A Book of Rogues and Imposters

Skated by with a mindfulness and breath awareness sketch at the PT appointment (which we ran late to because Dad misremembered what time his appointment started, argh).

Got to see the PT assistant I used to see at this clinic (of course I recommended my Bellingham PT clinic to my pained parent), which was awesome. She made *DELIGHT* face when I sketched that I'd done all the teacher-trainings for pilates instructor and am planning to apply to PT school this fall. :D

Mom's spent a lot more time around me than Dad has post All The PT: his boggle face when I helped carry a corner bookcase up from the living room to the office was pretty epic.

There's a reason I put all those hours into this. I can take the heavy end of a purpleheart bookcase up sixteen steps and a ninety-degree turn two days after kayaking and a day after baking. I can plan to attend PT school.

My first in a long, long time, and my first Canadian event ever.

It went well, I feel like, and for the garb's first outing it performed admirably. Some tweaks on the outer layer to do--it kept rotating to give me a gape in the back of my neck and no space at the front--but overall for an adventure in all day wear my profound compliments to my lady hostess. <3

It's interesting being in a position to say 'If my schedule allows for it, I'll go to more'.

But the old man's gone, and I'll never be attending an event in isolation.


..... Definitely want to lay hands on camp chairs before next time, though. Stupid hip. You'd think a very nice cushion would be enough, but noooo.

2004 Mark 2.0 is going considerably better than Round 1.

( Read more... )

It involves something from Dogfish Head Brewing (the US Thanksgiving victim was Noble Rot, although Veggie and I also got into the Midas Touch. We just didn't have enough drinkers for both 'beers' and Veggie's dad's cherry kajifa), and every glass shape and rim one can lay hands on.

No, seriously, I brought a straight-sided rimless glass, a relatively-straight rimmed glass, a rimmed stemless wine glass, a rimless stemless wine glass and a Glencairn down to the house on the island I grew up on to do this trick.

We added a brandy snifter, my dad's Favourite Wine glass (a glass-paperweight-round rimmed glass with a stem exactly as long as his three fingers excluding pinky, which goes under the base of the glass), and a tiny little stemless-snifter-type my parents either stole or bought off Scandinavian Airlines when I demonstrated the trick with a bottle of red wine to my mother the night before US Thanksgiving. We discarded the clay goblet as an option after a taste each.

See, the party trick is you take a bottle of something, pour enough for multiple-human tastings into each of the glasses you have available, and then everyone goes down the line of glasses. Veggie and I have yet to agree on a 'this tastes the best' selection, (which is convenient when one only has one drinking vessel of that shape/rim. >.>) with one exception.

The Midas Touch taught us that one should include the original bottle as part of the tasting procession. That was neat.

Because Veggie's mum wanted to do high tea at some point and we needed lunch anyway.

I stealthily arranged to have the only none-rose teacup set at our table. And then took pictures, because the J&G Meakin Classic Blue Nordic pattern is actually quite lovely.

Then I ordered iced tea. Because fuck that hot liquid shit, have you noticed I'm MOVING, universe?

(I passed the set to Veggie, because otherwise I think I'd have been eaten.)

Veggie and I were down visiting Veggie's parents today--well, no, not really. Veggie's parents were hitting the wall on finding a new place to live and we offered to come down and help.

This somehow turned into an unexpected Best Buy multi-hour excursion to find replacement computer, TV and blu-ray player.

Much to my shock, I found a second laptop that works with the hand issues. No dice on weight (which also pushes me out of the Macbook Pros, argh), but the really weird thing is that it's a PC.

The hell.

(For the record, it was an Asus Zenbook, the i5-3317U variant. Also the class name 'Ultrabook' is ridiculous.)

I had Veggie get pics before she had to leave for school.

It was foggy this morning, so I look even more vampiric than usual, as a note.

( cut for pic )

Thank you for having a Moment at the business paperwork earlier this year. It made replenishing the supply of blank CDs today remarkably easier.

Sincerely,
Future You

--

I really do not miss Metro Seattle's traffic. Ye gods. It took us half an hour to get through eight freeway exits. *squinchy face*

In other news, acetone will take the shiny off patent leather, rubbing alcohol will show you what the underlying leather looked like, pre-dye. O.o; That was fascinating and scary to find out, and I still have an acetone headache. I do kind of love how cold your fingers get while scrubbing something with acetone, though. Pleasant flashbacks to chemistry labs.

Well, that took me a week.

In my defense, I spent the weekend in Kamloops meeting relations. Noooot exactly the most conducive environment to bounce sparks off my frontal lobes, especially when I'm being sniffed over as someone's wife when most of them hadn't even met me as the girlfriend. It seems to have gone well? I think?

Anyway. The plan for our big wedding celebration is May long weekend of next year (the weekend before Memorial Day, for the Americans in the audience, Victoria Day weekend for the Canadians). We do not yet have a locale nailed down, but the weather tends to be less snotty over in Kamloops than in Vancouver. Options thus far are a ski lodge over that way, but we need to do some research into sleeping accommodations for everyone. I suppose we might also be able to strike some sort of deal with the Cypress guys, if the snow's backed off enough that they're in the process of closing down for the year around then. *ponderface*

Back to Kamloops, and the weekend.

Between us, we only have one living grandparent (his mother's dad; mine all went before I was nineteen), and half the reason we went was so I could meet him.

Nice gentleman, if slightly reserved. Happy about some plans, and fretting about his raspberries and who was going to pick them when they came ripe. I resisted the desire to admit to my inclinations re: said fruit. It's hard to intone 'There will be no survivors' when there's that much of a generational and cultural gap, y'know? >.>

In addition to the grandfather, I increased my aunt count and cousin counts by one each, and the once-removed's by two (the aunt was from the side with seven girls and two boys, everyone else was a Doyle. And male. I may be doomed to sons).

The first once-removed I met when we wandered into a shop-garage after meeting one of the uncles at his local pub and discovered a small horde of young men fixing a dirtbike. He was twenty three, eldest of the eldest of the second-born Doyle.
The second once-removed I met when we went by the cousin's place after meeting him at his local gaming space*, to meet his wife, kid, the sheddingest chihuahua who ever shed, and the 3/4 cane corso 1/4 boxer mix of 'oh god, love meeeeee'. This kid is the eldest of the secondborn of the secondborn. Also seven.

There is no way I'm going to be able to guess the degree of relation in the Wall of Doyles come next year by age. Yeesh.

(*: Ten minutes after introductions were made and we'd been watching miniature armies turn into tiny smoking craters while chatting, the cousin remembered that he was mad at Zach for not bandying about the wedding. Direct quote: "Wait, I'm still mad at you!")

Unsurprisingly, the cane corso mix responded to Zach's 'omg you have a giant head! I LOVE giant headed dogs!' and my 'Aww, lookit your stub wave when we talk about you!' with all the demands for pettings. Sometimes by putting his head adoringly between my thighs so I could scritch his ears more.

My god, the jowls.

Between the Jowls of Adoration and the chihuahua deciding to cuddledammit (she was summarily removed from my lap twice before I gave in and invited her up), I seriously need to wash the jeans and shirt I was wearing that afternoon.

I hadn't spent any time in Kamloops previously. The closest I'd gotten was sort of skirting near it when we went to a wedding in Kelowna a couple years ago (high summer in the BC Interior: crispy).

Visually speaking, it's kind of like Monroe and Albuquerque had a mutant baby. All scrubby sagebrushy hills--with posted 'bighorn sheep hang out here' warnings in a couple of places--and then you get down towards the river and everything goes all green. Saw a few houses with fifty year old willow trees eating their yards, a few others with gardens.

Thus far, my conclusion is 'interesting to visit, but I don't think I want to live here'.

So apparently yesterday it was teeshirt weather, at least in Albuquerque.

Today Denver had several inches of snow, various flights were delayed or canceled, blah de blah de blah de blah.

Only trouble I've had so far was a frame for an embroidery project getting mistaken for a tiara by the TSA, and the gate agents in Denver apparently unable to decide which gate we're leaving from.

'I've started this entry three times', can't decide which of two gates we're departing from. I feel like a member of a school of cranky two-legged fish.

In other news, apparently February Visits are when I edit draft novels and my favourite jeans die.

Go figure.

So we finally have snow! After weeks of teasing and cold-without-snow!

Naturally the Subaru's thermostat decided to die yesterday afternoon.

So we got it over to the mechanic this morning, expecting to get it back sometime before Thursday (the day Mom gets in from Hawaii; the weather gods are probably laughing at her too).

Got the call half an hour ago that it's good to go. *facepalm*

Now we just have to figure out how to get it from her house to mine (answer: lure boyfriend southwards. An Accord, a Legacy and a Pathfinder do not a five-foot couch transport make. Not without one of them being a secret TARDIS, and one would think the mechanic would have noticed...).

This is not shaping up to be a good body week. It's possible I'm coming down with something--at least one of my classmates has a wet cough--and whacking my bad elbow hard enough to raise a bruise with a dining room chair Sunday hasn't exactly helped.

Naturally I had a test yesterday and have another one Thursday.

Today I turned twenty seven. I actually feel like something of a grown up--which is pretty funny considering a couple weeks ago another patient in the waiting room at the physiotherapists asked in all seriousness if I was still in high school.

So. Due to circumstances including the spectrum tendency to imprint, my father's involvement with the fall of the Soviet Union*, and various houseguests over the years, I developed a taste for Russian vodka.

Like, Siberian grocery store vodka.

This is freaking impossible to find in North America. And websites in Great Britain.

Now, I dragged my brother through a tech writing class a little while ago, and my father wanted to thank me properly. (This included two bottles of scotch old enough to drink themselves in the states, but no luck on the vodka. Yes, this is how we know about the websites in Great Britain.)

So Dad asked a friend if he could help. Said friend asked someone he knew was heading to the area. Said someone was staying with someone who actually lives in the area. Said friend emailed my father to this effect, and dad forwarded the email to me.

The nice lady who lives here and I have been playing phone tag for nearly a month, now. We had a tentative plan to meet today in Seattle so she could give me two bottles of properly Russian vodka.

Sadly she fished said in her garage in Everett.

My Russian is not up to meeting her lovely mother, who has no English at all, but lives at her place. So I rescheduled for next week, to confirm Monday or Tuesday as to timing.

I technically have voicemail from her right now. Sadly I cannot check my voicemail while I am in countries not yet technically my own, and I didn't see the missed call until well after I was in Vancouver.

Ay yi yi. Let's hope the booze is worth it . . .




*: kind of true, if you turn it sideways and squint . .

So there's an interview meme going around, and I asked darthneko to get me.

( the verbiage for the meme )


( she obliged. )

I now share legal first and last names with both a dentist (I used to worry the hygienists considerably), and a exterminator.

Also, my mother so strongly associates macadamia nuts with me that she sent some as a slightly-belated birthday gift. I'm not actually all that enamoured of said nuts, but I do make a rather tasty pie from them; this only furthers my amusement.

Not the peaches (the veggie) and raspberries (me), anyway, and since mom likes apples and my brother approves of anything with caloric content...

So yeah, farmer's market. I signed up for a CSA this year, which has been . . . interesting. Feel like I'm paying overmuch for the amounts we're getting (3/4 of an ounce of mint is Way Less than you'd think), but the enforced weekly visits to the farmer's market have been kind of good for us.

I haven't been posting much; fell off the wagon a busy weekend and never quite got back on in July. So, I'm just going to babble a bit, try to get myself back into the habit--


The Beast's getting somewhat less obsessive about the Big Blue Room now that he gets a certain amount of access to said, though we're still a little concerned because he hasn't had his second immunization shot for feline leukemia yet. Work in progress, as is his continuing quest to make himself silver through self-shaving. Neurotic cat, us? Surely you jest.

We need Moar Bookshelves. I'm thinking starting a new wall in the guest bedroom, and seeing what I can do to keep books from escaping the top of my dresser, for starters. Bibliophiles, us?

I continue to struggle with the jigsaw puzzle approach to storytelling, especially with the damn!epic. Massive story is massive. Small pieces are small. Frustration level: Climbing . . .

Me and Ruadhan need to kill a bottle of wine together sometime, see if we can't get over the blank spot in the river baroness expansion. I'm hoping to get a 2400 word piece and a 3600 word piece into a pair of 5000s, or if I'm feeling ambitious a pair of 6000s before posting, but I need Ruadhan and Sidonie for it and neither's being particularly cooperative at the moment (with Sidonie this is hardly surprising, as the sequence details some of her final poor planning decisions).

While I'm banging my head on that, there anything you'd really like to see me write? I acknowledge that at least a few of you have trouble narrowing down requests ('but it's ALL shiny!'), but specific requests get filled way, way faster than generic 'yay tae writing!' approaches. =\

Contractor: Gremlins!
Veggie (on couch): This house is known for them!
Tae (also on couch, in ragged chorus with Veggie): This house is full of them!


The bathroom floor is now a tile patterned vinyl-over-plywood, instead of painted oak boards; it's classier than I expected.

In other news, last month my mother finally got through to my father that she didn't want to live year-round in Guatemala (my theory is she used a sledgehammer), and, when he snippily inquired as to where she'd rather live, she replied (as she has since he started making serious noise about fleeing the island in '06) 'Hawai'i'.

They've just rented a 3/2 in Captain Cook on the Big Island, having headed there after renting the house on the island out at the end of last month.

They're paying less a month than I am. I am deeply bemused.

Text: You didn't tell me the sore throat hurt this much. Ow.

E-mail: The monkey gave me plague. Please bring me Theraflu on your way home?

--

It runs course in five days, given the evidence, bordered by the sore throat from heck and feeling like roadkill on either end.

Nevertheless, I managed ~1500 words of new fiction today. Hail me. And thank you to all who took the time to comment. <3

Imna go fall over now. Oigh.

So I bit K over in her journal for the icon meme, and she gave me a list of five. :)


( images and explanations )

So, there's a 'I give you a list of five things I associate with you, and then you babble about them' meme going around, and I asked zero_pixel_coun for a list.

She gave me
russia
fangy grins
firearms
tattooing (in fiction & otherwise)
cattle-raids (and sagas thereof)

( this got long. )

I -- ow. *rearranges icepack on back* Well. The physio agrees with me--aside from my hips (which are a knotted mess. If you ever have kids? Make sure they crawl. Life can get pretty damn interesting otherwise), I am definitely hypermobile.

I think one of my knee joints slipping lightly out of place (I only noticed because a muscle fiber near it was randomly twitching--like a cat shaking/fluffing its tail against your leg, only the cat was on my chest at the time, assisting in the dislocation of my collarbone and sternum, and he's not actually long enough to be on my chest and have his tail trapped between my leg and the couch at the same time) might have had something to do with tha' agreement.

I need to remember to look up exercises for the hypermobile; more muscle mass helps hold things in place.

In other news, I am now a quarter-century old (as of Monday). I can now rent my own damn vehicle, and be listed as a driver the next time we have a need for a rental! Yay!

My parents gave me my own weight in alcoholic chocolates, my wife roommate took me out to dinner and encouraged a visit from The Rum, and the monkey my boyfriend bought me stockings. :)
Thank you to those of you who extended birthday wishes, and if you didn't, hey, no harm no foul. :)

Do you know your average typing speed? If so, do you mind sharing it?

(If you don't and are curious, I used http://www.typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed.php but a google search for 'typing speed test' turned up 1,730,000 results, so you can pick and choose to your heart's delight.)

The reason I inquire, you see, is that I'm strangely depressed by my results and I'm wondering if I'm being Odd again.

Hi. I would be Tae.

Aside from being a strong believer in the idea of comfortable bras (once the phrase 'double f or h' applies, especially when one's ribcage isn't particularly extravagant, this gets Complicated), and one of the newly declared Quality Purveyors of Doom (incorporated since XXX), I am an ex-SCAdian, ex-hard-science-major (I can rant in an amusing fashion!), and live in Seattle.

Many people of my acquaintance would not be startled to discover I was involved in a world domination plot.

I used to habitually default to wearing black; not for any particular reason like a Goth Phase (I always figured I was way too freckly and habitually scruffy to really pull off the effect), but because it was easy.

These days I appear to be habitually drawn to a mix of grays and silvers, and I often pair them with other colours. This kind of amuses me.

Friday's appointment went okay; as I said in an email that evening, "It still ain't the peripherals." Nerve conduction tests on two different nerves in both hands came back normal.
I ended up going and getting x-rays taken of my neck; doc thinks there may be something out of whack there that's affecting the shoulder. Of course, he was also muttering to himself about hypermobility and argh, other doctors around then, so I may not have caught all of what he was looking for.

Next appointment's Monday. Here's hoping there's something both obvious and easily repaired.