Category Archives: Play

Sites I'm currently infatuated with

LOTD

In which all my base are belong to these sites.

I totally love the Internet, yea verily! Here’s where I’ve been spending my time lately:

I never fell for the social networking mystique of Friendster or MySpace (prolly because they’re butt ugly), but Facebook freakin’ pwns me. And Ravelry – a knitting site – even though it’s still in beta and is invitation-only, totally RULES THE freakin’ WORLD. LibraryThing is just plain cool if you read a lot, last.fm is what you listen to when your iTunes library is on an external hard drive out in your jeep, and I use Meebo to keep from having to install eleventy-hundred IM apps on my laptop.

I’m going to go knit some clogs now.

In other news, even though I got my iPod USB cable yesterday (thanks, AmmZon!) apparently I didn’t leave for Washington today. Maybe tomorrow.

God, I’m so lazy.

Happy October, Y'All

Travel

In which I’m so lazy I haven’t even been knitting.

On the birthday, we went out to Red Lobster for dinner. It was really good.

Sunday I never even got dressed. I laid in bed and watched DVDs on my laptop all day long (the VLC media player totally rocks, btw), and ate way too much junk food. I also dorked around at Facebook a lot, and installed last.fm software so when I get my MP3 library unfucked it’ll scrobble properly..

Today I’ve bathed and dressed, and after I eat some lunch I’m going to unload the jeep and get some boxes ready for shipping. I’m waiting on my iPod cable, so I’ll be here at mom’s at least through Wednesday. I’ll probably take off early on Thursday, unless there’s some reason not to.

I got a response from one of my unsolicited applications to Walla Walla ISPs. (!!!) I have high hopes that I won’t have to change career paths. I want to work for ISPs forever.

Hello from Wyoming!

Travel

In which I check in.

I wrote this really long, boring entry about how the oil pressure gauge in the jeep no longer works, but decided to spare you it and say instead that it’s awesome to be at my mom’s house! So relaxing.

Driving is tedious and boring and I do not understand why some people claim to enjoy it. Plus the jeep is loaded to the gills and handles like a fucking feather bed so I’m going to have to redistribute the load if I ever want to get over any mountains.

Oh, damn. I just realized that I left my iPod sync cable in Fairfield! I can’t rip any of the going-away mix CDs I’ve received onto my iPod, which SUCKS. I’m gonna have to beg AmmZon or Truck to mail it to me ASAP. I knew I’d forget something.

Back in the Midwest

Travel

In which I now consider myself to be a resident of the Left Coast, visiting Iowa for a week.

I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaack! Back online and back in Iowa, that is.

The captain of my flight out of Portland said that we could listen in to the air traffic control chatter on channel 9 if we wanted to, so I pulled out my iPod headphones and did just that. For the entire flight. And now I think it would be fun to push tin for a living. I could totally do it, too. It’s geek, but with planes instead of packets! (Not to mention you would not have believed how sexy that German Lufthansa pilot’s voice was! OMG. For real. WTF Lufthansa was doing in Denver I’ll never know, but whatever.) So I’ve decided I need to learn the phonetic alphabet. Alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot, golf, h, India, j, kilo, lima, motel, November, o, p, Quebec, r, sierra, tango, u, v, whiskey, x-ray, y, Zulu. I’m half-way there.

I’m taking a couple of gigs worth of stuff off of the iPod my brother gave me before I wipe it and put my stuff on it. Tedious. But worth it, for delicious tunes.

In fact, I’ll be spending all day playing with my new laptop (it’s old, but new to me and it works, and it’s MINE) and organizing my few belongings into coherence.

It takes a lot of software to make a laptop comfortable. And a lot of cleaning to make things that have been stored at The Ex’s house reasonably clean.

Greetings From The Left Coast

Travel

In which I’ve made it!

I took a commuter flight from CID (Cedar Rapids, IA) to ORD (Chicago O’hare). Then I took a big ass jet from ORD to PDX (Portland, OR) where my kick-ass baby brother picked me up and promptly took me to a dive bar so I could decompress over a few drinks.

iPod Pr0nNow I’m at his place and we’re dorking out hardcore (his desktop is gorgeous) on hardware. The image is of our two iPods plugged into his tower. (No, iTunes doesn’t know what to do when you connect two iPods simultaneously. We don’t suggest you try it if you’re not a card-carrying FUCKING GEEK.)

Jay-rob’s giving me his iPod and I’m giving him mine. Right now he’s loading an assload of Todd Rundgren onto my new iPod BECAUSE HE’S SUPERIOR IN ALL WAYS.

Bro-there’s are excellent. You should get one, if you don’t already have one.

Tomorrow, we’re driving up the Gorge to Walla Walla to see the fam-damily for gramma’s 85th birthday celebration. Whee!

Warming Up & Cooling Down

Travel

In which I must be part bear or something.

It’s warming up to birthday time! I can tell because I’ve been getting gifts already. (I love gifts.) Someone emailed me an entire Ben Folds album, and someone else bought me lunch via Paypal. (Fear of Pop, Vol. I rocks, by the way. I’d already had a few tracks off of it, but listening to the whole thing in context is even more kick ass. I sure do love that Ben Folds.)

In contrast, the weather is cooling down. Rapidly. Much too rapidly. I don’t like it.

I usually adore autumn, but the days seem to have shortened much more suddenly than usual and it’s cold enough at night to see one’s breath. My physiology is reacting by wanting to sleep for 12 – 14 hour stretches. Since it got cold three days ago, I’ve hit snooze on my alarm for an entire hour each morning. I just can’t wake up and when I finally do my brain literally, physically hurts.

I’ve always been this way. I’ve been socialized to believe that I don’t try hard enough, that I can’t wake up because I’m lazy, but I can tell you it ain’t about my attitude. My body must depend on some combination of temperature and ambient light to process my sleep patterns, and when those things change so suddenly I get stuck in deep sleep and can’t get out.

Or something. (I don’t know! What the hell am I, a sleep expert?) All I know is that the temperature dropped 50 degrees from one day to the next, and I woke the day after having slept 13 hours and feeling headachy, confused, and stupid.

Yay for coffee!

Tonight I gotta pack my suitcase and tidy my room and get some of the boxes out of the back of the jeep. Tomorrow is my last day at work; I’ll be leaving around three or so. I have a 6:30 flight out of CID and tomorrow night I’ll be in Portland hangin’ with my baby bro!!! HELL TO THE YEAH, BITCHES!

Update: Packing for travel this time of year is a pain. I’ve checked the weather for PDX and Walla Walla, and it says it’ll be, like, 85-ish during the days and 57-ish at night. So I need strappy summer things and also jackets and socks. Gah.

My mom suggested that I use my luggage allotment to take some shit out to grandma’s, saving space in the jeep. She’s a genius! If time allows I may just select a box at random, tape the shit out of it at work, and take it as my second piece of luggage. I’d meant to go through my boxes of shit and consolidate it (most of them are half garbage anyway, I think) next week, so I don’t really have anything that I know contains only stuff I want at this particular juncture.

Moving. Such a pain in the ass!

More Little Things

Photography

In which there are several visual aides!

With the help of NLW I collected a bunch of stuff from the farm yesterday, but I never did see my beloved Polaroid camera. I looked all over the place several times but it wasn’t there. Bread said he couldn’t remember seeing it anywhere.

Last night in bed I thought about it really hard, and remembered seeing it on the white shelves in my old office a year ago. Those shelves were packed by Bread himself the last time I went out there to get stuff. Therefore, the camera could be… in that box right there!

I jumped out of bed and opened a box. The camera wasn’t there, but it was in the box below! (Now all I have to do is find my Kodak Brownie and I’ll be good.)

The reason I love the Polaroid so much is that it takes pictures like these:

[color] [black & white]

The thing is simply amazing, and that’s all there is to it. If only I didn’t have to hoard the flashbulbs.

I threw away half of the stuff in those two boxes, but in the process I found a couple of old short stories. (The ‘Fixer’ one I wrote the last time I lived in Walla Walla – eleven years ago, as a matter of fact.)

Here they are, for your amusement, two short stories I’d totally forgotten about, found in my stuff, and scanned into PDFs:

[A Real Fixer-Upper] [Landed Aristocracy]

See, I used to be a cool person who took awesome photos with vintage cameras and wrote short stories for fun! And now I’ve proved it.

In other news, Iowa is pretending to be Oregon today. The sky is overcast and has been steely and unchanging all day. It hasn’t rained, but it looks as if it should. From horizon to horizon, the color is the same uniform pearly gray.

Things I Want

Wishlists

In which it’s probably true that McDonald’s isn’t so good for you. On more than one level.

There’s a story about a monk who suddenly and inexplicably becomes obsessed with the news. It turns out that the servant who prepares his food does so while reading the paper, and the subtle vibes in the food have affected the monk.

Similarly, today I had breakfast from McDonald’s and ever since I’ve been thinking about things I want, things I would buy if only I could.

I tend to avoid magazines and malls and catalogs because they cause me to want stuff I can’t have anyway and which is generally overpriced and no more functional than the things I already do have. Seeing the things I use, after looking at the nicer things available generally, makes me feel like a style-less bumpkin and so I make some effort to avoid the whole thing by shielding myself from advertising.

I’ve had New Agers tell me I don’t have tons of nice stuff because I have issues with abundance, that I need to realign myself and clear out feelings of guilt in order to experience proper flow. But that’s all crap, and I know it. If stuff was truly important to my path, I’d have figured out how to get it by now, hey what? That I haven’t – that I’ve given up all of my stuff repeatedly – informs me that this life I’m living is not particularly about the stuff. If I want beauty I can go outside and watch a sunset: I don’t have to own beautiful furniture and appliances in order to recognize myself as a lover of beauty, an appreciator of functional art, a Libra.

So, yeah, there’s a lot of nice stuff out there I’ll never own. And I’m okay with that. After all, it’s just stuff. Other than the occasional playful foray into the world of shopping, I tend to ignore the whole thing altogether.

Usually. But not today! Here’s a list of crap I want:

When I rejoin the ‘real’ world in the near future, I will probably have a fairly rocky readjustment period. In Iowa, one can get by without nice things for looooong periods of time. One can simply not think of nice things, if one is judicious, and be quite happy with what one has.

But in the ‘real’ world I’ll need normal clothes, at the very least. I have the feeling I’m going to be longing for things I can’t afford much more than usual for the next year or so, or until I can reconcile myself with the new local laws of nature. I’ll probably bitch at first, and then it’ll all go down hill from there. You should probably stop reading me now.

Well, after you buy me a birthday present, that is.

Clear Your Calendars!

Social

In which there will be a little gathering before I leave.

Baby Girl, who is awesome, is throwing me a going-away party. It will be at the little bar on Saturday the 22nd. The official hours are from 7 to 9, but it will probably continue much longer. Please come there and let me hug you goodbye.

Even though September is my birth month and my moving-away month, all I really want are mix CDs from everybody. Send me off with some of your favorite music! Please?

If you read this, you’re invited. You might also receive an evite by email (twice!) or a phone call. Either way, please come see me off on the 22nd!

In which that nastly little whore spoils me rotten.

Social

In which I’m totally not worth it but I love it anyway!

NLW let it be known that she expected to hang out with me before I move away. She made some sweetly snide comment wondering if I could ‘make time’ in my ‘busy schedule.’ I retorted, “Dude, I work FIVE HOURS A DAY. It’s not like I’m busy.”

So it was decided we’d hang out last night. And so we did. She came over and immediately told me a sad story: her household lost a dog recently. I hate that shit. *sniffle* But then we went out for Mexican food – and a strawberry margarita! – and talked our faces off. Then we went to her house, where we continued to talk our faces off more and she made me a gift of some awesome sock yarn so I could make some toe-up socks soon.

Pink Cottage YarnThe photo (on my monitor, at least) actually does capture the colorway rather well. Rather than being one of those electric-bright clown puke multis that’s so popular lately, it’s a muted pinkish-brownish sort of thing that is going to make awesome socks. (And maybe some gauntlets, too, since the skein is 450 yards and I tend to make short socks.)

Sock knitting is all the rage these days, probably because socks are small and portable projects while also being affordable and complex enough to be interesting.

She also gave me the “This damn thing took me seven years to finish” Sweater she’d knit for the Ever Handsome Mr. J but which is the girliest sweater ever so he can’t wear it without laughing. (Or one assumes, being laughed at.) I told her I’d take it to the Northwest, have it tye-dyed, and give it to a lesbian so it could fulfill its sweatery destiny. Because everything – even seven-year sweaters – deserves to be be in its dharma!

These are the socks I’m knitting right now. They’re fuckin’ awesome. I basically taught myself the magic loop method with the help of the Internet and five minutes of tutoring from NLW who loves me more than I shall ever deserve. (And who will also be VISITING ME ON THE LEFT COAST NEXT YEAR. Oh yes she will.)

In other news, Sin left me a voice mail yesterday and he has the most fantastic, cultured, charming voice.