catching up

This is a post of things that are totally unrelated to each other. Just so you know.

I haven’t been swimming. My shoulder’s doing better, by and large (though I think I spent too much time knitting last night, or possibly yesterday’s brief spate with free weights should have been done with the lighter weights, because it’s faintly achy today), and I’d been thinking that okay, I really should get back to the pool and that I could give it one more week’s rest and start after we got back from Belfast. And then yesterday we got a notification the pool will be closed for maintenance the second half of August. Doh. Oh well, two more weeks of not swimming won’t hurt my shoulder, that’s for certain.

And speaking of Belfast, there’s going to be an attempt at breaking the world record for the largest number of pirates gathered in one place on Saturday. They need more than 1500 pirates to break the record. I cannot wait to get pictures of the quays teeming with pirates and tall ships!

Probably everybody knows by now that John Hughes, director of our childhoods, died yesterday. He was only fifty nine, and although he’d apparently retired from movie-making a decade or more ago, he left a hell of a legacy. I’d been thinking recently that I needed to buy The Breakfast Club, because I haven’t seen it in years. Now I think I will.

It seems like fully half the people I know are at Worldcon. I am envious. And *wow*, the whole blogosphere/Twitter/Facebook thing makes not being there a great deal more immediate. Of course, it means I can find out everything that’s going on even if I’m not there… :)

Hair nattering behind the cut because only Blue Haired Angie might care, and she’s not reading LJ much these days anyway. :)

I’m growing my hair out, although this is kind of hard to tell because my interpretation of “growing my hair out” tends to be “keep it quite short until the stuff on top reaches a length with the cheekbone-length cut of the rest of it”. I do this because my hair is very very very *very* straight, and I think it looks like absolute crap if it’s layered, which is what effectively happens if you just grow it all out instead of giving the top a chance to catch up. Anyway, it’s reaching the all-the-same-length point, and now I’m stuck in a terrible quandry: bangs or no bangs?

I’m kinda thinking bangs, because I haven’t had them for about a decade, so it’d just be something *different*. It’d delay the Return of the Rogue Stripe indefinitely, but since that’s a year, year and a half away at the soonest anyway, I’m not sure it’s a convincing argument in favor of !bangs. So I might cut some tomorrow. *looks thoughtful*

*laughs* Poor Lucy. Her tail is shaped like a crooked finger, and the other evening she was in the kitty bed, which has a crocheted kitty cozy in it. The cozy got caught on her tail, the poor thing, and she leapt out and spun in circles on the hardwood floor going, “Meeeeeewwww!” in this high thin pathetic voice. I got up and she instantly stopped spinning and just looked up at me with big sad kitty eyes while I rescued her. She’s a bit smarter than Zilli in that regard: he’d have run like hell all over the house, but Lucy seems to have a fundamental grasp of the ways in which humans can be useful. She doesn’t object to her toenails being clipped, either, because I think she’s learned to associate five minutes of nail clipping with *not* sticking to the carpet.

has some interesting things to say about the positive nature of being friends with talented people: I realize that having friends who are always doing something amazing, new books, new plays, new movies, whatever motivates me to work harder, lest I have nothing to bring to Show and Tell. Of course, Kyle Cassidy is friends with Neil Gaiman, which sort of puts him in a whole different level of “friends who do cool things” than most of us even dream of being in. :)

I think today’s kind of a day off. I may work on the short story down in the living room instead of making any real attempt at new words. Yes. That sounds good. Also I have plans to go to the Farmers’ Market. That’ll be good too. :)

I’m certain there were other things I was going to mumble on about, but I can’t think of any right now, and this is probably a long and eclectic enough post as it is. Off to feed the cats & go to the market!