triadruid

Obviously I'm not going to finish another book this year, so I'll go ahead and post this this morning... long list is long, but mitigated by the sheer number of graphic novels. Also I'm amused that this year almost all of my favorites were non-fiction, when most years I barely manage to read 1 or 2 non-fiction. Maybe it just has to be a better book to grab my attention in that category??

Legend: bold means I've read it already, Italics means I'm working on it, and * means I've read it before. Previously read books/reviews are in the 'read lists' tag.( Suggestions and commentary welcome )

Hello, Dreamwidth/LiveJournal... it's been 34 days since my last confession entry. Actually that seems to be the new pattern, looking back at January and such. Oh well, that means I'm living life, right? Sorta. Life is indeed busy, but some of it is good (really good) and some is really weird/bad.

Thing the First: I'm COVERED in poison-ivy-or-something-like right now, and I'm one of those lucky folks who can transfer minute amounts of urushiol from one part of my body to another, even though that's not supposed to be possible. I'm 99% sure I got it at the annual Blue River Rescue, but it's driving me batty. Topical creams aren't doing crap, so half the time I'm zoned out on Benadryl. I think I've got some in my shoes from several years ago too that keeps giving me foot blisters, and just learned that you can supposedly deactivate it with a hot wash cycle. Worth it even if it trashes my shoes' finish. BATTY I TELL YOU.

Thing the 2nd: Just finished cardiac rehabilitation - by the end I'd ran 5k (on a treadmill), ran a 7:56 mile, and only tried to pass out once. I've got a much better idea of my current cardiac capacity (AND limits!) which is kind of the point... still should get a HR monitor, but finances are tight enough right now to make it a lower priority. Still doing Fitocracy and still find it useful as a motivator, but they've just pushed through an *unfortunate* graphical redesign that is only slowly getting better. The problem with Internet startups is that they can try to Chase All The Things too much and end up doing nothing very well, but the people of the site are fantastic. If you were interested when I announced it before, they are now out of beta and you no longer need an invite to join. I'm 'naybliss' there; I think if you are on FB it will give you an autoprompt for friends you know there.

Thing the 2nd-and-a-half: Having finished cardiac rehab, K and I wanted to join a gym to keep going. One of my rehab nurses mentioned the Bene-Fit gym near us in the Red Bridge Shopping Center; turns out after going there that she's related to the owner! Also one of our neighbors works the front desk, and recognized us by our car. Heh, small world, etc. Anyway, we've gone twice so far and it's a very nice little gym. Decent hours, especially for an independently-run establishment. And the price is right; Bronze membership starts at just $10/month!

Thing the 2nd-and-two-thirds: Speaking of finances, 'bounced' my bank account the other day in a surprising turn of events. We've been dining out more and made a few bigger purchases lately, but that's no excuse for not keeping better track. Was able to transfer things around and avoid any major problems, but meh, embarrassing.

Part E: Boulevard has a Barleywine. A rye barleywine, and it's frickin' amazing. Complex, rich, warm, colorful, fantastic finish, and 11%ABV to boot. Whee? Related: Martin City Brewing Company is pretty awesome for a new restaurant, despite not (yet) having their own brewery license in place. Both the food and the staff are excellent, though the place can be a little loud (uhh, we helped with that problem, actually).

ζ: Mafia Scum suffered a catastrophic, unpredictable server outage that wiped out months of posts due to a suboptimal backup procedure. Many games were recovered via the amazing utilization of Google Cache by some very clever users, but my latest giant game got destroyed. Which is not the tragedy it could have been, as the game was just Too Damn Big and flawed in its core. Still, it's both stunted my desire to run games for a while and (hopefully) rekindled my efforts to work on the back end and site skins. Time will tell...

Seventhly: Finally finished painting the front door yesterday. When it got surprise-replaced last fall, we got the wild-ass idea of painting it copper, but that's not really a practical basecoat color for insurance contractors to implement. So we got a basecoat down in a sort of pumpkin color and then it got too cold to paint the glaze on. I'll try to get a picture posted soon, but it really does look surprisingly like http://www.kpcopper.com/doors/7-DoorPanels-In-1s.jpg

Ochtú: Miss the gaming; we've been SUPERbusy lately and less frivolous (well, sort-of) pursuits have taken precedence. Exercising in particular is becoming addictive in a good way... Games Night still happens, of course, but the RPGs are on the backburner. Ideas continue to flow, which is a step beyond first-world-problems, I'm guessing.

3*3: We'll be missing JordanCon this year, it appears. The massive drive, the expense-per-unit-of-fun (not that it's not fun, but it's really concentrated in one fandom, for the most part) and general burnout on extroverted activities led us to this conclusion. I think we'll end up going out of town somewhere that weekend anyway, just someplace closer and quieter. Going next year AFTER the release of the final book is probably a better use of limited resources. K and I are almost to the end of TFoH in our rereadaloud, with an excellent book coming next. A coworker who also happens to be a total wotfan gifted me the audiobooks in digital format too, so I've put them on the mp3 player and started listening to them in one ear at work. Funny how much of the first book I have near-memorized after 15 rereads...

Lastish: All complaining aside, life is pretty good. There's other stuff going on that is either too small or too private to mention, but if you made it this far, well done.

Last nights dreams were a mélange of the ongoing Angelic Mafia game I'm running, snippets from the 80's miniseries V, and a surreal sequence wherein I got to listen in on Mötley Crüe's explanation of how they were being so much better behaved; to wit, there had only been one sexual assault, a broken table, and a smashed keg that night, as opposed to two rapes, three hotel fires, and a couple of cases of alcohol poisoning earlier in the tour.

Yeesh.

Tired. Okay, not actually tired, because we Slept All Fuckin' Day, but off-kilter. I keep having to recalibrate to 'normal society' expectations, like what you can and can't say/look at/find odd.


Mostly caught up on LJ. Internet at the house is still sketchy, but tonight it's somewhat better (hence actually posting here). They're sending a technician out Tuesday between 5 and 7... yes, I know today was Tuesday. I meant the next one... Grrr. Apparently it's "signal noise on the line", which at least means it's neither the modem nor router.

Got a fair bunch of pictures at Dragon*Con. Some are still in post-processing due to the flash starting to die, but many are good. Those can be found at featherynscale's Flickr account, or elsewhere on the Internets.

Speaking of elsewhere on the Internets, my Green Arrow costume wins the "most pictures taken of me" contest, hands down, so those'll be showing up all over the place I'm sure. Not bad for about a week's work, though next year's iteration will be better. A couple of minor logistical issues popped up, but thankfully the skintight doublet wasn't one of them, even with all of the scantily clad ladies around (including two GA-less Black Canaries, one of whom nearly expired from glee at seeing me). Which is good, because lots of little kids (many not even at the Con, but at surrounding restaurants and the like) wanted to have their picture taken with "Robin Hood". That was especially worth it. Hardly anyone knew who John Constantine was, and No One did before dark. That was funny, if not wholly surprising, in retrospect. hekatatia: As promised, here's the first picture link!

Very little drama. Insane amounts of fun. Going back next year.

P.S. The Wheel of Time track director is working on being an Actually Real Live Famous Person, between hosting JordanCon next April, and getting a piece of her humor up on Cracked: http://www.cracked.com/article_16587_hollywoods-5-saddest-attempts-at-feminism.html

I feel like I'm No Fun lately. I'm not sure it's true, and I'm not fishing for compliments; just kinda... worn threadbare.

Yesterday was Action!Packed!
( Handfastings! )

( Flirting! AIDS! Lightning Storms! )

( Dinner! Failure! Dinner? Failure! Dinner and a Show, finally )

( All's well that ends well? )

Not my best day. On the other hand, I've had a lot worse.

My family goes out of town again, and what's the first thing I do? Stay late at work, of course...*headdesk* Of course, being on the phone all yesterday meant I came home, stared about a bit, and went to bed early without saying 10 words to matchgirl42. Sorry 'bout that..

Also, I think I've finally 'broken' a bone; I use scare quotes because I'm not certain, but one of the metatarsals in my left foot has been hurting like hell for the last three weeks most times that pressure is put on it. Maybe a stress fracture, maybe something stupider like arthritis? Bah.

Still not getting much writing done for NaNoWriMo, even though I'm narrowly ahead of featherynscale (at least until she updates whatever she did on the plane yesterday), but I got "a" website updated.... also finished Stranger in a Strange Land (very Heinleinian), and The Philosopher and the Druids, which was better (and yet different) than expected. That officially brings me up to 50 books this year, first time I've done that since Book-It! in grade school.

Is it Friday yet?

Got a little more than 400 words done for NaNoWriMo yesterday during crafting; it's been very difficult so far to suppress my natural desires to copyedit and research, which slows me down.



But then 50k words is probably an unattainable goal for me this year, so I'll settle for just racing with featherynscale instead. :) Still, it's forcing me to write more than I ordinarily would have, which is good, and will further the backstory for our Amnesia Campaign (we're writing separate stories this year, from two different places where we need to fill in backstory about the world).

featherynscale put one of these together yesterday, and it was cracking me up.

( Stuff ... to do )

Apparently in an effort to propitiate wildnsquirrelly's desire for over-the-top dreams, this morning's last sequence was turned up to 11, if not actually 12.

( Read more... )

No clue what that was all about. Yesterday was actually pretty boring, so my brain had to compensate at night?!?

::edit:: And then Firefox crashes right before I post this. Thank Gods for saved drafts...