Well enough to go into work, at least. And of course, rosefox's birthday dinner tonight.

Hi again all,

First, thanks for all the very useful & informative comments on my yesterday's question about USAlliance and credit unions in general.

Second, I apologize to those who didn't get a reply to their specific comment! I wrote a number of them but then there was a hiccup and many of them disappeared, and now I can't reply to them at all. Sorry. Arrgh.

I think I will whip up a list of questions and contact the various CUs y'all have recommended and ask the questions.

Thanks again. :)

The trend is revealed!

***

Tonight I’ll be the guest on Twitter’s Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer’s Chat! At 9 PM EST, for an hour or so, I’ll be taking questions from the moderator and audience at the #sffwrtcht hashtag. If you miss it, it’ll be archived later, and I’ll have a link for you when it goes up. I am nervous! I hope I do okay!

In other news, unless something explodes, all the Earthrise packages are going out today! I am planning on taking them to the post office after work. Expect photos!

…and that’s all I’ve got for now. I am tired. *crawls off* *flops*

Mirrored from MCAH Online.

The world's slowest Farscape watch continues. Slowly.

( S01E06, 'Thank God It's Friday, Again'Collapse )

( S01E07, 'PK Tech Girl'Collapse )

Spoil me and have your rest day taken away.

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And I will post about that soon (not to mention I'll explain what CRSF is), but for now:


A little housekeeping:

In answer to those who have asked me why I write 'shit' as 'sh!t' and various forms of 'fuck' as 'fck', because, y'know, I'm such a bad-ass:

I'm not really being coy. I noticed a while back that ! is basically i upside down. I think writing the word 'sh!t' with an upside-down i makes it funny. (Humour is in the funny-spot of the beholder. This is what I behold.) If I want to get serious about sh!t, I use the word 'shite', which I first learned from Irish students (back when I was an unreconstructed American). 'Shite' is brilliantly emphatic, describing something that is so crap, there is no possible salvage.

'Fuck' is a loaded word. Many people, even those more plain-spoken than I, find it unpleasant to hear or read. Back when I was a young, carefree writer, I used it liberally, flinging it here and there and there and there and even there. I'm older now and my vocabulary is bigger. I'm fine with profanity but I also really enjoy word-play–puzzles, riddles, codes, and words with upside-down letters. But 'fuck' can also be a cathartic word, or at least it is for me. I've decided it's the consonants. F followed by the K sound–the sound is aggressive, belligerent, a verbal punch. So I'm keeping that part of the word, which is actually most useful to me. But those who feel that 'fck' is incomplete can buy a vowel.

If you're not one of the people who asked me about this, you can skip this post, although I hope it didn't cause you to run screaming into the streets.

Got home today to a package which I expected to contain a copy of Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It didn't.

It contained two copies. Because this is apparently how Amazon monkeys deal with space-inna-box now? IDEK

Given I can't exactly be arsed to take on the hassle of dealing with Amazon when it's their mistake and not costing me money, I mentioned that I had a copy going begging to a good home to a friend who made grabby hands, so one of them will be winging its merry way to Wisconson as soon as I manage to consign it to the tender mercies of media mail.

Today's seen me ill in my stomach and disordered in my mind (oh digestive system, you are not awesome enough to have this power over me) so I then fell offline to read my copy. I thought it would help. I knew enough about it to expect it to be one of those books that hollows you out, during the reading, but I thought it would fill me back up.

Not...as such. It didn't really have anything to give. I found it very...literary.

So it appears I have two copies going begging to a good home, and one isn't spoken for. Bearing in mind that it will have to defeat the goblins of media mail transit after I get around to mailing it, which will depend upon my being awake of a Saturday in time to remember I've something to mail -- so, to be blunt, if you're in the top five of your library's hold list this will not help you -- speak up in the comments to claim it.

If more than one person has commented, LJ & DW, by the time I'm done with work tomorrow, it shall be the random number generator.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment wherever. Read comments on the Dreamwidth side.

As of the 12th.  I haven't read any of the update so can't vouch for it being wonderful or anything, I'm just sending up a signal flare that more Homestuck exists.

It's my 35th birthday! If you want to "get me something", here's my wishlist:

1) Donate to the ACLU, the EFF, or Lambda Legal.

2) Submit a story to Long Hidden.

3) Tell me about something beautiful.

4) Support someone in your life who's having a hard time.

5) Get CPR (re-)certified.

6) Do something good for yourself, something indulgent and delicious or quietly happy-making.

7) Question the dominant paradigm. Ask "why?". Explore the roots of customs you take for granted.

8) Ask someone you know to teach you something that's new to you.

If you do any of these things, I'd love to know about it. Please leave me a comment or drop me a note.

I'm looking forward to seeing what it's like to be 35. Thanks for keeping me company along the way. <3


You're welcome to comment on LJ, but I'd rather you leave a comment on the Dreamwidth version of this entry. The current comment count is .

Said tonight to a roommate who had trouble sleeping last night as she pondered the problems of existence:
"And [Browngirl]? All the problems of the world don't mean squat when you're faced with somebody flashing their underwear."

So we're still at Doug's. It was decided to wait until the sun started to go down and things began to cool off to a more bearable... 100 degrees or so.

I took this picture quite a few hours ago. Can we say Holy Mother of god, boys and girls? Jesus-fucking-Christ!



I just got out of the shower. I took a cold one. It was the perfect temperature, since I love really hot showers.

I am not joking.

I want to talk about the confluences between lifting/fitness and gender, yet I cannot ever seem to put my thoughts in a rational order that doesn't consist mostly of short phrases with exclamation points. (Sometimes I'm more masculine than others! I think "strong" is not gender coded! Yet I think many of these new muscles read on my body as masculine! Why is that!) There's plenty to say about the way that this experience has been something I am doing for its own sake--I'm loving this fitness stuff, passionately and with delight--but that this doesn't preclude it from also being related, as most things are, to my gender identity and presentation.

Complicated, yeah.

*

Getting real, here.

My partner has been having a lot of emotional and mental difficulties recently, job-related and therefore life-related. This is one of the many reasons I am glad that we're leaving the country for what will end up being a sort of year's sabbatical for him and at least a recovery period for me. I do not like seeing my life-mate depressed and being unable to help. I am a fixer, you see. I fix things for other people obsessively, and I caretake those I feel strong emotions for with a zeal that I often have to check because it's a little much and I can't sustain my own self-care if I'm putting all of my energy out externally.

When we come back, we have to face the employment-versus-emotional/psychological-capability wall again. That worries me. We have hopes that he'll have the time to develop some sort of marketable skill that can take him out of the regular workforce over the year away. If not--well. We'll see. There's got to be a solution that ends with him (a) able to pay to live and (b) not in constant distress. We'll figure it out. (Any advice from folks who also have trouble working outside the home for Reasons is totally welcome.)

I haven't been able to fix this, and it drives me up a wall. I just want to be able to provide for us so It's All Better, but that's--impossible. So other solutions must be found.

Submitting an Input Paper to the Committee on Human Spaceflight


In addition to the many sources of focused input to this study, the Committee on Human Spaceflight recognizes the importance of reaching out to the communities interested in human exploration. This request for input papers is open to any and all interested individuals and groups wishing to submit their own ideas on the role of human spaceflight and their vision for a suggested future. In developing their papers, respondents are asked to carefully consider the following broad questions.

What are the important benefits provided to the United States and other countries by human spaceflight endeavors?
What are the greatest challenges to sustaining a U.S. government program in human spaceflight?
What are the ramifications and what would the nation and world lose if the United States terminated NASA's human spaceflight program?
The committee is seeking input papers of no more than 4 pages in length, not counting any figures, tables or references. (Due to the expected volume of input, the committee is unable to guarantee that papers of greater length will be considered.) In discussing the above questions, please describe the reasoning that supports your arguments and, to the extent possible, include or cite any evidence that supports your views. In considering #1 above, submitters may consider private as well as government space programs. 

Because participants will be self-selected, these input papers will not be used to judge the prevalence of attitudes or opinions within various communities. However, they will help ensure that the committee hears about important issues from interested parties. All submitted papers will be reviewed by members of the Committee on Human Spaceflight and will also be available for public viewing via links to the committee webpage. All input papers will be considered non-proprietary for distribution with attribution.

Submissions to the study committee can only be made by following the instructions at the following link: :

INPUT TO THE COMMITTEE ON HUMAN SPACE FLIGHT SUBMISSION FORM

White papers should be submitted no later than July 9, 2013. Papers submitted after this date may not receive full consideration by the committee.

Nicked from io9

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.

Oh, why not? Maybe it's just today's fad, but nobody's going to suffer if it never shows again...

This afternoon I’m not really in the kitchen anyway, except for washing dishes (I am learning not to say “washing up”, because it confuses Americans) and sorting stuff after the yogi dinner last night and before Katherine comes tomorrow.

I am however in the back yard, smoking bacon. Not that it needs much attention. Every twenty minutes or so I wander out and chuck a handful of soaked vinewood chips onto a few sullen coals, and a minute later the grill is leaking smoke from all its orifices. It has a lot of orifices. Cook’s Illustrated says it’s the worst in its field, for poor construction and gaps all around. I like it, though. Probably because I know no better, but hey.

Oh, and I boiled some rice for later. We’ve got cold grilled pork in the fridge, and long beans from the farmers’ market, so obviously I’m thinking Chinese. Probably just a fry-up of rice and pork and mushrooms, with the beans on the side. (Karen tends to like things served separately, I tend to like everything mungled up together in a single convenient dish; I may call this a compromise.) Ginger in the beans, garlic in the rice, soy in everything.

The bacon's been on for an hour and a half, which is probably enough. If I had a Thermapen, I'd know. I'm still dithering about that, but really I ought to stop with the dither and just splurge. Meantime, I just rely on smell and taste and feel, and what kind of cooking do you call that...?

Holy crap, you guys - it's been a week. First of all, our mystery guest of awesomeness came to visit for a few days, wherein he performed MANY SNUGGLES upon both Greyson and Spain the Cat ... and altogether we went to the Writing Excuses retreat - not because we were proper attendees, but because we were in the neighborhood. We did BBQ and podcasts, and shenanigans occurred. A marvelous good time was had by all!

Shortly after our mystery guest departed (within hours, actually) ... we had new guests! My dad and stepmom appeared, along with Duke and Daisy - their recent adoptees from the Dane Crazy Great Dane Rescue outside Nashville. Really, you guys. Four adults, three dogs (the smallest of whom was 85 pounds), and a very pissy cat in a folk Victorian bungalow for a few days. IT WAS AWESOME.

And even if Big G hadn't recently been clipped for summer, he still would've looked like the teeny baby of the bunch.



Daisy is a slender young lady about Greyson's age, underweight in the wake of a bad abandonment situation ... but they've put a good 25 pounds on her, and they're stuffing her full of fancy kibble and cookies to bring her up to speed. Duke is 5 years old and 130 pounds, every ounce a gentleman. He was surrendered when a family lost its home, and at his age, he was difficult to place ... despite his awesomely easy-going disposition, slow and gentle demeanor, and tendency to sit on your lap, just because he's feeling cuddly.



[Note regarding that pic: I am 5 ft. 5 inches tall, and weigh somewhat less than 130 pounds.]

Anyway, as mentioned previously, it turns out that my dad and stepmom are kind of big fat suckers. Which has worked out very well for these two newly spoiled pooches - much to Big G's personal delight. Daisy was a playmate he could spar and wrestle with, and Duke was a freelance nuzzler with a cinder-block-sized head to deliver kisses on demand. Besides: BONUS DOG GRANDPARENTS. Seriously. Best dog week EVER.

But the week got a little weird when we loaded up the dogs and trekked them out to a big old cemetery for a happy-go-lucky big dog walk ... for we soon learned we were not precisely alone. No, not ghosts. CATS.

Out from the woods sprang two tiny kittens - who pounced upon the dogs as if they could eat them (and had EVERY INTENTION of doing so).

The dogs are all wildly pro-cat, thank God; and the kittens received no damage apart from a serious drool-spa combined with an excessive tongue-bath. And then, because I also am a big fat sucker (it runs in the family), I scored a box and stuffed the kittens thereunto. There was exactly zero chance that I could hang onto the little stinkers, given our overstuffed household situation (never mind our cat-hating elderly feline matriarch); but I knew a safe place where I could take them.*



The little black one with the teeny white paws is a hellion. I drove all the way to the shelter with the box fastened shut, my heavy ol' purse sitting atop the box, the seatbelt strapping the whole thing shut, and one hand holding the lid secure ... and he(she?) STILL managed to repeatedly get a paw through the cracks in order to flip me the bird.

Both kittens are hella-sweet, VERY dog friendly (I was joking, above), and happy to be held, cuddled, and cooed at. The black one (who I've dubbed "Killer") just took offense at being stuffed into a box, that's all. His(her?) sibling, the stripey little "Spook" was the adventurer of the pair - the first one to accost the dogs and to accept the subsequent damp snorgling that ensued. Killer was somewhat more dubious, but still willing to fling him(her)self into the mix in case backup was required.

You guys, I SERIOUSLY, and furthermore DESPERATELY want someone to adopt these two. I'm reasonably confident that they were dumped, as they're about 6-8 weeks old, very healthy, all alone, and we have NEVER seen or heard kittens in the cemetery despite daily walks there with Big G. This is, by the way, the cemetery in which my husband took the baby fox picture - so we know good and well that there is a robust community of predators lurking about the city of the dead. These babies hadn't been there long; they were VOCAL and hungry...yet fiercely lovable.

They are not feral.
They are comfortable with people - nay, pitifully desperate for people. They came to me when I called them, literally running into my hands.

If you are in the Chattanooga area - and/or might be willing to drive there - and you'd be interested in adopting these two ridiculous cutie-pies ... please contact the McKamey Animal Center at (423) 305-6500 and ask about the cemetery kittens admitted there by yours truly. They have plenty of paperwork from me under yes, this name [points at the URL] because it is my real name; I had to fill out a bunch of stuff to surrender them, and I felt awful about it the whole time.

But it was better than leaving them for fox chow. In the rain. Did I mention it was raining? WHO THE HELL DUMPS KITTENS in the CEMETERY in the goddamn RAIN??? I don't even want to know.

So. Yes. Please consider adopting, and please spay and neuter, and please make room in your hearts and your homes if you can.

McKamey Animal Center
4500 North Access Rd.
Chattanooga, TN 37415

(423) 305-6500

---

* Not the shelter from whence we acquired Greyson and Spainy - but that one is always, ALWAYS full. When they have openings, they cull critters from shelters like McKamey. McKamey IS a kill shelter and I hate that, but their kill rate is low, and they perform a major amount of adoption-driving and fund-raising to spay and neuter throughout the land. The shelter manager lives in my neighborhood, and he's been very helpful with regards to rescue, sterilization, and rehoming of stray and unwanted critters. It's a good place to take vulnerable kittens, but it's not without its risks, and I very much would like to see them elsewhere.