Posts

Showing posts from September, 2013
If there's one thing being sick does really really well, it's... well, actually,it's make me an emo, mood-swingy bastard, who has to blow her nose every fifteen seconds. It's like being a raging cokehead, except without all the fun parts. If there are two  things being sick does, however, the other one is fuck up my sleep schedule. The boss-lady is also on vacation right now, so I've no pressing need to be up before noon at any point. I spent a couple days honoring my late rat, and all the pet rats that have gone before, by hiding under the blankets and eating macaroons. Believe me, it's the sort of thing he would have done. Now I'm just sort of tired of being up at 5am, when all the world is dead. Cramming things into my brain helps some. It also helps that Supernatural  is made almost entirely of mood whiplash and plot twists, which means that if I'm watching one of the arc episodes, I can't  tune out mentally, or I miss cool stuff. If I'm wa
Okay. Right. I'm not actually dead. What's been happening over here is that I've been: Working Sick Working while sick Shooting while sick Failing to recover from the sickness because I've been working and shooting instead of sleeping Running home a lot to tend to a rat who was also sick The good news is that the rat is no longer ill. The bad news is that this is because I no longer have a rat. He kept belly-flopping out of his house and scuttling across the floor to get me whenever he felt especially lousy, waking me up with a sort of splut!  noise and then a bazillion freezing cold rat toes all over my arm. I didn't really want him swan-diving that far, so for the last couple of days, I just pulled his cage off the stand and sat it next to the bed. I was rather rudely awakened by a flying rat to the face a couple of times before he figured out I'd left the lower door open, but at least he didn't hurt himself. I was going to eulogize the lit
The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - "The Night Before Xmas" The Adventures of Sam Spade - "The Biddle Riddle Caper" Box 13 - "The Clay Pigeon"
The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - "The Horseless Carriage" The Adventures of Sam Spade - "The Prodigal Panda Caper" Box 13 - "Archemedes And The Roman"
The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - "The Persecuted Millionaire" The Adventures of Sam Spade - "The 251235679 Caper" Box 13 - "The Perfect Crime"
I feel like I'm leaking money this month. It's frightening. The worst part is that I kind of am, although not as fast as I think, and all of it for things I actually have to buy. Having an extreme amount of money makes you start losing the distinction between things you want and things you need -- when you have heaps more money than sense, you start thinking your life requires a Porsche 911, for instance. When you have no money at all, you start telling yourself that your socks don't have that  many holes, and your shoes are mostly  fine. It's gotten to the point where I'll stand in the grocery store and argue with myself over whether I really need to buy food, which scares me a bit, since I already don't eat when I'm under a lot of stress. Mostly what's happened was that moving was slightly cheaper than I anticipated, and the boss-lady at Circlet is actively looking for extra things to hand me so I can bill for them. So now it's time to order ba
You guys might want to keep an eye out for horsemen. I went and bought a phone today. I don't like telephones. Part of it is one of the more annoying PTSD-ish symptoms of the anxiety disorder -- when I was growing up, a ringing phone never  meant anything good -- but mostly it's just that I don't use them. I have a hard time parsing speech over the phone. I know all the new ones are advertising call quality, music player, multimedia, blah blah blah. Bollocks. Phone calls are still squashed into oblivion by the compression algorithm, still missing a lot of weird frequencies and waveforms, and still are mostly mush to me, particularly when I'm trying to use a cell phone in anywhere other than a quiet room, which is pretty much what they're for. My hearing is fine and always has been; I can hear CRT deflection whine, and it drives me bonkers. It's just the telephone I have trouble with. The upshot of all that is that last time I went out and exchanged money for
The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - "The Babbling Butler" The Adventures of Sam Spade - "The Dry Gulch Caper" Box 13 - "The Bitter Bitten"
I tell people that I'm terrible at marketing. This is a lie. What I'm terrible at is manipulating people into buying something they didn't originally want. I would be shit at selling things like laptops on commission. If someone turns up going, "I just need to check my email and put things onto my iPod," I'm not even going to bother showing them the $2200 Alienware gaming rigs. I'm just going to walk them over to the $300 refurbs. They would walk out happy, but I would be surviving on a steady diet of ramen for the rest of my life. Eventually, I would get fired for not trying, and I would probably be happier for it. On the other hand, I'm the last person on Earth you should be talking to if you want to be talked out of purchasing something you've been eyeing for a while. Do you want it? Will you enjoy it? Do you have the money for it? Then buy the fucking thing and get on with your day. Moggie is in the market for a new car, and has recently achi
All moved into the new place. We go down en masse to sign the lease formally tomorrow morning. The room is tiny and the view profoundly uninspiring, but there is much to like about the apartment as a whole. It's another one of those converted Edwardian houses I've decided I really love. Plaster walls, wood floors (planks, not laminate; they're laid in a herringbone miter pattern in the corners), strange projections and edges where former fireplace voids have been filled with modern conduits and plumbing. The floor plan is an odd shape; the kitchen has some unexpected pop-outs in the walls, one of them coming through casing on what obviously used to be a doorway, where a closet has been added ex post facto  to what is now one of the bedrooms. The interior has signs of wear, but also signs that the owner and tenants care about the place. The walls are mainly not white, and have been painted over repairs that are just visible in low-angle light. There's a linen cabinet,
I've been asked to write something on the topic of cutting off one's toxic parents. I'm not sure what kind of help I'll be. I didn't do any super-formal Not Talking To You Anymore ceremonial severing. I moved across the country and never bothered calling again. (Not that I was calling them much in the first place. I'd been in the same apartment for a few years at that point, and I'm not sure they knew where it was, because they had never been invited to visit.) I'm in the US, so "across the country" means "like five hours by airplane, seven if you have a layover", and none of them appreciate traveling much, so there's no real danger that any of them are going to try hunting me down in person. Plus I changed my mobile carrier and my phone number, and didn't bother to share that with them, either. I don't know how my parents reacted. I got one extremely vitriolic email from my sister, full of charming stuff like complaints