In which I totally got some this weekend. Yum.
Saturday night we went out to the P ‘n’ E for dinner and drinks. We sat in the bar. Right before we were served our dinners, a dude walked up to the bar and ordered a double 151 and orange juice. The bartender – also our waitress – brought our food out a couple of minutes later. She sat next to me for a moment and whispered, “That dude? Is like walking liver failure! A double one-fifty-one? Am I even supposed to serve that?”
She went back to work. Not long after, the dude stood up and headed for the head. He got the hallway door open and then proceeded to fall down. Twice. Several kind and concerned patrons helped him to a table, where he nodded out for awhile.
The whole vibe was weird. People were trying to be helpful, but you never know. Was the dude shitfaced when he got there? Having a heart attack? Narcoleptic? Diabetic? What! You just don’t know, so the bar tender called an ambulance.
The EMTs checked the guy’s blood pressure and left. Apparently there were tracks on his arms, so maybe he’d just hit before walking in, and had failed to make it to the john before his nod came on. Who knows. All I know is that the whole episode made me unusually uncomfortable for some reason, and as soon as we were finished eating, we left.
Back at Teh BF’s house, we cuddled into the couch watched one of the best! episodes! of Doctor Who! of ALL TIME! (The penultimate episode of the fourth season rules, IMO. Everybody’s in it.)
When we went to bed, I got mercilessly ravished, for a really long time. Which will teach me to shave… more often. (Heh.)
Sunday I slept in in peace, then a cup of coffee was placed on the bedside table and I got a back rub. (True story. Man spoils me absolutely rotten.) Later we ran errands, stopping at Walmart and the Asia Oriental store for HABA and bento stuff, with a brief interlude at Ti Kalli – one restaurant that hasn’t closed this month – for lunch.
I absolutely love Mexican food, and I love being back in a town where there’s tons of it.
Then we watched the Super Bowl. I read the #superbowl hashtag on Twitter throughout the entire game – it was sort of like being at a huge online party, and it was a laff riot to boot. (I nearly fell off the couch when everyone started freaking out about Bruce teabagging the camera man, OMFG. So funny.)
After the game I got Teh BF take me to the grocery store for veggies, and then he dropped me off at home. I rescued my laundry from the basement, packed my lunch, and went to bed a little past midnight.
I so did not want to get up this morning. It was a really rough wake up for me, so I comforted myself with an awesome veggie omelet and a big mug of tea. Feeling better after that, I went to take a shower… and ran out of fucking hot water before I could condition my hair! GAH! (The side apartment shares the water heater with the house proper and there’s currently a couple with two kids stuffed in that tiny 1-bedroom over there.) (Come to think of it, I ran out of hot water last Monday morning, too, so apparently they both shower on Monday mornings.) Running out of hot water pisses me off, but it was ultimately good for me in the sense that I was ready with enough time to walk to work this morning instead of driving my brother’s truck.
I know, I know. This entry wasn’t worth the time it took to write it; I just wanted to gloat about the AWESOME NOOKIE, that’s all. Can you blame me?
In which I don’t talk about things because too many people I know IRL actually read goblinbox.
My posts have sucked for awhile because I have a lot to say that I can’t say (I’ve been writing awesome posts in my head, though!) on two topics in particular:
The first topic is work. I could go on and on and on about work, but since management reads the ‘box on occasion I’d probably get fired because you don’t talk about your company’s solvency on the Innartubez.
I have lots of backseat driver observations about how things are done that I could recount in acerbic, witty prose and we’d all enjoy my cleverness… but since I want to stay employed, I will recall to myself that I’m a drone and not a manager because I’m a drone and not a manager.
In a nutshell, though: the economy, it’s affecting our customer count. Which means I’m worried about my job security. And since we all are, I think it’s okay to say at least that on my blog and move on.
The second is the band. I could go on and on about how I ‘only turned down one lousy gig and haven’t been called back since!’ and how I’m all offended that I essentially got fired before I could quit, but the guys have been known to check in here and I don’t want to burn any bridges especially since I get the impression all I have to do is call the band leader and say I’m still interested. Can you say run-on sentence? I knew you could.
In other news, um… well, there is no other news. I’m not doing much lately. Haven’t even gotten my vacation schedule for the year figured out yet, but I’m certain it involves a visit to NYC! Oh, and I bought another bento box. Yes, yes, I know: I’m a freak! I’m sorry!
Oh, and the third is the relationship: I suspect it’s in bad taste to compare one relationship to another in public, so I haven’t gushed about how nice it is to be with someone who doesn’t {insert scathing complaint about ex here} and always manages to {insert cute thing current BF does here}. But trust me, there’s a lot of that going on in my head. Apparently, if you hook up with someone that likes you, they do shit like bring you coffee in bed in the morning, and they don’t think you owe them for it. It’s way cool.
In which I decide to honor my extroverted side’s need to be totally fucking antisocial.
Last week I had pretty rotten PMS. Emotionally I wasn’t all that much bitchier than usual, but I was as waterlogged as a long-dead corpse in a stagnant Midwestern pond and I decided to spend my weekend at home alone, where I couldn’t piss anyone off with my rotten, cranky attitude.
The Curse started Saturday morning and accordingly I spent all day in bed, except for a trip around the block with the dog and a brief dinner trip to Rosita’s for delicious chiles rellenos. I spent all day in bed Sunday, too, and never left the house once. Both days Teh BF dropped over briefly, but not long enough to piss me off.
I played with the Eee PC. A lot. I played with my new 20X External DVD Rewritable Drive w/Lightscribe, too, and my cell phone and my iThing. I watched Wall-E, the fourth Indiana Jones movie, the third Mummy movie, half of the X-Files movie, half of the Holy Grail, and about four episodes of Torchwood. I surfed for ebooks, yarn, and porn. I napped. I drank a latte. I finished Parable of the Sower and started Escapement.
It was lazy and decadent and, overall, just plain awesome.
I felt mildly sad leaving the house this morning, because it meant my weekend of self-imposed aloneness (which wasn’t all that alone, because G’ma was home and has no problems whatsoever just talking up the stairs at me) was over. But it was 11 degrees out even with the sun shining, and my sweet BF got up early on his day off just to drive me and the blue dog to work (I could have used the walk after all that lying around, but the dog probably would have gotten frostbite with her tiny little not-very-heeler feet) so that made me feel all special and loved and nice.
I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that perhaps a smidge of the sadness was actually at doing the right thing and leaving the beloved tiny notebook at home; I don’t really need to have it at work with me, but when I do I just can’t keep my hands off of it because it’s so hella adorable! and I don’t want to lose everyone’s permission to bring in their laptops occasionally by over-using the privilege.
Oh, yeah: in my defense, while I didn’t do laundry or get properly dressed or even bathe all weekend, I did clean the sink and toilet in the front bathroom. Poorly. But still! It’s something!
In which I get a third package.
This morning I received my 2Gb RAM stick and used my trusty BMI pocket knife to install it into the Eee notebook.
Yay!
In which the notebook is here! The notebook is here!! OMFG the notebook is here!!!
UPS’s site said my Eee PC wouldn’t get here until Wednesday, but it was sitting on my desk when I got to work yesterday morning. Squee!
It’s tiny. It’s über-cute. It’s portable. It has killer battery life. It came with its own little slipcase and I can carry it around in my bag. It has a video port and can drive a huge monitor! It has three USB 2.0 ports and a micro SD card slot!
I installed Firefox (and WeatherFox and Foxmarks) and FileZilla and BOINC and SETI@home and VLC and iTunes. I put my favorite wallpaper on it. I scowled at the pre-installed Microsoft Works. (Microsoft WORKS?!) I touched it all over. I showed it to my co-workers.
And then I took it to the bar last night. In my bag! Tiniest little device ever!
Oh, and it picks up wireless from the foot of my bed, which is as far as you can get from the router and still be inside the house. Even the iPod doesn’t see the router from there!
Right now I’m copying my iTunes library onto it. (God, I love USB 2.0. I can move my entire library in about half an hour.) When I put the hard drive back into the old IBM Thinkpad A30, I’m going to give it to Left Coast Girlie for her birthday!
In other news, I read the two most recent inauguration speeches last night. In my opinion, Bush’s was stilted and entitled and Obama’s was moving and uplifting. Those who were disappointed by Obama’s speech should relax a little; half the nation wouldn’t recognize ‘a unifying theme’ if it poked them right in the eyeball.
In which I get the first of many packages.
When I got to work this morning my new phone, an LG Lotus LX600, was on my desk.
I unpacked it, which required opening about six plastic bags and removing five plastic clingies from various of the phone’s shiny surfaces, and plugged it in. Then I checked the quick start manual, and unplugged it from AC power and plugged it straight into one of my PC’s USB 2.0 ports.
I went to sprint.com to activate the phone, but I couldn’t log in…
…so I had to give it to my brother (who is the primary name on our shared cell phone account) to activate it. It was gone FOREVER. I nearly DIED. But then he brought it back and it was finally a properly activated phone!
I love the form factor. It’s square and somehow manages to be chunky and sleek at the same time. It weighs less than my old pink Katana.
It tells me – verbally, not in the form of a dialog notification – when I get text messages. “Message received,” it says. How cute is that?
I love the qwerty keyboard. (It’s a text freak’s dream device.) It’s also an MP3 player (not that I need yet another one of those) and its on board speakers are the best I’ve ever heard from any phone or iPod.
It can be mounted as an external hard drive by clicking the Home icon > Tools > USB Mode (4) > Select Transfer Music or Mass Storage or Phone as Modem or PictBridge. You can move images to and from the device, and put MP3s on it as well.
It has a built-in Google app, Sprint Navigation (a GPS map app), a browser (Opera Mini can be installed instead), and a nicely configurable interface. There’s a built-in doc viewer but I haven’t tested it yet. It takes video.
I will spend my evening transferring my contacts manually, because I’m both too cheap to buy the backup feature and too lazy to take both phones over to Sprint to have them moved.
Long story short: I love the new phone! Can’t wait ’til Notebook Wednesday. This week is totally gonna rock.
In which I publicly admit to stealing resources* from my employer.
I’ve been running a little eBay side business from my desk this week. In between calls I’ve watched my auctions, printed shipping labels (with the work printer, on the work paper*), and packed Priority Mail cartons with old electronics (and taped them shut with work tape*).
I made $282.11 from four auctions. This amount is over half what I paid for the items originally, but that little bit of awesomeness isn’t even the point. The point is that if you write a good item description on eBay, you can sell ANYTHING. Even if it’s old and crappy!
The eBook sold for $101.11, which is about $15 less than a brand new one costs. (I under-quoted shipping, though, so I ended up having to spend an extra $4.55 to get the thing mailed off, making my net $96.56, which is still more than I expected to get.) One of the Pocket PCs, the e400, sold for $36 to a company that sells refurbished devices and I’m wondering if they’ll part it out or resell it on their website. The final Pocket PC sold for $99 to what sounds like a company name rather than an individual so it may find itself re-refurbished or parted out, too.
The best part of all this is that the money I got (plus $130 in Xmas money) has allowed me to order this:
[You are now hearing a very loud, angelic “AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!,” btw.]
Innit ADORABLE?!?!!? It’ll be here next Wednesday.
It’s an ASUS Eee 900HA 8.9″ notebook with a 160GB hard drive, a 1.6Ghz ATOM processor, and pre-installed XP Home. (I was going to order another gig of RAM too, but they were out, so that will have to wait until I can find it elsewhere.)
I also bought an external USB CD+DVD-RW drive because my new, tiny, adorable little ASUS laptopette doesn’t have a built-in drive. I don’t want to have to share a drive over my network just to watch a movie or burn a CD.
The moral of this story is that you can totally sell old junk on eBay, and use the proceeds to buy shiny new things!
Now, can somebody make it next week already so that I can start playing with my new notebook, plz? Kthxbai.
—
*I probably owe BMI about 6 minutes of unpaid work after all that rampant thievery.
**This public admission of unlawfulness is all part of my attempt to join my brother in his county jail weight loss regime.
In which today brings a us recipe!
Left Coast Girlie says: “Here’s the yakimandu recipe. You can remove the meat and use tofu and veggies like mushrooms and cabbage…. Thought I’d share.”
Yaki Mandu
2 pkg. (30 sheets each) wonton wrappers
1 lb. lean ground beef or chopped sirloin
2 medium carrots, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
20 to 25 medium mushrooms, chopped
1 pkg. (12 oz.) firm tofu
2 green onions, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbsp. sesame oil
1 Tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp. toasted sesame seeds
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 egg, lightly beaten
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In which I’m fat, obsessed with bento, and refusing to see any possible correlation between the two.
Misc
Teh BF’s bento box arrived so I packed a lunch in it and gave it to him today. He seems pleased. My mom has emailed that she needs sci-fi, so I’ll be lugging a pile of books to the post office this week. My eBook auction was up to $102.50, but then the hapless individual who’d bid it that high must have done some comparison shopping and discovered s/he could buy a new one for fifteen dollars more, and retracted! I was disappointed, to say the least.
…aaaaaaaand here’s a gratuitous iThing screenshot of my eBay app, from last night when I was still making bank on the eBook:
Spring
The weather is wonderful. I walked to work today without a coat on! I saw bees today! This is the kind of mild winter weather I moved here for; screw that Midwestern-style frozen tundra crap.
Fat
I weighed and measured my body this morning. HOLY SHIT. It has gained 11 pounds and 2.5 inches (in girth, not height, sadly) since I got a boyfriend. This is empirical proof that men make me fat. So, yeah, thanks for asking, I’m totally on a diet now… and will remain so, to varying degrees, until I can cut my own damn toenails again without running out of air. Water, walking, and isometrics are now my life. Damn.
…it will be interesting to see whether I’ll choose food or cocktails for dinner tonight, though. I have between 386 – 736 calories remaining today, so I might be able to have a little of both. Yay!
In other (very exciting!) news, I’ve made an online friend through Flickr and she and I have arranged a swap. She’s sending me a bunch of bento-junk love in exchange for things she can’t get in Japan: Tillamook cheeses, crackers (like Triscuits and Wheat Thins), Mexican hot chocolate, and Neutrogena eye cream.
I can’t wait to get my box of authentic bento junk from Japan! Whee!
In which I shamelessly plug my auctions.
This week I’ve listed four items for sale on eBay:
- An old Gameboy Advance SP (sold!)
- an eBookwise 1150 ebook reader
- a Toshiba e400 Pocket PC, and
- a Dell Axim X51 Pocket PC.
I did this because I no longer need, want, or use any of these items. And why is that?
Because my iPod Touch replaces them all! (Thanks, work! Best Xmas present from an employer EVER!)
Let’s gaze a moment at it, shall we?
Aw. Innit cute? I love my iThing.
Twitter! Surfing! Ebooks! Games! Facebook! Music! Movies! And it even has an eBay app, so I can conveniently track my auctions while I’m at the bar!
This may be the most perfect device EVAR. (Except for the part where I still have to carry a cell phone. And it’s only 8GB instead of 120GB, so I still need my other iPod for my music collection. And no free Office doc reader. But whatever.) SO deeply in lurve.
VSCO
Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
