Wait, We're Having a What, Now?

Last night en route to an evening of Warhammer, I stopped at the big grocery chain to pick up coffee because my corner grocery doesn't carry the kind I like. I found the place packed, huge lines at the checkout, and vast swaths of the cereal aisle empty, as if swarms of Froot-Loop eating locusts had passed through. WTF, I thought--it's almost like people are stocking up before a blizzard. Then I thought, hmmm. I haven't checked weather.com in the last 48 hours or so.....

Oh.

So I woke up this morning to an inch of cottony fluff all over everything ("morning" is a relative term here, since Warhammer went until 1:30 am and I didn't get to bed until 2:30 or so) and supposedly we're well on our way to 7+ inches of snow, with a layer of freezing rain/ice in there someplace. I managed to heave my sorry rear out the door an hour ago to buy cookie-baking supplies and something for dinner; the Safeway was a little less scarily cleaned-out than last night's trip to Marsh, and I didn't have to wait in line too long, so no complaints. If I get snowed in, I should be able to survive on gingerbread and almond shortbread for a couple days. I've got multivitamins. It's all good.

I'm Not Sure Whether to be Proud, or Embarassed.



The best part, for me, is when the Snitch goes streaking off toward my old dorm, Jewett House. Good thing it got remodeled, or there'd be a danger of the snitch getting stuck in the antiquated elevator...

Jesus, Make It Stop!

So far my Thanksgiving Day has been marred by something (cats) setting off my allergies early in the am; it's now 3 o'clock, and my nose is still running pretty much nonstop. This despite the application of 24-hour super-Claratin, which I can tell you right now is worse than useless--it doesn't make you drowsy, but it also doesn't stop the nasal drip, hence you're fully awake to enjoy it. Bite me, Claratin.

Since the drugs aren't working, I've resorted to prayer, as you can see in the post title. Last night I finally got around to watching Jesus Camp, and if it taught me anything it taught me that the world's problems would be solved just by invoking Jesus in the most trivial matters possible. If you've not seen it, and you have any interest in American politics or religion, you really should. It's a documentary about evangelical Christians; specifically, evangelical kids and how they are being trained as an army to "take back America for Jesus!" If you think the army metaphor is a bit over the top, see the film and think again. These kids walk, talk, sleep, breathe, and even bowl the Religious Right agenda (a memorable scene involves a bunch of these kids at a bowling alley, whispering fervent prayers to Christ before flinging a gutterball, more often than not.) Yea, the lord is with us, even when bowling. The movie is fairly serious, and presents a frightening (to many of us) view of Christianity which should disturb my genuinely Christian friends even more than it does non-Christians like myself. It does have a few lighthearted moments, including a brief and ironic appearance from exceedingly smarmy mega-church leader Ted Haggard, who shortly after the film was made was caught up in a scandal involving methamphetimene and a male prostitute. One can only hope that this shook the blind faith of some of those kids in the film.

Today I've made 3 pies, blown my nose 119 times, and cleaned out my refrigerator. What've you done?

Ooooh, Spikey!

I'd be excited about my slight uptick in hits this week, except that I've figured out that apparently the TV show "Heroes," which I've only seen one ep of but I hear it's nice, has recently aired an episode titled "Cautionary Tale." So all of a sudden, I am getting hits from the UK, the Ukraine, Germany, Mozambique--all googling for "heroes cautionary tale." As well as random places in the US. Although I'm obviously not what they're looking for, I am gratified to see that I am the #1 hit for this google search (presumably since all three of those words appear in my header.) Only one or two of them have hazarded an actual look at my blog--but if you are, in fact, here hoping I am talking about the Heroes show on a regular basis, I'm very sorry to disappoint you. You'll have to wait til I've watched a few more disks of the set my coworker loaned me last week.

My adventure for the weekend is that I was coerced into dog-sitting for one of my neighbors; I'm in the town directory as a dog sitter, but the last time I dogsat it was an utter disaster and I didn't want to repeat it. But these folks seemed desperate, so I said OK. Things were a little surreal when I biked over there after dark on Wednesday and found myself passing sign after sign that said "No Outlet" "Dead End" "Roadway Ends" and "Turn Back Now, Before It's Too Late." There are lots of signs like this in my little town (well, the first three) but I seriously had no idea there were any houses back on this little gravel path along the river; I was about to turn around when I finally found the house #, at the second-to-last house at the farthest southern tip of town. Surrealism continued when I met the dog, who is the world's most gi-normous Rottweiler. "Oh, he's a sweetheart! Don't worry, you can just let him out without a leash and he'll come right back in!" Jesus, I thought, I am DOOMED. This dog is going to go blitzing off into the sunset, and there is no way I will be able to force a 150 lb herding dog to do anything it doesn't want to do. So this morning, when I had to go let him out for the first time, I'm thinking "Crap, crap crap... I so don't want to do this."

Naturally, it turns out that this is the most timid Rottweiler in the history of the breed. I had to lure him outside with a dog biscuit because it was chilly out. He ran back inside as soon as I opened the door. Additionally, he is painfully sad that his family has left him, and it is all he can do to look up at me with his sad, pitiful eyes, and silently ask, "Why? Why did they go away? Was it something I did? Tell them I'm sorry." No doubt that will only get worse before they return Sunday night, he already seems convinced that life, as he knows it, is over forever. Poor, poor gi-normous dog.

OK, Now That's Funny...

Because I found myself pretty annoying in the books...


Find out your Harry Potter personality at LiquidGeneration!

Because You Can Never Have Too Much Star Wars...



Yes, it's me as Dork Skywalker. Another Halloween triumph--though sadly this photo doesn't show my vintage 1978 Kenner/General Mills blaster in improvised holster on my right hip. You'll have to just imagine the coolness.

And Now for the Talent Portion of the Program...



Thanks, Heather. That was one of the worst things I have ever seen or heard on the internets.

And my other laugh for this week was a link from Defective Yeti to this Open Letter to a Can of Baby Corn. You're making everyone uncomfortable, Baby Corn. It's time for you to go.

I've Got My Geek On....and I Can't Get It Off.

My parents are out of town for a week, and I have this ritual where every time I'm taxed with feeding their fish and picking up the mail, I try to get one more load of my junk out of their garage/house/etc. A year or two ago I liberated both my guitars and my old Crate amp from my former bedroom. Here they still sit, of course, more or less unused (Karen! When's our next jam fest?!) But at least I'm trying to be mature and not use their home as a vast storage dump for my stuff. So this week, since I've been thinking a lot about Star Wars due to projects at work, I decided to check out the large plastic bins marked "Star Wars Toys" out in their garage.

Oh. My. God. Not just toys, mind you. Not just toys, but things I didn't even know I had. Things like this.....


Who wants a ring-neck T-shirt with Jawas on it? ME!! I DO!!!!!!!!

(Several of my co-workers pointed out that the funniest thing about this cover is that C-3P0 and the stormtrooper have their shirts tucked in.)

Pirate Day? Whydah Not?

And the first person to get THAT obscure reference wins a gold doubloon....

I've been talking like a pirate all day; as it's not technically "Type Like a Pirate" day, I'm taking a break. My coworkers and I hit a local club for their "Party Like a Pirate" night, and that was entertaining though somewhat sparsely attended. I suspect it's partly that it's a weeknight (even pirates have to get up in the morning; someone has to drive the ship) and partly that we were a wimpy pirate crew and all left before 9 when the real dedicated party crowd probably showed up. Arrrr.... we be gettin' old, mayteys. But two things of note: one is that HeatherW posted an utterly fabulous link in my brand new comments to the previous post. Go click it. And two is that Defective Yeti has posted a comprehensive list of all the 36 countries our president has asserted have their "boots on the ground" in Iraq. And here I thought the president was fudging a bit! Not so--and thank god the Cimmerians are on our side. (Come to think of it, is there more than one Cimmerian? Or was Conan the only one?)

Holy Haloscan, Batman!

OK, I finally did it. Killed my link to enetation (though theoretically all my old comments still exist on their server) and implemented Haloscan. So feel free to comment away!

I'm home sick from work today, which is kind of a new experience for me; I don't think I missed work more than once or twice the entire time I was in retail--with the exception of the Chicken Pox Incident, which was less being sick and more a near-death experience that lasted over a week. But I woke up this morning, blew my nose about 16 times, and thought to myself, you know... if I were my coworkers, I wouldn't want to be around me today. I am gross with a capital G. So I called in, and went back to bed.

A Few Things of Note

First of all, yes I know that my comments no longer work. :) I have two options, since enetation is apparently more or less a lost cause. One, I can switch to New Blogger's comments and completely lose this template which I've become attached to over the years. Two, I can sign on with Haloscan, which I've been toying with for a while. But I'm going to need to sit down and take a few minutes to set up the account and monkey the code into my blog. Which I've not really felt like doing just yet. So there will be a short delay; and in the meantime, if you have something you simply must get off your chest, you can put it in the comments of Dark's Carnival or The Wax Lion.

Secondly, I'm in New York! Wooo hoo! Sent here to infiltrate the competition.... that is, to check out local museums and see what kinds of cool stuff they're doing. So far I've been to the AMNH, which was fairly awesome--even their bad displays are really good-looking. The ones that are bad are more bad in a sort of 1930's way of looking at native cultures kind of thing. :) And the ones that are good are awesome. Today it's the Bronx Zoo and the Cloisters. Jane had the decency to pick a co-op in the far north reaches of Manhattan when she moved here a couple months back; so the Cloisters is only 2 subway stops and a pleasant walk through the park away from where she is generously hosting me. Sweeeet.

OK, OK!

Gencon post is up on Dark's Carnival. And it is officially my first post written from my---ta daaaahhhh!!!--new super sleek black MacBook! I'm just dripping with coolness....

This is Not the Gencon Post!

Gencon post will be up on Dark's Carnival shortly; I'm trying to resurrect that blog from the dead a bit. Might start posting pictures of minis over there too. If you find it annoying that I have three different blogs, well.... too bad. I like to keep things categorically seperate; I realize I could tag my posts, but it's partly about appearences. I like that the backgrounds/template styles are different for my different types of writing. I'm thinking of turning Wax Lion into my professional blog as well, the one I link back to when I'm commenting on other museum industry blogs (yes, there are such things) and the one where I babble a bit about philosophy of museum display etc. But don't worry, coworker who reads my blog--I've got no intention of making any remarks that might get me in trouble with the Powers that Be, even on my "anonymous blog." I'm not so deluded as to think that anything on the internet is truly anonymous.

Blah blah blah, this is quite a long post for a post that was intended just to tell you that I'm not actually posting about anything.

Perfect Days

You could argue that life in Indy is somewhat wanting lately. We've been slogging through day after day of 90 degree heat and not a drop of rain for nearly 3 weeks; the canal has dropped about a foot, and the mosquitos are many and vicious (even I'm getting bitten, and I usually don't fall prey to the little boogers much; right now I've probably got 10-20 bites in varying stages of itch.) I returned from my business trip to San Diego to a hot, stuffy, humid, and incredibly messy home. The window a/c unit is barely making a dent in the oppresive atmosphere around here, and it's too hot to cook or clean effectively.

So where's the upside? Well, the mornings are nice. I've been going for bike rides at 7 am, since it's too hot by the time 8 rolls around for me to bike to work right now. My house has a new resident--a female turtle named Harriet, who will be released back to the wild as soon as she's healed up from a mild trauma to her shell. It's fair time, and my dad and I spent a pleasant, if sweaty, couple of hours this morning at the fairgrounds. (While I'm grateful for the air conditioning that was added to the Home and Family Arts building in recent years, I must say that the culinary displays were far more entertaining when they fell victim to the heat and humidity after the first 3 days of the fair. Nothing has ever equalled the spectacle of the "Murder in the Cathedral" wedding cake, in which the red sugar windows of the church-shaped cake had melted and run down the inside of the structure and out the doors, pooling around the feet of the bride figurine like a gory testament to the value of pre-marital counselling. Later in the week, the icing under the groom's feet softened and he fell over into the red puddle, as if some jilted former lover of the bride had shown up and redefined the term "shotgun wedding.")

And I've been going out bat-watching in the evenings. The high mosquito population means that the little brown bats around here are very active and visible; I can go out and sit by the canal with a beer at twilight and watch as every few minutes, der fledermice flit past. I can't complain.

"Have Mercy!"

So in browsing the program for the San Diego Comic Con next week, I found a session that purported to examine the work of the worst comic book in existence. "Ha!" thought I. "How bad could it be?"

Nothing could have prepared me for the sheer awfulness that is Fletcher Hanks. Sure, the art is cheesy in a kind of crappy Golden-Age way... but what really marks this comic as beyond dreadful is the scripting. Not just stilted and dull, but actively, indescribably crappy. If you can stand it, I strongly recommend going to all three of the scanned comics on the Links page and reading them in their entirety. I am particularly drawn to/repelled by "Space" Smith, whose name is always spoken in quotes, even by his girlfriend-copilot. In the issue in question, they visit a planet called "Bloodu," where the evil inhabitants want to drink their.....wait for it....their.....BLOOD! Hooray! 10 points to you. Anyway, I had a great time reading this crap. All you Harry Potter fans out there can keep yer Book Seven tomorrow; I'm going to run out and buy a copy of "I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets: The Comics of Fletcher Hanks."

Not Dead, but Sleeping

I found a newspost, with a little effort, that states that Enetation is "temporarily offline" and that accounts won't be affected by this. We shall see--perhaps when they resurface they'll have improved their comment spam protection. At any rate, things are ticking along at a surprising rate. People keep asking me how the job is going, and I say, "Great," but that doesn't really convey a picture of what I'm really doing. In the last week, I've interviewed a Holocaust survivor with an amazing story to tell; I've written labels about Indiana Ponds; I've tried to condence the Civil Rights movement into a 25 word paragraph; I've watched seemingly endless media coverage of Ryan White from the late 1980's; I've firmed up plans for the work-sponsored trip to the San Diego Comic convention at the end of the month (we've got an extra day! we can go to the zoo!) and I've been firing hilarious emails back and forth with an AIDS activist who we're hoping to focus on in the big exhibit. Busy, exhausting, fun. yeah.

So I'll give entetation another week or so, and then we'll look into Haloscan.

RIP Enetation?

My comments feature seems to be down, and enetation.com is rejecting my browser. Could it be dead? Are all my old comments lost? Will I be forced to look into Haloscan as an alternative? (No, not using blogger comments. I have them on my other blog, and they're irritating.) So much for my "lifetime subscription," perhaps. If it's not back in another couple days, I'll start investigating the alternative...

Blargh!

It's been a while since I let a month go by without posting anything at all--kind of shocking, really. Anyway, here is what I have been doing instead of blogging:

1. Going to Wiscon, where I ate much food, drank much drink, friended around with friends, and even listened to a few panels and readings. I even went to the hotel pool, which was a new experience--those who know me know that I have a completely unreasonable fear of swimming pools. A mild fear, to be sure, I don't run screaming from them but I also never go out of my way to get in one. ANYWAY, it was a great weekend in Madison despite the sinus headache mentioned in the prior post.
2. Starting my new job. S'wonderful, s'marvelous, s'kicking my ass. I'm having some trouble adjusting to being on a schedule again; I'm not complaining, it's just that after 5 years of irregular work, it's a big transition to be someplace for 8.5 hours per day, in clothes both ironed and color coordinated, and be organized enough to efficiently accomplish all the stuff that has to get done after work. I'm more in the groove now than I was 3 weeks ago... It's just taking a bit of time.
3. Going to my college reunion. 15 years, holy crap on a stick.
4. Going to visit my 93 year old grandpa for Father's Day. He utterly rules. So does my dad.
5. Watching the family of beavers that has built a lodge up the canal about a mile from my house. I can bike out in the evenings and watch them swimming around and eating plants and stuff. I haven't seen them cut down a tree yet, but that would be awesome.
6. Watering my tomatoes--we've been having hella hot dry weather here, like much of the country lately. It rained for the first time in ages this morning, thank god. i still haven't put my A/C unit in, so I'm relieved the heat broke, at least for now.
7. Sleeping. All this work and travel and stuff wears ya out!

So what have you all been doing while I was gone?

Damn Right It's Better Than Yours...

So I made it to Madison (and MLE, where the heck are you??) and so far I've been to a couple nice readings, one panel that jumped the shark faster than you can say "Elvis," and a panel about fighting with people at cons that did not, sadly, involve an actual fight. (it was the sequel to last year's panel on flirting at cons, and while it lacked a lot of the hilarity value it was still pretty entertaining.)

I had a sinus headache when I woke up this morning; it was partially alieviated by going for coffee up the street, and hearing the Milkshake Song over the PA while eating my scone and caffiene. Feminist sci fi in one ear, her milkshake bringin' all the boys to the yard in the other. Too great.

Yayyyyy! Shiny Toy!!!!

In the first of no doubt several major purchases with the fever of "I've wanted this for 5 years and now I have a paycheck!" I finally did it. I bought.....

THE BIKE.

Yes, the bike. The bike I've been wanting. The bike I drooled over way back in this series of blog posts. Well, not exactly that bike, but it's been 3 years; the Trek "Adventure 4000" is no longer available. In point of fact, the cool burnt orange color is no longer available--they switch colors each year, and burnt orange metallic is soooo 2006 apparently. So I went in the bike store, and there was this orange bike, and I was all like "ooh, shiny!" And then I discovered that it was a 25" frame. (if you are unwise in the way of bikes, which I was right up to this moment, I will tell you that to ride a 25" frame bike I would need to be about 6'4" tall. Sadly, I'm not.) So I sez, do you have this in a smaller size? And they sez, no, it's Last Year's Bike, that's the only one left. Too bad. Rat Girl sez, how about this one? It's pretty, it's blue! I proceed to pout... but I wanted orange.... sniffle. In that moment, I go straight from being slightly interested in purchasing a bike sometime in the near future to being completely obsessed with obtaining a 17.5" 2006 Trek 7.3 FX in burnt orange. Because that's the way I am. I comb the internet that night, I call up stores all over Indianapolis; I call a store in Oshkosh Wisconsin on the vague promise of a lead. Things look grim. Then I check the store locator on the Trek website, and find that there is a bike store way out on the west side of Indianapolis that I've never heard of before. I give them a call, ask them my question, knowing full well that the answer will be no, and Lo and Behold! They've got one! It's on clearance! Hooray! Off I go to the bike store, and an hour later I roll back home with a new Trek 7.3 FX and a sweet bike rack for the car as well.

Sometimes, being obsessive compulsive can be downright fun.