In which there are issues with the utilities.
I had two bloody marys at the Dead Cock after work last night. I hung out with MissT for awhile. Then I went to band practice.
After about 40 minutes of practice, the power went out. And it stayed out. So I left band practice — no way to play electric instruments with no power — and for lack of something better to do went back to the bar, which still had power although it was flickering frequently.
Played Megatouch games with MissT for awhile, had a drink.
Drove home. The Hwy 34 corridor had no power at all, not a farm light or street light or house to be seen. It was eerie and really, really dark.
No power in Batavia, either. When I walked in the back door, Bread had candles everywhere.
Power was restored shortly before midnight, which is when we went to bed and ravished each other. (Actually, I ravished him and he laid there and took it like a man. *wink*) The power stayed on all night, then went out again sometime between six and seven for another hour.
So I’m really tired and I want to take a nap, and it was really fucking cold in the bedroom this morning. Cold and tired is my least favorite combination ever.
It was zero degrees outside when I got up, but it had heated up to a balmy eleven degrees by the time I drove past the bank sign on my way to work.
In other news, my knitting site is down, and so is its host. Neither name will resolve, which means their DNS servers are down, which means something catastrophic has happened. I don’t even know where they’re located physically. And I don’t know any IP associated with the host or I’d try some tracert to see where it breaks. Of course, none of you care about any of this… it’s just that it’s hard to break the Internet so it’s interesting when something stops working.
In which I’m trying to decide whether I should just turn around and go right back home.
It’s just gonna be all kinds of crappy out for the rest of the day. This just in:
WINTER STORM WARNING IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 PM CST THIS AFTERNOON.
A MIX OF FREEZING RAIN, SLEET AND SNOW WILL CHANGE TO SNOW AROUND MIDDAY. ICE ACCUMULATIONS UP TO A QUARTER INCH WILL BE POSSIBLE. SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 4 TO 6 INCHES ARE EXPECTED IN THE AFTERNOON. NORTHWEST WINDS INCREASING TO 20 TO 30 MPH IN THE AFTERNOON WILL CREATE NEAR-BLIZZARD CONDITIONS. ACCUMULATING SNOW WILL END BY EVENING… BUT THERE MAY STILL BE SOME BLOWING SNOW.
A WINTER STORM WARNING MEANS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW… SLEET… AND ICE ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. STRONG WINDS ARE ALSO POSSIBLE. THIS WILL MAKE TRAVEL VERY HAZARDOUS OR IMPOSSIBLE.
A quarter-inch of ice under five inches of snow? Travel very hazardous or impossible? Christ. I vote for daffodils instead.
More importantly, however, is that someone just put hundreds of dollars on my desk. Yay, payday!
In other news, I had a bit of a spa night last night. I trimmed my toenails, plucked my eyebrows, and then had a lovely steam bath and mud mask. When I woke up this morning, my face felt awesome.
Sadly, it doesn’t look as good as it feels, but at least that nasty blemish on my cheek went away. I really do harbor a deep suspicion that people with small pores are fundamentally happier.
An update (12:37 PM CST): …then again, maybe not:
ICE STORM WARNING IS CANCELLED.
SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 4 TO 7 INCHES ARE EXPECTED NORTHWEST OF A CEDAR RAPIDS TO DUBUQUE LINE…WITH 2 TO 4 INCHES OF SNOW EXPECTED NORTHWEST OF AN OTTUMWA TO ROCK ISLAND TO DIXON LINE. LIGHTER SNOW AMOUNTS BETWEEN 1 TO 2 INCHES WILL FALL SOUTH OF THIS AREA. INCREASING NORTHWEST WINDS WILL CAUSE BLOWING AND DRIFTING SNOW WHICH COULD CREATE NEAR BLIZZARD CONDITIONS OVER PORTIONS OF EASTERN IOWA AND NORTHWEST ILLINOIS THIS EVENING.
Another update (1:38 PM CST): The weather’s just laming out altogether now. Guess I’ll be having a 5 o’clock cocktail at the bar after all.
.NOW… PERIODS OF FREEZING DRIZZLE AND LIGHT SNOW WILL CONTINUE THROUGH 3 PM WITH UP TO AN INCH OF SNOW ACCUMULATION EXPECTED. BITTER COLD ARCTIC AIR WILL MOVE INTO THE AREA WITH TEMPERATURES FALLING THROUGH THE 20S. NORTHWEST WINDS OF 10 TO 15 MPH WILL PRODUCE WIND CHILL VALUES AROUND 10 DEGREES ABOVE ZERO. TRAVEL CONDITIONS WILL REMAIN HAZARDOUS ACROSS THE REGION.
In which I bitch about other people’s driving.
I seriously hate people who drive SUVs.
I realize my ’92 Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo is technically an SUV, but at least I don’t drive like a fucking moron. Four-wheel drive helps you go in bad conditions, sure, but it doesn’t help you stop.
It’s freezing motherfucking rain out there, people! There’s two inches of hail on the ground in places! The roads are slick. There are patches of ice.
I was passed by three vehicles during my drive in to town this morning. One was a UPS truck: okay, he’s heavier — more traction — plus he drives that thing for a living. The other two were assholes driving SUVs who obviously thought their choice of rides made them impervious to weather. One lost control of his vehicle immediately after passing me and slid into the oncoming lane! (Fortunately, there wasn’t anybody in the lane at the time or I’d have ended up in a ditch.)
Even the semis were travelling under the speed limit. If they’re going ten miles per hour under the speed limit, you SUV-drivin’ assholes should be going 15 or 20 under.
I drove in part-time 4WD at a responsible and controlled 45 MPH. Fuck you ditch-bound idiots in your bloated grocery-getters. Grrr.
In which you see the progress my househusband has made.
While it’s true that there are piles of clothes all over the house, the floors haven’t been swept in weeks, and there are little chunks and flecks of dried foods stuck to the kitchen counters, my home-bound husband has been doing a little something ’round the house of late.
I present to you… the Remodel Gallery!
The future living room:
The future kitchen:
The future upstairs half-bath:
And in other news, the peacock likes to hang out on the porch. Plus he’s grown a really lovely tail for this year:
Also I hear there’s weather on the way. There was a watch out earlier, but the NWS has just upgraded us to a full-on winter storm warning: rain, freezing rain, and snow in the region… all between now and tomorrow evening. Yuck.
How long are mid-life crises supposed to last? Because I think I’m still having one.
It started before my birthday last September, my self-styled crisis, and though I’m feeling much better in many ways I’m feeling worse in others.
Well, not worse. I don’t feel bad, exactly. I just don’t give a shit about a whole huge section of my life.
I seem to like best the parts of my life that occur places other than my home.
I like my job, I like my band, I like my local bars and restaurants, I like my friends. I don’t want to go home after visiting any of those places. I get mild baby anxiety symptoms when driving home.
Yes, I just said that: going home makes me anxious. Because I’m clearly in deep denial about things.
Aw, fuck.
I’m hip deep in the seven-year-itch and I’m trying to figure out if I still like being married. Actually, no I’m not – I know I don’t like it right now. What I’m trying to figure out is if my selfish discontent is enough of a reason to kill a perfectly good, took-me-years-to-find, warm and solid relationship.
This is not a fun space to be in. I feel like a total cunt.
I could go on and on and on describing all the shitty, destructive, heartbreaking relationships I went through before I found a man who loved and wanted me, and I could compare and contrast all night, illustrating how hard this relationship rocks. And there’s really nothing wrong with it. My home life is smooth. We laugh every day. We never argue about the things that most couples divorce over because we’re both really laid back.
But. While there’s nothing wrong with my marriage there just isn’t much right with it, either. I’m wondering if this is temporary grass-is-always-greener phase, or if I really am discontented in any kind of meaningful or significant way.
(Someone said something to me the other day, something that really struck me: “I want to be with someone who will make me be more than I am by myself.”
And I asked myself, am I more than I would be alone? And the answer, I think, is no. I’m not. I’m less, because I spend so much of my time caring for him that I end up not caring so much for me.
I don’t know that I believe that being with another person, any other person could ever make a person become more than they are alone. It is an interesting thought-experiment, though.)
It seems I’m tired of giving. Of being required to give, of having agreed to give so much of myself to another person. Tired of having to be pleasant, available, open. I don’t want to talk about my fucking day, I don’t want to cuddle, I don’t want to be propositioned, I don’t even want anybody to be there when I get home. I want to be able to go somewhere, anywhere that is totally and completely MINE and where no one has the right to walk in and expect anything of me without being invited.
I spend a lot of time in my office, but my husband just walks in and bugs me. He’s not trying to bug me, he’s just trying to hang out with his wife — the one who has been ignoring him a great deal for about five months now. But it feels like he’s bugging me, and I’m discovering that it pisses me off that I’ve made decisions that have put me in a position where I have essentially given up my right to be totally autonomous ever again. I’m not a me, I’m a we, and I don’t like it. It’s our house, our life, our world.
I really don’t feel like I have the right to say to him that I want him to stay the fuck out of my room. I mean, this is what I always wanted, right? A life partner. To never be alone. To be known and loved. He’s my husband, my partner, he should be able to ask me for my attention and affection. He deserves.
Sad thing is, apparently I need a great deal more space than he does. He seems to be infinitely capable of sustaining a level of physical and psychic intimacy that makes me feel like I’ve lost my boundaries altogether. And the experiment of the past few years of my marriage has taught me that when I feel like I’ve lost my boundaries altogether? I. Go. Nuts.
I get crazy, depressed. I have these terrifying, awful panic attacks.
Who knew! It turns out I’m really, really good at denial… and all this time I thought I was really in tune with myself!
Christ.
Reading the blogosphere yesterday killed me. All these single folk going on and on about how they wanted intimacy, to belong, to have someone wondering where they were, to have and to hold, yada yada yada. And I’m thinking, What I would give to be alone! To not have to answer to anyone! To schedule my own meals, sleep times, social times! To not be a fucking ‘we’! To be able to make decisions by myself again! Oh God, to control my own life!
But it’s been so long that I don’t know if I really want what I think I want. This could just be a phase, a step of personal evolution. Growing pains. Does anyone really want to be lonely?
I am a pretty selfish person. I’m great at giving when I choose to give, but once I pass a certain line I resent it. I didn’t know this about myself, but after observing the shape of my panic disorder over the past few years I have to acknowledge that it’s true: I didn’t want to know I was selfish, that I resented sharing myself and my space so much, so I internalized it and became sick.
I basically don’t want anyone depending on me. If that’s not the very definition of selfish, I don’t know what is.
In which I babble aimlessly, just as you’ve come to expect! Because if nothing else I certainly aim to please. Now hush up and pay attention.
Last night after work I picked Bread up from BoS’s house, then bought us drive-thru (with plastic – ugh) and took him to the bowling alley, where he was going to hang out watching BoS bowl league until I finished band practice.
But then he decided he was sleepy so I went ahead and took him home; it seemed silly to make him sit in the bowling alley bar when what he really wanted to do was fall asleep on the couch. I mean, he’d done three loads of laundry that day, so he deserved a ride home, right? So I drove him home and dropped him off, then turned right around and headed back to town for band practice.
The moon was just rising — it was about a quarter past seven — and it was massive and orange and so very beautiful. I tried to take a picture of it with my cell phone, but it sucks and does the experience absolutely no justice:
When I got to rehearsal, there was chocolate because PjK is a doll. Yum.
I taught him, WTC, and KO another song I’d written and they seemed to like it. We played but mostly we chatted a lot. Love those guys. (GSW and BvB weren’t there last night, so it was only a partial rehearsal.)
My guitar needs new strings; it won’t stay in tune. I also really need to start playing with a pick.
I gave WTC a fairly vigourous back rub (he actually likes Rolfing) because his back is still fucked up and apparently he can’t get emergency visits with his chiro.
And then I drove home, around 10:30, and went promptly to bed.
In totally unrelated news, this is a picture of Bread and me from the engagement party the other night:
My favorite VD quote from the blogosphere: “At least if you’re single you know what to do: wear black and self-medicate.”
In which I’ve been totally busy all day! (This is a geek post; you can skip it if you’re not one.)
You know what’s awesome? Being busy at work! There’s an old web server here that’s been hacked (yes, totally pwn3d – and yes, we’re appropriately ashamed) and some clever little punk-ass geek is running a mail server on it and sending tons of spam.
Tons of spam. Which is slowing the box way down, and both mail and HTTP services are halting and crashing. Argh. The box is totally compromised.
Buzz has been engaged in a fairly active battle with our spamming friend all day. He’d take the mail server down, the hacker’d turn it back on. Root passwords have been changed, stuff’s been deleted, installed, moved… it’s a kind of chess-like warfare, really.
I’ve been moving content off the hacked box and onto another server as fast as I can. Some of the content I’ve moved and done DNS for included my employers’s own web site and several sub-domains. Getting those moved was exciting — pages didn’t come up, scripts didn’t work, PHP wasn’t turned on — but we managed it. Then it turns out the cgi-scripts still aren’t working, so I just spent the last hour messing with that but I still can’t get them to work and I have tons of sites left to move. We need to get the box turned off ASAP.
The day has whizzed by! I think I actually feel good about this whole working-for-a-living thing. *shudder*
In which the poverty continues.
I have a cup of shitty gas station coffee, two cigarettes, five dollars (in the form of a $2 bill and $3 in quarters), and my guitar.
Happy VD.
Now, who wants to buy me lunch?
A list of predominantly hard sci-fi books for your reading pleasure. I’ll loan you the ones I have, as soon as I can find them.
Click book covers to go to Amazon.
Lucifer’s Hammer ~ This is the one I told you about Tuesday. Oh YUM. A dinosaur-killer strikes the earth; hilarity ensues.
Darwin’s Radio ~ I have the second book, Darwin’s Children, in paperback. You’ll have to buy this first one.
Ilium ~ I have both this and the sequel Olympos in hardcover. Combines hard sci-fi and the classics you wish you were reading.
Code of the Lifemaker ~ I can’t remember why I liked this book so much, only that I did.
An Oblique Approach ~ This is not hard sci-fi, it’s military sci-fi/alternate history. IT’S FUCKING AMAZING; I’ve read the entire series twice. (I think I only have these in ebook format, though.)
The Boat of A Million Years ~ Solid hard sci-fi. I think I have it in hardcover.
Wheelers ~ This was a great read. Neat alien lifeforms. I used to have it in paperback; I’ll look around.
~+~+~+~
For free sci-fi in ebook format: the Baen Free Library.
For sci-fi that’s not free, in ebook format: Fictionwise and Mobipocket.
In which there’s so much to tell you. Oh my babies, such a weekend! With pictures, even.
Friday
The Holy Couple’s engagement party was celebrated Friday night at the Dead Cock. There was a party of 30 upstairs in the new restaurant; we were the new kitchen’s guinea pigs. The food — buffet-style hors d’oeuvres — included shrimp alfredo and crab-stuffed mushrooms and bruschetta salad, and was really quite good. It was almost like being in another town entirely! But the flatware was decoratively trendy and blatantly right-handed, which irritated me. I ended up eating with my fingers.
Bread and I were fashionably late to arrive, from having accidentally napped after ravishing one another when I got home from work, but we were just in time for dinner.
After food and drinks and toasts (the bride-to-be’s father almost cried, so sweet), the party moved downstairs into the bar proper. There were champagne-and-rum jello shots, and a keg of Rolling Rock for the party guests. There was a DJ. There were the usual Friday-night-small-town-meatmarket patrons. The party guests and the bar crowd intermingled. Hilarity ensued.
I danced some, drank some, socialized some. Saw my stylist; saw her have an argument with a guy I assume is her boyfriend that went something like, “You said one beer! You’ve had five!” Saw two boys that I rather suspect had once been dating but now appear to be estranged (this is just a guess, neither of them are out) have a really awkward conversation in the middle of a swirling, packed bar. Saw two chicks I don’t know come out of the women’s bathroom with that ‘I just did a big fat line of coke off the back of the toilet’ vibe on.
Saw lots of people react in interesting ways to the jeweled bindi I was wearing. One guy motioned me over and said, “May I ask a question?”
“Sure, ‘sup?”
He pointed at my forehead. “How does that stay on?”
“Glue.”
A beat. “No,” he said. “I’m serious.”
“So am I. Glue, dude. Cosmetic glue. Like for false eyelashes?”
He had no idea what I was talking about, so I went back to dancing. It was cute.
Saw short, fat chicks in oversized t-shirts do excellent Latin moves on the dance floor. Saw my favorite bartender bust his ass making about two hundred Jaeger Bombs. Saw drunken rednecks get all up in each other’s faces. Saw a lot of fantastic cleavage. (Watch out! Here’s some now:)
Basically, I had a really good time. It was especially nice that Bread wasn’t nagging me to leave, and that Ray had shown up so I had my girl to dance with. (She was wearing the most fantastic outfit: a black zipped hoodie with a hot pink AC/DC logo on it, black pedal pushers, and strappy black pumps. She so rocks.) The party was in full fucking swing.
Suddenly, at about ten to one, two guys came crashing in through the plate glass window at the front of the bar and hit the floor hard.
Apparently they’d been fighting, had taken it outside, and then brought it back in by throwing each other through the window. I didn’t see it (I was at the back of the bar at the time), but Bread did and he said it was the absolute pinacle of bar fights. He feels he can die happy now, having literally seen it all. “It was great,” he enthused. “I’ve only ever seen that in movies!”
Within seconds of the crash, the music was shut off abruptly and all three bartenders were screaming, “Party’s over! THE BAR IS CLOSED! Move out, people!” Bread gathered me up like a fussy mother hen and we were probably halfway to Batavia before the ambulance even arrived on the scene.
I heard the next day that both the participants went to the hospital and were released and then spent the night in jail. I heard the Dead Cock’s owner has agreed not to press charges against them if the window is paid for. (It’s a huge sheet of plate glass, so I’m certain the replacement value will be quite high.)
Needless to say, we missed the after-party, if there even was one. I’m proud of Bread for staying out ’til one o’clock in the morning… no doubt a huge goddamned sacrifice on his part.
Saturday
Saturday morning, in bed, I took the following picture of myself and my dog Shiva (and this one, too). Apparently my cell phone’s camera has a built-in “antique” setting:
Aren’t we cute? If there’s one thing I do well, it’s bedroom hair. *wink*
Bread went to Cedar Rapids to look at a job remodelling his sister’s new house, and I lazed around. All. Damn. Day. and enjoyed having the house utterly to myself. NLW and I had mumbled something to one another about maybe seeing a movie Saturday night, but it didn’t happen… which is probably good, since I literally can’t afford it and she’s already bought me a movie ticket this month.
Bread and I are now at that stage of poverty (today marks the seventh week of his unemployment) where it ceases to be at all amusing. We’ve run out of savings. As in, I have ten bucks in cash and that’s literally it. (I am really, really not interested in living on credit cards.) How I’m going to buy gas and lunch all week is beyond me at this point, but Bread mentioned something about hocking an assault rifle so we’ll see how that goes.
I made Thai chickpea curry and jasmine rice for dinner. Bread fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV. I watched some South Park and went to bed. I listened to a lot of remixes on my iPod before falling asleep.
Sunday
Sunday afternoon, before getting in the shower before band practice, I took the kitchen shears in one hand, pulled all my hair back to the nape of my neck with the other… and whacked it all off in one swell foop. I now have a completely crooked bob – crooked as in tacky, 80’s-style noticeably asymmetrical. Ah, fuck it: I graduated from highschool in the 80’s and I can have asymmetrical hair if I want to!
Rehearsal was fun, as always. The band learned a song I wrote, and BvB and GSW came up with the catchiest, most adorable backup part IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE. The drum-playing half of the rhythm section was in a fantastic mood; the bass-playing half had fucked up his back and was grumpy and required lots of petting and hugs. (BvB’s hubby eventually gave him a handful of hydrocodone, which probably adjusted his mood much for the better when he got home and took them.)
I got home at a quarter past seven and promply went to bed. Now it’s Monday and I’m at work and I really should be, you know, working. I’ve got a failing server full of sites that need to be moved — yay tedious goddamned server chores! Yay extra hours at work!
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Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
