Andee from the internet.

Gods, tonight, except for one bit, was just full of the argh and facepalm.

• It should not have been that hard to find an application, shareware, trial or freeware, that outputs extruded text in .3ds. I'm just saying.
  
  
• related to the first, tonight seems to be the night for online creative stuff. Finally updated the dragonsea homepage... that was a bittersweet process, let me tell you. *sigh* at some point soon, I need to tackle my own web site... arghfllf 2004 era code.
  
  
• related to the second... I should never devote that much time to refreshing my server's visitor logs. Really I should stop checking "300 most recent visitors" entirely. No good has ever come of it.
  
  
• in cheerier news, I got told a story over Skype this evening. :)
  
  
• the disadvantage to people removing themselves from reading your LJ.... you get things happening like morlock bringing me a bottle of NOS as an attempt to be cheer me up. lolfail. Ah well *puts away for Sunday*
  
  
• trying really REALLY hard not to be bitter about Watchmen. It really isn't working.
  
  
• I have a super secret mission in the works... here's hoping I can pull it off. If I can, that'll be amazing. If I can't, ah well, one more disappointment to the pile.

Well. This post just flamed out into negative and fail. I think that's my cue to cut it short and go to bed.

7:00 is getting darker and darker. If it weren't for getting up to pee every three hours these days (it really has settled into 1am, 4am and 7am intervals at night, it's a bit scary) I'd still be dead asleep.

Had a sleepy/worky afternoon after Osaka, and then morlock took me out to dinner @ the bluebonnet, with a stop at the comic store. Testament to my returning appetite, as being still full from Osaka I still managed to toss down an entire turkey club sandwich. Gonna have to keep an eye on things today but so far no ill effects... and again, it's not like I'm craving anything too terribly unhealthy. Except maybe coffee. I didn't have any yesterday, and I was all right... I'm trying to make that an occasional treat rather than an everyday necessity, and actually having the vanilla soy milk around does help with that, as I crave heavy creamy and sweet in the morning. Apparently the coffee is optional there.

The evening was wrapped up with a book in morlock's armchair watching McCain flail during the debate. Who the hell is Joe the plumber? I'd be creeped out enough by McCain's direct addresses to him to move to Canada this morning. Actually it was funny, I wasn't paying attention so much to the debated questions as both candidates demeanors... I felt that Obama stayed relaxed and confident in his positions enough to make McCain nervous on a few occasions. McCain... just seemed squirrelly and stiff for most of it, blinked a lot, and I felt he resorted to taking potshots at Obama too much. And that he always had to one-up Obama at the end of every point, like he needed the last word. And at several points I was reminded of those annoying alltell wireless commercials, cause I felt that McCain wanted to end most of the talking points with "Oh yeah, well Senator Obama, you're still a ding-dong! Do you want a ding-dong for president??" To which point I would be all like "yeah about that, have you looked at your running mate lately?"

Today's plan/goals: Worky worky, and a lot of it. *sigh* Just need to gird the loins and push through it today, otherwise it's just not going to get done at all ever. blarg. Also want to tidy up a bit in my room, clean the downstairs bathroom, and tackle a few grody areas of the kitchen, as Amastan and Ale are definitely showing up this weekend. We'll see what time and energy allow for today, but I feel confident that I can manage all that and an episode of Murder She Wrote with C.

So off to it. Can't do a thing w/o breakfast after all...

I went to Silk City's karaoke night with lostcircuit and morlock last night and had a blast. I'm a bit miffed to find that the picture I took of morlock and EZ clowning around on stage while morlock sang "No Diggity" didn't make it over here, considering I took that one at great peril and ended up getting chased around the bar a bit by both boys, but oh well.

Drunk people are SO DAMNED FUNNY. There was the grizzly old guy that spent a good ten minutes trying his best to tell me that I had a beautiful voice but needed to control my breathing better (which _is_ true... the breathing anyway, I'm still at the state where I refuse to believe anything pertaining to the quality of my voice). There were the multiple guys who tried to hit on lostcircuit by using her order/chaos shoulder ink as an opener (it is an unexpectedly badass tattoo to find on a tiny shy blonde). There was the chick who kept dropping her important possesions all over the bar that I then kept finding, like her keys one minute (I kicked them accidentally when going to the bathroom) and her drivers license the next (I just found that under a bar stool.) Memo, chickie: GET DEEPER POCKETS. There was J's friend EZ, who arrived fucked up and got progressively worse as the evening wore on. At one point he was pretending to turn people gay with his "magic finger." Yeah. And lastly in an unexpected realization that for once he had a designated driver on tap, morlock also proceeded to get pretty got-damn sauced as well. And morlock fucked up is hilarious. It's like Christmas cause why, look! It's a happy fun ball to poke! *giggle*

Apparently people kept telling morlock that "your ex-girlfriend is hot, dude." I'd be lying if I said this had no positive effect on my ego.

The actual karaoke bit was fun too. I felt I had a bit of a rough start out of the gate, as I started with Cass Elliot's "Dream a Little Dream" and... I don't know, everyone else told me I sounded fine, but I felt like I was pretty glaringly flat for a few bars. The rest of my songs were better - did "A Little Respect", "Basket Case", and at the end of the night ended with "Umbrella", which I think I rocked the shit out of. I don't remember what lostcircuit sang much, except for laughing at her for getting stuck up on stage forEVER doing "Groove is in the Heart" which I swear, 90% of the time she was up there, the screen read "[INSTRUMENTAL BREAK - 45 seconds]." But whatever she did sing, sounded pretty damned amazing. morlock sang "Sunday Morning," "Don't Stop Believing" (which is actually his solo in his acapella group), "No Diggity" (with special drunken white homeboy interpretive dance backup from EZ)... damn don't remember the fourth one he did. Oh! "This is How We Do It." His duet with EZ on "Ain't Nothing but a G Thing" was funny as hell too.

Right before we left, EZ, who had passed FuckedUpland and was on the express train to TotallyEffingWasted decided he was gonna to "Baby Got Back" so to help him out (and to distract people when he fell out laughing instead of rapping) I hopped on stage and well... decidedly did not let the fact that I was wearing very tight low riders go to waste. Gods. These days, with the way my body's shifting out, I certainly am quite little in the middle but I got much back. Damn. Probably the most surreal moment of the night was the female karaoke DJ catching me as I came off stage and being all "That was really good!" Er, thanks, lady, I'm glad to know you were entertained by my five minutes of booty shake n shimmy.

Yeah, I know, a bunch of you would have dropped good money to see that, well YOU WERE NOT THERE. HA.

After we managed to get home in one piece I had some nice chilling out time with morlock. That's the other nice thing about going out, it tends to be a good way to scrub out any mad/annoyed/sad we'd built up. This time was especially needed since on Tuesday we'd had a blow up on IM and I didn't want to even really talk to him until right before we left for the bar. I guess at some point I'll elaborate on this crazy cycle we've been on lately, where we're... not exactly back to normal exactly, but being nice to each other, etc, then something'll happen to piss off/trigger/hurt one or the other of us, we'll fight viciously for a while, chill out, make up, then go back to square one. It's a nasty little merry-go-round, but morlock pointed out that we spend a lot more time in the good part of the cycle and far less time in the bad part than we used to. Which is true... we only spend a couple of days fighting these days rather than fortnights. Progress is a good thing.

I'll see if I can again try to upload one of those pics of morlock and EZ for your (but mostly my) amusement and enjoyment.

ETA: ( boys being silly )

So, after a retrospectively hilarious incidence where I went home after work after all, accidentally fell asleep and woke up six minutes before I had to be at my therapy appointment (running on blisters hahahahahaha ow), I think I like this new chica - she's just scattered enough to be relatable but seems to also be very straight up and cut the bullshit, which is what I think I need. The other thing is that her focus is on working in the short term on specific goals rather than a long drawn out years of therapy process which I think is going to be good for me as well considering my usual attention span. So I see her again next week, I have some homework to do (and I'll probably post it here, as it's making lists) and... yeah. We'll see how it goes.

Afterwards I met sundart and we did dinner at Friendly's (cause sometimes all you want in life is some greasy fried food that is so guaranteed to be bad for you that you can literally feel your arteries clog as you eat it, mmm mmm) and afterwards went on a fairly long walk (my poor feet, lol, they're never going to heal at this rate) through town and around the fields behind our old house (which is actually a block behind our current one)... Dude. DUDE. Those fields are positively SICK with fireflies!!! I spent about ten minutes periodically interrupting the deep serious conversation sundart and I were having pointing at little flashing lights and squeeing my fool head off like a five year old. I love... LOVE... fireflies. Another thing to put on the "things I actually like about summer" list, I think. I mean, WTH, I totally thought first week of June was way too early for them? Anyway, yeah... we had a long serious heart to heart of the caliber of what we used to do when we'd just talk for hours on end about whatever. This was about serious stuff, like THE FUTURE (dun dun duuuuuuuuuun), her valid concerns about my relationship with morlock and where that's all going to go from here, her wrist problems and how she's pushing herself to be better too fast, us and where we are as a couple... you know, fairly heavy crap, but it was good and it was followed by hanging out and cuddling, which also hasn't been done in a very long while.

After that i finished out my evening nested in one of morlock's armchairs wrapped up in my old-ass Brown Blankie (probably the last time in a while I'll actually be cold enough to do that, given the projected temperatures this weekend) with a purring Ivy on my lap and a book. Totally fell asleep watching the Daily Show there - morlock had to poke me awake and send me to bed. But it was still a decent end to an already good evening.

I'm still kinda tired this morning, and the lingering grayness of the world isn't helping me perk up any. There's a lot of headnoise happening, which I might talk about later, but it's not wigging me out for once. Right now it's all about getting through the next couple of days at work, and right now there's no real reason why that should be an issue, and then trying not to melt this weekend, though in truth I for one am sort of welcoming our new hot and humid overlords. Never thought I'd say this, but I'm so thoroughly tired of the cold that 92 degrees sounds positively wonderful. Which of course doesn't mean that three days from now I won't be sprawled somewhere quietly moaning "I'm melting.... MELTING... oh what a world, what a world" in my best Margaret Hamilton voice.

Note to self - cellphone makes a far better alarm clock than the alarm clock. That and getting up in fear of waking the person you're sleeping with... especially when you know they haven't had a good night's sleep in a week and they actually seem to be sleeping.

I don't know why i even bother complaining about how I feel before belly dancing, cause I always leave feeling better, if not ready to wrestle bears or something. The beginner class is rawther big, and I think Joanne might shoo people that were in her last class into her advanced beginners class to make up for it. sydneycat seemed to have an awesome time as well, which made me happy - it's always fun to have someone to take classes with.

Joanne lent me a set of zils, which i get to hang onto for a little bit as there's no class over july fourth weekend. I'll probably play with then a bit, get used to how they work (completely different from what I was thinking, but it will be fun to learn) and in the meantime work on improvising stuff to Jonothan Richman's "Egyptian Reggae," since I've been obsessing over it since the MEAC show.

My evening was good too... the sort of low key anniversary sort of thing that I like a lot. Apparently the theme for tonight was COOKIES, as my anniversary present to morlock was a handful of Sugar Jones cookies (can you believe it? there's a COOKIE place in Amherst that DELIVERS. though not in the summer. Still!), and his to me was making a non-dairy version of his infamous chocolate chip cookie dough, a huge tub of which now sits in my freezer, so now I can bake up a bunch of cookies whenever I feel like it. *chuckle* it's funny, we're both the biggest nightowls evar (you can usually find us wasting time online until well past 2am but somehow when he's over here and also way back when at the Farmhouse we manage to wear each other out and fall asleep well before midnight. Which honestly is probably good for both of us as I know we don't tend to get enoug sleep ever. Prbably the reason why I'm actually awake early today instead of rolling over in bed and going "Aw, shit."

Plans for today all depend on how work goes. If it goes well, I may slip out a bit early, if not, bleh. If it eats my soul, I swear I'm going straight home, going to bed and hiding from the world until the next morning. well, okay, maybe I'll pirate a bit if that happens. But I dunno we'll see. I've got two bits of amorphous social activities on the table with question marks after them - one for early in the evening, one for late - we'll just see how Tuesday goes.

oh yeah, and tonight there's grossfairy shopping. I should make a list.I should also stop babbling and get dressed or something.

RIP Pat Morita

It's funny, cause while morlock and I were watching Avatar: The Last Airbender marathon on Nickelodeon (which BTW, everyone needs to see right the fuck now, it's fucking amazing, more on it later) he came up in conversation, mostly in trying to place one of the voices. (the character in question turned out to be voiced by Mako, obviously still having a raucous amount of fun with voice acting since Samurai Jack). But damn. He will be missed.

I had a very good, quiet Thanksgiving. I spent the day with morlock as he cooked a cubic mess of extremely yummy deep fried chicken, fries, and cookies (go here for a picture, it was quite tasty) and watching first the Macy's parade (yay... though, teh fuck, no Hess advertising? Good thing I already know what this year's truck is - and it's red!), then the aforementioned cartoon, since they ran the entire first season of it. Seriously... one or two episodes in, and I was hooked. The animation is gorgeous (if rather heavily influenced by both Cowboy Bebop (one guest character is a dead ringer for Spike) and Princess Mononoke), the design and mythos of the world is interesting (the title's linked to the wikipedia article on it, which is rather exhaustive in its explanations), the characters are well drawn and believable (they're kids, and very real ones too), and the stories have that blend of epic and serious with room for completely screwball humor that anime has had a lock on until recently. Also... I was actually surprised that this was a Nickelodeon produced 'toon, as really, both them and the regular division of Cartoon Network have been churning out crap for the past few years. Also it manages to be fairly adult for it's Y7 rating, which is very unusual for an American 'toon. So yeah. Totally splitting DVD box set costs with morlock when it comes out in January.

The rest of the evening consisted of stuffing myself to the point of sleepiness, hanging out a little with sundart and anzovin when they returned from Thanksgiving with the Jews that she's been dreading (but turned out ok), and other than some annoying and unfortunately timed yapping of some small muff of a spoiled canine one of sydmor's next door neighbor's holiday guests had brought over, it was a quiet evening of cuddling and falling asleep in front of the TV. Yay.

Today I'm up in sydmor's apartment, waiting on repairfolk for their dryer and enjoying the quiet of what feels like a completely empty building. All them crazy folk must be out shopping.