solarbird | thursday 23 December

AND we're in Kentucky.

I forget how omnipresent the Kentucky cigarette smell is - it surprises me again every time I come back here to visit. Even places where nobody smokes smell a bit of stale cigarettes, and it takes me a few days to stop getting nauseous.

annathepiper's brother Marc and his wife Didi are letting us stay at his house for the week; it's closer to Richmond than Lexington, about 20 minutes away from the circular highway that runs around older Lexington and which is now surrounded on all sides by suburbs - so far out that it's no longer a "belt" but sort of a ring halfway between downtown and city limits - or maybe less, I'm not sure.

Lexington has mostly adopted the California endless-suburb/car-only/pedestrians-are-evil "edge city" concept, and it's much the worse for it. I haven't been downtown yet, but I want to try to swing through there at least once, to see whether it's gotten any better.

But Marc and Didi have been very nice, and their kids are - well, a herd of four (currently) five (once the other one gets here) kids all under the age of eight. So that's alternatingly fun and deeply alarming. Charlie (nee "Melon") has an actual still-working NES, so he's getting his old sk00l cred the honest way. He's got a lot of game cartridges for it and he's pretty good. Mostly today, we played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Welcome to 1986; here's your Bon Jovi album. Earlier, on another 8-bit 80s system, we played Street Fighter II on a Zenith wood-framed console set in the basement. I could feel the leg-warmers coalescing around me.

Or was that the cat?

Don't laugh; it's a big cat.

Anyway, today we mostly arranged a bunch of stuff, and also went to Rickey and Tracy's house to visit them (and their three(!) kids) and borrow a cup of internet, which we did. They made chili, which was tasty, and we sat around and talked a bunch about nothing in particular - since they're both regularly online (Rickey professionally, even - he's a webmaster) we talk pretty much all the time, so it wasn't all that much different. They've been hosting the gaming group they're in, and doing the LexFA fun. Anna grabbed a more recent AdWare definitions file for her brother's free-from-the-office-and-infected-with-EVERYTHING machine (I cleaned off probably 5-7 pieces of individual spyware last night), as well as the Spybot and Firefox install executables. He'd previously pulled off a few dozen other pieces of adware/spyware/malware crap, but it was still trying to get back onto the net, and continued to do so after I made more headway, so there's clearly some more crapola infecting the box. Poor thing.

I also talked a bit with Ercel and

starfallz, setting up stuff with them; yesterday, we made general noises about doing stuff with Scott E. (who wants us to see his new house; his old house's neighbourhood turned virtually overnight into a duplicate of the neighbourhood we just moved out of, complete with student fuckhead riots and UK reaction identical to UW's) and Brent, both of whom we'll talk to more again after the big Christmas Eve day here at Didi and Marcus's. So that'll be fun.

Right now Anna and I are both sitting here writing - she's ... oh, now she's making an LJ post too, that's funny. Last I looked, she had been working on t3h novel. Of course, neither of us have net, so we won't be posting these for a few days. Hoepfully at Starfall's, maybe day after tomorrow. Or Sunday. That'd work too.

Anyway, that's about enough for tonight; I want to get to bed around midnight, just so that I can be all showered and presentable and such for the festivities tomorrow.

Oh, yeah; the WINTER STORM 2004 AAAAAAAAAGH failed to KILL EVERYONE as was predicted, and while it did take us over 10 minutes to get into the rental car this afternoon to go visit Rickey and Tracy, and another half an hour to get the ice off the windows enough to head out, that's all it was - once we got off the cul-de-sac, the roads were already fine. Tonight's supposed to get really cold, but that's all. Which is really too bad - I'd have liked some snow. But at least it keeps the travel easy. Always a silver lining, except when there isn't...