Baxil [bakh-HEEL'], n.
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Baxil" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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02:11 am
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NaNo update
Week 1: Muse frolics about in the playground, running from shiny thing to shiny thing, shouting "Wheee!" and exhausting herself on the slides and swings.
Week 2: Muse sulks at the edge of the playground because, when she built a huge sand castle directly underneath the slide, her friend Authorial Standards promptly came down without looking and squished it.
Week 3: Muse's sulking is interrupted by a Novella in a nearby van. "Want some candy, little girl?" he whispers in a husky yet strangely alluring tone. She gets too close to the vehicle, arms reach out, the door slams shut, and before she can scream they are 13,000 words down the road.
So, yeah, there go my pretensions of frittering NaNo away via the completion of dozens of scattered half-finished projects. I can't abandon my protagonist now! He's running from the authorities after spoiler spoi ler spoilersp oi le rspo iler! Plus, y'know, backstory! And the worldbuilding is all falling together! And and and ...
I'll have to figure out how I can "with one bound, Jack was free" my way out of the mess, so I can get back to the various requests and writing trades and finishing up of old projects and then planning out the Fireborn game that starts in December and catching up at work and and and augh. I'm glad November is just a part-time thing.
Anyway, NaNo user page has been updated with an excerpt from "The Time In Her Eyes." If you're interested in beta-reading and offering constructive feedback, drop me a line in some fashion; it's a neat enough story to be worth second-drafting once all the words come out.
How's your novel going, if you're writing? How's your month going, if not?
Current Location: ~/brainstorm
Current Mood:  wordful
Current Music: Bax's NaNo game music mix
Tags: misc life updates, writing
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04:07 am
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Upgrades and updates
My life seems to have gotten a little out of balance lately. I say this because it's a modestly better reintroduction after five weeks of silence than the traditional "*tap, tap* Hey, is this thing on?"
It's not that I've been too busy to write; I've got no less than three unfinished short stories (and some completed song lyrics) on the front burner. But that's the problem. For a while my creative urge just dried up (or sublimated into roleplaying, one of my ongoing offline activities that has happily picked up the pace). And now that fingers are hitting the keyboard again, there's such a backlog that I'm dancing around from project to project and falling back into my old bad habits of leaving everything 80% finished. And with so many stories crowding around seeking resolution, I've been putting off journaling in favor of fiction.
The good news is that this creative burst is carrying me into winter in high spirits, rather than a few months of endless freaking out over the weather and general lack of daylight. And procrastination has its fringe benefits: for instance, I'm up at nearly 4 AM putting some final polish on a relaunch of the TTU Wiki. I just upgraded its back-end software (after three years and seven releases), which was a lot less painful than I expected, so I wrote some custom code for it to make its category listings prettier (i.e., sorted by columns instead of rows, which is slightly less trivial than it sounds).
The wiki has been getting a lot of attention lately, actually. I'm really proud of the glossary of TTU slang, and there's now some excellent detail on events like the New Year's Flyby. And I finally fixed the permissions so that any registered user can make edits wiki-wide -- which should make it a lot friendlier as a collaboration tool.
All of which is well and good, but ... it's almost November, and you know what that means.
Yes: NaNoWriMo is upon us once again. And, 48 hours from the start of the race, I find myself dithering.
On the one hand, a lot of close friends are committing to write, and I really want to join them in solidarity. It would also do me good; some of my best work has come out of the frenzy of the November word-count dance. My creativity is currently working overtime and crying out for outlets.
On the other hand, I know, with great and terrible certainty, that if I make any sort of NaNo commitment, all of my half-done projects are going to die ignominious deaths, and that rankles. I've also got more social commitments than usual this year and don't feel like I could devote the time to NaNo that I really ought to. (I also wrote 50K words of Legend of Hero last year, and traditionally I've taken a year off after each NaNo success.)
I'm juggling a few ideas for "alternate" NaNos -- I'm no stranger to the idea, having moved from BaMoJoEnt to BaMoTTuSto to novels and back. Perhaps I could create a new page on the TTU Wiki every day, or go back to the classics and post some nonfiction every day? Or maybe I ought to just keep on keepin' on, and spend November finishing my 5-story backlog ...
Thoughts? I'm in a state of severe waffle here, so reader input (and especially fellow NaNo-er input) will go a long way toward helping me channel my pent-up writing bug.
Current Location: ~/laptop
Current Music: Jim's Big Ego, "She's Dead"
Tags: misc life updates, requests, writing
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10:14 pm
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August
This weekend, I noticed that the heat wave broke. Earlier, we had had the luxury of not noticing, indoors in front of our two-week-old air conditioner -- but while helping ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) firestrike move, in the heat of the day, in the middle of the Central Valley, the conclusion was inescapable. It was hot, but not ridiculous.
Elsewhere, friends are complaining about three-digit temperatures, or heat waves in cities that have never heard of "air conditioning"; clearly, summer has not yet left us. But here, the heat has receded. It has come and gone all season -- mostly stayed -- and now, as we trek into a new month, our blunting of heat's edge has taken on a sort of melancholy permanency. It doesn't help that, barely two days into August, our local pagan circle has already celebrated the first of its harvest rituals.
Summer is my favorite season. It is a season of fire -- and wherever life's path may take me, I am a dragon, and fire is my element. Summer is a season of action, of travel, of adventure; it stirs a wanderlust, fueling the flames of the soul. Even when it overwhelms my body (with temperatures in the range of, as the local patois puts it, "stupid hot"), it keeps my mind in motion; I am at my most productive, most fulfilled, most driven when my body's rhythms must keep pace with early mornings and endless afternoons. Around the Solstice, with twilight lasting past 9 p.m., with the sun greeting me no matter how late I leave the office, life feels natural -- I am finally fully in the flow of time.
Summer is also my season of birth, and July always brings with it a stretch of reflection on time's passage. I've been increasingly unsettled this year, and as the heat wave has fallen away and the end of the season looms, it has become obvious why: this moment in time, as summer falls away, is reflective of not just the season's passage but that of my own life.
We are born in winter, grow up in spring -- timidly pushing our way through snows and rains to blossom in the glow of lengthening days -- and come into full flower in glorious summer. There is endless time, days of unquenchable energy, to fuel any desire we dare to explore. Nothing is outside our reach. The heat of our lives is intense; passion drives us, and we dance, whirling in its grasp, barely thinking to breathe as we hurtle ourselves through the season.
Then something reminds us to pause, to look up. Perhaps it's the incrementally lengthening nights, the easing of the relentless heat, a few more dried-up streams as the last of the snow melts off of the mountains. The world is still alive, vibrant, endless, but we have a bit more comfort with which to pause and reflect, and it's not quite so simple to charge across the landscape in endless motion.
In midsummer, you are aware of these things as distant sensations, tickling at the edges of your consciousness. You've lost 15 minutes of sunlight per day; what of it? There is still so much summer left!
And then summer starts tumbling toward its end. Those 15 minutes turn into 45. The heat tempers. You're still in a season of motion, but there is no way to ignore the change in the air. Anything is still possible, but there is a growing sense that time is short, that soon you will be moving into a new phase, and that you could slip over that threshold at any time and not even realize it until hindsight kicks in. Perhaps you already have? A low-grade panic begins to whisper into your ear; is there anything you still wished to accomplish with this season that has not yet been addressed?
Part of you says, that's silly. You can range around the hills, sometimes, straight through to October; the rainy season is still months off. Part of you welcomes the change; as your world cools, some journeys become easier.
And part of you is screaming, clawing desperately for purchase as possibilities landslide away down the center of the hourglass.
I still have plenty of heat left -- both in the seasonal sense and the lifetime sense. But sooner or later, the dog days will shade into the long Indian summer.
I wish I could say that I was prepared for the change. But time will drift on regardless.
Current Mood:  melancholy
Current Music: Lisa Loeb, "Snow Day"
Tags: hiking, misc life updates
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02:34 pm
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GIP; and Legend of Hero: 048-050
I just added my 69th user icon. Huh-huh-huh. Insert innuendo here.
In other numerical-landmark news, my fantasy serial Legend of Hero just reached its 50th update! Yay! It's been a learning experience to transform "hasty NaNoWriMo novel" into "edited serial fiction", to have a single project occupy my mindset for such a sustained period of time, to meet self-imposed deadlines and push the story forward with new material and thrash into shape what was already there. I'm getting close to the end of the prewritten buffer, so in a lot of ways this is where the rubber hits the road (how long can I buckle down and start producing more new raw material at a sustainable pace?), but it also feels like an accomplishment to have gotten this far, another sign that I'm reaching the point of being able to write a saleable novel and/or other long-form fiction. It will happen.
Anyway ... 50. Wow! It feels like a birthday -- and where would a birthday be without gifts? Thanks to my readers who wrote reviews of LoH -- and to Web Fiction Guide's Drew Daniels, who just this weekend gave my serial a WFG editor's imprimatur with an official 4-star review and the praise "If you are an RPG Gamer you’ll have fun with this story."
The fun continues this week with a return to the main characters' explorations. Hurrah! David talks Kevin into visiting the Hall of Heroes again, shows off his new skills and equipment, and tries to teach Kevin how to unlock his own special attacks. And Trent? Don't think that he's out of the picture -- in fact, he has started his own investigation into the nature of the Shadowlands ...
The statistics-obsessed geeks among you (and you're in good company) should also visit LoH's Bonuses section, where several pages of David's Shadowlands game-system notes have now been unlocked. That way I can keep the elemental crystal stuff from becoming several thousand words of tedious exposition, while still peeling back the layers for those who care. :)
Current Location: ~spiral
Current Music: Scorpio Rising, "Goofball"
Tags: legend of hero, misc life updates
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11:13 pm
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1k
The good news: $2,000+ in tax refunds this year. Thank goodness for the Lifetime Learning Credit adding a silver lining to huge student loans.
The bad news: Sick. Crawling into bed once I get all my investment crap entered into our tax return.
May push back the LoH update tomorrow. We'll see how I feel.
EDITED TO ADD: Well, this was kind of an underwhelming entry for my 1,000th LJ post.
Current Location: ~/Brainstorm
Tags: misc life updates
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12:51 am
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In visual creative news
While I'm on the subject of my creative output: It struck me a week or two back how much actual artwork I've produced that I've never really shared. (Shown to people who have met me in person, sure, but never actually posted anywhere.)
I got a deviantArt account a while back to view friends' pictures. I never intended to put anything there. But it seems like a good place to open up another facet of my creative life, and the gallery features are a little less scattershot than with my LJ photo collection, so what the heck.
Go check out my art gallery -- and "friend"/"watch"/whateverthehelltheycall it me if you want. I'm uploading pictures a few at a time as the mood strikes me, so there will be more art to see if you keep an eye out.
Today's pictures feature Savi, the ambiguously gay unicorn recognizable from one of my LJ icons and/or my terse, ineffable stories. There's also an old self-portrait that might give you a chuckle.
Post icon is also from a piece of old Baxil art: a scale model of my headmask I made to fit over a finger. The time is about right to get that made into an actual wearable mask, so we'll see what comes out of that as I have more money for enormous art commissions.
Current Location: ~/Brainstorm
Current Mood:  tired
Current Music: "Snow Dancing In The Schoolyard," FFTA OST
Tags: misc life updates, multimedia
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06:31 pm
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New year's, and Legend of Hero: 022-024
Happy New Year! It's been an eventful 2009 so far for me. I've spent a day hanging around at home writing; a day in the hospital*; a day roleplaying; a day hiking; and a day at work. (I like those proportions**, but I somehow doubt they're sustainable.)
kadyg and I recognized our third anniversary, but the celebration will have to wait for a week or two until we can book a room at the hot springs. I managed to get antibiotics and a tetanus booster and still walk out of the doctor's office less than $200 poorer. roaminrob and I helped kadyg take her first walk across a frozen lake.
The big news, however, is that my sister got married. Congratulations, Sarah!
Fun facts: This makes the number of days between our anniversaries the same as our difference in age. It's also twice the difference of how old we were when we each got married. And the span between our anniversaries is twice as long as the span between our parents' birthdays. Lastly, if you take the month and date of her anniversary date, 1 and 5, as the starting digits of an integer sequence (like the Fibonacci numbers with different starting values), the 6th term is equivalent to the number of days between our mother's birthday and her anniversary date.*** Thrills!
Anyway, before my math geekery makes my readers all run away screaming, SUBJECT CHANGE!
Legend of Hero continues its ambitious update schedule -- Monday, Wednesday, Friday -- and since last time I mentioned it here, we've seen Riselmian show off a special move (admit it, RPG fans, you were waiting for that, weren't you?), and the resolution of the Christmas cliffhanger. Today, the heroes return to Earth.
Can't tell the players without a scorecard, so there's also a characters page with reams of thrilling statistics and appropriately thematic pixel art. And we're winding down the second major arc this week -- good time to catch up before the heroes all start delving into their own quests!
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* Getting antibiotics for a cat bite****. And if this feels like deja vu ... well, let's hope that history doesn't repeat itself. Starting in on the probiotics WAY earlier this time.
** Except for the "day in the hospital" thing. ]B=8(
*** Assuming you're counting days in a 0-based system. But hey, we're all programmers here, right?
**** This makes my new year's Mean Time Before Cat Bite Failure approximately 14 hours*****. I know my MTBCBF has been poor recently, but this is just ridiculous.
***** If people were hard drives, I would so totally be Western Digital.
Current Location: ~spiral
Current Music: Johnny Cash, "Folsom Prison Blues"
Tags: american health care is a piece of shit, legend of hero, misc life updates
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03:59 pm
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Hand-posted because LoudTwitter fails
8/29 12:08 P.M.: I'm setting this up as an experiment: will I write more to my journal if I have a place to put thoughts that don't rate a post of their own?
8/29 12:15 P.M.: Such as - Never mind the talking dog. The REAL mystery of "Scooby Doo" is how two preppies ended up partnering with a lesbian and a stoner.
8/29 4:33 P.M.: http://zarfmouse.livejournal.com/264655.html - A good starting point for integrating Livejournal + Twitter with acceptable password hygiene.
8/29 4:35 P.M.: Twitter allows you 140 characters per 'tweet' (update). I seem to be very good at exactly hitting the cap. This marks four times in a row.
(Yes, I set up a Twitter account. Let me know if you're there. However, I don't really plan to use it for much of anything beyound an excuse to post stray thoughts to Livejournal. This will continue to be my journaling space.)
Current Location: ~/brainstorm
Tags: 140 characters, misc life updates
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06:43 pm
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Last weekend was eventful, mostly owing to Lovely Wife kadyg's graduation from cooking school. Two sets of parents, one happy newly minted chef, one giant celebratory Indian meal, one sightseeing trip to Alcatraz, and lots of driving around San Francisco.
She was too modest to mention it in her brief wrap-up, so let me be the first to mention that she is a chef cum laude: the gold cord you can see in the photo means she earned a high enough GPA to graduate with honors. Many congratulations!
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I'm more and more in love with the camera that I bought to replace my fallen workhorse. It's a Sony DSC-H2, bought refurbished direct from Sony at more than half off. The thing has 12x optical zoom and utterly fantastic low-light pick-up. With no tripod, I was taking no-flash shadowy indoor shots with some pretty remarkable results. The photo above was taken from the upper balcony of the auditorium.
Also, it was great finally meeting eredien and rax a week ago Friday. I'm glad I made it out to the party (despite the necessary early departure). The conversation with you guys and krinndnz was wonderful. Care to remind me of the book that was doubly recommended in the discussion?
Current Location: ~/brainstorm
Current Mood:  proud
Current Music: The White Stripes, "I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother's Heart"
Tags: misc life updates
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06:58 pm
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Booths-eye view: County Fair liveblogging
So I am, as we speak, at the Nevada County Fair on my employer's dime. We've got a booth sandwiched in between the music stage and the carnival rides. It is (he said with a small measure of understatement) noisy.
The vendor directly across from us is selling dragon statues. They're pretty large, dramatic, and surprisingly cheap. The only thing stopping me from picking one up right away is that all of the dragons are standing on, holding or otherwise prominently displaying human skulls. Not my thing.
We don't have a good view of the fair itself -- we can see a few other shop stalls, and off to one side, the back side of the carnival rides -- but it's a decent place for people-watching. There have been a higher-than-expected number of teenagers walking by with halfhearted mohawks; maybe it's coming back into halfhearted style.
The fair also has some sort of weird, occasionally glitchy wireless access maintained by one of our competitors. I logged in and tried to check e-mail by typing 'gmail' into my browser ... and it redirected to some sort of configuration page with fields for "Name," "Message" and a button named "Schema Lock!" I typed in a message to the account of "If you're reading this and trying to figure out why your wireless access point is broken, you might want to keep 'gmail' from redirecting to your schema lock page," and clicked away.
They fixed the redirect glitch less than an hour later, so I must have broken something important enough to get their notice. ;-)
p.s.: While I'm here tonight, Friday and Sunday, I'll try to be on AIM as baxildragon. I may not respond quickly - talking with passersby or boss takes priority -- but it'll be a nice break from the people-watching.
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Update, 8:05 p.m.: With the sun starting to go down, the entire look of the place is changing. The carnie rides in the background are lighting up like Vegas. John had the foresight to buy some professional-looking lamps, and our well-lit booth is standing out like an anti-sore thumb against the darkened tents of everyone else in the row. The only other vendor to have any lighting is the one directly across from us (with the dragon statues), but even they only have a bunch of random hanging bulbs. If we were in an anime, this is about where we would be striking ninja poses with giant radiating lines springing up in the background and the voiceover is shouting Ultra professional! as the camera zooms in for a three-part close-up.
8:09 p.m.: And John returns with lemonade. Just in time for me to think, "Wait a second, I'm liveblogging the county fair. What the hell."
8:10 p.m.: Yay, my first IM from someone who noticed my aside! Hi, jacarath!
8:20 p.m.: Over the course of the day so far, I've met someone from my gaming group, someone from Go club, someone from the pagan community, and a co-worker from two different jobs. Apparently Nevada County is in that sweet spot in between "too big to find anyone" and "too provincial to draw a broad range of residents".
8:45 p.m.: The band on the music stage behind us has switched from rock loud enough to be heard from the farthest corner of the parking lot to a lengthy blues-inspired riff. Even John acknowledges that they're good. I hope this lasts.
8:53 p.m.: The fashion winner of the evening (in my humble and probably completely lopsided opinion) has to be the teenage girl who just walked by for the second time. She's got a modest top and a bright red miniskirt, along with black leggings that have been cut out in large semi-triangular stripes and replaced with fishnet, producing something like a zebra leg effect. Also: More mohawks. The mohawks can't be more than a fraction of a percent of attendees, but they are pretty distinctive. Sadly, no colored mohawks. I guess that's a bit too edgy for our rural tastes.
9:04 p.m.: Aw, nuts, the great blues guys stopped. It's now been a minute or two of silence so this clearly isn't a stop between songs.
9:06 p.m.: Kid with lightsaber!
9:08 p.m.: It's now been at least half an hour since anyone's stopped by.
9:11 p.m.: John (looking over my shoulder): "You need Twitter." Me: "Bah. Twitter is just liveblogging for people who can't blog."
9:14 p.m.: Hi, Laura! Another random person-I-know sighting. And since she's the only person who's dropped by our booth lately (and I had to wave to her to catch her attention), John and I have decided it's time to start slowly packing down.
Current Location: Nevada County Fairgrounds, CA
Current Mood:  calm
Current Music: Some rock cover band, "R-E-S-P-E-C-T"
Tags: misc life updates, work
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10:40 am
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Reminder
Just a heartbeat post to let you know that kadyg and I (and a very statuesque friend) are chronicling our road trip over at wallyontheroad. Thrills! Chills! Extreme statue photography!
Already we've visited several major landmarks, had an (extremely lucky!) run-in with the law, and failed to capture photographs of prairie llamas. (Next time, Gadget. Next time ...)
Journal: wallyontheroad
Photos: gallery (remember that it's multiple pages)
Video: Coming soon ...
Current Location: Hays, KS
Current Mood: content
Tags: misc life updates
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11:59 am
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The state, the state, the state is on fire
Visibility's a quarter-mile in town today. "*EVERYONE SHOULD AVOID ALL PHYSICAL ACTIVITY OUTDOORS.*" There's talk of evacuating the tiny town of Washington, about 15 miles east; and that's not even the fire that's pelting us with smoke.
And it's like that in pretty much the entire northern half of California.
It's not a good time to be a firefighter. My thoughts go out to everyone on the front lines.
Current Location: ~spiral
Current Mood:  worried
Current Music: "Beyond All Fear of Doom," Souls in the System sndtrk
Tags: misc life updates
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01:14 pm
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Dear life, still miss you. Signed, me
Hey, looks like this Internet thing is still on.
- Gratuitous Icon Post:
Lake Emo Lake Valley Reservoir*, near Truckee, Calif., just begged for this. Anyone know of any happy-face bodies of water? I foresee great success for LOLakes.
- The end is in sight: I just gave notice at job #2. I doubt that'll get me back any time until after Memorial Day, but moving forward that'll allow me to really streamline my schedule. (tired cheer)
- Waiting for the upgrade: I've just been informed** by the Microsoft Knowledge Base that "Tad's Mouth Doesn't Move" when he speaks. No known workarounds. Well, crap! You'd think with nine months in their testing cycle, my parents could have caught that one before it shipped.
- A modest proposal: roaminrob made the mistake of exposing me to the Screaming Frog very shortly after I discovered Cat Yodeling. And now I know what must be done.
The world needs a Screaming Frog/Yodeling Cat duet remix.
I recommend using them both as backing vocals for Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You."
- Your Baxil has evolved: Comedian Eddie Izzard famously has drawn the distinction between "executive transvestites" and "fvcking weirdo transvestites." Pace Eddie, I'm pretty sure I completed my transition a week and a half ago to Executive Dragon.
It went something like this:
Saturday: Spent the afternoon in the close company of a dozen topless pagan women (and almost as many men), capping off a ritual to Dionysus with an afternoon of overtly sexual competitions.
Sunday: Went home and assembled an investment portfolio.***
Both, for the record, were firsts for me.
(Edited to add: I'm not trying to imply that Saturday was a "weirdo dragon" day. No no no. Random pagan debauchery is good. More like, I'm an executive dragon because I can both do these things and blend in conventionally with some measure of objective success.)
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* Enter "39.307,-120.585" without the quotes in Google Maps for original. Although I used Mapquest's satellite view for this icon; the color was better.
** Via the hilarious "Funny Microsoft Q Articles" compilation.
*** If you should find yourself in a similar position -- the entire U.S. market is taking a thorough beating right now. I, and my financially savvy father, recommend fleeing into commodities (especially energy) and foreign bonds. Right now, the dollar's in a slight rally, so it's a good time to buy in. The underlying structure of the economy is such that painful inflation is basically inevitable.
Current Location: ~spiral
Current Mood:  okay
Current Music: Michael Johnathon, "The Dream"
Tags: misc life updates
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10:30 pm
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Still not dead
Updates, or fragments of updates, or updates of fragments:
- Somebody shoot me now: My "two-weekend" third job, covering for the departure of a paginator at a local newspaper, metamorphosed into four weekends, then eight. Now their top candidate to fill the position fell through, and I'm being told that they need me until at least late May.
I can't leave until they find a new designer; I can't drop hours at job #2 because the only other person doing my job is quitting; and I can't drop hours at job #1 because the only other person doing my job is quitting.
It's only by the (strained and deteriorating) grace of roaminrob that I'm able to work six days a week right now instead of seven. My social life isn't completely on hold, but it's on life support. And I haven't touched my friends list this month.
- "Day 34. Cops still bored."[*]: Got pulled over by law enforcement today for pulling into a parking space. Did you know that (in California at least) it's illegal to make any U-turns in a business district, except at properly labeled intersections? (I know this, because he said I looked skeptical and showed me the relevant passage in his copy of the Vehicle Code.) This includes pulling into a parking space on the opposite side of the road.
Fortunately, I was either polite enough and/or sincere enough in my protestations of ignorance that he let me off with a warning. At least now I know that our roads are safe from the vile and pernicious evil of business-district u-turn scofflaws.
- First-world problems: There is one fringe benefit to working ridiculous hours -- money to spend. Bought the copy of "Rock Band" I've had my eye on since winter, and have been vainly trying to find both time and friends to enjoy it with.
There is one aggravating thing about Rock Band: ARRRRGGH HARDWARE. I was already aware that you can't use Guitar Hero controllers with it (short version: Activision sucks donkey balls and I'm not picking up any GH games). But it turns out you can't use Rock Band controllers with it, either. I currently have three guitars in my house, at most one of which works*, and have just returned a fourth dead guitar to the store. I'm sure it's a lovely game and I really look forward to playing it. Someday.
- Content stolen from the Internet dept.: "And there were dragons in the earth in those days."
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* One official Rock Band guitar, DOA. One official replacement Rock Band guitar, unusable because I own a PS2 and they sent me an Xbox 360 guitar (not cross-compatible, and it took me a week of research to realize that). One third-party Psyclone Kingmaker guitar, recently returned to store because whammy bar died within a week. One third-party Psyclone Kingmaker guitar, new, still in box. Moral: Using equipment produced by the lowest bidders make the baby Jesus cry.
Current Location: ~/bedroom
Current Mood: tired
Tags: misc life updates
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11:19 pm
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Oddly appropriate icon
Last weekend, we had a little incident with our clothes washer. By "incident," I mean "flood." And by "little," I mean "half the kitchen and living room, and also through the walls so that both our next-door and downstairs neighbors had to mop up too."
Anyway, I am given to understand that it was unpleasant. I was on my Work Schedule From Heck at the time, so I first found out about it by calling kadyg during the middle of the mopping up. At which point I promptly freaked out and almost didn't make deadline with the night's layout. "Half the living room," it should be belatedly mentioned, included my computer desk.
Most of our books, papers and gear were safely up on desktops or bookshelves. However, the battery backup-qua-surge protector that powered basically everything on that side of the room was happily sitting in a quarter-inch of water by the time Kady and Rob ran out to the living room to take in the disaster.
It was promptly unplugged (and confirmed waterlogged). But I had no immediate way of knowing whether it had shorted out and taken out the half-dozen devices plugged into it.
Kady managed to plug in my monitor and watch it blink to life. An optimistic sign. My lovely, 12.5-month-old Mac Mini, on the other hand, wasn't booting.
Literally. About a week out of warranty coverage.
Got home to find out that this is because its power brick was also sitting on the floor next to the UPS. Picked it up and it dripped.
The good news, as I discovered about 36 hours later, is that when I took my computer in to work and plugged it into a known-good power brick there (my tech support job uses Mac Minis for our work computers as well; that's what convinced me to get one), it worked fine. Bad news is that, having spent the better part of a week drying out my power brick, it still isn't transmitting power to my Mini. Chances are high that I'll have to throw the brick away and buy a new one.
Is there a word that is an exact antonym of "silver lining"? I know I'm feeling tremendously lucky right now that I don't have to replace a $600 computer (and data that hadn't been backed up in months), but somehow I'm still annoyed over the much smaller expense of the bits that did blow out.*
Edited to add: Apple Discussions thread.
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* Total damages: $50 brick, $35 UPS (it's making some death click when plugged in now -- after the same full week of drying out), $50 DSL modem (but we swiped an old spare from work), one $3 DSL filter, several man-hours of mopping, and a modest amount of landlord goodwill. Apparently the UPS had the good grace to ground as it shorted. (Come to think of it, I think the printer power brick was down there as well -- I should check it. But it cost us less than $100, if it comes to that.)
Current Location: ~journal
Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: Jars of Clay, "Flood"
Tags: misc life updates, technology
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08:44 pm
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Note on the run
If anyone's wondering about my recent silence -- I'm temporarily back at my old newspaper job (one of their paginators left and they need some fill-in work). It's good money, but since it doesn't reduce my other obligations, it's job No. 3 and brings me up to about 65 hours/week. I'm currently on Day 12 of what was meant to be a 19-day streak with no days less than 8 hours on the clock; turns out the paper needs me for longer than I expected, and without some emergency schedule rearrangement that's going to be over a month.
My entire social life is basically on hold until at least mid-April.
I would, however, like to wish Lovely Wife kadyg my warmest congratulations for finishing classes today. She has now started her externship, and when that finishes in June she will be able to come home and officially call herself a chef.
Yay!
Current Location: ~journal
Current Music: Stevie Nicks, "Planets of the Universe"
Tags: misc life updates
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03:35 am
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Two things
1) Does anybody (preferably someone at a university, with access to scientific journal archives) have any idea where the species name of the beetle Cetonia baxil came from? Google fails.
2) Due to sudden and extreme poverty, I am going to have to skip Further Confusion this year. :-(
Between holidays (and being forced to sit out four workdays), a wave of vet bills for Ocras' kidney problems, and a little fiscal miscalculation, keeping up with expenses this month is completely flatlining our slowly dwindling financial reserves. To the point where even the gas for driving down to San Jose and back is starting to look like a luxury expense. Unless someone wants me at the con desperately enough to give me a complete Friday-night-to-Sunday-afternoon free ride, I'll have to take a pass and start saving up for 2009 once kadyg gets out of cooking school.
Unfortunately, it's likely this will be the case for Pantheacon as well. (And kadyg is hosting a ritual downstairs on that weekend, anyway.) Apologies to the people I was looking forward to meeting there.
Current Location: ~/Brainstorm
Current Mood:  disappointed
Current Music: Indigo Girls, "Hammer and a Nail"
Tags: misc life updates
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10:59 pm
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New Year's meme
Via paka. 40 questions about my last 12 months.*
1. What did you do in 2007 that you'd never done before?
I got a tattoo. I dealt with chronic illness. I successfully restored my website from backup. I joined a local Go club. I cashed in savings bonds. I posted to an adult filter in my journal. And once kadyg left for cooking school, I lived (at least for 5 days a week) in a place I wasn't sharing with any other housemates.
( Meme cut )
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* Meaningless footnote added due to complaint from wife about post footnotelessness.
Current Location: ~/Brainstorm
Current Mood: calm
Current Music: "Guardian Legend Naju Overture OC Remix," Russell Cox
Tags: meme, misc life updates
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09:50 pm
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Hours worked: 2. Motorcycles seen: 1,700. Old Ones defeated: 1.
Previous post aside, I've had a full weekend. kadyg came home from school, we took our cat Ocras to the vet again (and determined, sadly, there are some permanent kidney problems that we'll need to deal with for the rest of his life), and then I got called in to work to fix someone else's mess that was preventing the restaurant management software from booting.
I left the house expecting that a simple reboot of both machines would do the trick and that I'd be home in five minutes. It took two hours. About a quarter of which was sitting in traffic. They called me in exactly as the local toy run roared through town, and I happened to unwittingly drive to work on the route they were using. So I got the privilege of sitting on the side of the road and taking in the festivities as 1,700 motorcycles drove past.
At least I got home in time for krinndnz's visit. Among the things I learned: If you're going to try to save 1926 Arkham from certain doom, try to save it from the ultimate destruction of Azathoth rather than the cruel enslavement of Chthulu. Because, man, Chthulu really sucks to fight against. (Speaking of which, guys: This is the song that I spontaneously rolled out as we were setting up the board. :-))
Edited to add: And I would like to officially award Krinn 10 Baxil Points for the coolest line of the weekend. As a self-introduction to roaminrob, Krinn said cheerfully, "Hi! I'm from the Internet!"
(I tried very hard to resist the temptation to add: "Krinn's here to glue captions to our cats." I failed.)
Current Location: ~/brainstorm
Tags: misc life updates
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01:33 am
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Failure of nerve
I'm not good with needles. Never have been.
When I get something injected into me, my heart starts racing. When I have blood drawn, I get the cold sweats. I even fainted once (though in my defense, I hadn't had anything to eat that day). I can't even watch injections on medical dramas on TV -- the instant a syringe comes out, my fingers curl into claws, and I have to look away and knead the arm of the chair until I'm sure the moment's gone.
So when my wife's dear cat needed a trip to the vet, I got a bit nervous myself. When early tests came back in showing signs of kidney failure, I felt a subtle sinking feeling above and beyond the pain of impending pet loss.
Then I started reading about feline CRF. And the good news: "CRF cats may be able to live for several additional years with [regular injections of] fluids and the proper diet." Keep in mind that with Kady in cooking school, I'm pretty much it as far as cat caretaking. And the regular injections thereof.
Ocras seems to be responding to antibiotics. I really, really hope this is something acute.
Because he was pretty dehydrated when we got him to the vet. They asked us to give him daily sub-Q (subcutaneous -- which is to say, injected) fluids for a week until we could get him re-checked and re-tested. No sooner had this news been passed down than kadyg had to go back to the city for school ... and it was me alone in the house with a fluid bag, a cat, and a needle.
The first time, Ocras was remarkably placid. Which was good, because I was so nervous I didn't even get the needle into his skin. I opened the fluids' stopper and soaked his back. After a little toweling off and some breathing exercises, beginner's luck kicked in; and 100 ccs of liquid went in before we retreated to the kitchen for cat treats.
Then tonight.
Staggering home after a 12-hour day, I sit in the kitchen for a bit, waiting for Ocras to lie down so I don't have to simultaneously wrestle him down and handle sharp things. I scoot over a chair once he's calm, and gently thread the needle in.
This time, he winces. It's all downhill from there.
I get everything seated and turn on the water. Again, his back gets wet -- it must have slipped out in the motion. Stop, recenter, wait for his tail to stop thrashing, retry. He gets squirmy again and I'm not able to get a good puncture.
I give up temporarily and retreat to the bathroom, where Ocras likes hanging out. He comes in to join me and settles in. We try again. This time, not only is there wincing and squirming, but also meows of protest.
My hands are shaking, and the nausea is so strong by the time I give up that I have to lie down on the floor of the bathroom for a few minutes to calm myself. Ocras isn't getting his fluids tonight.
A week of this is going to be hellish. For both me and the cat.
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Update, 11/29: Much easier with an extra pair of hands. Thanks, Rob.
Current Location: ~/couch
Current Mood:  nauseated
Tags: misc life updates, pets
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