triadruid

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.

Fractal's house is still in the process of reconfiguring itself, and one of the ways that I'd like to do that is by reworking the Traditional American Golf Course Lawn into something lower-maintenance, lower-impact, and still attractive. Since the implosion of our former lawn company, it's been understandably difficult to find someone willing to mow the half-acre behemoth for the old rate. We don't want it mowed every week to a maximum height of 1", either... we're not going for the Better Homes & Gardens award here, kids. But the city gets cranky if your greenery goes above 10".

Since the fence went up and the number of dogs doubled, the back yard has been more-or-less self-maintaining from four-footed traffic; it'll probably need to be mowed only once or twice a month going forward. However the front yard is in a low/well-irrigated place (our street has swales, not curbs) and grows at an absurd rate in the summer months. We might even have to get it mowed once more this year.

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Anybody else looked into this?

Anybody familiar with logic puzzles, or cars, is welcome to help out on this one. :)

Our household is apparently going to be in the market for new vehicles over the next six months or so. It's not entirely clear how many have to shift, but both mine and featherynscale's are aging rapidly, and kittenpants' is too small for some of her needs.

( So with that in mind... )

(No, there isn't really a concrete problem to be solved here, but getting input from others and broadening our search window is a useful exercise, and probably entertaining besides)

That seems to have been the theme of yesterday.

That, and our basement trying to flood again.