Despite this, I dragged the boy to the local march (a town over) and spent a couple hours listening to awesome music and nasty women speak up. Or, well, he drove because I was mostly passed out in the passenger seat due to COLD. It was good to be there, good to see how crowded the area was, good to run into people I know and see other people posting things on Facebook that I didn't run into.

I remember being disappointed and angry when Bush was reelected in 2004. I wasn't scared then the way I have been the past couple months. I don't know how much has changed externally, or if it's just me growing into the wannabe revolutionary I always said I would back in college.

That is all.

I moved in with the boy almost two years ago, and he already had a roommate at that time. This weekend, the roommate has vacated to her girlfriend's house (with all 3 of her cats), the boy is at a conference, and I HAVE THE HOUSE TO MYSELF. Myself and the cat that I'm responsible for because she's my mom's only my mom can't really take care of her anymore and it's totally cool because I have my couch and she has her loveseat and everyone's happy. Other than I should scritch her ears more, but she thinks I should scritch her ears 24/7.

I don't quite know where to begin. What music shall I blast? what tv show or chick flick shall I watch? What food shall I eat? How shall I tidy the house? How much of the bed can I in fact sprawl on all at once?

On the other hand, I haven't been this properly alone for this long in almost two years--because I'm pretty sure I'm going to have the house to myself all week, unless roommate actually decides to bring her cats back that quickly or the boy has to leave his conference suddenly and early--and OMG WHAT IF THE ZOMBIES FIND ME AND KILL ME. Or the toilet breaks. That's probably more likely to happen. WHAT DO I DO THEN.

I told the boy I was watching Doctor Who and Castle this week with or without him. He retaliated by buying the entire season of DW on Google Play. Whatever, man, I HAVE NEW WHO TOMORROW. And a couch all to myself. With sea salt dark chocolate caramels and chicken salsa verde BECAUSE I CAN. I am going totally going to live up alone time while it lasts.

The Official: Embrace the horror, you work for the state now.

That line means *so* much more to me now than it did 15 years ago.

I decided a rewatch of Invisible Man was in order. It's making me happy.

Also, 64 DAYS TILL WEDDING OH SHIT BEARS. Other people apparently get joy out of these countdowns. I take a kind of masochistic glee out of checking on that number. I think I would rather invite all of you than half my family to come to the party. No, that's a lie, I think I'd just like to have two parties, one with family and one with all of you. My family's had a lot of funerals lately, they need to have a happy reason to come together and celebrate. But dammit, I would totally dig a geeky party of happiness. (Maybe we *will* figure out how to have ourselves a TARDIS wedding cake. MAYBE.)

So last month my mom and I, randomly, wrote a fairy tale. Via texts. Y'know, a sentence or two at a time, back and forth.

( I cleaned it up a bit for typos, auto correct shenanigans, and my mom's inability to find the quotes on her phoneCollapse )




My Auntie Ethel died yesterday. This grief is strange to me--she's been fading away for years now, mentally, to the point the past few times I've seen her I'm not always sure she remembers who I am, only that she knows and likes me; my mom today said she's been missing her sister for years, and it's true. (We used to have such conversations--she was the best aunt for a precocious pre-teen, who would sit and listen and engage; I could still talk to her about what I was studying up until grad school.) And after the wrench that was my dad last year, after the pain and duty that came after his passing, this is...strangely light. I can grieve without having to worry about who will look after mom and how the hell do I administer an estate and who will take care of the cat. I can just be sad.

This evening, mourning over the new shitty turn my career has taken and wondering what I could do instead, after drinking a delicious and slightly alcoholic minty Oreo shake:

"I could open a bakery. Make blueberry muffins all day long. ...that's a shitty business plan. No! All you get are blueberry muffins! If you want anything else, go somewhere else. No chocolate muffins for you!"

For some reason, this was hysterical to me. It might have been the delicious and slightly alcoholic minty Oreo shake talking.

Later this same evening, taking the masking tape to the couch to remove all the orange fur from the cat:

"Honey, you are a sheddy, sheddy cat."

The boy said we're lucky to have each other.

See now, if the cat would just lie down next to me on the couch all the time, we'd both be far happier. (I don't think she agrees with me, I think she insists she's happiest lying in my lap with me constantly scritching her ears, but my allergies and my laptop do not agree with her.)

The cat is lying down next to me on the couch right now, you see, calmly and purringly, and that just does not happen very often.

So this past weekend visiting my mom she mentioned, once again, the Aunt Dimity books by Nancy Atherton. And these are mystery books I have not read before, and I'm in the mood for trying something new, so I pick up a couple on Kindle and apparently am probably going to have to pick up the rest because I kinda adore Lori and Bill and Dimity and all the other characters. The writing style is immediately engaging too. (Also, there are recipes at the end of all the books. Any book that involves baking is AOK in my, er, book.)

And Lori got divorced a year ago and lost her mom recently and is having a really crappy time of it and comes out alright in the end, and, okay, I'm weeping on the plane reading this book, you know? Because it's about grief and love and learning to live with loss and it's really hitting home for me. It doesn't help that I was also reading ceremony scripts our officiant gave us to peruse and weeping at all the sappy love bits. I'm sure every other passenger on that flight near my seat wondered what the hell was wrong with me. I've already told a friend she has to pinch me if I start weeping at my own wedding.

In other news, they got me onto the new network system yesterday, which meant I spent the entire day at work today IMing one of our IT gurus, going "C, this is broken now. C, do you happen to have that password because I totally never bothered to save it myself? C, I can't even *find* this software on my laptop now!" It's okay, he got a lot of M&Ms out of hanging out in my office with me half the day.

Oh! So, based on somebody's recommendation--it might have been NPR (I read a lot of NPR at work when I need a 60-second brain break, rather than listening to it on the radio, because I continue to have no auditory concentration ability at all), it might have been a RL friend, it might have been one of y'all--we've started watching Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on Netflix, these glorious mysteries set in 1920s Australia about a young woman whose sister went missing and who now makes it her business to get into everybody else's business. I've started making a game out of identifying who will be her new lover in each episode, her outfits are always gorgeous, and she is so unapologetically, unabashedly determined to make sure things are done right--and so unapologetically, unabashedly disinterested in judging other people and how they live their lives--that the show is a real delight to watch. We're only 5 episodes in, which makes me happy, because it means there's still a couple dozen episodes to go.

Okay, it's a little ridiculous how much I adore period mystery drama. Or even modern mystery drama, come to that. I've also been working my way through the Enchanted Chocolate Pot books (for lack of a better unifying title for the trilogy?) by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer and I'm pretty sure there's at least one or two new episodes of Castle and Forever we haven't seen yet. w00t. GIVE ME ALL THE MYSTERIES. Ahem.

HI.

I'm still alive. No, really. Just--stuff and things and life keeps happening. Seriously, when I get home from work I mostly want to curl up and play Minion Rush or something else relatively mindless.

But, can I just say, I have been totally loving on Forever? Like, this is the show where my happy place is right now, the show that I am excited about every week because OMG THERE'S A NEW EPISODE YAY. Castle is still a happy place for me, but I'm not OMG YAY about it like I am with Forever. And it's all Ioan Grufford's and Judd Hirsch's fault and they are so adorable eee I can't even and if I ever get my fic-writing mojo back there will be DW/Forever crossovers you bet your sweet bippy.

Also Agent Carter was awesome and cool and so enraging that I wanted to punch every man in the face on average at least twice an episode. Which made for a lot of wincing by my fiancé.

(Um, yes, hi, I have a fiancé now. Fiancés are cool? My engagement ring is a TARDIS. ( I am not kidding, y'all.Collapse ) He proposed by standing at our favorite place in the whole house--there's a step there between the kitchen and the den, so he stands at the bottom so I can stand at the top and be almost equal height with him--and asking, "So, you wanna be my companion through time and space?" BECAUSE THAT'S HOW WE ROLL, YO.)

I might disappear for months on end again. It has been known to happen. Sorry about that.

Okay, maybe I'll regret it later, but I threw my first-ever fanfics into the recycling bin today. Complete with illustrations. I was 12 years old, I didn't even know I was writing fanfic. I couldn't even bring myself to reread them. (Which is what makes me think no, actually, I probably won't regret it later....)

I also threw out all the old TV Guides from the '90s demonstrating my geeky obsessions of the day. Ye gods.

Completely unrelatedly, my mom just finished reading something on Kindle entitled How I stole Johnny Depp's Alien Girlfriend, which I was pretty sure was real person fic, but maybe it isn't after all? She said it was the silliest thing she'd ever read, but in a good way.

I'm pretty sure I have a professional duty to watch this.

We're in the middle of interviewing for an electronic records archivist position, by the by, and one of our top candidates is, as I keep telling my boss, a geek who covers it well. My boss is very good at drawing people out in interviews, so the candidate ended up mentioning his extensive Magic: the Gathering collection in one of his answers to our questions, and I thought to myself, Yup, called it.

A pic of the six-foot Sir Winston Leonard Spencer ChurchBear (Winnie for short) was requested. I am happy to oblige:

( Read more...Collapse )

What did I tell you? BEAR.

Also, for those of you who are academically inclined and would wish to do some research, there's now a wiki for sci-fi authors' archival collections at various institutions. The institutions mostly seem to be U.S.-based, though I think I saw at least one U.K. university, and the listing is by no means complete (they don't, for example, have Connie Willis' papers listed at University of Northern Colorado). But still, it did my geeky heart proud to find this announcement on a listserv today, and hey, it's a wiki. Add to it!

I would just like to state that, now being the proud owner of a six-foot bear (the boy is smugly satisfied about his Valentine's present), I want to spend all my time curled up with it, reading.

For the record, the six-foot stuffed bear has a red bow tie (because bow ties are cool) and is named Sir Winston Leonard Spencer ChurchBear, because he needed to have an appropriately distinguished name to go with his bow tie. (That said, I call him Winnie more often than not.)

Hi, again. I can't seem to get back on the LJ wagon, let alone the fic-writing wagon. And my fannishness these days mostly consists of rewatching previous seasons of Castle and trying to get through the bleakness that is the first half of the third season of Farscape because I know things will get better! I know they will! It won't be all death and gloom! I think I spend so much time writing really complicated emails and other documentation at work, these days, that when I get home I can't face writing anymore.

Sigh. I think it's time for me to get back to reading. With the bear.

We saw About Time in the theater this afternoon, and this evening in our quest to finish all of New Who before the 50th anniversary, we watched "The Angels Take Manhattan" and said good-bye to much-loved companions (again, in my case) but the repetition still didn't stop me from BLUBBING ALL OVER THE PLACE. Because apparently that's what I do.

Sentimental old fool.

(About Time was lovely, sappy and sentimental yes, but lovely rather than dramatic, and really, you can't go wrong with Bill Nighy.)

Oh, yes, hi. Er. Life has been hectic, to the point that I dreamt in the wee small hours this morning about screwing up at work and having to fix it. Woo. Thank the gods for three-day weekends.

I was on vacation for a week. Tomorrow is going to suck.

( Read more...Collapse )

Yesterday being the boy's birthday, a big group of us of course had to see the movie last night.

( and here be spoilers, along with a revisiting of geeky stereotypingCollapse )

Okay, I have friends coming next weekend, I slept far too late, I need to get some housecleaning done and buy some groceries. Wah.

Rewatching Farscape; Aeryn Sun is being awesome and Chiana is being angry and Zhaan is holding the world together, and this seems the best thing to watch on International Women's Day.

The thing about White Collar: they do the 'OMG I can't tell Peter/Neal/Elizabeth/Hughes/everyone else ever this major secret!' thing a lot, right, but then--unlike other shows, like Supernatural, say--the person keeping the secret ends up telling it anyway, after just a couple episodes of strife and lying. So they have some of the drama but then they undercut themselves and move onto creating tension in other ways. I really like that they do that, it's much less reliant upon a really stupid narrative trope that annoys the crap out of me.

***

So a couple weeks ago, I got a sinoplasty done on my nose, and it was bloody and painful and blech. And then apparently I developed a sinus infection from them, y'know, rummaging around in my sinuses for an hour, so I've continued to feel painful and blech, off and on, some days much worse than others.

I reserve the right to cut off my nose if, after all this, I'm still sneezing and sniffling and wheezing come spring.

***

I'M GOING TO PUERTO RICO THIS SUMMER. I'm still trying to figure out if I can also go to the Grand Canyon. And I'm definitely going to Indianapolis and New Orleans. (I thought this was supposed to be my light travel year. HAH.)

I'm flipping through the newsletter from the Midwest Archives Conference, looking over the info about the annual meeting in April, when I discover the plenary speaker is going to be one of the board members for the OTW and HOLY CRAP NOW I REALLY HAVE TO GO TO THIS CONFERENCE.

Thank you, geeky archivists, for being geeky. (No, wait, she's going to talk about A03? HOLY CRAP I REALLY HAVE TO GO TO THIS CONFERENCE.)

That is all. Well, no, it's not all, I decided this morning I really *am* that stressed, but that is enough for now.

Back in those glory days of the late 1980s, when my family thrived on such shows as Murder, She Wrote and Adderly, we also enjoyed Father Dowling. My mom got it on DVD and I'm finally watching the first season, which she lent me...er, several months ago...and, oh, let's chalk up another '80s-girl-crush, shall we? Sister Steve is adorably happy-go-lucky for having a pretty rough backstory, with far too many mad skillz to be entirely believable, but when Father Frank tells her "Absolutely not!" she just smiles in that "oh, you're so cute, thinking I'm going to follow your orders" way and then goes and does what he forbid her to do. And is awesome doing it. (Also, she wore a tux while bartending. Women in tuxes are a weakness for me.)

Now I want to watch the rest of Adderly, just for Mona Ellerby to go along with Sister Steve and hello, brain, remember how it's the 21st century now?

I'm supposed to be in a reflective mood this time of year, or something, I think, but I've been too busy. I think that sums up this year for me--I've been too busy to really think, and reflect. Maybe that's true every year, and I reflect and think more than I realize, in the in-between times: scraping out five minutes here in an airport lounge, two minutes there in the shower, ten minutes in the car on the drive between my usual cities. Maybe.

It's been a challenging year for me--challenging in the best sense of the word. I've traveled too much, I've been frustrated and disappointed at work, I'm still learning to live with another person in my life, I had surgery for the first time in my life, I've written the least amount of fic since, er, I started writing fic. Through all of it, through all of this year, the key, the theme, the important point all along--I realize more and more at the end of this year, so maybe I have had time to reflect after all--is communicating. Figuring out how the devil to communicate effectively with myself and other people should probably be my new year's resolution every year.

I'm learning. I'm still learning. That is what makes this a good year, a challenging year. I have learned so much, I have filed away so much experience and information that I will be able to continue to use in the coming years. This is how I can become the person I already am, the person I want to be.

I've gotten better at saying no when I'm overwhelmed. I've gotten better at vocalizing hurts and coming up with new ways to express ideas when the old and tried ways don't work. I'm still too ridiculously busy, and I still find myself yelling for no reason when I'm by myself (because the real, underlying reason hasn't been examined yet), but I'm getting better.

We had snow here today, so instead of holding a game night with a big group of friends, instead of going out partying at the bars, I'm hunkered down at home in my pjs, planning to cook dinner and play my new Doctor Who Monopoly game with my boyfriend who still hasn't bloody seen the show. And honestly, that seems like the best way to spend tonight.

Happy New Year, everyone. May 2013 bring good friends and good experiences.

Do your co-workers sneak-gift and card you? I mean, they wait until the exact moment you leave your cubicle/office and sneak in to drop off a card and/or gift?

Seriously, my co-workers are ninja gifters. I left to get some nummy cinnamon-pretzel sticks from the food table or to pick something up at the printer--FIVE SECONDS--and my supervisor dropped off a card in the meantime, with no sign that he'd ever been remotely near my cubicle. It's both charming and disturbing.

So is it just a quirk of my admittedly quirky office, or is this common? (I'm totally going into work early to drop stuff off at people's offices before they come in tomorrow. I'll out-ninja them all, haha!)

OMG life. No, seriously, I don't even know where the hell all my time is going, other than to work and making presents for people and wrapping other presents for people and packing for trips and preparing to MOVE early next year OMG and dancing lessons and writing Christmas cards and doing choir board stuff (oh crap need to write more thank-you letters for donations, mustn't forget to do that before I head out this weekend) and just trying to keep my head above water.

I wasn't this busy two years ago. I know I was not this busy two years ago. Right?

I'm sorry I'm never around anymore. I miss conversations and connecting with people through my little black box. I miss writing fic. I miss goofing off online and reading fic and--stuff. I miss my invisible friends.

I've still got one more present to finish making and probably another card or two to write, preferably tonight. After I eat dinner, since I sort of forgot to do that earlier in the midst of packing and CULLING CLOTHES omg I have too many clothes.