A couple of pencil starts to pictures.

My dental hygienist says I can be the first person to visit her cottage on the Rivera. Since I am paying for it and all.... Sigh.

I re-directed all my lists yesterday. There were some to-dos that weren't getting done, so obviously I needed to re-think. Good for me. Now, I'm back on track.

In what sounds like a really low-budget horror film, voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers.

The hairy, reddish-brown creatures are known as "crazy rasberry ants" — crazy, because they wander erratically instead of marching in regimented lines, and "rasberry" after Tom Rasberry, an exterminator who did battle against them early on.

Also? They eat fire ants.

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

Current Mood: dorky

When I was a teenager, I noticed a odd new trend with my friends. One by one they would vanish for a day or two and return with chipmunk cheeks. It seemed that we'd hit that magical time in puberty when wisdom teeth had to be removed. After the ninth or tenth friend, I'd learned more about impacted wisdom teeth than I cared to know. It seemed inevitable, however, that I would go through this process and decided to asked my mom if she could take me to the dentist to have my wisdom teeth checked.

While I didn't realize it at the time, it was my good fortune to ask at the dinner table.

( Read more... )

• 18:00 Yay dolores park and good weather and alcohol and friends and scantily clad girls! #

Oh minstrel, play this tune: "Our Friend has
come drunk, pure and faithful Life has come drunk!"
If, like sparks, He should put on the robe of
Severity, I will know Him, for He has come drunk to us in
that guise many times!
If, He should pour out my water and break my
jug -- say nothing, oh brother, for this Water-carrier has come
drunk!
I try to deceive my Drunkard, and He smiles:
"Look at this simple man, from whence has he come drunk?
Are you trying to deceive that Person the least
of whose words makes water and fire selfless, earth and air
drunk?"
I said to Him, "If I die and Thou comest to my
grave, I will jump up shouting, 'That sweet-faced Beloved has
come drunk!'"
He said, "How should the spirit of him who
receives this breath die? He who is drunk with God subsists
with Him forever."
Behold ineffable Love, filling the cuplike spirit!
Behold the Face of the Saki, who has come from the realm of
Subsistence, laughing and drunk.
Everyone in the world has chosen a friend, and
ours is Love -- from the time of Alast It has been drunk
without you and me.

-- Ghazal (Ode) 391
Translation by William C. Chittick

I went out for drinks after work this evening with three of the other women on my team.

Overall it was a good time. Except for the fact that all three of them have or had wedding anniversaries within a couple of weeks -- and, understandably, they were all enjoying talking about their plans.

And I could say nothing.

I sat there and listened and smiled and affirmed that it all sounded wonderful. And I tried not to let on that each new story felt like another wound in my heart. Each shared confidence reminded me of all I have lost, all that will never be.

On May 31st it will have been a year since Lohain's death.
That's the anniversary I'm preparing to observe.

The pain is less than it was, but it hasn't gone away.
The wound is not as raw, but there is still a hole in my life where he should be.

There's no need to rush things, he told me. We have plenty of time.


God, I want him back.

Chocolate and sarongs at World Market, $70

Dinner at Granite City, $80

Books at Barnes and Noble, $110

The look on my husband's face when I see him with stacks of bargain books about cats, PRICELESS

Current Mood: giddy

Poll #1188125 Is it a Boy or a Girl?
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Puer? Filia?

This is me making nice with Water.

I watched some really interesting shows on The History Channel today--about ancient Egyptian military technology and about Roman and Egyptian architecture throughout the ages.

Tomorrow is my nephew Cody's birthday. :) I'm looking forward to calling him, but I think he's still in school, so I won't be able to talk to him until the afternoon.

Tomorrow, Mark and I are going to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts to see their Pompeii exhibit and to meet our friends Steve and Karina there. Karina is our DM on Saturday nights. We might also see an exhibit of Korean art, so that should be different from anything I've ever seen before.

okay, computer savy people. I have a printer program to make PDFs - but it won't imbed fonts. I need fonts imbeded. I think last time I just used a free trail program.

where should I go? what should I do? How much will it cost?

tanks!

Swish and Flick's "Hogwarts House Party" is silly, and not great, but oddly fun. And downloadable.

It will be clearer if I get the second row posted tonight too :P

Update! I did post the second row. Wow, how about that.

( Read more... )

I have managed to catch my big toe in a fold of my pants and sprain it while coming off the bus. Considering the amount of walking I do at work, this is Not Good™.

Current Mood: annoyed

• 00:21 And now John has rezzed a large yellow submarine that he's wearing as a hat - while Paul has become a strange octopus ... #
• 08:05 For Amber rp players: The Shadows of Amber board has been recreated: tinyurl.com/64lebg #
• 18:08 @HarperBeresford - Happy Birthday! Hope you have a great day! #
• 18:11 @divaregina - Welcome home! #

Poor, rural, working-class white folks from Appalachia wanted to strike a blow for feminism. Well, way to go, West Virginia! You’ve certainly done that. And now, clearly, you’ve shown that you’re the most feminist state in all the union.

Things I've done today that have been stressful-

Calling Time Warner about my `net connection being out (thankfully it was storm-related and wasn't off long).

Calling Maintenace to put in a work order to fix my bathroom light

Having to fire my cleaning aide! At least that was over the phone too; I left a message on the program coordinator's voice mail. Still, eeek!

Current Mood: annoyed

'There is no such thing as writers' block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.' Terry Pratchett.

Trust Terry. Well, was anyone constipated today, or did we all go through the motions smoothly?

Sorry.

Sound off!

I went to karate class last night and got sooooo frustrated. It was just one of those nights when I felt so klutzy. Kept falling out of balance on the slow kicks, and then, just to complete my humiliation, sensei decided to work on spin kicks (tornado kicks, spin hook kicks). Spent some time stretching after class, brooding unhappily on my performance, near tears in frustration, actually, and finally I decided to talk to sensei. I felt a bit craven to beg for reassurance, but it was really bothering me. He assured me that I was absolutely on track of where I should be at this point in my study. I need to work on keeping my breathing regular--if I start holding my breath because I'm getting frustrated, I fall out of the kicks much more quickly. It helped to talk to him. A little.

Still.

One of the most useful lessons I've taken away from my sporadic study of yoga is the concept of understanding that some days your body simply does what you ask of it better than on other days. The trick is to accept what your body can do each day without beating yourself up about what you can't do. I remember what sensei told me a long time ago, that for most kids the challenge in karate is physical, but for most adults (and for Delia, as I've written before) it's primarily mental. Well, it's both for me, but what was really bothering me last night was mental. Or rather, my mental reaction to what I was doing physically.

Today I folded laundry and there were no unmatched socks! I do not think I can remember this ever happening to me before. I don't know what other people do, but I have a special bag that I keep, where I put unmatched socks, and then I hide it in my closet, because I don't want to have to look at so many unmatched socks. And because I don't want anyone to know how many there really are. It is a state secret.

Every once in a while, I go through the bag of unmatched socks and throw them away. This is painful. It is admitting the truth: that I will never find the mates to those socks. It is not their fault. It is mine. I did not look under the couch often enough, of search through the leaves in the backyard. I did not stand at the door when children came home, and checked their feet to see if they had both socks on them.

You would think that the best day ever is the day of unmatched socks, but it is not true. It is a better day when there is an unmatched sock on my bed, where I fold my clothes, and I pick it up to take it to the bag, then find the courage to look inside the bag--and find the mate to the unmatched sock. This happens very rarely. More often, what I realize when I stare at the unmatched sock in the bag, is that this is the mate to a sock that I threw away some months ago, given up on too soon.

But still, it stays in the bag. Maybe someday the other sock will come back to me. I have to give it a chance.

1525 words on Seven for a Secret today, which gets me just over 10K Word count, or 11750 SMF. Pretty good for a day when I woke up with no idea what the next scene would be. I was going to stop after 1300, but realized that I could break 10K with just a little more work, so I pushed on into the next scene and wound up finishing it. (Short scene, yes.)

Same-sex couples make pronouns complicated. This may be the secret reason behind much heteronormativity.

Current Mood: pleased

Crys emailed me with a BBC news story that the BBC has threatened legal action against a fan over her knitted puppets patterns of Doctor Who monsters that she had placed on her website. One of these was of an Adipose.

I note that the seller of my Adipose, which was her own design and unrelated to the fan in the row, isn't offering anything on eBay at present so she may have decided to keep a low profile given this situation.

Anyway, my Adipose may have to go into hiding in case the Beeb send out squads to gather in all the renegade soft toys.

My knitted Adipose!

Okay, so this is a clip from MST3K, and the set-up is, that the Neptune Men are invading Japan, and their little snack-cracker-shaped space ships are wreaking havoc, and then...well, this:

Current Mood: amused

I have been mulling about betrayal this week, and about making mistakes in general.

It's a lot of little things coming together in my mind. I spent a lot of time--perhaps too much--kicking myself about a couple of bone-headed things I had said in this journal. Just stupid things, really, the sort where I look back at myself and wonder, My god, Peg, what on earth were you thinking??? (I've mentioned my seven year "statute of limitations" rule, where I refuse to feel guilty about anything that happened over seven years ago, on the basis of the fact that you all replace the cells in your body over the course of seven years, so you can rightfully say it was an entirely different person who made that mistake.) I've been reading a ton of fanfiction about Severus Snape (*waves to bohemianspirit), about the choices he made (not to mention listening to "The Bravest Man I Ever Knew" on the Ministry of Magic website on endless repeat). I've been following the coverage about the trial between J.K. Rowling and RDR Books. (Reminder: this is the trial concerning the Harry Potter Lexicon webmaster Steve Vander Ark, who, contrary to J.K. Rowling's wishes, is trying to publish a print copy of the Lexicon through RDR Books). The trial concerns issues of fair use copyright; I've mentioned the excellent analysis being done by praetorianguard. I was listening to PotterCast's [pottercast] episode about the trial, in which the PotterCast staff talked about the severing of their longtime relationship with Steve Vander Ark over the issues coming out of the trial and where sue_tlc in particular talked about her personal grief over the loss of the friendship.

I've mentioned it before; I, too, was friends with Steve because we worked together on the HPEF Board of Directors. This has all been bothering me a great deal more than I have said here.

I liked him. I can't understand why he has done this. I read the coverage about his words and actions during the trial, and while I want to scream at him for doing such a thing, the part of him that was his friend reads about his own grief at how he now feels cut off from the Harry Potter community, and I find myself sympathizing with him against my will. It hurts to find something inside of yourself that still tugs you toward someone who you feel has done something betraying.

This, coupled with all that Severus Snape fanfiction, has made me think again about the essay I wrote about remorse and transformation of character in Book 7. It's fascinating to re-read that essay, keeping the events of the J.K. Rowling trial against RDR books in mind. I wrote:

Rowling has always said that that series is about choosing what is right over what is easy. What I started thinking about as I read DH is that, especially in this book, Rowling has as much to say about the people who initially chose wrongly, and then went back to correct their mistakes. Choosing rightly the first chance you are given is best, of course. If you don't make mistakes, you don't have as much to fix. Some mistakes are enormous, and they can create consequences that are permanent.

Is it still possible to go back and choose again, differently? To say, I was wrong, I take it back. I want to now move in a new direction, the first one I should have chosen"? Since it is our choices that make us who we are, Dumbledore tells us, changing our choices means transforming our character. Is this possible, even when our initial mistake was enormous, leading to permanent consequences

msscribe

167.4 miles to Lothlorien. I have turned back from Redhorn Pass, and it's looking more and more like I'm going to have to pass through Moria. Here in Connecticut, wisteria are blooming, and lilacs are headed to their peak. Spring is rapidly becoming summer.

I did go out for a two mile walk this morning (in deference to my sore toe, I walked only.)

And now it is a little after 11, and I have written 501 words and fed myself a ploughman's lunch (bread, cheese, onions, olives, pickles, oranges, some cold leftover pork) and made some rooibos to see me through until it's time to go to the climbing gym. (I do not know how much I will be climbing, but I will at least drive down, show up, and put in some effort. I may stick to the slab, in deference to all the ways I m old and sore. But hey, I can belay.)

And now I am thinking about what this next 500 words needs to accomplish, other than Sebastien wangsting about how old he is. At least he is--unlike many angsty vampires--old enough to have earned some angst.

The cat is very fascinated by the busy monkeys working to clear out the burned house across the street.

Current Mood: working

I'm sick all right. Freely running nose, sore throat, coughing up phlegm. The insides of my collarbones itch. Headachy. If I felt up to it I'd go to Wheatsville or Whole Foods for wild cherry bark tea, but it's because I need it that I don't feel up to it. Isn't that lovely?

Even if I was feeling better, we've got a thunderstorm underway. It knocked my internet connection out for a few hours, which sucked.

Got hold of the audiobook of Very Bad Deaths. I'm most of the way through it. It's pissing me off a little; Spider Robinson's weak points are all showing through. And there are a few things that really get to me.

( semi-spoilery )

It's stopped raining while I've been typing up my little rant. Eeek, sunlight! Heheh.

Well, I think I've whined enough for now.

Current Mood: sick

Hey, guys! I haven't been able to participate in the last *mumble mumble* weeks because of the day job, but the semester has ended and final grades are in, so I WILL be back starting tomorrow with a vengeance. In the meantime, check out my LJ for a post today about the "muddle in the middle" of that novel. We're far enough into Nin90 that some people may be reaching that point. The post might help everyone get that extra energy push to get their 750 words a day for the rest of the current Nin90!!

"Let me assure this House that Her Majesty's government has never been approached by people from outer space." - from briefing for a debate on UFOs in the House of Lords in January 1979.

The MOD have released previously secret documents for download on UFO sightings from 1978-1987. (BBC Report).

The Government have even set up an official web-page to facilitate this: UFO Files from The National Archives.