Some son of a bitch hacked my site this evening. Joy, oh, joy. Bastard.
*helpless laughter* Conspired against! I have received a package in the mail! It contains five Terry Pratchett books! It's a New Year's gift from Trip, which Marith conspired with him about, which is how it resulted in having Pratchett books instead of something else. *laugh* Wonderful! Thank you so much! I will read them soon! :)
And Ted also got a gift, although it was less conspiratorial, especially since Ted was reading over my shoulder when Trip was asking me about it. *laugh* He got the D20 Mutants & Masterminds book, and he, too, is very pleased!
Happy damned New Year! Or happy new redesign, anyway. :)
Some notes about the redesign: if you're using anything lower in version number than 7 in Netscape, you'll be seeing the barebones version of this site. Comments are 100% inline for the barebones version. At this moment in time, neither the archives nor many of the non-MT pages are working in NS4. They will be; I'm working on a php-based barebones template. It may take another day or two.
If you've got IE, Opera or another Gecko browser (Mozilla, Netscape 7, Chimera), you should have the option to get/make comments either as a popup or inline, as you prefer. Just click the appropriate linke. If you can't handle that, I can't help you.
And now I shall go and do the Dance of Smug. *dance dance dance*!
Incidentally, or perhaps not so incidentally: many thanks to Bryant, whose fault this all is, because I wanted a random quote on my page after he got one on his, and Kent, who spent a whole lot of hours troubleshooting problems with the redesign and helping me get it up and running.
Evan-of-all-people is a hero! He fixed my layering problem! THANK YOU, EVAN!!! *dancie dancie dance* Now to finish the redecorating!
And then, Mom, I will scan in the pictures of Breic. Honest. I've just gotta get this done. o.o
Let's see. Anything to report this morning? Nnnnnnnooooot really. *zums off*
I have finally found the address for Davis-Panzer Productions, the company who produces Highlander. Having found it, I wrote a query letter pitching our Highlander series idea to them, and went and put it in the mail.
January is pitch month.
VIVIVI.*
Wish it luck. Wow, *please* wish it luck!
*vivivi is shorthand for 'vibrate vibrate vibrate' (as in, with nerves). It's all Sarah's fault! o.o
Buggering, buggering, buggering hell. Does anybody who might possibly read this know why IE6, NS7 and Mozilla...something or other... wouldn't read CSS layers correctly? Opera and Chimera are rendering the layers correctly, but IE, NS and Mozilla are lumping them in the wrong order. The bottom layer has a z-index of 1; the top layer, of 2. Ideas? Suggestions? I'm at the end of my tether.
*redecorate redecorate redecorate* (this is an interim page, this white-background one. carry on, nothing to see here.)
Ok, the time stamps are back, although they're in the wrong place and I'm not sure they do a damned thing to help out the layout of the page, but it's okay, because I'm still redecorating. Honest. Soon the mess will go away. Soon, my precious.
Last night I curled up on the couch in my Rogue blanket with my Stitch doll and watched Lilo & Stitch. I am very smug about all of this. And I swear, I'm like a little kid with her blankie. I keep looking for excuses to haul the blanket around and snuggle with it. The problem is that I don't want to leave it on the couch because I'm afraid the cats might pop their claws in it, and I don't want it to be destroyed.
And Angie liked her Christmas present. I'm all smug. And sleepy. I should shower!
A banner day today. Got up and got Emily to the airport, went shopping, got boots and a headache, came home, watched _A Few Good Men_, the dog puked on me, I did some laundry, went for a walk (40 minutes in the snow is quite a lot of walking), came home, took a nap, had a story idea, took a looooong shower and let it percolate, and am working on it a bit now. And my foot is asleep. :)
You guys all rock. Thanks for all the commentary. Now I must decide what to do with it. (Actually, Theno, I was considering the whole two-links thing already, one for the non-popup permenant link and one for the comments popup window. Either would work for making comments, Ah do b'lieve.)
Uhm, do I actually have anything else to report? Not really. Still working on redesigning. Things will continue to be a mess for a few more days. Bear with me. And, let's see, we're going to go see TTT again this afternoon. Yay! :)
Ok, we have some comments on the comments and the fact that we're not necessarily too crazy about them popping up in their own windows. Give me some feedback on this; let me know if you hate the popup windows and prefer it to all be in-line, or if you don't mind the popups.
Whether I'll actually listen, mind you, depends entirely on how I feel when I'm done redecorating, but I'd like to know, anyway. :)
Oh, and just in case you were wondering, the apple pie turned out brilliantly, and OH OH OH, Shaun gave me the COOLEST book, Anatomy for the Artist, or something like that, which is, you guessed it, all about anatomy from an artistic POV. It's SO cool!
Lots of phat Christmas l00t this year! Ted got ALL the loot, and then I *also* got all the loot! And then Shaun got all the loot, TOO! Shaun cleaned up in the gift certificate department, coming away with five or six of them, as well as clothes and the first season of the 80s Transformers cartoon. *bwahahah*
Ted got 3 (yes three) power drills, two of which are cordless, a sander and a something else, plus some other power tools, a lasagna pan which is 23423 inches deep, a WHOLE BUNCH of clothes, some of which he's wearing today and looks very snazzy in, a couple of what I persist in calling video games (although I guess really EverQuest isn't exactly a video game; also he got Neverwinter Nights) and he got the gaming stuff he asked for except one of the things wasn't at the store so I got him something else random instead, and he got ... other stuff too that I can't think of right now!
I got ice skates (hooray!) and a DOUBLE-BOILER! wow! didn't expect that! totally cool! and a gift certificate to Home Depot, which makes me very pleased *indeed*, and a Bosco's Comic Shop and a Blaine's Art Store gift certificate and a Waldenbooks gift certificate, and *gasps for air* a copy of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and a copy of Wet Grave by Barbara Hambly aaaaaaaand oh, the print I wanted, although that's not actually here yet, aaaaand ooh Lilo & Stitch, and a Stitch doll, and -- I got a lot of loot. :)
But the coup d'etat gift was from Angie, who sent me a Rogue blanket. She'd been VERY excited about the gift and couldn't figure out how to wrap it, so told me I wasn't allowed to open the box she'd shipped it in until Christmas. So I opened it up and the first thing I see is a black X on a red background, so I knew it had to be an X-Men something, and it being me, it had to be a Rogue something. So I started unfolding it, and Ted and Emily and Shaun saw the stripe before I did, and started LAUGHING and LAUGHING, and I finally got to see the stripe, and *I* started LAUGHING. Oh my god, what a ridiculous and perfect gift. And it's *so* soft and cuddly and warm! I love it! Angie'd included an explanatory note, in case I didn't get it, but oh, I got it right *away*, we all did, and oh, it was *so* funny. What a *wonderful* gift. *helpless laughter*
Hey, Trent updated his page!
This test is pure evil. I was able to make an educated guess on 10 of them and am certain of 4. Which doesn't mean I'm right, just certain.
(spends some time looking them up) I was actually right on 3 of the 4, and was, er, well, kind of close on the 4th. I should've gotten it. Ah well. Wow. What a test. o.o
Oop, I forgot to say Merry Christmas Eve. :)
Talked it out with Sarah and I think I'll write the SF version of Back to Avalon. I'll name the other one something else and write it some other time. :)
More presentwrapping now.
I dreamed last night I got on a boat to heaven / and by some chance I had brought my dice along! / And there I was, and I hollered, "Someone save me," / but the passengers they knew right from wrong!
Actually, I dreamed last night that the publisher accepted Urban Shaman. Sadly, it hasn't come true yet. :) Then I had an action-adventure dream, which made me think I should maybe work on the Bombshell book next month instead of on Back to Avalon, which I'm having plotting issues with anyway (I have two entirely different books I want to write with that title; one's fantasy and the other is SF and I have to decide which one I want to actually use the title for, hnf).
Whew! Ted's parents made it here safely, their dog peed on our carpet (o.O), we had dinner, I made fudge, the tree STILL isn't done, and ... I'm going to go get something to drink now.
Fudge made it to Sarah and Anna! Yay! Sarah's Christmas present also made it to her! Yay more!
More of the presents are wrapped, the bathroom is clean except for the floor, the dog's run has been cleaned out to an insufficient degree, but it's a *whole* lot better than before, the dog is sleeping on my foot at the moment, the tree has not been decorated, and I've eaten too much fudge.
Trip is trying to decide where to eat, and it's making me hungry. Hm. :)
Having just stated this isn't a political blog ... *laugh*
I would like very much for the CIA to go in and verify this. I'd like even *better* for somebody who isn't affiliated with the federal government to go in and verify this. I'd like somebody who struck me as vaguely trustworthy -- actually, the UN, which generally seems pretty disgusted with US warmongering, seems fairly trustworthy to me, but goddamned Bush and his cronies won't take their answers as truth -- to go in and verify this. Somebody who is not on the federal payroll. I'm pretty sure the CIA will find something damning, if they're told to.
And this is why this isn't a political blog. I don't trust anybody anymore, and it makes me sad.
Real Live Preacher, courtesy of Population: One, is one hell of a blog.
I periodically feel vaguely guilty that my journal is just a journal, and not political or sociological or any other sort of -al. It's sort of curious to feel that way, as I never had any intention of it *being* an -al blog. Most of the purpose of starting the online journal was because people kept saying to me, "What've you been doing?" and I had no idea what the answer to that question was. "Uhhh... not much, really. Just kind of living." I've been keeping a paper journal since I was fourteen (incidentally: if you do this, when you are 19 or so, and you sit down and have a discussion with yourself about whether you want to keep the journals? Keep them. I knew I'd regret it if I threw them away but I threw them away anyway. Bad move. I don't regret it as much as I might've if I hadn't thought about it and consciously said, "Yeah, I'm going to regret this," but I regret it and advise you not to do it. Anyway.), but the paper journal is for me. The online journal is for people to keep up with my life.
Of course, when I started this thing -- as I was just saying to Garrett -- blogging wasn't hip. It's been very interesting to watch the online community move from journals to blogs, and the whole thing makes me wonder where the hell we'd be if the Net hadn't sprung up. We weren't prepared, generally speaking, for the Net. Marith says that H.G. Wells predicted computers, and I know Larry Niven predicted flash crowds, but I don't think anybody saw the potential of blogs bringing down Trent Lott. Now, I don't know that blogging is 100% responsible for that, but it seems like it's at least partially responsible.
There are a hell of a lot of good political blogs out there. There are a lot of bad ones, too. I just think it's a little weird that I feel like my journal ought to be one of them. That's not where it started out, and I perhaps feel like I should have evolved a bit. OTOH, politics these days just piss me off pretty much across the board, and there's only so much point in working myself into a froth. Usually I can get worked into a froth by other people's blogs, and evidently that will have to do.
Sleeeeeeepy. Probably it would help if I went and took a shower, which I haven't done yet. OTOH, I have managed to get to the post office and send off the last two boxes of stuff.
I have to make some more goodies. I have to finish cleaning the house. I have to do something else the very idea of which makes my eyes so sleepy I can't even think of what it is. Oh. It's wrap presents. Right. I remember. I have to do more laundry, too. Boy, do I know how to have fun or what?
Ok, off to shower. First things first.
All hail Ted! The carpets are clean! Everything looks much nicer. The bathroom is half cleaned; the fumes drove me out. I'll give it another go later tonight. There is art on the walls in the bedroom, which now looks much more finished than it did. We're working on getting the Christmas tree up. And getting dinner. And I made fudge. And Jai called and went AUGH because she had to stop reading Urban Shaman to go do some other stuff, and Silkie is AUGHing because she doesn't want me to change the opening chapter of Angles at all, and it's really very sleepy out.
Ooo. Perhaps I'll go put some hooks up and hang a sword on the wall!
Sleepy. Been out shopping most of the bloody day. All the Christmas shopping is done. Um, well, all of it except my Mom hasn't said what else she might want for Christmas, so I only have one thing for her, which seems insufficient. *sulk* Anyway. It is, however, done besides that!
I have to go clean the bathroom in a few minutes. I'm procrastinating. :)
Two Weeks Notice was pretty cute. Also, it was only 90 minutes long, which I'm discovering I appreciate in a movie these days.
Good day! I went to a writer's critique group this morning and came away convinced I need to rewrite the first chapter of Angles entirely; too much description that doesn't add to the overall story, and it cuts into the action too much, and yeah. Needs rewriting.
Then did Christmas shopping! Got all Ted's shopping done! Not much more to buy, now! Yaaay!
_Do_ need to clean the house and put up the Christmas tree. :)
Everybody is going to TTT and loving it! yaay! *beam*
Irrational surges of panic about writing, today. Since I've got one book at a publisher and one book that's not yet rewritten to send to one, I'm not sure why I'm panicking, but I'm panicking anyway. . o O ( what if it's as bad as all the other slush? what if somebody's having a bad hair day when they pick it up? what if what if what if? )
o.o
We were sucked in by the power of the One Ring last night! I want a Sean Astin. Can I have one? Some pretty spoiler-free comments follow.
We were discussing, after the movie, that we'd like for Peter Jackson to do The Hobbit, which made Shaun say if Jackson did The Hobbit, that Shaun wouldn't be able to buy the DVDs until the Complete Definitive Swear To God This Time We Really Mean It End All and Be All Super-Duper Extra-Special Nifty Whoo Boy You Couldn't Wait For This, Could You? Packaged With Your Very Own Real Live Sean Astin, Every 100th Comes With Legolas version of the DVDs came out.
I'd put in the Sean Astin bit and Ted or Shaun said the Legolas bit, and then I wanted to upgrade. Although I'd rather have Aragorn, but y'know. :)
In other news ... there is no other news. :)
1. If Sean Astin doesn't get a Best Supporting Actor out of this trilogy, I'm going to hurt something. Just like the first movie, I enjoyed it all, but my *God* I *believe* Samwise.
2. Gollum rocked. Oh my god. And again: oh my God.
3. The Ents were pretty good, although I thought they were better in concept than in actual practice. They looked like stop-motion animation to me, and I don't _like_ stop-motion animation, and there was too much bluescreen stuff with Pippin and Merry riding around on Treebeard. None-the-less, storming Sauromon's tower was pretty awesome.
4. Ted told me Aragorn actually ends up with Arwen (I haven't read the books). I was stunned. I was sure he'd end up with the human chick. *boggle* I guess True Love Conquers All!
5. This movie had no beginning or end. I mean, it really didn't. This is clearly a movie for people who have seen the first one. It is also clearly a movie which is going to be finished later. Very much a Middle Part. Ted says it ended differently than the book -- earlier than the book -- but it would've taken another 45 minutes to get to where the book ends, and it was already 3 hours long.
6. Legolas swinging himself onto a horse is very nifty. Elfs is cool.
7. Gimli is funny. :)
8. Sean Astin rocks.
Dentist appointment today. It's cold out. And that's about all I've got to say. :)
It occurred to me today that if I wanted to get Angles finished by the end of the year, that I was going to have to actually start editing it. It's sort of like Sarah taking a break to relax her brain and forgetting she needed to get Chase edited. :) I was doing sort of the same thing. "Doo dee doo dee doo, should finish by the end of the year, oh, wait, that means I need to /work/ on it, doesn't it?" Right. So I got 7 chapters edited this afternoon and then my brain turned to goo. Still, 7 chapters isn't bad. :)
My busts are here!
(Yes, yes, of course they are, where else would they be?)
I mean, my Rogue and Gambit busts, which I ordered back in February or March. The paint job on the Gambit is very very nice, which is, I believe, due to the fact that it's #22 out of 1000, and they're hand-painted. The Rogue's paint job is ... not nearly so good. Especially the mouth, which is fairly awful, and I think the color of the yellow in the uniform is kind of vile. It's #630 out of 1000, so I think the painters were going BORED NOW. Anyway, yay, they're here! Yay!
Some site maintenance stuff: Deirdre, Gavin & Breic have an photo album of their own in the gallery now. The pictures of pregnant Deirdre have been moved there. David Forbes' memorial service photos are up now, although not yet captioned. For those of you who were waiting for them, sorry it took so long; I just finally got Little online again after the move. Speaking of which, there are some new house photos, although I think I linked to them earlier when I had them just stuffed in a directory, so they might not be all that new. And lastly, the 1000 drawings project is finally underway.
I think that's everything.
Got up and gymmed this morning, then had a piece of fudge for breakfast. There may be something flawed in this workout structure...
A posting from Deirdre, telling all about her having a baby:
we are good!
it's actually spelled Breic!
his head has made a dramatic return to almost normal (or at least what i assume was normal :) he looks so different than he did at birth!
amazing. did i mention that i got to pull him out of me? he came out past his shoulders and i looked down and there was this BABY sticking halfway out of me! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
gavin and mom said my eyes almost fell out of my head. that was a trip. also a trip was my first glimpse of the little cone of his head :)
rather inspirational for the next ten minutes or however much longer it took. pushing was weird and hard to get the hang of. sort of like trying to push a bowel movement, aiming about 6 inches beyond your body.
gavin got to cut the cord :) we're both sore as dogs today, there was one particularly effective postition in which i braced off of him a LOT. that was the hardest and most intense thing i've ever done in my life. which i expected but it's just not POSSIBLE to expect it on the level at which it actually is. wow. BUT totally worth it, thank heavens remembering pain and experiencing it are two such different things. or we'd be a world of one child families :) TOTALLY worth it, immediately as soon as he was out of me i thought.
i put vitamin E oil straight on the little cuts that i think i received from his very long fingernails (he came out with a couple little scabs on his face from cutting himself in utero) and they've healed already. praise vitamin E!
he is so amazing! it's so amazing that a separate LIFE just came out of me! and good natured! he really is. he hasn't really cried at all, except right when he came out, and he stopped as soon as he got warm (which was quickly). Julia, one of the midwives, did a home visit today and did a PKU test which involved drawing blood from his little heel and he just gave a squeak at the prick and recovered just about immediately. bled all he needed to and then stopped. how clever of him :) tough little baby! hopefully he'll stay so cheerful :)
gavin was AWESOME, he's still pretty wiped out. i have the mommy hormones to help me recover but it was SO intense emotionally, and he breathed through every contraction with me and did all the sympathetic pushing that he could... also held me up in one position which must've WORKED his back and arms.
i can fit into normal pants! wow. mom's a little pissed about that :) she said i'd better not tell that to very many people who've had babies, if i expect them to still love me. :D or words to that effect. :)
Mary Lou (midwife #1, Julia ended up not attending because she had a sick child and an out of town husband, so another one, Jamie, came in instead) had a dream two days prior that we had a red headed baby boy. and there he was. :) she's, like, meant for her job, i think.
i love you guys very very much! we will get pictures posted ASAP. love!
deirdre
Failed my roll to go put the ms in the mail. The line at the post office was an hour long. Iiiiiii don't think so. I'll have to get over there tomrrow. Hmph.
Run spell check 900 times, fix the tyops that people pointed out that spellcheck woulldn't catch, fix the lead/led issues, looks up the words spellcheck doesn't recognize, finish the formatting, get the good paper. Name, address, phone number, email, and wordcount on the front page. Title, byline, am I missing anything. No? No.
Time to PRINT THIS BITCH OUT.
(89 pages in: of course I forgot something. I forgot to make sure the header font was consistent with the body font. Dammit, dammit, dammit. But I'm not throwing out a quarter of the ms's worth of paper because the numbers are in the wrong font. *mutter*)
I just came across this headline: "FDA approves childhood vaccine"
I had no *idea* you could vaccinate against childhood.
(The actual story is here; it's actually a new combination vaccination that will let kids only have 3 shots instead of 9. But damn, that's really not what the headline suggests.)
Fwsh. I want to be writing, not working. I am, unsurprisingly, wanting to work on the next Walker Papers book. :) However, much as I want to futz around with that, I have to do real work, as I have a code freeze at the end of the day.
My exceedingly cool coworkers got me a $100 gift certificate to Home Depot as a housewarming gift. I told them I'd make a note, "Supplied by CHI", on the shelves it bought. :)
I wish I would stop hacking. I've got a small rattle of a cough in my throat that keeps bothering me. This has been a very extended cold.
Let's see, what else. Anything else? I have a nephew! *beam*
book finished. author very tired. must remember to check for consistency of missing hole/o through ms before printing.
I'm very tired.
We went to the Young Dubliners last night at the Bear Tooth Theatre, and it was an *outstanding* show, but it didn't start until 11:30 and didn't get over til 1am. I spent 90 minutes jumping up and down and dancing, which was very fun (and best of all, my back is perfectly fine today! I think I'm healed!) and made me wish I knew people to go dancing with up here (2 nights a week of 3 hours of dancing each would go a long way towards melting off some of this fat I'm carrying around), because I love it so much.
Then we got up this morning and went to brunch, which was being hosted by Ted's company, and Ted won a $50 gift certificate to Barnes & Noble, so after we went shopping for 1. food and 2. good paper for printing manuscripts on, we went to B&N and spent most of the gift certificate. Came home, and I got chapters 24-28.5 edited on the Word file, and then I ran into the part that actually needs to be rewritten, so instead of doing that I went to the gym and had a fairly decent workout. Unfortunately, while we were gone, the dog found soem piece of carpet somewhere to chew up. :(
So I ate dinner and now I'm staring at the rest of this manuscript, and at the time. Punch Drunk Love is playing at 7:40 at the Bear Tooth, and -- oh. I see it's playing the rest of the week, too. I don't actually *have* to go tonight if I want to see it on the big screen. OTOH, I really don't feel much like writing, and the only thing I really kind of /do/ feel like doing is making Christmas goodies, but nobody in the house is eating them except me and I don't know that I've actually got it together enough to send boxes of stuff out to people this year, and I don't want to be the only person eating all the sweets I'm making. I mean, what's the point? :P
I'm an aunt!
Deirdre had her baby at 9:12am this morning, an 8 pound 3oz baby boy named Braic Hugh who has copper-penny red hair! What a surprise that is! Especially since Deirdre and I were bald until we were five! Well, not really, but we didn't have much hair for a long time, and when we did it came in brown. :)
Wow! Congratulations to Deirdre and Gavin!
Now we have to go buy Ted some new tennies, because Chanti ate his. *sigh*
Done editing the hard copy of US. I'm done for the day, with 23 of the 30 chapters edited in the doc file. Don't let me forget to run a spellcheck, and to do an individual word search on the word 'led', which I misspell as 'lead' with remarkable consistency (my Mom pointed this out when I was writing Angles; I had no idea).
I just took the Which SF writer are you? test (link courtesy of Teresa Neilsen Hayden) and came up either Frank Herbert or Isaac Asimov. There are worse fates. :)
Ups and downs! Big up: I /did/ email M. Brust with the log, and he was greatly entertained by it. (Garrett and Henry both said, "You *didn't*." But I did!) Down: Spider magazine rejected my short story. Snif. I'll have to find somewhere else to submit it to! Hmph!
I have succumed to the vampire name meme, mostly because I really rather like mine:
The Great Archives determine you to have gone by the identity: Marion Vigée-Lebrun, Known in some parts of the world as Leto of Gypsies. The Great Archives Record: A traveller of travellers, of good humour but dangerous.
There is tremendous silliness going on on Too this morning, all due to the publication of Steven Brust's The Paths of the Dead, which is written in a manner something like this:
"My friend! How long has it been since we have met?"
"Friend, I do not know; could it be years already?"
"It could be years, and yet my heart says it is not: and yet again, there are lines on my face and yours which were not there when last I looked upon your visage."
"Then if it has been years, my friend, we must now celebrate!"
"Celebrate! If you would do me the honor, sir, I would buy you a drink!"
"Ho, what is this? No, I must insist: _I_ will buy the rounds..."
Bryant and Lance have just finished reading this book, and you might guess what their conversation is like this morning.
I am, in fact, extremely tempted to email a log of their conversation to M. Brust. :)
I need more hours in the day. Or, better yet, I need to be independently wealthy so I can spend the hours of the day doing what I want instead of working. I could get an art degree in 2 or 3 semesters, for example, if I could go to school full time, and that'd be very keen! Sadly, that has nothing to do with reality. If I could figure out a way to actually pay for the classes (which, incidentally, reminds me that I ought to send in the student loan form to see if they'll give me any money) I might be able to swing as many as 2 classes a semester, rather than full-time, but I can't decide if that's worth the bother. I could accomplish ... not quite the same thing, probably, but certainly accomplish becoming a better artist on my own by getting up an hour earlier and drawing, which would be 1. less expensive and 2. much much less inconvienent as far as work is concerned.
This is all Ursula's fault.
Speaking of which (sort of), if I intend to swim tomorrow morning, I should go to bed now so I can get up early enough to do that.
G'night.
Ehehe! I got my NaNoWriMo t-shirt in the mail today! I'd forgotten I ordered it, so it was a very nice surprise! I told myself that if I broke 50K words by the end of November, I'd reward myself with one of the 'No plot? No problem!' t-shirts. And I did, so I did! Heheheh!
In a fit of record-breaking quickness, I got the new copy of Amnesia Moon in the mail last night, and promptly checked to make sure it had pages 25-56, although I cannot imagine that PNH didn't also check before sending it. It did, so I'll have to read it this weekend. :)
Mac&cheese for lunch. Every time I have mac&cheese now, I'm reminded of Ted saying to Anthony and Mary that, left to my own devices, I would eat nothing but mac&cheese, and Tony saying, "How very *guy* of you," to me. :)
I gymmed! Actually gymmed! Weight lifted and everything! It was kind of a short and not *terribly* exertionful workout, but since 1. I'm still coughing and 2. I haven't done this in a long time and I didn't want to make myself sick, mildly low-key is okay. Besides, I worked out hard enough to make my arms wibbly, so I think I did okay.
I'm feeling better, mentally, even if it's 5 after 8 and I've been up 2 hours already. I woke up at 5. For some reason my own personal sleep patterns seem to feel that if I'm going to get up before, oh, about 8, that I ought to get up at 5. I didn't get up then, but I did tell myself very firmly that I was going to have to get up at 6 even if I was very tired. Consequently I only sort of half slept for the next hour, but I *did* get up. Yay me!
Chantico didn't chew anything up last night, although she did finish the job on my shoe when we went to dinner last night.
Tomorrow night: Star Trek Nemisis! Saturday night: Young Dubliners! Yay!
Poor Ted has a migraine and stayed home today. I just heard him speaking firmly to the dog, who hasn't been *newly* bad, but man, did she make a mess of the rug and my shoe. (I just spelled 'stayed' 'staid' and 'shoe' 'shoo'. *sigh*)
It finally snowed! I put the dog out on the long lead for a while so she could romp in the snow. She dug, of course. *beats head on wall*
Well. Chantio stayed out of her kennel last night and ate not only one of my shoes and a rug, but also a pound of fudge.
*sigh*
Feh. I'm just not very good at making toffee. I tried making a half batch, because I have yet to successfully make a full batch, and I thought I remembered that half batches worked better.
Now I remember that it was quarter batches that worked better.
Feh.
I think I garlicked most of the rest of my cold out of my system. My ears are still a little poppy, but mostly I'm breathing easily again and I'm not coughing. Yay!
I have a new goal in life. I want to be as sexy at 70 as Ian McKellan is.
(Marith said, "Goodness. You do aim high.")
I will have to start working towards sexiness tomorrow, because today I have eaten more fudge than God could shake a stick at. :)
(Actually, hopefully tomorrow this damned cough will be gone and I'll be able to gym in some fashion or other. *snivel*)
Thinks to do this week:
1. apply for stupid student loans
2. apply for Irish passport
3. fill out Nathan & Cecilia's paperwork
4. fill out 401k paperwork
5. christmas shop
6. go to the bloody postoffice and send gifts
7. eat too much fudge
8. figure out who to ask for letters of recommendation for grad school applications
9. make a christmas wishlist
Ooh, the people next door are repainting. I just opened the blinds and can see into the house across from ours' sliding doors, and the room is all empty except a ladder and a guy with a paint roller.
My dog just abandoned her peanutbutter ball in hopes of getting a slice of orange from me. What a weird dog.
13 days. 13 days, and the light will start to come back.
An excellent day today, despite, or perhaps because of, not getting up until 10. I read two books which I hadn't read since the 80s and to my delight, they were as good as they were back then. (The books in question are The Unicorn Quest and The Unicorn Dilemma, which are part of the Unicorn Saga, by John Lee; I found the 5th book in the series, which I hadn't known existed, at Title Wave about a year or 18 months ago, gawped, said, "I don't have this book!" and rushed it home to sit with the rest of the series, which I wanted to re-read before I read book 5, since I bought and read the first book in 1986, when it came out, and, y'know, I'd kind of lost the continuity of the storyline o.o. So Ted's been re-reading David Eddings books, and I've got this huge pile of books I haven't actually ever read before, and I kept thinking I should read those instead of revisiting old material, but Ted's re-reading made me decide it was okay to re-read instead of reading fresh, and plus, I wanted to read them more than any of the other books I've got lying around, so I did! Hah! Take that! Gosh, what a long parenthetical statement this is turning out to be. While I'm at it, I'll mention that Shaun asked what I was reading, and I said I'd read the first two books of the Unicorn Saga, and he said, "By ... Lee?" And I said yeah, and he said something along the lines of, "How pathetic, I haven't even read them, but people are ALWAYS coming in to Title Wave and asking about those," which amazed me, because I had this vague idea I was the only person in the world who'd actually read them. Huh!)
Then I made a turkey pot pie for dinner, and that turned out pretty well, and I followed it up with an excellent batch of fudge. Hah!
So I'm sitting here with clogged up ears and trying to get them to clear, and it reminded me of when we went to California when I was 12. On the plane trip on the way down, my ears popped, and for three weeks they wouldn't clear, and I couldn't hear for beans. Drove my mom absolutely insane. She thought I was just being a jerk, because every time somebody would say something, I'd say, "What?" She must've cleared about six pounds of earwax out of my ears, because every time I'd say "What?" she'd clean my ears out again. They finally cleared when we flew back to Alaska.
This childhood memory brought to you by coughing and the letter S.
Know what I'd like for Christmas? Ice skates. Ice skates that fit my fat feet.
I should tell somebody in my family that. :)
How peculiar. Email in my inbox from Steven Brust and Patrick Nielsen Hayden inside the same thirty days. Granted, because I emailed them both on different topics, but none the less, very peculiar.
I emailed PNH because I started reading this copy of Amnesia Moon that Trent sent me. I got to page 24, and the book started over. I mean, entirely. Title page, dedication page, copyright page, everything exactly replicated except for the author's signature on the main title page. When it reached page 24 again, the next page was 57.
So I went and looked all over the net to see if this was a common error or if by some mad chance Jonathan Lethem, who is the author and who is a little weird, had possibly done this on purpose. I couldn't find anything on the net. So after looking for an hour, I emailed PNH and TNH to ask about it, because it's a Tor book. Mostly to find out if, like, the whole batch had turned out like that or if I'd just gotten lucky, rather than trying to get a new copy, since it's apparently still in print. Anyway, PNH emailed back and said it was probably a bindery error (which I'd gleaned from reading the Tor site, but I still thought it odd to find no mention on the net) and to give him my address and he'd see about getting me a new copy.
The thing I think is _really_ peculiar is that Trent sent me this dysfunctional copy. I mean, I gather he's read the book, and since he stuffed it in the box of Buffy tapes, I'm assuming he read this *copy*, rather than going out and fetching me a new one, but why on earth would you send a person a book with twenty-five missing pages if you'd read the book?
Of course, it was published in 1996, so maybe he'd read it a long time ago and had forgotten it was broken.
In other news, we went to Treasure Planet today, and I really enjoyed it a great deal. I thought it was a very nice adaptation, and I thought it was by *far* the best blend of traditional and computer animation I've seen. (Generally I loathe combining traditonal and computer animation; it looks tremendously clunky and fakey to me, because they're two entirely different mediums, but this was _very_ nicely done.) Then we rented (well, several things, but relevantly for the evening) The Legend of Bagger Vance, which I also quite enjoyed. I'm not sure why the critics panned it so much; Charlize Theron was sort of awful in places, and it wasn't exactly action-filled, but for pity's sake, it's a movie about golf. And I liked it. So there! Ahem. :)
And, er, um. Oh! Mom finished re-covering our couch, so now instead of a blue 3 cushion couch, we have a kahki ... khaki? Kakhi? You get the idea. Two cushion couch! I'll take a picture tomorrow. :)
(I'm feeling better, if you couldn't tell.)
Better today. Not well, but better. I've managed to lose three pounds. Heh. o.o
Sadly, one of the lights in the office is out, and I'm afraid if I try to change the light I'll get dizzy and fall over, so I'm sort of sitting around in the semi-dark (I actually turned the overhead off and turned Ted's florescent desk lamp on; now it's buzzing, sigh).
I need to go downstairs and get 1. food, 2. aspirin, 3. water. I'm feeling very much as if I don't write things down right now, I may never accomplish them. I also need to pay bills, try emailing Tor again, and figure out what paperwork I need to send my 401k people to prove I bought a house with the loan I took out against my 401k.
Oh yes. Here are some pictures of the moose who visited our nice green backyard yesterday. o.O
I'm hacking up horrible yellow gunk and coughing so much my ribs itch. I do not like being sick at all.
Zilli seems to think that the new bed is especially for him.
Aaaaand I would like you all to say hello to my friend Sarah, the NOVELIST! Sarah finished writing her first novel last night! YAAAAAAAAAAY SARAH!
3900 words written today. 67K words written total. 45 chapters. 353 pages, in double-spaced 12pt Courier font. One novel, finished.
*very slightly smug look*
1690 words. I may be able to wrap it up in the next chapter, or it might take one more short epiloguey sort of chapter after that. I will finish tonight.
I have a cold. Apparently sleeping at that great elevation made me sick. :( My ears itch and my throat hurts and my nose is stuffy, and I'm eating oranges and drinking water in hopes of ridding myself of it. Snivel.
Mutter. 1600 words tonight, another chapter finished, and I've still got two to go. I've stopped for the night, because I don't feel like writing another two chapters tonight. Gotta start earlier tomorrow.
It's *raining*. It's the second of December and it's five hours past sunset and it's *raining*. What the *hell*.
In other news, I made a terrible batch of fudge. I've never done that before. I'm sending it to work with Shaun tomorrow. (It's not *that* bad. It's ... adequate.)
Bed! Bed! Bed!
What the photo doesn't properly show is that the top of the mattress is square with my hipbone in height. The bed actually has little steppy things so you can get up into it, but they cost $99 each and we didn't have that right now. :) But it's cool! And it has under-the-bed storage! Two drawers on each side, and a Square Box on each side, and the door on the end there opens up and there's a 6' long empty space between the drawer sets! Perfect for losing cats in!
Yay! Bed! The rough draft of the house is now done! :)
61K, 41 chapters, 323 pages, and I think I've still got two chapters to go. I've written 4400 words today and I'm trying to decide if I'm all written out for the night. I think I might be, because in order to finish I have to write at least 3K words, and if I write more, I'm likely to want to finish, and I don't think I feel like doing 7500 words today.
I went to see The Goonies today. It was pretty wonderful. :)