Chrystalline

I didn't get much accomplished yesterday. Spent most of the day on FB, then got ready for the free dance class at UAH that a friend told me about, only to find that my sneakers weren't just coming apart - the side of my foot was sticking out. Since shopping is not one of my favorite things, I do tend to leave things until I absolutely can't avoid it :/

So, I made a run to New Balance first; made it to the class only about five minutes before it was supposed to start. It went okay, though I'm not very good at it. My friend is a lot easier to follow than the instructor, actually. A couple of the guys I got partnered with kept telling me to look up, since the instructor had said we were supposed to keep eye contact as much as possible, but I couldn't. Until I feel confident that I know what I'm doing, I'm going to have trouble keeping eye contact with anybody. It's part of that insecurity thing.

Afterwards, I went over to my parents' house to give my brother the rest of the guitar stuff I found in my purse last week. Ended up staying to watch whatever episode of NCIS they were on, then having a nice long talk, the way we usually do.

Today, I had lots of stuff I intended to do: hang my living room pictures, pull staples and tackboards in the last bedroom, wrap the frayed wire in the attic, clean some of the stuff out of the family room to put into the attic, do laundry, vacuum the living room rug, wash dishes, etc. What I actually did: I was checking FB for messages (still trying to get in touch with my late friend's BF) when I got a call from friends I hadn't seen in a while. Met for lunch, stayed and talked for a long time (tipped extra since the poor guy couldn't clear the table until we left). They had an appointment, so they arranged to come over after. I went home and spent an hour beheading all the dandelions I could find in the front yard, at least until I was so tired I could hardly stand the heat anymore. (If ever there was a time I wish the neighbors had munchkins I could borrow: yes, dearie, go pick all the dandelions you can find! Yes, they're very pretty. Look, there are some more! Go get 'em, kiddo!)

Ended up having a nice long chat (must have all my friends over more - must get house straightened up a little), but didn't do much. After they headed back home, I climbed up into the attic to wrap that wire at least. Had trouble getting the attic door to come down - will have to replace that blasted wire/twisted-hanger with something that is gentler on my hands when I pull. Then I had to get a step-stool out to be able to reach the attic stairs in order to unfold them. This is not great. The attic is kind of a mess, with wires running all over the place (and they only bothered to insulate the part that's over the house itself, not the part that's over the carport-turned-garage). So, pink fiberglass strewn everywhere, with wires coming and going almost at random. There is also a TV antenna mounted just under the peak of the ceiling up there. I found the wire dad had been talking about and used the electrical tape he'd given me to wrap it. That was a little harder than I'd expected, mostly because trying to hold the flashlight and wrap the wire at the same time was really complicated. The worst part, though, was when I climbed down and couldn't get the door to close. I don't know if it just needs oil, or if there's a latch I'm just not seeing, but it's tremendously frustrating. I hope I don't run into it tomorrow when I leave for work.

I ended up sticking the stuff from the family room in the garage instead. The attic needs some work before I'll feel comfortable storing anything up there.

To those who don't know me very well, this may sound like bragging. It's not. This is me being introspective about my reality. It's also very long, which is pretty typical of me.

http://www.apollo.edu/dreambig

Sounded interesting - a full scholarship to University of Phoenix for retail employees. Work had a notice for managers to make sure that all employees were aware of this opportunity (though unless they bring it up at the meeting this coming Saturday, pretty much nobody knows - communication is a huge issue in this company) and I decided to check it out.

I've occasionally considered the possibility: another degree, to get me somewhere more useful than I've managed so far, to get the credentials to be acknowledged when I write about things I've observed, as though the ability to recognize patterns in the world and follow scientific logic requires certification from an accredited agency. (I have a sort of cynical amusement at this notion, since I noticed long ago that the problem with standardized intelligence testing is that it is limited by the intelligence of the test creators.) Psychology, perhaps, or an MBA? Maybe even something in web technology.
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and a coffeetable on order, expected later this week. Of course the first thing I do after getting things settled is sit down on the couch with laptop and cola, then spill cola all over everything! Only a little on the couch - wiped up all right - and I wasn't terribly concerned about the carpet - it's already got stains I haven't been able to get out - but the laptop worried me. I tipped it over (spilling the cola from the laptop to the carpet) and propped it face-down to encourage any drips to fall out rather than in. So far, it seems okay, and the couch has good cushions and good lines, so it should be relatively easy to reupholster when I'm ready to do all that work to make my living room furniture match. I'll be looking for slipcovers in the interim.

In other news, I hit my one-year anniversary at work last month, which automatically conferred on me the one week's worth of vacation that full-time employees are given. What's weirder to me is that it's annual by calendar, not by personal anniversary, so they told me it had to be used by February 1, because I get another week's vacation after that, for use between this February and next. As a result, I'm off the rest of this week. (At least officially. They asked me today if I might come in this week if they called? I said maybe, because I'd already started making plans.)

The vacation is handy. Work is finally starting to settle down from the holiday-season-in-retail chaos, though I just signed up to take a temporary (six month) promotion which will probably have me pretty busy. The idea, though, is to make use of this time for house stuff and Meetups. It was going to be better-job-hunting/business-starting, but since I just accepted a six-month responsibility, that's kind of on the back burner. Still want to get business going, but it'll have to be in the spaces between.

The washer has developed an intermittent leak, or it could be the connection, because there are stains on the floor from before I bought the house. The garage door spring broke about a month ago; dad and brother came and replaced it for me. It was a bit of a shock, being unable to get my car out of the garage because it would only open about three inches. I had to ask my brother to take me to work that day (late, of course), then dad and brother helped get the door open long enough to get the car out. I've gotten spoiled, being able to get in the car without worrying about rain and such, but I certainly preferred parking in the driveway over being unable to leave.

Yukihito is well and truly gone. I've seen neither hide nor hair of him, other than tufts of fur left behind on his favorite chair from before. I'm annoyed, and I miss him, but there are limits to how much running around I can do. He was an outdoor stray for nearly a year before I took him in; I can only hope he found accommodations more to his liking. I do want to get other cats, but I have a lot of balls in the air right now, and I'm inclined to wait until I can resolve some of them.

I have stopped fostering cats. The three I had intended to adopt were too high-energy for indoors, no matter what the others say, and the kittens ruined the floor in the spare bedroom. I'd expected them to ruin the carpet, but not to soak through the carpet and padding to destroy the hardwood flooring underneath. I was quite annoyed. I can't really fix the flooring, and I'm not sure what a potential roommate would think.

On the other hand, I've also been wanting to grow a number of tropical plants (edible ones), and since I can't really afford to build a complete greenhouse just yet, I'm thinking of turning that bedroom with the ruined floor into a sort of greenhouse. (leaving me one room to get a roommate, still) I'll need grow lights, since the windows won't let in enough light by themselves, but climate control will already be settled, since the plants like temperatures in the same range I find comfortable.

I'm also intending to try to raise rabbits for meat and fur, but that'll be in the garage or out back, not inside the house, and there are so many other issues to tackle first!

The folding dining room style chairs I saw at Costco are gone, so I'll have to figure out something else for family room seating. It's not really laid out for permanent seating, but the camp chairs aren't really all that comfortable long-term, so the folding wooden ones seemed the best choice. I'll have to see what I can find.

I have also discovered that part of my foot pain may be from the fact that my formerly-ridiculously-high arches have fallen to be really low arches; apparently, walking on tiptoe develops high arches, and since I always used to walk around the house barefoot and on tiptoe, well. So I've been making a point of walking tiptoe when I can. Mom also gave me a can of tennis balls to use as foot rollers, and I've also noticed a significant difference in the level of pain based on whether I've gotten a full eight hours of sleep at night - not something I usually do, but apparently I need to.

And now, I'm really tired, so I'm going to call this good for now.

I usually have weird dreams. Bizarre "Escher meets Lewis Carroll meets Gene Roddenberry" adventures that no one would ever write on purpose. The most memorable ones are often frightening, too; the spiders on every surface, including between the layers of Kleenex in the box, or the one where flying alien pancakes that secrete human-dissolving acid interrupted Commander Riker's (yes, that Riker) class on swimming in a church gymnasium that has never held a pool but did for that dream. (Think Reign of Fire with flying acid pancakes instead of dragons and you'll be pretty close - and yes, in a totally bizarre anti-climax, we humans succeeded in fighting back with forks) Occasionally they're even simple scifi, like the one about the super-human girl and the anti-government rebels surrounded by the dictatorial government's forces and struggling to find a way to get everyone out to fight again another day; that one I typed up, at least in part, and my dad keeps asking when I'm going to finish the story, because he liked it a lot. I've posted about my weird dreams once or twice, but I don't think I ever mentioned the prophetic ones.

I say prophetic because I don't know a better word to refer to dreams about things that later come to pass, but it seems awfully pretentious for the level of events I usually see in those dreams. It started a long time ago, when I was in grade school, and let's face it - having your mother sign an absence form for when you were sick doesn't seem important enough to be worth dreaming in advance. In college, I dreamed about hanging out with friends I hadn't made yet. It's pretty much always been minor things, little snippets that are just enough to know, 'hey, I dreamed this before it happened!' but not enough to make a difference in any way. It's not like I have a chance to change anything based on these dreams, because it's always just a single moment in time, a snapshot featuring people I may or may not know. I won't see it coming in real life until it happens; the people I don't know yet in the dreams are vague and indistinct. More annoying than anything, really, so I've had no patience with people who hype it up: "I dream about things before they happen!" "Yeah, so?"

Last night (or this morning, I suppose, since it's the dreams right before waking that are memorable) I had another dream. I was at a clinic, with my indistinct husband (who, oddly enough, felt like an afterthought here), and I was pregnant and scared. A lot of the details are fading, as is usual for dreams, but weird as it was, it felt like one of the prophetic ones, which leaves me torn, and a little freaked. I mean, sure, deep down, I really want to be loved (who doesn't?) but I've already officially given up on the whole romance-and-marriage thing. The chances of finding a guy who both interests me and is interested in me are infinitesimal - it's never happened before (don't get me started on the ex-BF-in-love-with-love), and I can't really see it happening in the near future. For this dream to come to pass, it would have to be the near future, because it's only a half-dozen years until I turn forty, and unless God plans on repeating miracles, pregnancy after forty is...unlikely at best. There's a reason it's newsworthy when forty-five and fifty-year-old women manage to give birth (though why someone would choose to start at fifty is beyond me; children run around a lot - it's exhausting even when you're twenty-something). I run away from guys who interest me because I'm sick of making a fool of myself. I misinterpret everything as interest from a guy I find interesting (I don't notice at all if I'm not interested, unless he gets really obvious, like telling me directly and asking me out, or being skeevy and leering at me) and I can't help reacting, even though it makes me look pathetic and clingy. (I've found some of my old crushes on FB and IRL, but I'm too embarrassed about the past to ever contact them) It's safer to just run away. Loneliness hurts, but it's easier than repeated humiliation. Dreaming of a future pregnancy leaves me fighting hope and fear, that part of me that desperately wants to be held and treasured facing off with the part of me that put up locks and walls to block out anyone who might attract me. There's a reason I identify with the protagonists of Skip Beat and (Kaicho wa) Maid-Sama. I'm really confused right now.

So, I'm trying to get back into online life, and I'm not getting there smoothly. I did have a brief stint with a local print shop, but the owner there made my previous manager look like a paragon of steadiness and predictability, and her cavalier attitude about copyright severely grated on my nerves. I'm currently waiting tables at a small local restaurant, but it's not enough, so I'm also looking for something else. Of course, I'm not sure whether that "something else" will supplement or replace, and it probably depends entirely on TPTB at the something else. We'll see. I had hoped that the tips would improve as I got better at it, but it's settled at "slow descent into insolvency" so yeah, I'm looking.

As for journaling, I've more-or-less decided to go with LJ and Feed2JS on a static HTML page instead of WP, but I'm still going to have to set up WP long enough to restore the old posts so I can copy the rest of them back over here. For a while, I had it set up to only cross-post part of the entry, so I have to use the archived version of the WP blog to fill in the rest. Don't think it'll restore the moods, though, so I'll probably just remove the nonsensical numbers. It's going to take me a while; I'm always overheated from work (it's usually about 85F in the dining room and 95F in the kitchen, and the heat outside afterward sure doesn't help - 108F in the car today), I'm tired, and my back and feet hurt. Handy that LJ now links to FB for cross-posting there, though. Should help.

Oh, yes, I got another cat in November. He'd been running around stray for months, a little ginger-and-white tom with a stumpy little tail, and after Smokey finally bit the dust, I had room. (the complex only allows two pets per apartment) About the time I decided I'd try to take him in, he disappeared for a while, so I thought he had a home. A couple of months later, I was coming home in the rain and found him huddled under a bush. Poor guy; I decided I wasn't going to wait for a convenient weekend and scooped him up. He wasn't keen on the whole "being carried" thing, but I managed to get him inside without too much flailing. I kept him locked in the bathroom so he couldn't pass anything to Wyberd, and the next morning I dropped him at the vet for testing, shots, and a bath.

They confirmed he was healthy, part Manx (not mutilated, which the neighbors had claimed) and a longhair. My first longhair. Kind of troublesome, really, but whatever. I still kept him in the bathroom, with a flea-and-tick collar (and felt justified in doing so when I found a dead tick on the linoleum later) and after a few weeks, had him neutered. He was very angry with me that day; it's amazing how much emotional range "meow" can cover. Anyway, by the time he'd recovered from that (they'd advised me not to let him out with the other cat until he'd healed), he and Wyberd had managed to get used to poking at each other under the bathroom door. So despite my fretting, the introduction was anticlimactic.

I toyed with the idea of calling him GingerSnapDragon, as a play on Gingersnap and Snapdragon, because he's ginger (almost the color of my hair) and white, and because while he's playful, he's also harmless. It took him a few weeks to learn not to use claws while "wrestling" with me, so I had a lot of scratches for a while, but he's got it now, and he has a marked tendency to run like a rabbit whenever anything unexpected happens. Still, that was too much of a mouthful.

Then I thought, he looks like fire on snow, how about Snowfire? Ah, but that sounds silly in English, so what will Google Translate give me? I thought Irish would be apt, since Manx come from the Isle of Man, near Ireland. Unfortunately, while Google Translate would give me the Irish Gaelic words for "fire" and "snow," it gave me no idea how to pronounce them. I wasn't about to name him something I couldn't even say, and most of the other languages sounded really goofy to me. Japanese, though, worked okay: "Yuki" is snow and "Hi" (hee) is "fire" and "to" (toe) is a typical ending for boys' names, so I put them together as Yukihito, and only then realized that it sounded familiar. Quick check with Google - yep, it's an existing Japanese name, and at least one of the manga I like to read has a character with that name. Leave it to me to find the long way around :\

He's very vocal, which is annoying, particularly since his favorite time to be vocal is about bedtime for me. I grew up with a half-Siamese who meowed only rarely, so having a cat that yowls every night is...very different. At least neutering made his meowing a little less insistent!

I know, I know, I haven’t said anything, but that’s at least partly because I didn’t have a lot of lead time between when I found out about it and when I had to fly. It was only about two weeks ago I found out about CPAC – my mom sent the link, and I almost disregarded it, but I glanced at the posted agenda and saw “How to Get Started in Hollywood” on the schedule for Thursday morning, and I had to come.

So I’m in DC. This is awesome.

The flight was almost an hour delayed, and I was exhausted before we even started because I don’t pack well in advance, and the idiot chicken-cat scratched his ear open Tuesday night, so I had to deal with a) catching him and holding him still long enough to get it to stop bleeding, and b) scrubbing off blood spatters, because the moron tosses his head when his ear is bleeding, which makes it look like someone went around flinging blood off a tiny baton or something. Work is still slow, so Manager had no problem with me leaving a little earlier than I’d planned, which meant I was ready almost exactly when mom & dad & brother arrived to pick me up.

DC isn’t as cold as I’d thought it would be; it’s about how Huntsville’s been the last few days. The snow piles are kind of impressive – the taxi took us past rows of cars parked on the sides of the road with snow piled up to their windows. Clearly, they’re not going anywhere.

The hotel is jaw-droppingly huge. It was kind of strange to get in the elevator, select our floor, and have the elevator start down. The lobby (which we entered from the front driveway!) is on the eighth floor here.

What really gets me, though, is how awesome it is to be in a crowd of people who mostly agree with me on so much. The Hollywood panel was great; conservative & artsy people like me – I did as much info exchange as I could. Again at the blogger free-for-all, too. I like this group. I hadn’t realized how much I’ve silenced myself because I’m so often around people whose views are incompatible with mine and I’m too timid to rock the boat. Getting cursed out by my grandpa at Christmas (because he disagrees with my political views) has shifted something in me, though, too – I think I want to start speaking out more. It’s my blog. It’s my life. I think I want it back.

Mirrored from Chrystalline.