Cimorene

1. I got my new sweatshirt in the mail today! It's the same one Carla got a week or so ago, but in olive green instead of navy blue. I love it so! My old sweatshirt was...not exactly something I would choose myself (had a big picture of wolves on it and said Alaska; I think it was given to us by Carla's aunt when they went on a trip there), plus it was worn thin in many places and the cuffs were pretty much shredded. Also it was a pullover, which is fine for in the house, but as a jacket to wear out, I'd rather have a zip-up sweatshirt.

2. We bought a new sofa! Earlier in the week we got a flier from Easy Life, which had an advertisement for a $599 sofa with free loveseat or recliner and we both liked the idea. The sofa reclines on both ends, plus the centre folds down to be a little table with built-in cup holders!

At first we'd been thinking about getting the recliner to go with it, since that's what would fit better in our living room, but the recliner turned out to be a rocker recliner, which I do not like, plus the hand pull on the side felt really cheap. So we're now not sure exactly where the loveseat will go, but we'll find a place for it somewhere, either in the living room or maybe here in the computer room.

I am all O_o over the fact that we have bought furniture. It's so grown up! We did buy a bed years ago when we got married, but that is the only furniture we've bought, new or used. Everything else was already in the house or hand-me-down from relatives. (Oh, and we got a coffee table from Carla's folks for Christmas a couple years ago.) Well, we did buy the three computer desks we have, and the CD shelves, but those don't feel like real furniture in quite the same way, you know? They're not a sofa!

Anyway, they were out of stock at that location, so it has to be ordered and will be delivered around the 8th.

3. They had Tim Tams at the grocery store! FINALLY! I have been hearing now for a year or more that Pepperidge Farm sells Tim Tams here, but I never saw them anywhere. I was kind of disappointed in the price, though. On sale for $3.50, regular price $3.99. I'm not sure how much they are at Cost Plus, but it's not that much more expensive. I was hoping these would be a little cheaper. I did buy a pack, but even the sale price is out of my price range except for very special occasions (like finding them for the first time ever).

So yeah, because my sleep schedule's been so fucked up, I haven't been taking my Wellbutrin. I really really need to remember that it's not optional.

Dinner tonight, which should have been dinner last night, was good, but it was only half of what I meant to serve and the meat was just a little too pink even though my meat thermometer said it was a lot more done that it turned out to be.* I really didn't feel the cooking vibe so we had the caramelized butternut squash/sweet potato dish (which was very good) and lamb, which was very good even if it was a little pink. We'll have greens and mashed potatoes tomorrow.

Things would have been a lot smoother if I'd been taking my meds, as it was I stressed this one waaaaaay too much.



*Um, hi...I'm really not in the mood for recommendations or helpful hints or solutions or whatever here.

Right now I'm mostly thankful that I no longer have a migraine.

There's food in the oven and I'll do a much longer post about it all later.

Hope those of you who celebrate (and those how don't) had a great day!

• 20:15 Full of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, & the traditional (for our family) pavlova, and thankful for all my blessings. Happy T-day, all. #
• 20:17 @SuperCricket Why wouid you do that? #
• 20:18 Am I the only one who thinks Black Friday is emblematic of what's wrong with our values? Of course, I've worked many of them, so I'm biased. #
• 20:31 @itsprettyokay And they're doing crazy things like camping all night in front of stores! WTF? #
• 20:32 OMG I never realized how wrong it is for Woodstock to be eating turkey. That'd be like me eating a gorilla or something. #
• 20:35 @itsprettyokay I think so. *sigh* Whether you're Xian or not, the values of Christmas don't include "act like a damn fool & go into debt." #
• 20:36 @SuperCricket But he's a lot closer to turkeys than I am to cows. They're the same family of the animal kingdom. #
• 20:42 @SuperCricket I think he's a canary. #
• 20:46 @itsprettyokay Right? And it's just...Well, when a materialistic gal like me thinks it's too materialistic...*G* #
• 20:47 @SuperCricket Well, I still find it gruesome. But it amuses me to find it gruesome. #
• 20:52 @SuperCricket *whips out machete* #
• 20:53 @itsprettyokay Yes! My favorite part of giving a gift is picking one that I know the recipient will love. #
• 20:58 @zillah975 Yeah. It's like when my mom feeds her parrots leftover chicken. Creeps me right the fuck out. #
• 20:58 @SuperCricket Now, THAT'S a knife! #

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1. Had a nice dinner today. I wasn't thrilled with my family, but at least we didn't have to stay too long. :p

2. I have managed to survive on only about an hour and a half of sleep. I thought I might crash when we came back from my mom's, but unfortunately I still had Naruto and Bleach to translate since I didn't get those before we left. And then it was like five-thirty or six and I was thinking, really, if I just push on for a few more hours, I can be on a fairly "normal" schedule, which is what I'm wanting to keep to while Erin is here, because while I usually love my sleep during the day/up all night thing I have going, it's not so great for company (and Erin is not back here until Saturday, but I'd rather not disrupt my schedule more than I have to).

3. I don't have to do anything tomorrow. I mean, there's stuff on my to-do list, but there's nothing urgent, and we don't have to go anywhere, and I can just catch up on my sleep and relax.

There's something else that I have been meaning to put on the list for days and I only remember it when I'm away from the computer. D: And each time, I'm like, oh, I should totally put that on my happiness post! But now I have no idea what it is.

1. Well, I got most of my Jump translations done last night. For some reason neither Bleach nor Naruto are out yet. Hopefully they'll show up in the next couple hours so I can get them done before going over to my mom's for dinner... But at least I got One Piece (two chapters this week), Bakuman, and Psyren out of the way!

2. I went to Panera for the first time yesterday. OMG they have delicious pastries. I thought they were just a sandwich shop, but Erin wanted to go there for breakfast, so we walked down (nice walk, like three, three and a half miles round trip) and I got a gingerbread bagel and a orange scone. The scone had this icing on it that tasted exactly like those Pillsbury orange rolls. And the bagel was sooooo good (and cheap, too; their bagels are only $1.25). I'd definitely go down there again.

3. Erin's off with her sisters for a couple days, but she's coming back here on Saturday instead of Sunday like she thought, so that's an extra day to hang out, yay. Plus she's going to be renting a car, so I won't have to get my mom to take her to the airport when she leaves.

4. I'm cat/house-sitting for my former neighbors for a few days, so that means extra money, yay.

Take a bagel, slice it, toast it and put a generous amount of cream cheese on both slices. Then take a couple artichoke hearts and chop them up fine* and use them as sammich filling. Serve with Kalamata olives on the side.

Speaking of food, we got our box yesterday; I was just too wiped to report it.

Persimmons, tangerines, apples, kale, chard, lettuce, some other green and sweet potatoes.

( rambly stuff about greens and T-Day dinner )

Due to a bit of stupidity on my part, I spent the day without internets. And you know...I missed people, but not the internets themselves. Lemme know if anything interesting happened.

Actually, you all should be glad I spent the day offline; I'm grumpy and crampy and apparently someone, probably Og, slept in just the wrong spot on the bed, forcing me to sleep in a certain position, so my knees and back hurt. It's not that I wouldn't happily kick him off the bed, it's that he does it in the middle of the night and I automatically adjust without waking up.

For those not on my NaNo filter, I'm declaring it a half win. I wrote 20,500 words and I'll probably manage another 5,000 before the end of the month. Or who knows, maybe I won't. Still that's 20K of fic I didn't have on October 31, so there you have it.

I have to go to our local upscale grocery store to pick up the lamb tomorrow. That's gonna be fun. I also have to go to Coco's to pick up the pie so at least I'll have French Toast for lunch or something.

1. My friend Erin is here from out of town. I haven't seen her in almost three years, so it's pretty exciting to see her again. We've been friends since we were like six and eight or something ridiculous like that. She's going to spend tomorrow afternoon through Saturday with her sisters, but then be back at our house and stay until next Wednesday. We did two hours of karaoke this afternoon and hopefully will do more next week.

2. I got the last of the books I ordered for my mom for Christmas, so that is my Christmas shopping done! (That is really my only Christmas shopping, actually, considering Carla got her computer as an early Christmas present.)

I've been sucked into Merlin, at least watching (girlchild loves it but gets scared when things get tense) and reading the fic, some of which is so good I had to rec it. It's an utterly ridiculous twisting of the Arthur stories, of course, and I'm still in love with the 12th century versions. But the characters in this are just so damn cute, I can't resist. Therefore, an OT4 icon, made by miakun, because I like them in any and every combination :-D

I'm just not in the mood for much of anything. I'm having my period and I think I'm coming down with a cold and I'm all with the grumpy.

I might be scarce for a day or two.

I feel like I haven't got much done today because I didn't get much done on the computer, BUT! I did do a ton of housecleaning, because Erin is coming to stay tomorrow, and plus this weekend I want to put the tree up and would want to vacuum and stuff before that, so two reasons to clean means I actually got off my ass and tidied, dusted, and vacuumed.

Plus we finally made a decision on how we want the living room organised, so it's no longer in a half-assed state since we moved the furniture around. I thought of taking pictures tonight (both of it and the rearranged bedroom, which has also had some finishing touches put on it finally, like plugging the clock properly in so it's not got the cord stretching out across the floor), but I think I'll just wait until after I've got the Christmas tree up.

Anyway, so yay, house clean(ish).

And now I am super tired, so I'm going to try and get some sleep and that way I'll be on a more "normal" schedule while I have company (and for Thanksgiving, too, since dinner will be right in the middle of when I'd normally be sleeping).



Also I loved today's Dinosaur Comics.

This is for people in the US only, unfortunately, but a code for Amazon has $3 off digital purchases, plus some new albums like Adam Lambert's For Your Entertainment and Rihanna's Rated R are on sale for $3.99 each, so you could essentially get a whole album for 99 cents.

There's also some good stuff in the 50 for $5 each section, including The Crane Wife and a Flight of the Conchords album.

I already downloaded a copy of For Your Entertainment, but I figured for that cheap, I should buy the official version as well. I also apparently had $12 in mp3 credits already (they give you $5 whenever you buy anything to do with music (such as the headphones we ordered a few months back) and then I forget to use them), so I bought Rihanna's, too. I still have $8 left, so I should see if there's anything else I want.

1. Helped my mom and Tom move some furniture yesterday, which earned us $50 off the rent. Woohoo!

2. My hair is blue! It was really a huge pain in the ass, made even worse by the fact that we no longer have a bathtub faucet (well, the faucet is there, it's just broken so you can no longer switch from shower to bath; it's on shower permanently), so I couldn't rinse my head under the faucet, but instead had to do it in the shower, getting blue all over everything, including myself. But I like how it turned out, so yay.

Title: The House on Mango Street
Author: Sandra Cisneros
Number of Pages: 110 pages
Book Number/Goal: 67/75 for 2009
My Rating: 4.5/5

This is a series of vignettes about Esperanza, a pre-teen girl growing up in a latino neighborhood in Chicago. It's very, very short, even shorter than the 110 pages it appears to be, because each story starts halfway down on the page, and often end with just one paragraph or a few lines on the next page, so there's a ton of empty space. The stories are all just little ordinary things, like reading somebody's memories rather than A Novel. I enjoyed it a lot.

Mooch from BookMooch.

I did hear back from the mods, which I didn't expect. Basically, the problem was my tone. Oh, and the mod who actually suspended me and deleted my posts didn't read far enough back--or ahead--to notice that the thread had been and continued to be way off-topic.

I honestly didn't realize that TWoP had a long history of being faily. It's a shame, because I really liked the SGU snark, as well as the recaps of Flash Forward. Oh, well.

I had to start again, because the stand mike wasn't working. It'd be fine if I had a desk, but with it on my lap in the back bedroom, I get echoes, and it picks up the ambient noise every time I shift position.

So I started...and realized quickly that the mike that connects to the jack on my laptop apparently picks up the broadcasts from the Catholic radio station whose tower is about a block away. While there's a certain irony in having the Catholic station ruining my attempt to record the NC-17 slash, I'm getting down to the wire here, and this is not helping.

Fortunately, I don't pick the station up after sundown, which still gives me a fair chunk of recording time. I've also ordered a USB headset mike that should get here on Wednesday. I kind of wish there were an adapter so I could use the jack mike at work, because my headset is crap.

I got hardly anything done yesterday. I was really tired and went to bed early, then ended up napping a couple times during the day, too, and then have been tired for the last several hours which means I just sort of sat here not really getting much done (but I didn't want to go to bed until I had finished a few things). :(

Also for some reason there's some sort of fuckup between Verizon and T-Mobile, so when people with Verizon call our phones (T-Mobile), they get a message saying all circuits are busy or something. D:

Anyway! On to the happiness...

1. The excerpt for this really bad gay romance is hilarious. I am almost tempted* to pay the $6.99 for the full book because I know it would provide much enjoyment in ways the author never intended.

2. This whole hair-dyeing thing is going very slowly because I am lazy, but I did use the toner on my hair yesterday, and here is a picture of me post-toner. My hair's still pretty yellow, but it definitely took out the worst of the orange. I meant to do the blue today, but that didn't happen, so hopefully tomorrow.

3. There is a World of Warcraft version of Peggle! It's only ten levels, but I will take anything I can get! Also it's free, yay. (And it's not an add-on for Peggle or Peggle Nights, but a stand-alone edition, so you can play it even if you don't have the others.)

4. Carla's going back to Indiana to visit her folks (and friends) in January and her parents are actually paying for the ticket! This is pretty rare for them, and not due to any lack of money.



*Not really, but maybe if it were half that price.

• 19:30 blogs.techrepublic.com.com/geekend/?p=1609&tag=leftCol;post-1871 #
• 19:45 @bibliotech I ADORE Mike Carey! I went to a reading of his here in 07. Alas, I have little memory of it, it was right after a seizure. #

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1. Carla got her new computer today! My old laptop (which she's currently using) is really starting to die (looks like it needs a new hard drive), so instead of saving the new computer til Christmas, we decided she'd just start using it now.

2. Had a nice walk tonight. Four miles, which is longer than we've done in a while. She's been busy with school, I've been busy with work, there's yoga two nights a week interfering with our schedule, and then for the past couple weeks she's been sick. But tonight Alexander wanted something from the Apple Store, so we walked down to the Promenade and back. Stopped at El Pollo Loco on the way, yum.

3. Speaking of chicken, I was boiling a whole chicken earlier today for use in enchiladas and I kind of forgot about it on the stove and so it got cooked way longer than I meant it to...but that ended up being a good thing! The chicken was just falling off the bones!