The Catbox

I want to hibernate. There, I said it. I hate it when I start to want to hibernate, since it mostly involves hiding in bed with books and my cell phone down a gorge. It doesn't help that I've been weirdly cold all though this warm snap, though it might be related to the fact I haven't been wearing so many layers and I think I got used to them before.

On the plus side, there is spaghetti and booze in my immediate future. I'm going to need to get more sauce for the pantry since I have plenty of other noodles still sitting sauce-less.

I also have more grad school in my future. Semester starts this week, though classes are on Thursday (at least, they are as scheduled which is not always what ends up happening) so I get to start driving back and forth on work nights. I prefer taking online or weekend courses, but this is one of those bitchy ones that's only offered at this-and-so time on such-and-such semester and is required for the degree program. I just hope that the prof isn't going to be one of those deluded idiots who thinks that you don't have anything better to do than take their course, or it's going to be a fun semester. (I hear there's one in the department.. I am hoping I don't get this person or there will probably be headbutting.)

I'm waffling about summer session again. On the one hand, it will dramatically speed up degree acquisition. On the other hand, it's summer and I won't get paid, and given how bitchy the Boss of all Bosses is being to the union over a proposed paycut, I think I"m going to be losing hella money out of my already-frozen wages once paychecks resume. (I totally get that everyone is tightening belts and that the government, being tax-supported, is going to be a year behind everyone else's financial crash. But one is still not entitled to be a jackass about it to the peons who are, you know, then going to be forced to figure out how to make ends meet.) That and I am also going back and forth about attending Otakon. It's pretty much the only thing that's vacation-y that I do in the summer. Bah too many choices.

Yats remains stuck on Moon Guard despite Tuesday maintenance. I'll have to remember to put in the request to get her moved after class on Thursday so that I can feel happy about playing WoW again. (Seems pointless to do a whole lot since there's always the chance of crap getting disappeared after a server move.)

OMG I LOVE LJLOGIN!

It's got cross-platform support that includes DW! I can easily and lazily switch between main and rping accounts on both sites now! :D

In other news, my apartment looks like a bomb made of boxes went off and I'm still about halfway done with packing. (I need to get the junk in the closets and the kitchen.) OMG OMG OMG

I also made an RP account for Uran after going through a million Youtube videos because I can't get screengrab for free from the DVD player. XD Can't wait to chuck her at people. (At this rate I'll end up tweaking things since I haven't completely finished the 2003 series she's drawn from and I know I'll probably want to screw around with icons. The Girl and I have a pact to watch Astro Boy together, so I can't cheat and watch ahead even on Youtube. Darnit.)

Got to spend some time with The Girl. We watched Up since I managed to score the DVD of it yesterday. It still made me cry. And the new little short about Dug also made me cry. Both in a good way.

I don't know what it is about movies geared towards children and making me cry.

I'm actually tipping at a bit of fanfic. It's an idea that's been kicking around my head for a while so I thought I'd try and do something with it. Let's just say it's Dr. Light's revenge for getting fridged and/or made into a bit of an ass in a lot of my fanfics. XD And that Blues takes after him far more than he'd like to admit.

It's gotten chilly again. I hope this means fall's here to stay finally. I hate it when the temps see-saw like they do a lot of the time. I usually end up getting sick when it happens and I have too much crap to do to get sick right now.

Continuing also to watch the 2003 Astro Boy. And.. well.. This is their character model for Dr. Tenma:


(image ganked from Wikipedia, for the curious)

As you can see, he has a rather unfortunate resemblance to a chicken. And since I've taken a bit of an instant dislike to him as a person, at least on-screen, well... there's been a lot of clucking involved. Especially since in a lot of his dramatic scenes he's backlit in profile so he really looks like a chicken.

And since I am dead tired this is hilarious. So I shall leave you with that.

I love screwing around on Facebook. I have discovered Farmville and the world will no longer be safe for cows!

Also, pictures of things coming to Flickr eventually. I have to go through them and do some cropping and ask people about wedding pictures and you know the drill.

Oh yeah, I went to a wedding on Sunday. :D katimus_prime and roflcopter_down's wedding to be precise. It was totes awesome. And I bawled like a baby at parts because it was OMGROMANTIC. And I have no idea what sort of wine was in the wedding favor.. help?

I got my hair dyed on Saturday but I can't find a decent non-blurry picture of myself with the new hair. :| I may have to coerce The Girl into taking a few when I see her again. It's purple-red and given the fact that it has universally been proclaimed awesome, I might just have to keep it that way for a while. Just because.

Of course, now I'm back to the rat race because I didn't decide to take vacation today. Blerg for transitioning back to hectic work schedule. I get a yay since I'm off Friday, but I'll likely be spending it on college work so boo anyway. Not to mention the mountain of paperwork from my actual job that I'll need to read through. sigh.

I am trying to talk The Girl into moving in with me in November when I move apartments. Wish me luck. :3

I'm trying to work through my homework, really. I have at least managed to get something on the computer now, and I'll try to refine it and write my other thing I have to write tomorrow. While somehow also managing to find time to do the stuff for work that I have waiting for me since of course there are also a zillion things to do with that. I will be SO HAPPY after this course is over. My bad for electing to take an accelerated course, I know, but the idea of having November and December off were tantalizing to my jaded little eye. And at least the professor seems to realize that we all have lives and jobs and isn't assigning a really insane amount of work-- if anything, the small pile of things to do each week is forcing me to spread out work on the big paper that I would otherwise be tempted to try to write in the last week or so of the class. It's supposed to be like 10 pages long and I've already got 4 very rough ones written, so I guess I'm ahead there. I just have to do my response to this book I read and I will be caught up and maybe even have a chance of sleeping this weekend omg.

What can I say, I'm tired and the tea only does so much. I've started drinking it without sugar because it's too much work to fuss with the Splenda packets and I'm not missing it much despite the fact that I've been drinking straight Earl Grey all day.

I also didn't get to eat most of my lunch thanks to working my tail off through most of it. This may or may not be effecting my mood despite the fact I ate a pretty good dinner a while ago. (Yes, I also probably managed to screw up effect/affect back there. I cannot be arsed to care.)

In other news, not much going on here. I got a new cell phone Monday. It's a little Nokia that was only 30 bucks since I downsized my phone. I HAVE an ipod and a sweet digital camera and I didn't feel like paying an arm and a leg for a fancy phone when I'm not going to use half the features since they require a more expensive phone plan! (Though I have to admit, the GPS thing AT&T is offering now looks really damn sweet. It's supposed to be more accurate than a TomTom, even. If I actually traveled more frequently, it would be worth the extra $20/mo.) My playdate was awesome and we got to play many games and had a lovely dinner and I was tempted to get an Xbox 360 for a bit until I remembered that I don't play video games much at all.

And now I am going to knit since I did have a half a notion of getting this scarf I'm working on done sometime before it stops being really cold.

I think I managed to sprain and/or pull a muscle in my foot. Not the usual suspect, either-- it's my right foot that's giving me the occasional issues. If this keeps up too much longer, though, I guess I'm going to be headed in to Patient First or making a podiatrist appointment or something. Can't be mucking about with bad feet.

Had an interesting bit of time with upgrading Norton. Apparently they give you the link to the wrong downloader or the downloader is secretly evil or something, since it ended up giving me a trial version of the wrong program instead of the upgraded version of the right program. So I had to call support.

Thank you dude from India whose name I don't have a hope of spelling. You were a big help and fixed up everything in a jiffy. I'm sorry I was on the line long enough for your manager to get on your case about it, so I apologize for how slow-ass the trial was being in uninstalling itself.

My homework is pretty much done for class on Saturday, which is good since I am in desperate need of actual sleep, especially of the after-work variety since I've been staying up too late playing Aion. I just have to write out a paragraph of paper proposal-- I have just the topic now, too, since I hang out with the media specialists at work a lot and have listened to a lot of grouching about how the technology office's policies are asinine and don't let us make use of a lot of technology available to us in a good manner. Especially in relation to things Internet, which really cramps our styles. Hey, that would be a good paper topic-- Why So Scared of the Internet?

I am having pot roast tomorrow. The pot just has carrots, wine, garlic, and meat in there with some herbs since the mushrooms went fuzzy on  me too damn fast. Teaches me to leave them in the plastic if I'm going to keep them out of the fridge. Still, nothing beats slow-cooked hunk of meat, and it'll be done when I go in for dinner since it's in the crock-pot. If I'm feeling adventurous I might even zap some of the fresh/frozen stuff and have some brighter veggie in there.

Going to DC on Sunday on a play-date with my married friends. (I'll have to think of another designation after EK gets married, lol) Haven't seen them in about a year, so this will be good. :D I just think I'm glad that we have the day off next Monday so I have time to recover.

I need to find out when BLITEOW is this year.

I have also discovered that mashed potatoes DO INDEED reheat well if you just mix them with something tasty to perk them back up after reheating. Gravy works and I imagine a little milk does as well.

That's all. I don't have the energy for anything profound and if I did I probably forgot what I was going to write about. Yay work.

I have been working on the impossible-- turning over my wardrobe.

The closet has been purged of the fugly or unfitting. And it has been partially re-stocked with shiny new clothes from a lovely shopping binge Saturday. The credit cards got some exercise, yes they did! It's always a complete pain in the ass buying clothes since you only have like three or four places you can go and you have to try everything on and hope that the prices aren't so high you're going to cry when you're a fat chick. And I'm lucky considering I live in a relatively urban area so I actually HAVE three or four places to go. When I was a rural fat chick I had one and the catalog, and thank heavens the catalog was actually decent back then or I would probably have had to go naked. (Nowadays the catalog sucks since they got cheap and their sizing is a trainwreck.) I just want to get clothes that fucking fit and don't look like trash, fashion industry! And hell, since I'm wishing for a perfect world, I'd like some models that are actually fat and not just in dress sizes that are two whole digits so I can get an idea of how things might look on my own self! I know my ass is terrifying to mild-mannered store clerks or something, but PLEASE. (And for your information store clerk lady, I am not a size-nine-which-we-don't-carry in your stupid gimmick pants. I'm a size seven and your might-fit-size-eight was big enough to me to easily try to stash my cat in the waist or something!)

It's going to be really fun next week since we're going to the Renaissance Faire on Saturday. I love the renfaire and the weather today was simply gorgeous and expected to hold all week. So yay for new clothes and renfaire!

I am keeping my fingers crossed, yes I am.

Tea experiment continues to go well. I've been drinking Earl Grey in the morning which has seriously been helping as far as the staying-chipper-and-not-strangling-people angle goes. It's what happens when you have to go to work obscenely early and then tend to need to stay late in order to get done the eight million things that need done daily. Especially now with the copy drama going on. :| Srsly gaiz, I think to be honest we'd all rather have the paper and be allowed to make as many copies as we want instead of have the Shiny Technology Thingie of the Week if it's all the same to the funding poobahs.

I'm taking my grown-up Flintstones vitamins again, too, since I figured it's probably better supplemented than sorry with work back in swing. Centrum makes chewables. I am in love with them in all their chalky orange goodness since it means I don't have to swallow a horse pill every day to supplement in some vitamins.

I have not yet killed the bromeliad plants. The cat has not eated them, either.

I wore pearls for the hell of it today. I think I like it.

ETA: The Rabbit of Seville

Today has been pretty cool so far.

Worked on unpacking ze office since we all had to move around at the end of the last year. I got all but one of the boxes happily unpacked, so it's just one box and the walls and then I get to start in on the pile of things I'd meant to bring in and held off on. Including a crapton of manga that I have just sitting around here that I no longer collect for one reason or another. Of course, it also means I get to spend the majority of tomorrow hauling heavy books around, but I was thinking about putting some effort into working on upper body strength.

We're going to go see the Rifftrax Live event at the local theater of movie. My job is to handle dinner and gas and probably popcorn, since The Girl covered most of dinner yesterday which involved driving into the city for crabs. :3

I have a new twitter thingie that ships tweets to my journal, though the timestamps on them are totally meffed up for some reason-- it's set correctly in twitter itself, but I dunno. And this one keeps 'em behind a cut, so on really wild ADD days you lovely readers won't have to put up with it.

Though it's kind of hilarious that I had some 14 year old randomly start following me. Dude, kid, I'm twenty-six; I'm not going to follow you back. Teenagers are totally capable of being cool people, but our interests are pretty much guaranteed not to coincide.

I had a neat idea for a DW cool thing to suggest somewhere later. We need a mass-edit tool for tagging. So if someone wants to change up tags they don't have to laboriously click on every entry to apply new tags. I am a genius.

ETA: Aaaaaaand I decided I don't want my journal junked up by twit announcements anyway. If I see something really shiny I'll write a real entry about it. But there's a link to my twitter feed somewhere in my profile if you wants to follow.

I've been having some lovely boring days lately.

Cleaning things out has been going at a relatively steady sporadic pace. I'm down to just a couple of zones that need looked at so stuff can be thrown away and/or re-organized.

I've been having fun with my cute little teapot. I already want a slightly bigger one-- the capacity on my hotpot is 32 oz and my cute little teapot is only 24. IKEA actually has a really lovely looking glass one with what looks like a good infuser for loose-leaf tea.. but it's 2 quarts and my hotpot is good for only one. Teavana also has a couple of teapots that would fit the bill nicely, but they're on the pricier side. Alas.

I went for a walk in town today on a whim. It was hot and sticky but not as hot and sticky as it's been lately. Only I was out when a lot of the neat little boutiquey places were closed, either due to the hour (a surprising number are 9-5) or because the owners are on vacation (which was the case for a neat little yarn store). I have some pictures I will have to put into flickr and post.

I think one of my "things I want to try and do this year" is to take and post more pictures from around. Not sure on what basis yet-- I usually have some pictures by the end of every month, but I don't always find subjects I like every week or even every two. Maybe I'll do a "month in pictures" thing and post my favorites at the end of every month.

Another "thing I want to try and do this year" is give up drinking Coke, mostly because I'm just tired of it. (Though every so often I try to cut my sugar intake a bit and cutting the Coke is one of the easiest ways to do it.) I'm not giving up ginger ale, Orangina, or the occasional root beer or other outre soda, though. (I've never been a gigantic fan of Pepsi and less so since I've gotten older.. about the only Pepsi products I'll drink are Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew, and even then it's rare because Mountain Dew is too damn sweet.) I kind of like the idea of steeping big jugs worth of iced tea on the stove every once in a while and having that, though I'm going to need to figure out how I'm going to rig an infuser/craptastic homemade teabags for a big pot of tea since I have been seriously enjoying the whole leaf tea I've been having lately.

I usually tend to time my resolutions with the beginning of a new school year since working in academics tends to send your whole schedule dancing to a school year's tune anyway. Much easier to change when work resumes than to form your habits all through that fall and then try to change in the middle of winter! I started bento last fall, stuck to it except for a few days here and there, and am quite looking forward to doing it again this year. I even have new boxes I got at Otakon and an octodog cutter since the ones I make my hand are invariably lopsided. I probably won't start obsessively taking pictures of my lunch like some people do, but I might take a few of something especially creative or pretty.

I am mildly bummed since it appears my extended family forgot I had a birthday last week. This is not the first time I've been snubbed by extended family on my birthday (this is in fact the second year running my grandpa has ignored it) but not even getting a phone call or printed-out generic card is kind of like the last straw as far as my not-particularly-great-but-not-antagonistic relationship with them has been. I think it's perfectly fair that I totally forget their addresses and whatnot for Christmas. If they bitch I can always say their stuff is with my birthday card from this year. :|