Hah! Guess what! I have had a WHOLE DAY OFF, and I have TWO MORE ahead of me! Hahahahah! *beam*
Apparently I'm only smug if you're looking at that houseofcards link down there with IE5 on a PC, but by God, I'm smug if you are. :)
Know where I am? I am NOT AT WORK! YAAAAAAAY! *happy dance, happy dance*
I didn't manage to sleep in extravagantly, but perhaps I made up for that by going to bed at about 9:30 last night. :) I am feeling very ... calm. :)
So they're remodeling the REI building on Northern Lights, and when they were tearing the roof off they found a billboard poster from Nixon's 1960 Presidential campaign on what used to be the outer wall. They're planning on preserving it and donating it to a historical society, or something. The story's here. Pretty cool!
Um, oh! I conquered scrolling text boxes at House of Cards. Aren't I smug?
Houston, we are clear for launch.
Q1 is launching today, with only a handful of second-priority bugs left to do; my project manager says she doesn't remember a quarterly launch with so few bugs, which is very gratifying.
I DON'T HAVE TO WORK TOMORROW. YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY! Furthermore (did I say this yesterday?) my boss gave me tomorrow as a comp day instead of a vacation day. YAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!
Tomorrow I'm going to read a book or two and write on Urban Shaman some (I may retreat to the library for part of the day in order to be removed from the siren temptation of the internet) and print out Legion to send to Tony aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand. Go to the gym and maybe to the pool to swim.
I am NOT GOING TO WORK.
I have to go kill the cats, who are being very bad. I can tell, because something just clanged off the counter.
My butt is very numb from sitting in the computer chair too damned much. :P
OTOH, Steve (my boss) said that if the launch goes off successfully tomorrow, I can take Friday off, and that I can have it as a comp day instead of a vacation day, because God knows I've put enough hours in to take about two weeks of vacation, at this point. So that's nice.
I am very tired. :P
I read a very good book last night, The Wild Swans, by Peg Kerr. It's very sad, but it's very good. I also made cookies, and then I went to bed exhausted. Actually, I did those things in the opposite order, but whatever.
I have another ten thousand bugs to fix today. I also need to email my boss and ask him if I can have Friday off, because I need a break. :P
Plus, I should drink more water.
I have a meeting that was supposed to start 25 minutes ago. I called in. No one has picked up on the other end. I'm getting pretty pissed off. No, I /am/ pretty pissed off. *snarl*
Ted and I went to see Guess Who's Coming To Dinner at the Bear Tooth Theatrepub this evening. I'd never seen it before. It was very good. :) (It, like Casablanca and Shakespeare, despite the fact that people keep _telling_ you that it's very good, is, in fact, very good.) The bit where Katharine Hepburn tells her friend Hillary off and sends her packing caused the audience to hoot and cheer and clap, which was *great*.
Then we came home and got Shaun and went for some ice cream, and while we were at Baskin Robbins, a commercial came on the radio for one of the local bicycle shops, and it said, "We have over a hundred years of experience!" and Shaun said, "They must take a long time," which made me and him laugh very very hard and made Ted stare at us as if we were extremely odd. *laugh* Well, *I* thought it was funny! *laugh* *laugh*
Well, I enjoyed the Oscars last night, mostly. I thought Halle Berry was very cute and Denzel was very stoic and I want to look as good now as Sidney Poitier does at 75. And Reese Witherspoon made Kitface (causing Trip to say, "Does that mean she should really be Reese WitherspO.On?") when she and her husband Ryan um Phillipe? came out to give the award for best makeup. They read all their lines off the teleprompter like good little actorbots, and they got done reading the nominees and Ryan said, "And the Oscar goes to.." and started opening the envelope and Reese, veryveryhopefully, said, "Can I read it please? Can I?" And Ryan said, "You make more than I do, sure, you can read it, here." And she went O.O! And Julia Roberts, who is the ultimate fangirl, got up to give the best actor award and whispered, "I kissed Sidney Poitier tonight!" and practically went 'hee hee hee!' with fangirl glee.
I must drink more water than I have been. People should remind me.
Kate Winslet looked very fine in a Red Dress, and Jennifer Connelly has gotten so thin she no longer has any breasts worth speaking of, which is very sad, because she used to have magnificent all-natural big boobs, and I think it's amazingly suckful that Hollywood encourages women to be so goddamned thin. She's still beautiful; I'm not sure anything short of a horrible disfiguring accident could make her anything /but/ beautiful, but I sure wish she'd put ten pounds back on. (To quote In&Out, which I watched the other day, "You look like a swizzle stick.") I think everybody in Hollywood should put ten pounds on. :P
I have to go finish making bread now.
*laugh* Oh yeah. Also, I just finished reading The Camelot Caper, which is an early book by Elizabeth Peters (who writes the Amanda Peabody books). The hero of this book, whose name is David, is Peter Wingfield:
He was tall, and painfully thin, with a long narrow face. His hair was black and untidy, his eyebrows were lifted; but the rest of his features were overshadowed by a nose of such lordly proportions that she forgot all else in the wonder of it.
I was delighted. :)
My chocolate ice cream turned out the second time I put it through the freezer. I think the cannister wasn't frozen enough the first time, and/or the mix wasn't cold enough. It is very, very rich. My gawd.
So for the last 4 days, at about 2pm, my cable modem kept going down. It was pretty clearly because the ground was thawing and at that time of the day it got warm enough to screw the modem up. About 7pm when it froze up again it'd come back up. So Friday I called GCI, and yesterday they sent a nice man out to fix my modem, and by gosh, he did. I didn't think it was going to be fixable until the snow melted and he could get to the lines, but he actually went and dug it up and did the work that needed to be done. Wasn't that *nice* of him? I was very impressed!
I have a knot of great pain in my shoulder. :(
I got up a bit later than usual this morning, 'cause Ted didn't have to go to work today because his parents are in town and he's being a good son, but I /did/ go to the gym, and did a lower body workout which I suspect will cause me, mid-afternoon, to suddenly be unable to walk anymore. :)
Then I came home and realized I was late for a meeting. Oops. But I met, and Ted BROUGHT ME BREAKFAST, isn't he a NICE husband? And I read Neil Gaiman's blog, which said:
[I had an airplane flight yesterday and there were two chatty ladies next to me.]At the end, one of the ladies asked what I did. I said I was a writer. "Well," she said, "When are you going to be a New York Times Bestseller then?" It was the kind of cheerfully patronising thing people say to strangers they meet on planes. I'm sure if I'd said I was a musician she'd have said "Well, when are you going to have a hit record then?" I think I was meant to shrug and say "One day," hopefully with a wistful smile, and she would have told me that was the spirit, but I said "Last June."
Which makes me say: GO NEIL!
In fact, it made me write him a note that said "GO NEIL!" and it ended up being signed "-from a bunch of Ambar (Jean-Marie Diaz) and Phyllis (Liralen) Rostykus and Angie-the-blue-haired-girl's friends! :)" because, well, he doesn't know me from Adam. Or Eve. :)
I am quite happy. :)
Oh, and also, there was email from Jai this morning, complaining bitterly about my friends and their webpages with links to nifty jewelry and how it all made her want to buy some and froth froth froth! Hee hee hee. :)
Oh yeah! Plus, fan mail last night! Someday I will have to work more on my new Methos novel. But not until I've finished rewriting another chapter of US. :)
I'm going to have to tell my coworkers that I'll be working from something like 10-3 their time and then sometimeintheeveninguntilsometimelaterintheevening until the snow finishes melting, because like clockwork the modem is going down around 2pm as it warms up enough for melting snow to get into the ground. Mutter.
On the positive side, I finished a book, did a portrait of Catriona (from a photo Janne sent me, of their vacation in Spain), and swam 2000 yards while the modem was down.
Bwahahaha! I continue to proselytize for
Strangers in Paradise. Jai and I went to lunch today, talked about dead people in our high school classes and comic books, and I sent her back to work with the first GN. Bwahahahahah!
hee hee hee
 | You are Civilian Calvin! You don't get to travel much outside your neighborhood, but you still manage to get in plenty of trouble. When you're not acting up, you like to wax philosophical. Take the What Calvin are You? Quiz by contessina_2000@yahoo.com! |
Anybody who's stood around in the amazing silence and whiteness of a snowstorm knows that there's always a little perfection in one. But this weekend's storm really was a perfect storm.
That's so cool. :)
Spooky! I went to the silly name generator that Angie has linked on her page (sorry, don't have the URL in my browser anymore) and I was putting in various names, and I put in Kit's full name, sans middle name, and, startlingly, it fed me back a silly name with Kit's actual middle name in it!
Sub Captain of Sticking Your Head and Arms Out the Window, Darth Katherine Marie Ellis!
Spooky! None of the ones with my actual name were nearly as entertaining, so nevermind. :)
I'm all excited about this because I just read Last Chance to See recently, and the kakapo is one of the birds that Douglas Adams and his co-author whose name is escaping me at the moment (Mark something) went to see. :)
According to the Disney Princess Test, I'm Belle. This pleases me. :)
yay me! I signed up for beginning guitar classes with the Anchorage Community Schools activities and classes thing. Yay me!
Also I went to the gym this morning, and I can now say with authority that it is *not* faster to walk home from NL/Minnesota than it is to wait for the bus. At least not in winter. It probably would be in summer.
I have to get up earlier so I have more time for a better and longer workout. Yus.
Flick flick flick.
I did a nice job cutting the bread! Usually I'm not so good at it, but since Ted wasn't home and I wanted a sandwich, I had to cut it my own self, and I did a very nice job of it. Ted looked at it when he came home and said, "Uh oh, what do you need me for now?" I even *cooked* *dinner* on Sunday! Isn't that amazing? Of course, Ted was stuck at work and Shaun had a date, so I was the only person at home to *eat* it, but I /did/ cook it.
Saturday night I went to Our Town, which me father had a part in. I'd never seen it before, and from this production, I came away with the distinct feeling that the theme of the play is, "It's not so bad to be dead!" The *actual* theme is "Stop and smell the roses," but this production definitely left an impression of it's not so bad to be dead.
Aside from that, it was a pretty good show, really. Most of the actors were good and the Stage Manager was very good. Emily had a wonderful face. George needed a haircut, but apparently he'd volunteered to get one and the director told him he didn't need to *hairy eyebrow*.
It is meltmeltmeltmelting outside! melt melt melt!
28.6 inches of snow in about 26 hours, which blew away Anchorage's previous snowfall record, set in 1955, of 15 inches in 24 hours. I haven't seen this much snow at once since my senior year in high school. Schools are closed today, including UAA, which means I can't go swim! *fnrt*!
We got up at 7am yesterday because the cats were being horrible and MEOWMEOWMEOWing and Ted went to feed them and said he was just going to get up, and that there was a foot of new snow, and I got up and we looked out the window at the paper guy who'd gotten his station wagon stuck, and I went to put some clothes on to go help him and we ended up digging out six cars, which is to say I helped with three and then my not-actually-insulated-boots permitted my toes to become very cold, so I came inside and Ted stayed out another half hour and unstuck three more cars. One of the guys we helped was a vet (he had disabled vet plates, that's how we know) and Ted, very irritatedly, said, "That guy must've been an officer, because he couldn't take directions worth a damn," when he came in.
Then we took our new 4WD Jeep Cherokee out and mocked the snow. :) Wasn't it *nice* of the weather to give us a snowstorm right after we bought a new truck that could handle it? *laugh*
I think I have to go take some photos of what my uncle Packy would call "a real fucking winter wonderland" before it warms up much more and it all melts. Today it's clear and gorgeous and sunny and beautiful. And snowy. :)
Snooooooooooow!
We have had like 18 inches of snow in the last 14 hours.
This is so cool. :)
Maaaaan. I'm paying the bills (o joy of joys!) and we're doing REALLY WELL this month. Very little non-specified errata has been purchased: I have six items on the 'other expenses' part of my spreadsheet, and three of them are groceries and stuff like that. It looks all nice and tidy and like we're not overspending!
Except two of the other three items are the THOUSAND DOLLAR DOWN PAYMENT for the new car, and the four hundred dollar insurance payment.
Maaaaan. And it looked so *good* until that part . . . ! *laugh*
Jai thinks that if I bleached the tweaky bit of my bangs that falls away from the rest of them, that'd be pretty cute, with this haircut, and I think she's probably right. But in an attempt to not melt my hair, I don't think I'll do that just yet. :)
Jai came over for lunch today! Which is to say, Jai came over to pick up Tori's dress and I lectured her on the X-Men. *laugh* Oh, and then I confused her because most of my friends have two names (or sometimes more!) and I refer to them by either or both indiscriminantly. *laugh* I hardly even think about it, but I know it's very bizarre to talk about Deen or Aberdeen or Emily and be talking all about the same person. :)
Other things accomplished today: more laundry, and cake-making. Oh, plus a bunch of bugs fixed for work. Aren't I studly? :)
Drat. I over-spun the ice cream, so it got kinda melty and crystalline. It tastes fine, but the texture won't be nearly as nice. I should set the clocks in the house to actually having the same time. Oop. I should go switch laundry around, too!
It is 8:13 and I have thus far accomplished
1. getting up
2. getting showered
3. starting laundry
4. starting ice cream
5. getting *more* laundry downstairs so I could do another load when the first one is finished
6. reading my blogs and comics for the day.
7. *not* eating a doughnut for breakfast
8. drinking 2 cups of water
Not bad. :)
I am, however, disappointed to note that despite going to the gym yesterday morning, I have not miraculously lost twenty pounds overnight. What a rip-off. :)
Despite 2 hours worth of naps yesterday, I still managed to sleep very solidly for 8 hours last night. I was apparently very, VERY tired!
I seem to have gotten down to the serious business of growing hair, now. The length reached a critical mass, or something, and now it seems like I Have Hair. It's close enough to being all the same length (despite the weirdness of having it shaved an inch over my ears that I feel I can now grow it with impunity and not require a bunch of trims to try to get it all more or less the same length.
I'm hoping that by October it'll be long enough to make it worth bleaching. I think bleaching my bangs right now would just look sort of silly. :) But by October it'll hopefully be cheekbone-length, at least (it'll require some trims to make it look proper, but), and that might be long enough to bleach. We'll see!
The cats are being bad. I can tell because they look guilty. I should go see what they're up to. :)
Sharbat Gula.
That's the name of the the Afghan girl who was on the cover of National Geographic seventeen years ago. That photograph, NG has said, is the one that more people than any other have written in to ask about: do they know her name? Do they know what happened to her? Did she survive?
Now we know. She survived; she has three daughters of her own. She's . . .
My God. She's alive. That simple fact makes me want to cry. I didn't realize how much I *wanted* her to be alive.
She'd never seen the photo. I wonder what it's like to discover you're one of the best-known faces in the western world. I wonder what it's like--
--to be her.
Wow! I just realized today was my two year anniversary at Consumer Health Interactive. Wow. Two years. Wow!
I went to the gym! I pretty clearly need to get there earlier than I did, though, in order to do a workout that feels worthwhile to me. I only had about half an hour, and I generally need 45 minutes or a little more, I think. But! I went. Yay me!
It was very, very quiet. This gym has a year membership, so I'll stay with it a year, but I'm not at all convinced I'll re-sign-up. I admit, it's nice to have equipment that's in good shape, which this stuff all is, but -- eh. I'm not sure I've ever felt like a gym was quite so anti-social as this place.
'course, if I talk to Ted's sensei's wife, Robin, who apparently goes to that gym, and we can arrange to meet, perhaps it will seem less . . . sterile.
The freaking Anchorage bus system does not, in fact, use transfers. How *totally* lame is that? So it cost $2.50 to get home, for God's sake. That, like, doubles the cost of the gym. If I'd been going to double the cost of the gym, I coulda gone to the Alaska Club, which is much more expensive but closer and would only require one bus ride to get home. Sheesh.
Bussing wasn't bad, though. They were *very* prompt, but standing around in the cold for a total of something like 35 minutes for a total of about 6 minutes of bus riding really seems like lousy signal to noise. The nice thing is it turned out there's a bus stop directly across the street from my condo complex, so there wasn't a lot of walking at the end, but I think I coulda made it a significant portion of the way home in the twenty minutes I waited for the second bus.
I think I'm thawed enough to go shower, now. And man, I'm hungry.
Lovely. Just freaking lovely. I have finally taken a look at the bus schedules. Would you like to know what they look like? Like this:
The bus I would want to get on near the gym (#4) arrives there at approximately 7:44.
The bus I would want to transfer to in order to get near my *home* (#36) gets to the transfer point that Bus #1 gets to at approximately 8:12.
It's about a 5 minute drive from the stop I'd get on to the transfer point. Assuming (which is rash) that the buses run on time, waiting twenty minutes in the cold just doesn't strike me as the thing to do. Especially in that part of town, where there are a lot of drunks with whom I do not particularly wish to hang out.
Sigh. I guess I'll do it tomorrow and see how it goes. If I get cold I guess I can duck into one of the gas stations, or, hell, walk to the next bus stop.
I can't find anything on the site about transfers. These people can't _not_ have transfers, can they?
I went to the library tonight and rewrote two chapters of Urban Shaman.
My coworkers have all commented on how damned many bugs I fixed this weekend. "We're not *nearly* as far behind today as I thought we were going to be," one of them said. *snerk*
Lunch, and then more bug slaying. Do I know how to have fun, or what?
This is *such* a *great* *suit*!
*kicks feet* I WANT one! Maybe when I'm thinner and have my corset, not that the suit requires a corset, but the corset requires being thinner...
I'm going to start swimming again tomorrow (which is sort of apropos of nothing, despite how it may look). If I swam an average of 3000 yards 5 days a week for the next eleven weeks or so, I could swim about a hundred and thirty-six miles by my birthday! Ahem.
Tomorrow my gym membership kicks in (ok, I could have gone Sunday, but I didn't). I need to check the bus schedule, and get some smaller bills for the bus so I can get home again. I should do that right now.
I'm having a hard time remembering what time it is in California.
I forgot to mention that we went to The Time Machine the other day. It was better than I expected it to be, which is kinda damning with faint praise, because I expected it to be very bad. But it was better than that. :)
I had a dream the other night that I was running (well, mushing) the Iditarod, and in fact, I was winning. I was less than a day's ride out from Nome, and suddenly I realized I hadn't taken my mandatory 24 hour rest. It was quite awful! I had to sit around nervously and wait for people to catch up to me while I took my rest! Before I was able to leave, at least two teams had caught up to me. Sniiiiif!
I fixed 46 bugs last night in about 3.5 hours. Not that that has anything to do with the Iditarod. I'm just telling you.
I meant to get up a little earlier than I did this morning -- not that I got up all that late -- but just as Ted was getting out of the shower, I flopped over into an Amazingly Comfortable Position, and was stuck there for an extra half hour.
Want to know something weird about my dreams? Here's something weird about my dreams: although I had never noticed it before, the random passers-by in my dreams apparently used to all be lily-white. At least, I never noticed them being anything other. Since coming back from San Francisco, I have noticed that there are people of all colors in my dreams now. I think that's fascinating. o.o
My cousin Moira had her baby this evening! A little boy, who weighed about eight pounds and whose name is Edward Hugh and who came into this world with a headful of dark blond hair. :) We do not yet know what Moira intends to call him. His grandfather intends to call him Ned. :)
Well, I went over to the women's club, which is very pink and grey, but has nice equipment and posters of beefcake guys on the walls (which amused me *laugh*). Not much in the way of free weights, but their machines are in good shape, and so I signed up for the 3 day a week package. It is quite literally 3 days a week, three /specific/ days a week; I'm supposed to go to the gym on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, now. (The other option was Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday; apparently, to go to the gym on Monday, you have to be a 7 days a week member.) Anyway, so now I have to put most of my allowance back in the bank to pay for it for this month, but I've got a gym membership and I'd better use it. o.o
oops. somehow I didn't manage to get any work done today, and I don't think I have enough brain to try now. I got a corner of the living room clean (heh, just a corner) and if I look at the corner I feel all accomplished. Of course, I have to *not* look at the rest of the living room, but at least it's something.
Tomorrow I will go look at the Women's Club and see if it looks like a place I want to go work out. If it does, I'll save up some more of my allowance and join it on the 3 day a week plan. I can manage to get to the gym three bloody days a week, right?
I swam this morning. Not very far: 1000 yards. The pool was very warm and it sucked my will to live. But I did swim, at least.
Mom is thinking about making dresses for little girls for special occasions, because she thinks that the clothes that they have for little girls for special occasions right now are appalling. Gold lame and satin are not, she feels, appropriate for little girls to wear. (If you put a five year old in satin, what are you going to put her in for prom?) And so much of it is sized-down tarty clothing, and it's just grotesque to put a five year old girl in clothes like that. Icky.
So she wants to know where parents of little girls (2-6 or so, I think) buy fancy dresses (for Christmas or Easter or _insert important holiday here_ ) and how much they pay (or are willing to pay) for them. I know at least three mommies of little girls read my page, so lemme know what you think!
Aaah, son of a bitch. Our PFD applications have been denied. There will be no miraculous influx of money. Not that I was counting on it, but it sure would have been nice. *sigh*
Son of a bitch.
I admit to cheating a little on this one, and using Photoshop to remove a poorly-drawn cheekbone. I don't think it's as good a drawing, quite, as the Gem drawing, but it *looks* like Tess, so I'm really happy. I've never been able to draw her before. Woot woot! *beam*
Yay! Janne and Cat got the presents I sent them a few weeks ago; a Storm for Janne, and a couple of toy rabbits for Catriona. Cat, Janne reports, "was delighted by the rabbits from 'Teddy and Cad' =)."
*much laughter*
I dunno. Maybe I should give up entirely on this whole pencil drawing thing, and concentrate on drawing with pen and ink. I really enjoy it, and I seem to be kind of good at it. I just finished the first real drawing I've done in more than two years, a portrait of Miss Gem, one of my Maddock characters. *happy wriggle*
bfe: pork roast, mashed potatoes, peas, applesauce, milk.
Well, today was a lot more productive than any days for the last several have been. There's still a lot to do, but I got a pile of stuff done, so I feel a little better. And it's 4pm and I've been at work for 8.5 hours so I'm stopping now.
My legs may be too embarrassingly hairy for me to go swimming tonight. Hm.
bfe: mac & cheese (how very guy of me), milk. brownie batter. cut my tongue on the beater. ow.
Mmm, fresh-baking bread smells soooo good. It's making me hungry again! I may have to put bfe's in individual entries when I get around to eating, instead of trying to put them in one, 'cause I get all bored going back and re-editing old entries.
bfe: breakfast: waffles. second breakfast: frosted shredded mini-wheats. toes: not hairy.
Poor Spike. Man.
I was having hair nightmares last night. A variety of them, ranging from going bald (male pattern baldness) to having hair stuck in my head like a barbie doll, to great gobs of hair melting off from a bleach job gone bad. In one part of the dream I had hair well past my shoulders, with blunt bangs cut, but I'm not sure I actually looked like me. Then I got my hair wet and it got all curly, which was kind of cool, but it was still falling out in big gobs, so overall I was extremely relieved to wake up and discover that I was not suffering from male pattern baldness.
Also I dreamed I was in a department store wheelchair race, in which you were supposed to go zooming around the store and touch a bunch of walls and do a bunch of, um, things. One of these things was stop at a little gymnasium sort of thing and do bench press -- and leg press and leg curls and leg extensions. o.O I lost the race because I hadn't even seen that list of things to do on the list, and besides, to be perfectly honest, I hadn't touched any of the walls except the ones in the restaurant where the race ended, because I'd forgotten about that part of it until somebody passed me and I saw her doing it.
I did not go to art class last night. I did work on a drawing, and I called some of the gyms on Northern Lights to see how much they cost, and I can afford to join one out of my allowance. Maybe I'll go look at them this weekend and think about it. The women's gym is the cheapest, even if it seems sort of silly to join an all-women's gym.
Good humans! Goooooood humans! It's evidently Women's History Month, and Encarta has a list of historically significant women in various fields. I was prepared to be up in arms, because nobody EVER acknowledges her, but they've _got_ Margaret Sanger! Go Encarta!
So even if I think Hillary Clinton is a really bizarre choice, I'm not up in arms. :)
I had a small bookstore accident last night. It's as well that the bookstore closed at 6:30, because if I'd had another hour to browse... but fortunately it was a used bookstore accident, so it was all on credit. Like Trip, I'm getting further behind!
I made my oatmeal slightly too thick this morning. On the other hand, I did pour a lot of milk on the counter.
bfe: oatmeal
*Man*, do I love Moulin Rouge. *beam* Although I don't know what the hell the people Ted lent the DVD to did to the package, but it got torn all to hell. *scowl* :P
Sarah got her birthday present! YAAAAY! *beam* *happiness* Happy happy! *beam*
Happy birthday Sarah! Well. Not til Friday, but still!
No car photos! Ted took the car out to lunch with The Guys to show it off. :)
bfe: oatmeal. mac&cheese, milk, 2 cookies. 3 cookies, randomly. chicken, rice, spinach, milk, 2 cookies.
*Maaaaan*! Rogue has already been taken, for an Alaskan license plate. Maaaaan!
X MEN, however, is available . . .
So, the car. The new car. The old car. All the cars.
The new car is a 1999 Jeep Cherokee Sport and has pretty much everything you'd want in a vehicle, including LOTS OF ROOM TO PUT THE BIKES IN, except for it has no CD player. As Ted says, he has a $700 stereo system; he can make tapes. It is dark forest metallicy green, and Ted says I can get Rogue vanity plates for it if they're available. :)
Ted is practically giddy. He keeps going, "VROOOOOOM!"
I am very pleased, because we went to several dealerships and looked at several other 99 Jeep Cherokees, and we liked this first one best, but it had 20K more miles on it than any of the others, and cost $2K+a_little more, so we went back to the first place and I said, boy, we really like this car, but all these other dealerships have the same car with less mileage and for considerably lower cost, and they said, "Take it for a test drive, and then we'll make a deal." So they gave it to us for $2.1K less than their asking price, so I am *very* *very* smug.
Ted should not be allowed out to buy cars on his own. We have Determined this. Ted would have bought a whole bunch of cars on Saturday with no haggling. We went into one place and the guy asked us what we were willing to spend, and Ted TOLD THE TRUTH. I told him he didn't get to talk anymore, after that. :) And he didn't! Well, not about money, at least. He's too darned nice to be allowed out alone to buy cars. *giggle* I have such a nice husband. *laugh*
Although, as he said, he wouldn't have *really* bought any cars, because he wouldn't dare do that without me there. He'd want to be sure I approved of the vehicle. Which I knew, but still, it was pretty fun to tease him. *laugh*
I'll take a couple photos of the car this afternoon at lunchtime, even if it's dirty (hazards of driving in Alaska) and the windshield hasn't been replaced yet. It'll be replaced on Thursday, no cost to us. Yay!
Pretty cheerful Kit.
Wilding says "kit, i had three bookstore accidents today."
Wilding says "at least one was roughly half the size of the other two, but man."
Wilding says "i should be kept away from these places, it's ridiculous what happens when i'm let loose near a mythology section."
Wilding blinks. but kit had a _car_ accident, which beats my bookstore problems.
(pause)
Wilding says "er."
Wilding says "that doesn't sound quite right."
*howls of laughter* *howls and howls and howls of laughter*
We are now the proud owners of a 1999 Jeep Cherokee. It's green. That's all the important information, right?
Well! We were going to go to the store to buy some chocolate chips and some tortillas, but instead, the starter in our car choked and died and we no longer have a functioning vehicle.
We think we're going to borrow my Mommy's car and go car shopping. The starter was replaced 11 months ago. This is not cool. :P
In an attempt to shake off a grim mood, I went for a 2.something (.3? .5?) mile walk, out to Earthquake Park and then a little further. It was very pleasant, although wow, do I feel vacant now. I suspect it would have been a magnitude of order better if I'd had a dog and hiking boots. Especially hiking boots.
None-the-less, it was very nice. It certainly did not, however . . . I have no idea what I was going to say after 'however'.
bfe: oatmeal, very small amount of icky oj. pork egg roll, chicken-fried rice, milk, ice cream (vanilla w/chocolate sauce). Chocolate brownie ice cream.
Me mumbly is back from Juneau, where she went to the PFD Boardroom dedication ceremony wherein they named the PFD Boardroom after Hughie. She said it was pretty nice, overall, and they allowed the Governor to attend; Mom said that even his speech was quite nice, and he didn't insinuate in any fashion that he and Hughie had been best buddies, or anything else that would have pissed the family off. Although apparently my cousin Alanna wasn't cutting the governor any slack, and didn't like his speech at all. :)
Mom brought home copies of the video they'd played at the dedication, and it was /also/ very nice. Mostly still images and film clips with a voiceover, but there was one startling part where it cut suddenly to a clip of Hughie talking, and -- well, I'd been warned, 'cause Mom'd told me about it, but she'd been utterly unprepared to hear her brother's voice, so oof.
Which is sort of what happened to me a few days ago when I went to the PFD homepage, and there's a small scan of the cover of their yearly annual report; Hughie is on the cover. I was simply not expecting that, and it sort of caught me in the gut.
This summer when I have some money (hah! :)) I'm going to put maloneclan.org up. I think I'll see if I can digitalize the video from the dedication ceremony somehow, and put it on maloneclan. I think that might be good.
And now, because I have been up 6 hours and have only eaten a bowl of oatmeal, I'm gonna go have some lunch. *vroom*
So HR told me my W-2 would be sent after the 5th of February. I still haven't received it so I just emailed and said where is it? She said, let me check on it, and then sent another email saying, it's on its way. If I had not asked, would it have freaking sat there forever? *mutter*
Well. Going to bed at 9pm certainly makes one quite wide awake by 5. Not that one got up then, no; one persevered and lay around in the too-hot bedroom until a quarter after six, but boy. Too bad we don't have any money: I certainly could have been up in time to get to the pool to swim with the Masters' team this morning. :)