In which I’m in a slump and need your input.
As y’all know, I read voraciously. So much so that I’ve already read most of it. All the Asimov. All the Bear. All the Robin Hobb. All the Vonnegut, all the Eric Flint, the Egan, the Guy Gavriel Kay. And all of a bunch of other shit, too.
In the last year I’ve discovered Jay Lake and some new Naomi Novik, but mostly I’ve just been re-reading sci-fi ebooks I bought years ago because I don’t know what to look for and apparently I’m too lazy to go surf around and see what’s hot.
I need to learn about new authors in sci-fi and in GOOD fantasy – clever, interesting worlds, not “magic” for its own sake – and modern fiction and engaging science and, what the hell, good erotica too.
Tell me what you’re reading, my babies! Please!
In which I realize something!
You know when someone says, “Say ‘Irish wrist watch’ fast three times!” and most people try to and proceed to totally mess it up?
Well, I don’t. I can say all kinds of awkward shit really fast three times! And I just realized that this is entirely due to all the pronunciation and diction one learns inadvertently when studying classical voice, which I did in high school and junior college.
Irish wrist watch! Irish wrist watch! Irish wrist watch!
In which Teh BF and I have been together for a whole entire year already. And it’s a good thing, too, because I’m entirely too pudgy to be on the market.
Saturday morning I did laundry and rearranged my bedroom in such a way that I can now watch movies while lying in my bed.
Saturday afternoon I ate a delicious burrito, and then I went and got my nails done. They look like this:
From the Laotian guy who did my nails came a nugget of wisdom just way too awesome not to share. The exchange went like this:
Him: When you get your nails done last? Long time?
Me: Oh, it’s been a few years. Maybe five.
Him: I can tell you got nails done before.
Me: Yeah.
Him: Many times before. Long time.
Me: Yes. The first time I got my nails done, they were still doing them round-tipped instead of square!
Him: No! You not that old!
Me: But now they’re always square.
Him: Yes. Square much stronger. One time, I do nails for a lady, she said she want round. I say, No! Not strong! Lady say, It not look natural, square not look natural. I say, You can look natural in the cemetary!
Me: In the cemetary? …Oh, you mean, when you’re dead?
Him: Yes! You can look natural when you’re dead!
And then we giggled companionably together for the next three minutes while he sanded my new acrylic French nails.
Meanwhile, I was having three rolls of 35mm film developed. Here’s a shot from the Yashica Electro 35 GSN:
And a shot from The Brick, aka the Argus C3:
Saturday night I had Singapore noodles at the P’n’E. I didn’t take a picture of them at the time because what kind of asshole takes pictures of every goddamned thing she eats? (Don’t answer that!) But this morning the leftovers looked like this:
Sunday I had an veggie omelet containing nearly an entire day’s calories for brunch:
Sunday happened to by my one year anniversary with Teh BF! He brought me coffee and flowers in bed that morning.
In the evening, he took me out on a nice dinner date for which he’d made reservations and to which he even wore a proper shirt! I put on proper shoes and had T. Mac’s veggie lasagna (along with an amazing English pea bruchetta appetizer and a couple of lemon drop martinis) for dinner:
In return for the coffee, flowers, and lovely dinner, I bought brunch, wore mascara, and tried not to be a bitch for the whole entire day.
In which a list format shall suffice.
1. I’ve decided to see Amma in Dallas this year.
I chose Dallas on NLW’s recommendation because I’ve never been to Dallas, and the programs are allegedly smaller and more intimate than those in Chicago. Don’t want to go to Iowa and be divided; when we go there it will be specifically to hang in Fairfield and see everybody.
2. I do not have hamthrax.
…YET.
The aporkalypse/baconic plague/epigdemic won’t actually get here until the migrant workers show up for spring planting, so if you love me you should send me gifts NOW as my time left on earth is undoubtedly quite short!
3. Got laid! Quite fantastically well, thank you.
OMG. You have no idea. I’m so spoiled.
4. I have three in-progress swaps going with people I’ve met on Flickr.
I’m trading an Argus, a tele lens, and two rolls of film for a Polaroid SX-70 and two C4 lenses. I’m making a pair of slippers in return for a custom bag and some random surprise stuff. And I’m sending cheese to Japan in exchange for moar bento stuff.
VERY exciting!
5. Goblinbox still gets massive traffic, but hardly anyone ever comments any more.
I’ve been waiting to post because I was hoping I’d get more than one comment on my last post. (Thank you, Shenry.) Does this mean my content’s as boring as I think it is?
Don’t answer that.
Maybe I should have another surgery or get divorced again or something. How about a car wreck? Suggestions? Shall I describe what Teh BF can do with his left hand?
6. I love payday.
I was down to fewer than ten bucks when my check arrived. I have no idea what I spent all my money on, but it couldn’t be classic cameras and classic camera accessories or film or developing so don’t even bring it up.
7. This chilly, crappy weather has me afraid that we’re going to go straight from 50 degrees to 110 degrees overnight, and that the summer will be unbearable.
The whole point of living here – besides the awesome Mexican food, of course – is the mild weather. I want my money back!
8. Being 40 sucks.
It doesn’t matter what I do, I’m just getting thicker Every. Single. Goddamned. Day. I look like I’m three months along and I have BACK FAT, and I’m actually consciously NOT overeating and I’m walking to work every single day.
Diet and exercise my ass: they mean Nazi self-discipline. I’m sick of being pudgy, yeah, but not enough to deny myself everything I enjoy. This is exactly what Cosmo was talking about.
9. My dentist is too expensive.
I need to go in for prophy again – my mouth is like a coral reef, swear to God – but I still owe the bastard five or six hundred bucks. So I’m not going. Which will only hurt me in the long run, but I go every three months and can’t get it paid off before my next appointment so the balance keeps growing.
Plus I have some soft spots on a molar that apparently need to be filled before they turn into cavities and they nag me about that.
Any locals have a CHEAP dentist?
I totally would get my teeth bleached if I could afford it. Is that vain?
10. In spite of reassurances, I still feel shaky about my job security.
Customer and incoming call counts are dropping weekly. I know enough about business in general to be certain there’s no way the company I work for is bringing in enough to pay its bills.
I’d go into detail, but a couple members of management read my blog and follow my tweets, so they know absolutely everything I ever say about work (which is why I say nothing that isn’t utterly innocuous). The general manager actually IMed me one day after reading a post I’d written to tell me that my job wasn’t actually in any immediate danger, which was really sweet, but I can still do basic math.
This week, we were told that we’re only on the phones on average of two hours a day, and that we need to be documenting what we’re doing the rest of the time. A list of free time activities were provided by my department head, but hello? I already do all of those things and there still isn’t enough work (because yes, I’m that overachieving bitch of an employee you hate who does more than strictly necessary and still has time to surf half the entire ‘net every day).
My hope is that when air conditioning season arrives my work load will return to normal, but I ain’t holding my breath. The load has been dropping smoothly since I started here eighteen months ago, as evidenced by my schedule: I was hired to close, so when I started I worked 12-9. Less than a year later they moved me to an 11-8 schedule because there weren’t enough calls, and just this week I’ve been moved again, this time t 10-7. Last night I took maybe three calls from six to seven. Hello, recession!
It’s not like this is a ‘real’ job, in the sense that I don’t make any money, don’t have a title, manage no one, and am basically being a lazy toad so I don’t have to get up early, shave my legs, or wear uncomfortable shoes. You’d think by now I’d have a career but noo-o-o-o: I decided to get married and drop to part-time so I could WASH SOME GUY’S FUCKING SOCKS and like an idiot I never got any certifications back when someone else would probably have paid for them, so the odds of my ever becoming an Internet engineer again are, like, zip… especially here. (This company isn’t an ISP, it’s a reseller. The “vault” here is basically empty.)
The point being that if I wanted to do a lateral transfer, I might as well just stay here until the business either fails or doesn’t and quit fucking worrying about it.
In which I cover four topics of interest only to myself.
Topic the first is: TEH SECKS.
Teh BF’s work schedule was changed about a month ago. Instead of having to be at work at different times each day (he used to start at 10, 10, 11, 11, and then 9 each week), now he gets to show up at the same time – nine AM – all 5 days. It’s probably much easier on him to have a regular schedule.
The bummer is that we only sleep over one night a week now, instead of three or sometimes four. So the nookie schedule? Is suffering.
I just wanted to bitch about that a little. Waah!
Topic the second is: WERK.
In the eighteen months I’ve worked here, I’ve sat in five different places. (The office contains about as many cubic feet as a semi trailer, so there’s really no good reason to be moving around quite so much other than it makes us all feel like we’ve done something tangible, a useful sensation when all you do is push pixels all day.) Monday morning when I rolled in, management stood about four feet from my desk with one of the sales staffers and discussed how best to make him comfortable… in my space!
WTF! I had to wait for a guy to QUIT before I got that space! I was at the end of a hall and had my Christmas lights up and my very own lamp (I bought it myself) and my dog’s blanket and it was awesome, and then right out of the gate on a Monday morning they go and give it to a sales dude?!?!
Talk about being smokin’ pissed off! But valiantly, I adjusted. And quickly, without cursing or quitting!
Long story short, they let me keep my desk instead of making me take one of those cool-looking but useless microwave carts, and did NOT put me under the skylight and did NOT put me where any old walk-in customer can make eye contact with me. (Reception? Doesn’t, most of the time. If you’re sitting where people can see you, you end up having to deal with walk-ins yourself because they give you these piteous “I’ve been standing here for six minutes I just need to make my payment and I’m on my lunch hour and can you please help me?” looks and what are you going to do? Ignore a real live human being making puppy eyes at you? No. You’re gonna go do someone else’s job and hope there’s a good damned reason for it.)
“You can’t fix stupid!”
Anyway! All four support technicians are now in a cute little enclosure together where no one can bother us and we can actually communicate with one another.
Our official tech area whiteboard says, “You can’t fix stupid!” Which is so true, because you totally can’t.
I like it a lot, actually. It’s pretty awesome to be in a tech department instead of in the middle of a sales department. I hate sales.
(Honestly, I would really like to be able to go RIGHT THE HELL OFF on work, but since half the office reads the ‘box I can’t. Which sucks, because bitching about work is really one of the main reasons to have a blog in the first place. If I could only tell you. Srsly. OMG. The hysterically funny posts I could write… this place is a total sit-com. They’d get me fired, but at least you’d get to pee your pants first.)
Topic the third is: TEH WEEKEND!
Tomorrow evening, on my brother’s patio, we’re having a BBQ. True story!
It will be held in honor of both James’ new apartment (he’s been there a month) and KJ’s birthday (which was last weekend). KJ’s gonna cook FODA on his grill, and Lannie and I are somehow going to produce a cake and some side dishes and get the patio swept and the table clean enough to serve food off of. [Yeah, so it’s a prepositional phrase. Whatever.]
I’ve invited everyone I know in the area, which is about twelve people (half of which I’m related to. I need to make more friends). Come on by!
And tomorrow morning I’m gonna give Bindu her first bath in two years. She’s going to HATE it.
Topic the fourth is: …Um, I can’t think of one now.
I’m blogging in between calls at work, and all my work tools went down for 20 minutes due to a server crash (the admin had to abandon his Friday evening and go swap drives around in the data center vault) so I was a little frazzled there for a bit. Now I’ve come back and totally forgotten what I was going to write. I’m sure it wasn’t that interesting anyway.
In lieu of real content, I’ll tell you this: if you read the Temeraire series, be it known that there’s another one out called Empire of Ivory. I’ve got it on my iPod right now! Yay!
Have a fantastically lovely weekend, my babies! I hope the weather is lovely for you, wherever you are.
In which I get the hell outta town!
I didn’t take a pre-spring vacation like I did last year, so I’ve been in the office without a pause since Vegas last September. (As soon as Amma’s tour schedule comes out I’ll be trying to book Chicago, and I’m also hoping to get to New York in late autumn.) Sometimes you just can’t have a good attitude if you haven’t gotten out of town lately.
I really, really, really needed to get out of town. I was sleeping too much, feeling irritated with my customers, and in general needing a little break in the old routine. I mean, when your mantra turns into “Fuck! Fuck! Fuckity fuck!” when you’re on the phone at work? You need a break.
Luckily, Teh BF’s birthday was Saturday! I gave him this:
Which is a sweet set of sushi knives with chopsticks in a groovy case, and in return he took me to Idaho with him:
Coeur d’Alane, Idaho! Where there’s a lake! And some leftover Rocky Mountains! And really good cosmopolitans!
We stayed in a resort hotel, ate an amazing meal, spent about an hour in the casino, and then slept in our room’s gigantic bed. In the morning we had the hotel’s VERY EXPENSIVE brunch buffet (apparently a buffet with chocolate fountain, ice sculpture, omelet and crepe bar = $30 a head) and then checked out.
I am the type of person who goes to a sporty resort and does nothing sporty at all. We barely even walked around; there was certainly no boating or fishing or water skiing or hiking or golfing or swimming. But the eating and drinking was stellar!
We took a detour through Medical Lake on the way home ’cause Teh BF was incarcerated there 23 years ago and wanted to have a look at it. He completely spazzed out and told me all kinds of crazy jail stories, like the one about breaking into the commissary and stealing cartons of cigarettes. Yes, when you’re in jail for stealing, you probably should not ought to be doing B&Es! Heh. My baby was a really stupid silly boy.
I took a lot of pictures – I brought three film cameras along for an overnight trip ’cause I’m a dork like that – but none of that is developed yet, of course. You can see the rest of my cell phone pics for now, though; they’re here. (Go look at them and come back. I’ll wait!)
When we got back to town Sunday afternoon, we went straight to KJ’s and passed out for three hours. (Most likely, those three hours were the most gorgeous three hours of 2009, but I needed the nap more than I needed fresh breeze and sunshine.)
When we got up, we ate at the new taco joint in town (it was AMAZING!) and then he took me home. I think I went to bed at ten, and slept until my alarm went off at nine this morning.
~+~+~
This morning I got up and packed my bento for the day:
That’s rajma masala. I made it myself.
Then Bindu and I walked to work. It was gorgeous and warm and I wished for a short-sleeved shirt.
~+~+~
When I got to work, the Yashica had arrived:
Can’t wait to get a battery and a roll of film into it!
In which I share a few nice things with y’all.
1. I have paid off my 2007 surgery completely and in full.
2. I got laid last night. Yum.
3. I received a new classic camera today. It’s another Argus C3 and it’s in fantastic condition:
4. This weekend is Teh BF’s birthday! This is excellent for two reasons. The first is that I will finally get to give him his present, which I’ve had for weeks and which is burning a hole in my brain because I want to give it to him NOW and he won’t let me. The second is that he’s taking me to Coeur d’Alane for the weekend! We’ll be staying at this chichi hotel and playing at this nifty casino.
5. The weather is nice!
In which I like him. I really, really like him.
I’m not a political animal.
I think politics are in equal parts numbingly boring and distressingly childish. While legal language is probably a neat game, I particularly loathe political talking heads and find them to be a most repugnant breed of humanoid: self-important and brash, and doing nothing but deconstructing the work of others and contributing nothing but dissent. Ick.
I think it is impossible to govern a capitalist democracy because it’s impossible to please everybody all the time. It’s impossible to be fair to everyone. Impossible to guarantee rights, when one of those rights is to have more wealth than everybody else does, and another is to be a total fucking ignorant moron that the state cannot legally or morally allow to starve to death.
But I really dig Obama. It’s nice to have a proper orator in the White House. It’s nice not to cringe when imagining his meetings with leaders of other countries. He probably actually reads his briefings and manages not to look like an American punk.
I watched much of his address [transcript] while eating my omelet and toast this morning. While I don’t care enough to speak to specifics of policy, I do have to say that I like the man. (He’ll be reviled and feared by the time he leaves office, but that’s the office’s fault, not the man’s.)
I like that he is still responding to public opinion (they all quit doing that after they’ve been in office for awhile). I like that he states opinions in the first person, like, “(A)nd I promise you, nobody is more frustrated than me with AIG.” I like that he explains his administration’s rationale with care, as here:
“And although there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of to banks — one of my most frequent questions in the letters that I get from constituents is, “Where’s my bailout?” — and I understand the sentiment. It makes sense intuitively, and morally it makes sense, but the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in $8 or $10 of loans to families and businesses. So that’s a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth. That’s why we have to fix the banks.”
I like that he rather scolded us a little for our greed and short-sightedness. I like that he seems to think our educational system sucks, and that he’s pro-science. I even like the Biblical references. Not because I’m Christian, because I’m not, but because it’s a time-honored tradition to reference one’s own culture’s historical documents. (I call the Bible an American historical document because we wouldn’t all be here if our ancestors hadn’t been such total whacko splinter Christians in the first place.) The Bible’s a powerful piece of literature when properly used, and I liked his use of the ‘house upon the rock’ parable. It worked.
I live with a woman who remembers The Great Depression. She lives frugality. She saves rubber bands, gives plastic bags back to the newspaper boy so he can recycle them, eats all of the groceries she buys (no slightly-soft tomatoes in her garbage), and buys nothing on credit ever. When Obama said that his administration intended to create legislation that would protect future generations from ever experiencing this sort of recession, she snorted because she knows shit happens; she’s seen it.
I waste a tremendous amount of resources. My whole generation does. We buy food, don’t eat it, and throw it out. We replace tools and electronics rather than bother to repair them, because we consider our ‘free time’ to be more valuable than money because we have more of one than the other. I can’t even guess how much paper I’ve wasted in my lifetime of using computers and printers; just today I printed two addresses on two sheets of paper, cut out the addresses, and threw 95% of the paper into the garbage.
I toss clothes rather than re-purpose them; I have an attic full of computers that still work but just not well enough; I’ve filled landfills with household waste and empty plastic bottles and bleached toiletries for forty years. I’ve lived in the bubble all my life. I don’t really know how not to.
But I know that I like having someone who seems intelligent (and less than wholly corrupt) in the office of president for once in my life. You couldn’t pay me twelve times his salary to do his job; and I cannot fathom why anyone would ever want to be the president of the United States and therefore distrust any creature who self-selects for the position, but the dude really seems to be well suited to it.
I wish him luck with it. I really do.
In which there are some events of the not-so-stunningly-fantastic sort. It’s not that interesting. You may talk among yourselves.
Saturday I had the first roll of film shot through The Brick developed. Several of them turned out really well, particularly considering that the rangefinder window is filthy and I can’t see through it, and that I totally guess on aperture and exposure times. (The roll is here if you wanna take a look at what a 1962 Argus C3 shoots like.)
I had my hair colored Saturday afternoon. No more roots! (I also had my eyebrows waxed. Best use of seven dollars EVER.)
Saturday night Teh BF and I went to bed – and to sleep – at 8:30. It’s a totally rockstar lifestyle, I’m telling you.
Sunday we went to brunch at The Oasis with family: G’ma, my brother, my aunt and uncle, two of their friends, my aunt’s mom, and KJ’s mom. The food sucked – the Caesar salad was fishy, the eggs were green, and the hash browns were those awful frozen fried potatoes with green and red peppers, and the rest of the buffet was FODA1 so naturally I couldn’t eat it – but the company was congenial.
Sunday afternoon we spent at my place; KJ watched golf with G’ma while I installed the giant hand-me-down flat monitor he gave me and watched a couple of episodes of Firefly and Torchwood on it upstairs. For dinner, I made black bean soup. He took off around seven; I did laundry and watched Mystic River and went to bed early.
I’m not sure if it’s blogging or aging, but though the agency of one or both I’ve finally relaxed enough to be utterly vacuous. I no longer worry about coming off as deep and self-reflective; I post utterly vapid shit with no greater meaning whatsoever and feel pretty good about it. I talk about getting my eyebrows waxed, for chrissakes. Is this what they mean by ‘mellowing with age’?
—
1 Flesh of Dead Animal.
In which I actually had breaking local news to share, but my favorite way of spreading it was down.
Last night, Teh BF and I went out to Kelly’s in Milton-Freewater, OR for a change of pace. We had fried food and a couple of cocktails and it was pretty fun…
…for awhile. But then the place started to reek like burning garbage, and shortly after that it started to reek like burning plastic! Very toxic, nasty, terrible-smelling burning plastic.
Apparently the diesel place two doors down? Was on fire.
A few minutes later we couldn’t stand the stench any longer, so we polished off our drinks and tabbed out.
As we were pulling out of the bar’s parking lot, gaping at the massive column of smoke rising from the Morton building two doors down, I pulled out my cell phone and Twittered, “The diesel place two doors south of Kelly’s in M-F is currently on fire,” thinking that @Carlos72 over at The U-B might like to know about it (as a reporter, he uses Twitter to keep up with local breaking news).
Then this morning I checked Twitter and saw this:
Yeah, that’s right: no activity on my account for fourteen hours! Which is utterly unheard of, since I’m following 63 people around the world, with several time zones covered. There’s never more than an hour without some sort of tweet! Never!
The four tweets I sent last night – two from my phone, one from my iPod, and one from my netbook – don’t exist anywhere. The Twitter blog mentions this outage not at all. Their status page sorta-kinda references it, but not with much clarity.
I’ve never had this kind of problem with Twitter before, so I guess it was just my turn. *sigh*
Update: Wow! Within ten minutes of posting this, all my missing stuff reappeared in my feed (not on my Twitter page, though)! So: yay! Color me impressed. Er, partially impressed.
VSCO
Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
