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Posts Tagged ‘personal’

important e-mail note

Sundell.net is down, so I can’t access that e-mail account at the moment. And it may stay that way for a few days. This is, among other things, the address my LJ comment notifications go to, so I won’t be alerted if you respond to anything I’ve said here or on someone else’s post. (I could switch it over, but eh. I just know as soon as I jump through that hoop, sundell.net will come back up and I’ll have to jump through it again.)

(On second thought, that might be a good way to fix the problem . . . .)

If you need to get in touch with me about anything important or time-critical, e-mail marie dot brennan at g mail dot com instead.

eeeeee!

THANK YOU, NEIL GAIMAN.

Because you posted tonight about watching the Perseids, thus reminding me that we’re at (well, one day past) the peak. So I ran outside and wandered around until I found the darkest spot I was going to get short of hopping in the car and driving into the hills (and believe me, I thought about it), and I stood on the sidewalk with my head craned all the way back and my hands cupped around my eyes to block out the street lamps, and then I saw something that might have been a faint streak. Then another, near the edge of my glasses, where I wasn’t really looking. Then a third, bright and clear, right in the middle, with a brief trail just to prove I hadn’t made it up.

Tonight, I saw the first shooting stars of my life.

Awesome.

back now

Approximately twenty-two hours transit time for six waking hours on the ground in Minneapolis. >_<

But I got to see family, which was nice.

fyi

I’m going to be mostly away from the computer for the next three days, so if you have anything urgent, uh, contact me telepathically or something.

Donald Dickey, 1918?-2009

My maternal grandfather passed away today, the last of my grandparents to go. He was 91.

Closing comments, not because I’m too upset to deal with them — I’m not; I’m doing okay — but because they just don’t seem right. That social pattern is wrong for this situation, at least in my head.

home again

I got home last night and crashed hard. Was passing out on the couch by 10 p.m., fell asleep in record time once I actually shambled upstairs to bed, slept like the dead.

I’m in the process of responding to comments on my trip posts, and also answering e-mails. I haven’t read LJ since late May, so if you posted anything I should know about, let me know; no way I’m trying to catch up on all that back matter.

So very nice to be home again.

The Swan’s Recipe for Improving Your Day

1) Wake up to find something has gone wrong.

2) Realize something else has gone wrong, too.

3) Have the second wrong thing be fixed by your wonderful husband (or other suitable figure).

4) Feel much better about Wrong Thing #1, simply because it doesn’t have company anymore.

Mind you, it would be better still without Step 1, but apparently you can’t have everything.

Birdies are twittering madly away outside my window.

(And not in the 140-character sense.)

The seasons here are different from those in temperate climes, and not so distinctly marked, but it’s been a while since I heard birds in the courtyard trees. A small sign of change.

FINALLY!

I’ve been in California for seven months, and I finally felt my first earthquake.

What’s funny is that it didn’t feel like what people told me it would. In fact, it happened twenty minutes ago, but I wasn’t sure it was an earthquake until just now, when the USGS map updated. More than anything, it felt like a reeeeeeeally big gust of wind came along and knocked my building a bit sideways, like when you’re in a car and a semi goes whooshing past — but I seriously doubt any gust of wind is big enough to make this entire row of townhouses rock like that. Sure enough: earthquake. 4.3, ESE of San Jose.

I know I’ve experienced a billion and one earthquakes since coming here, but none of them big enough that I noticed them. Now I have. I can mark that off my checklist.

Tonight’s packing-induced revelation

I am somehow taken by surprise every time I notice something is wearing out.

What, you mean I can’t wear a pair of pants, or a shirt, or shoes, for eight or ten years and have them still be in good condition? You mean these things are less durable than, say, the Pyramids of Giza?

Somehow this both startles and offends me, as if it is not the natural order of things.

Well, at least I get my money’s worth out of what I own. But it’s very annoying to me when something falls apart after less than a decade of constant wear. I mean, really.

File Under “Sad But True”

Conventions have become my major reason for cutting my hair.

For those of you who don’t know: it’s down to somewhere in my waist-to-butt range, depending on when I last got it cut. It got that long because in high school I fell into a pattern where I’d forget to get it cut for, oh, a year at a time? I’m better now, but I still regularly go six months or more without thinking about it. And when I do think of it . . . yeah, it’s often because I’m about to go to a con and decide I should clean up the ends a bit.

Which is a wordy way of saying I got three inches whacked off today, and ICFA was the occasion. I head out on Wednesday, and am looking forward to poolside conviviality that legitimately doubles as work.

Between now and then, though — time for some work-work.

learning to walk all over again

I’m currently test-driving a Kinesis keyboard, and man, it’s like having to learn to walk again after being in a wheelchair or something. The basics are okay, but so far we’ve discovered that somewhere in between my earliest typing lessons and now I started hitting the C key with my index finger instead of my middle finger — which doesn’t work at all well on this; I keep getting V instead — and also that I’ve become very habituated to certain habits of motion when it comes to things like Ctrl+C, Alt+Tab, and other such keyboard shortcuts, which do not work at all the same with this layout. The placement of Space and Backspace, on the other hand, has been surprisingly easy to adjust to.

Unfortunately, it makes a sound on the computer with every keystroke, and I’m not sure how to turn that off.

Not sure how I’m going to approach this experiment. I was warned that the learning curve on the Kinesis can be unpleasant (but brief), so the best thing to do is bull through, but on the other hand this is slowing me down distinctly, and now is maybe not the best time for me to interfere with my ability to type. Then again, is there ever a good time? When you make your living with your keyboard, probably not.

Anyway, I’ve annoyed myself with this for long enough right now; time to go do something that doesn’t feel like trying to untie a knot by looking in a mirror.

I am surprised.

I honestly expected the two fairy-tale options in the poll to come in somewhere near the bottom — I figured people would look at them, shrug at Yet Another Fairy Tale Retelling, and vote for something else. But I woke up this morning to find them in the lead, and they’re still #1 and #3 as of this posting.

Which is encouraging, because my brain has been giving off hints that the ghost-princes story (which is currently leading by a good margin) is about the speed it’s up to this month. I was going to try and save the non-researchy stories for later in the year, but I think now might be a dandy time to relax with one.

In the meantime, today has been pretty thoroughly productive, and the last couple hours of it has involved (work-related) reading in front of the fire. It’s one of the few points on which I have no interest in being all Californian and environmentally conscious: I don’t care if burning wood is bad for the environment, I like doing it. Fake fires are not the same; you need the crackle and the conscientious tending of the fuel, or else it doesn’t count. I’m very happy to be living in a townhouse with a working fireplace, and really should have made use of it before tonight.

Tree bad. Fire pretty. ^_^

I need a hobby.

No, really.

I say this now because today kniedzw and I will be hosting our annual Outrageous Clothing Mockery Oscars party, and that means a lot of time spent sitting and watching the TV. And when I do that — or anything else that engages my eyes and brain, but not my hands (i.e. books are exempt) — I find myself very restless, needing to do something with my hands. If I’m table-top gaming, I keep rearranging my dice, not out of superstition but a need to occupy my hands. If I’m watching TV . . . let’s just say I know over a dozen varieties of solitaire, but after a while that gets boring.

I need a hobby.

The problem is, the obvious hobby — knitting — is not really useful here, because kniedzw already has our knitting needs (such as they are) covered. We have all the scarves we need, and aren’t in desperate need of hats or gloves or sweaters or suchlike. I could knit things for my cousins’ kids, maybe, but that moves it from the category of “random thing to do while watching TV” to “obligatory thing I must finish by X time because someone’s waiting for it/will outgrow it otherwise.” I don’t want to take on any more obligations. I want this to be something where if I don’t finish it for six months it’s no big deal. Crocheting is too similar to knitting, and we already have sufficient afghans in the house. Embroidery? It’s a possibility — especially if I learn more than the three stitches I presently know — but I’m not sure what I would make. We’ve already got embroidered dish towels, courtesy of my mother, and I don’t have any costume pieces in foreseeable need of it. (I think I was embroidering during the Oscars a couple of years ago, for the Changeling game.) Ditto inkle weaving, though I’d like to make use of the looms currently sitting around uselessly. I could learn to card weave, as I’ve been meaning to do for years, but at least in the short term it’s likely to occupy too much of my attention to be suitable for this situation. Maybe once I know the basics, it would work. And cross-stitching is once again covered by my mother. The only patterns I like are much too complicated for me to attempt, so I leave them to her.

Other possibilities? Maybe even ones that don’t involve textiles? (No, I don’t know why I default to thinking of Things Involving Thread.)

Welcome to Fantasyland

Cooking is not high up on my list of things I love to do, so it’s taken me until now to follow up on the slow cooker suggestions you all gave me a while ago.

On the joint recommendation of sarcastibich and amysun, my first attempt was your average beef stew: cow, potatoes, celery, carrots, onion, garlic, some corn just for variety. It worked, more or less: needed more seasoning, either flour or thinner-cut potatoes to thicken the liquid, and I’m curious to try it with tomatoes in, but on the whole, a success.

What was definitely a success? Walking in from karate to the warm and wondrous smell of food ready to be eaten RIGHT NOW. Dear Mom and Dad: thank you for the slow cooker; it is exactly what we needed.

I think my next experiment will be kendokamel‘s suggestion of the chicken-red wine-veggie thing, since it will use up the rest of my onion, celery, and carrots, and I like the idea of being able to chuck couscous into the pot right at the end. It will mean waiting five minutes or so before we can eat, but that can be while kniedzw hangs up our gi and I get out the silverware. (Why yes, I am ravenous after karate. How could you tell?)

Bit by bit, I’m beginning to actually cook, for values of “cooking” that don’t mean “chuck pre-made thing into oven/microwave/skillet.”

small favors

It isn’t actually a good thing that some confusion on my publisher’s end means my copy-edited manuscript isn’t here yet, but as it turns out, I’m just as glad; being dilated at the eye doctor’s renders me more or less useless for anything that involves reading. I’m managing this post, but it’s hard, and to read print I pretty much have to take off my glasses and hold the page two inches from my nose.

And my current Netflix haul is all subtitled, natch.

Today’s kind of shot, I’m afraid.

What’s awesome?

Getting a new computer.

What’s not so awesome?

Suffering a hard drive failure after less than a week.

At least Vista alerted me to the disk error and got me to back up the files I had changed or moved since shifting everything over, so I didn’t lose any data. And I don’t have to ship anything anywhere; a technician’s supposed to be coming by within the week to install the new hard drive.

But GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

‘puter! ‘puter! ‘puter!!!

New computer arrived today, replacing the 6-year-old box that could no longer maintain a wireless connection, and saving my laptop from the kind of continual usage it really isn’t built for.

It’s white. I don’t remember the last time I had a white computer.

Transferring files over from Puck now. Most of my programs are installed. Next I get the fun of re-setting various preferences and suchlike. Ah, the fun of a new computer. It’s blazingly fast, though, and I get to use all the pretty Vista features I disabled on Puck so as to maximize battery life. (Vista is pretty, though I’m still learning my way around its actual functioning.)

New ‘puter! <bounce>

this one goes out to all the cooks on my flist

This Christmas, kniedzw and I were the happy recipients of a new slow cooker. I expect it will be particularly useful on karate nights, when I come home at 9:15 ravenously hungry and wanting food NOW NOW NOW — but only if I know what to put in it before I leave.

So I turn to you, O Internets, for slow-cooker recipes. Please note the following constraints:

  • Spiciness is discouraged. If your attitude is, “it’s only a little spicy,” it will probably be too much for my poor weak palate.
  • I also don’t tend to eat mushrooms, or beans in large quantities. Yes, I’m aware my life would be easier if I could get over this whole picky-eater thing.
  • Bonus points for recipes that involve meat, veggies, and carbohydrates, all in one tasty dish. Exercise makes me crave an actual balanced diet.

Suggestions? This is a pretty small cooker — I think it’s maybe five or five and a half quarts — so we’re looking more for two-person-sized recipes with maybe some leftovers, not things that can feed a whole family.

There’s a box on my desk.

I have a box on my desk now, a box whose lid is sculpted into the shape of a pile of pens, and it has a Hemingway quote on the side that I disagree with, and I have put pens into it. It’s taking the place of the plastic Staples desk organizer my pens used to live in. Only that isn’t true; the organizer holds several other things (like rulers and pads of paper and my mini-stapler) that don’t fit into the Pen Box, not to mention more pens than the Pen Box can actually fit. So the plastic thing isn’t going away; it’s just moving onto the shelves behind me, where I don’t see it when I’m sitting at my computer, and in the meantime my Favored Pens get to live in the Pen Box on the desk, which makes me feel much more elegant and writerly because it’s not made of plastic.

This has no bearing on anything I actually do, but it feeds the ego and the self-image. As if I have upgraded my Writer Equipment, and by doing so, somehow upgraded a tiny piece of myself.

I figure, as long as I don’t forget how irrelevant this actually is — i.e. don’t fall into the consumerism trap — I’ll enjoy the illusion.