収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Not too much going on; I've been really sleepy today and now I'm kind of not, which is stupid timing. I suck at Wii baseball and haven't drawn anything yet this break. annathepiper and I did go out and buy a bunch of gifts downtown yesterday, though, which is good. I still have to get more, though - but fortunately we aren't doing any more gift exchanges for another several days, so I've got time for things ordered to come in, yay.


Pups and Chicks and Frost

More Money Than Taste, which is not their title but would have been mine. It's an article taking apart am extremely expensive chocolatier's self-produced mythos. If you don't know much about chocolate (like me - I know I like it but haven't thought of it too much beyond that ^_^ ), it also seems to be a good primer on the basics of chocolate.

Sony is getting fined for shipping involuntary-install rootkits on music CDs, but not really enough as far as I'm concerned. Still, it's a start.

Friday's token: 0.1 miles
Saturday's miles: 2.7
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1457.5
Miles out of Rivendell: 999.5
Miles out of Lothlórien: 545.5
Miles past Rauros Falls: 127.6
Miles to Isengard: 334.1

Here, have something stupid and pointless.

[Anna] says "AMULET OF REFLECTION BABY"
[F] RAR
[M] says "Rawr!"
[Anna] picks up a new kitty in Sokoban, and heads on down. Fort Ludios, here I come.
[M] yaaas!
[M] is rooting for you!
[Anna] yeek! Big Room on level 10!
[Anna] oh jesus christ there's an air elemental.
[Anna] says "AND a Rust Monster. GAH!"
[F] peers
[Anna] is going to have to think about this.
[F] says "What game, again?"
[M] says "Nethack"
[Solarbird] sends openly ** Blackjack. **
[Anna] says "nethack. :)"
[Solarbird] sends openly ** dammit **
[Anna] bips Solarbird. :)
[Solarbird] sends openly ** Pong? **
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] 0-1
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[M] eyes Anna. Is she like this in person? ;)
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Anna] says "Yes."
[Solarbird] 1-1
[Solarbird] bip
[M] says "Truer love I've never seen."
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] 2-1
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] 3-1
[M] is, mind you, laughing her ass off. :)
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] 3-2
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] 4-2
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[F] THWACK
[Solarbird] bzzzzt
[Solarbird] 0-0
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] 1-0
[M] kicks [F].
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] 2-0
[F] bites [M].
[M] can tell you've never had a 2 year old, and learned when to leave well enough alone. :)
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] bip
[Solarbird] 2-1
[F] will never have one either
[M] says "Wise man."

( You can't fool me - it's memes, all the way down )

I think we just had a tiny earthquake. That's the first one I've felt - if it was one - in, gosh, a couple of years. (It was really little. A couple of books tipped and a stack of mail fell over, and there was just a little rattling.) I kind of thought it was a large truck going by before I remembered, "oh wait, we live at the end of a dead end street now." I went and checked for a large truck anyway, but there wasn't anything out there.

Entire duration was five or six seconds, intensity felt kinda like this: .:::....

Time was 12:50pm, plus or minus a couple of minutes. Nothing on the USGS website yet, but it hasn't updated in a while.

In other news, today is much better from an allergy standpoint. Far from perfect, but definitely better. I've also vacuumed and done a lot of housework stuff. And we ended up walking a bit getting around the U. District for Mimi's birthday dinner and movie, so I've got some to log on that front, too. Yay!

Sunday's miles: 1.4
Miles out of Hobbiton: 246.35
Miles to Rivendell: 210.95

This is very much a Convergence Zone day. Lots of rain, lots of clouds, cool - it's really nice, actually. ^_^ And hopefully it's washing some of the grass and nettle pollen out of the air. I haven't had any blinding, migrane-like sinus headaches yet this year, which makes it better than the last couple of years, but yesterday was still pretty bad - or rather, the night before last was, with yet another night of very little sleep. I think I got a reasonable sleep total last night - I only woke up twice, which is good. I'm a little dazed and a little dizzy today, but that's the worst of it.

I'm really looking forward to the end of this pollen cycle. When my allergies are extra bad, if I go biking, I can really get taken out. So I'm kind of leery about biking to murksouth on sunny days now, which takes out most of my biking time. It should be better by July, though. I hope. Strangely, yesterday's allergy shot was no problem.

Work at 5038 is proceeding apace; I'm going to go down today in a little while and see what I can get done. Scrubbing the bathroom closet - where we used to have the cat box, it's a weird 1911 gravity shower that got the plumbing taken out some time ago, but the showerhead was left in, tho' disconnected, and as such is a great conversation piece - took a lot of work, and on a hot, hot day on top of it all. But it's sparkly now. (Honestly, it cleans up a lot better than I'd remembered - as can be said for the entire main house. I didn't scrub the walls when we moved in, and it turns out the previous people hadn't done that either, and probably never had, so the place is noticeably brighter. Surprise! Even the floral wallpaper in the kitchen that I never, ever liked is better when cleaned down to like-new.)

Anime night has been showing Farscape, which I don't really like - but I've been taking advantage of it lately to draw and work on ideas for some projects I want to pursue in grad school research. Last night, I did - and, being too sleepy, botched - a bit of circuit math. But the basics of what I was noodling through were sound, and I'm starting to get used to thinking about some of these problems again, which is good.

It's going to have a weird little interface, though. I have to admit that. But I've got an old book (The Cheap Video Handbook, circa 1978 or so - I found it used several years ago and grabbed it as potentially interesting) from which I'm pretty sure I'll be able to leverage EE material, which is good, since I'm really weak in that area.

Over the weekend, I helped spazzkat with a couple of truckloads of stuff - furniture, mostly - from his old apartment over to here. So I got a pretty good workout on Saturday from that, which makes up for no biking or much walking on the weekend. I'm enjoying having the house up to four people again, too. I like when it feels like stuff is going on. ^_^ I've put something to keep the door downstairs open so that Polly can visit. We're thinking about putting a kitty door in that door, and possibly in the laundry room door as well, once we have monex again.

Anyway, having now had lunch, I should finish this little write-up I've got to do for a local convention, and then get back do doing actual things. No flower picture today; the weather keeps changing and nothing else has opened up yet! A few things are on the way, though, so hopefully I'll have something soon.

Friday's miles: 2.0
Monday's miles: 2.5
Miles out of Hobbiton: 239.5. Halfway up Weathertop. Should be a nice view!
Miles to Rivendell: 217.8

I've never seen weather like this in Seattle. I heard more thunder this afternoon than I've ever heard before in this part of the country. It wasn't as loud as you get in the midwest, but it was happening over and over. I'm surprised there isn't more freaking out on my friendslist.

The camera is getting less and less well behaved, so I may run out of flower pictures, alas. The last few I tried to take came out unusable. ;_; Which is too bad, since more flowers are starting to bud out. Here's from one taken earlier that was still salvageable:



I have... two more I can use, I think. I'll poke at the camera some more, maybe it'll behave again. That's happened before.

Today was the worst allergy day of the year. By previous year standards, it was nothing, and the rain helped. But still: annoying.

Miles today: 0.1 (token)
Miles out of Hobbiton: 196.7
Miles to Rivendell: 261.3

Does anybody know if anything else by The Go! Team is as good as this single? (See above.)

And my biggest innovation of the day is putting button-holes in my kitchen towels, so they stop falling off the button-style drawer pulls we have in this house. @whee!

It's been a bit, hasn't it?

+0: Okay, so! First. I posted about the showing in July, which opens on Friday with a reception. You should show up. More people at the reception is good. ^_^ I got my postcards, so I've been scattering those about in shops and stuff. I'm going to mail a bunch out, too. So you might get one!

1: We're thinking about making another offer on another house. Let me rephrase that: we would have by now, probably, if the FARKING AGENT would have called us back already. But she hasn't. (This is not our usual agent; he's out of town this weekend.) There is crankiness. Hopefully it didn't sell already.

Mind you, it's not a house we'd be thrilled about. But the location is okay and we wouldn't have to do a zillion things to it immediately before we could even move in. That counts for something.

-2: Zoe attacked me and meant it this morning. My finger still hurts. She got to go back under the covers for about half an hour. I don't know whether she gets the message of "attacking the person who feeds you is stupid."

-3: Various depressing or otherwise disturbing posts in my friendslists and groups I read. Blah. I wrote a long and somewhat difficult reply to one of them, but not the rest. I really should have replied to another one - on a blog - but just couldn't work up the energy to register and reply. I kind of feel like I should have, though.

+4: Went over and hung out at Paul's apartment, and played Mario Cart all night. I'm getting a little better at driving, finally. Combat's fun too. Unfortunately, Paul figured out what I was doing and I went on a little losing streak.

-5: We've got a crazy person setting fires in the neighbourhood. I've found two of them; one across the street two weeks ago in the bus stop's trash can, one next door last week, trying to set a signpost on fire. (He burned the base to charcoal.) The police say that there's been a big rash of them, but they don't have any clues about their identity yet. Yay.

-6: Summer is usually asshole-student-party free, but not this year; one last night, one last weekend too. I guess the fuckheads have more and are sticking around this summer. God, I can't wait to get the hell out of here. If we don't have a new place by August, we're moving into an apartment. That'll suck.

-7: My allergies have been brutal this year. I think I'd better start getting allergy shots or something. I was on three antihistamines last week; this weekend, I'm back down to no more than two, but that's still bad.

+8: I got past the block on "All the Moons of Mongo," so it's moved back from "failure, abandoned" to "possible sculpture." It's still kind of a sprawling mess, but now it's a single sprawling mess rather than five or six separate, unrelated sprawling messes. This is a big advance, and I think part of the process for this piece. It's the most massive piece I've ever done, so it makes sense that it'd be difficult.

9: Played more with the old Velo handheld; I've got an idea about how to improve the battery situation; it'd be cool if it worked, and it won't cost anything to try. So I will!

But now, I should shower. La.