted. He'd only had three visitors the whole day, and they hadn't bought much. It's so hard to be an entrepreneur at that age - I remember my frustration as, one after another, my childhood moneymaking schemes fell by the wayside.

I hung around and gave him tips until I caught his mom watching me through the window. Scary-looking lady. She made me nervous so I left. She probably thinks I'm a child molester or something for actually wanting to talk to her kid. Whatever happened to the good old days when you could walk up to a child and initiate a conversation without people throwing you weird looks? Sometimes I think that kids are the only strangers worth talking to.

We set up a tether for Oli so that he can hang around in the yard while we're at Cedar Point tomorrow. It'll make us all feel better if he's anchored to something. What's Cedar Point, you ask? Oh, you poor, uninitiated soul. It's one of the only perks of living in Northeast Ohio - a rollercoaster park so fantastic that connoisseurs of the field routinely label it the best in the world. I am not making this up. It's only an hour and a half away by car, so we're getting up early tomorrow to be there when it opens. I'm going to ride the Top Thrill Dragster - the fastest, tallest, coolest coaster on the planet which just opened this spring. Think 0-140 mph in 4 seconds. That's about the most gees you can get outside an Air Force centrifuge. *joy*

Finished A Canticle for Liebowitz a while ago. It was actually pretty cool, though I stick to my previous impressions (see earlier posts). I moved directly to Rising Stars of Manga Vol. 1, which r0xx0rs mah s0xx0rs. The winning entries were so cool...and one of my favorite webcomics, Van Von Hunter (I can make links now! Yippee!) won first place! Maybe I'll enter someday when my inking skills graduate beyond "ballpoint pen".

Then I read the 1993 collection of Writers of the Future winners. For some reason, those things always depress me. Maybe it's because nearly all of the authors have never made a sale before and most don't seem like they're really good enough to go mainstream. Maybe it's the fact that I submit at least one story every year and have never gotten above "Honorable Mention". I know it's a huge multinational contest, but somehow I keep hoping that all that prize money will come my way someday. Gourd knows I could use it.

A couple of them were actually very funny and imaginative, and I'll have to look up those authors to see what else they've done in the last ten years.

Now I'm reading the latest issue of Asimov's, which in my opinion is the best SF magazine out there. After that I'll start Day of the Triffids, another enduring SF classic that became a bestseller for entirely different reasons. (Think "Giant intelligent subconsciously-phallic tentacle plant-monsters take over world" and you'll basically get the whole plot. But I'm perfectly willing to give it a try.) |^_^|

there's always something there to remind me

[[10/29/07 - The Top Thrill Dragster is still awesome.]]