| Women ninjas. |
[Nov. 22nd, 2009|08:22 pm] |
The music awards:
Shakira has women ninjas! |
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| Quantifying a life. |
[Nov. 22nd, 2009|04:47 pm] |
Good news on the work front: My tutoring job is going to give me 16 hours a week as of Dec. 1, which is great. It's an improvement.
The pay rate is good, and it gives me the required experience I need for teaching. (90 hours is the magic number. I'll have it by the end of December. Then I need a year of school for the teaching certificate.)
Unfortunately, it's not quite enough to live off of.
I don't have a car in car-dependent Maryland, so I'm having to ask "mommy" for rides to work, to interviews. I have all the time in the world to write -- yet can't find the space because I have to write around other people's schedules.
It's been four months and I'm getting the feeling she's burned out. As am I.
I want my life back.
Quantifying a life.
( When I drove across country to Seattle in 1996, I had a car. )
Aside from the degrees, how did I end up with less than when I started? |
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| Mousie report. |
[Nov. 22nd, 2009|03:35 pm] |
Mousie report.
Some of you may recall this post wherein a family of mouse babies took up residence in one of my fleece jackets (in a box that happens to be outdoors). I discovered this when I pulled my jacket out of the box, scattering mouse infants everywhere. I removed my other jackets, packed the box with newspaper, and used newsprint to scoop the littles back in the box.
A week later I discovered I'd missed four mouse babies, who'd fallen into a box I took inside. Noooo....
Then the temperature dropped and I thought the outdoor mousies were history.
Three weeks later ...
I'm happy to report that the mouse babies survived, and have moved on. But the nest is clearly there, and there are no apparent corpses.
Proof of life: the fleece jacket was not so lucky, sacrificed to the cause. The Mousies chewed a few holes.
Unless Rainy Pass can fix it. |
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| Bad night for Monte kitty. |
[May. 20th, 2009|12:24 am] |
Rough night for Monte kitty.
First he gets his kitty treats from WG. So far so good.
Oooh, but they don't sit very well with him.* He makes a quick trip to the litter box.
Ten minutes later, he wafts by mom and dad for some snuggles and pets -- "Oh, ew, what's that smell? Get off of here!"
So he does what every self-respecting cat would do in his circumstance. The brown streak scootch.
Cue more noise from mom and dad -- "Hey! No!" He's confronted with swearing and grumbling. Then he's swooped up by mom and stuffed into the bathroom, where dad already has the dreaded tub running.
Nooooo!
He yowls at the door to be let out. No such luck. He's dipped in warm water, back legs struggling and kicking as mom and dad wash sticky poops off of him.
Finally he makes a break for it, dripping wet, his tail drawing a thin line of water all over the apartment. It takes him forty-five minutes to lick himself dry. Or at least damp.
He hops up onto the bed ... and is forced to sit at the foot of the bed, not on his favorite pillows.
To add insult to injury, from all that licking he ends up throwing up a hairball.
Man, what a night.
* WG has since thrown those treats away. |
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| Do I write around this? |
[May. 12th, 2009|02:11 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | home | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  terribly amused | ] |
You know the way you occasionally (ihgt) recall (reeber) a word, but perhaps (aybe) aren't sure how to pronounce it? So you talk around it?
I'll (I') going to have to do that for (the tie being) now. The letter "m" (had to cut and paste it here) is broken on y keyboard.
Aazing how any words use the letter " ", eh?
First thing we do, let's kill all the passwords with the letter " " because that's already probleatic.... |
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| UW Budget cuts? Try devastation. These couldn't be worse if they used napalm. |
[Apr. 28th, 2009|01:13 am] |
Tonight has been a terrible night for no reason I can discern.
WG was happy and perky when I came home. The kitty was purring. I curled up with my homework on clean sheets.
But I had a lot of reading to do. WG turned petulant and needy, cuddling close and miserable, interrupting again and again in subtle ways -- until I snapped at him. My mood turned foul and frustrated ... and then guilty.
Monte kitty also resented my homework. He chewed my book, sat on it, did "walk-bys," and then threw up a hairball on the bed.
I stripped the sheets, found a snuggle position for the (now unhappy) WG and Monte kitty. Then finished my reading. I just picked up the email from the University president.
UW Budget cuts? Try devastation. These couldn't be worse if they used napalm.
For the University of Washington, the resulting budget decisions are dramatic. The bad news is that the Legislature decided to reduce statefunding to the six public four-year college and universities more than any other sector in state government. The University of Washington received the highest percentage cut in all of higher education - 26 percent. This is a stark and sobering number. Beginning July 1, one quarter of our funding from the state will no longer exist. It is unprecedented in state history, and as far as we know, it is by far the largest reduction in state support to a flagship university by any state in the nation. It takes our state funding level back to where it was more than a decade ago and drops the portion of the state budget dedicated to four-year higher education to an all-time low.
The somewhat better news, though it may not appear so to our students and their families, is that the budget authorizes our Regents to increase resident undergraduate tuition up to 14 percent for the 2009-11 biennium ... If approved by the Regents, tuition for resident undergraduates wouldincrease $875 next academic year and $1,000 the following year.
Sigh. I thought the stimulous bill had money for universities in it. I thought that was the priority.
I feel lost. Like school right now is a hopeless black hole. Sanskrit is a lost cause. I'll never be get funding to take the final year now.
I may be a tad depressed.
Of course, I've also been reading Toni Morrison tonight. She has a talent for leaving me in the dumps. |
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| The CT scan results, or, I guess intramural soccer is out. |
[Mar. 26th, 2009|11:16 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | health, home, wg | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  lethargic | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Beastie Boys - No Sleep Till Brooklyn | ] |
I guess intramural soccer is out.
The CT scan results: WG has a fractured sessamoid. Oh.
It's a soccer player's injury. The fracture hasn't gone all the way through the bone which is why it wasn't clear on the X-ray. It looks like a knife cut across the base of the bone.
The little bone's about the size of a grape or maybe your thumbnail, on the ball of your foot right before the big toe. It's small, but important, because it's a flexor joint with the tendon of the big toe stretched across it.
The tendon kept pushing and sawing over the break which is why -- ow, ow, ow -- it hurt.
The tissue around the tendon had been tenderized and inflamed after months of walking on the fractured bone. Now that he's been off of it for two weeks, the inflammation has gone down.
Well. Kids break bones all the time. They heal. It'll just be a little slower for WG because he's not 12 anymore and it's an extremity. |
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| Watchmen and Sanskrit, or the post in which Icarus abuses the lj-cut. |
[Mar. 25th, 2009|12:58 am] |
I credit all your good wishes: WG's limp is improving. My grades are not as bad as I feared. You must share your power of good wishes with the rest of the world, since clearly you could end both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
WG will learn the results of his CT and bone scan tomorrow. I failed the Sanskrit final spectacularly, but based on the numbers here I must have been running close to a 3.8 - 3.9 before WG's injuries, so I'm saved from failing the class. I need to study those missed chapters this week or I'll be in trouble next quarter. Expect some Sanskrit posts this weekend.
My Greek History professor indeed graded harshly. I'm considering whether it's worth contesting the grade.
Who watches the Watchmen? We do!
Went to see Watchmen with WG tonight. We had our usual petty squabble on the way there. WG's a backseat driver which is why I make him my chauffeur. But it's not wise to have him drive with a walking cast. I ended up running red light after he insisted I'd missed the turn into the theater --
WG: Honey, honey! It's right there to the left, to the left--!
Icarus (baffled, looking around): What? What? It can't be, it's not--
(Vroom.)
Icarus: Driving with you sucks. Also, that traffic would have hit you first.
He was very conciliatory (he hates backseat drivers). I ruefully admitted I'd written down the address for the wrong theatre. We circled the block until we found it.
( The Neptune in the U-District is old fashioned theatre, built 80 years ago, ) There were exactly three people in the theater so we... sat in the same row with them, thus proving humans are social creatures. Someone should do a doctoral study.
WG is Nite Owl. ( That was my guy up there. )
Needless to say, I loved the movie (for other reasons as well). As a side note, we both enjoyed the tasteful frontal nudity. Good to see a movie that has just as much (or more) male nudity as female. Reading reviews from you guys, I noticed that most of the people who hated the movie hadn't read the comic, while most of those who loved the movie had. So I made sure we'd both read it first. ( In case I blunder into spoilers. ) It's visually stunning, but what made it were the actors. The actors were so well cast -- and this story is about the characters. Cast the right actors and you have 90% of it right there.
WG wants to see it again on DVD, so he can pause the opening montage and study the background details.
Afterward, he made a wistful comment about ice cream, so we hunted down an ice cream shop for sundaes and sat in the shop like 1950s teenagers. I'd brought my notebook and jotted down a scene for Out Of Bounds that hit me in the ice cream shop.
( If you want to shoplift, carry Sanskrit books. )
Now WG wants to do another date tomorrow night, this time an art film at the Varsity. Ah, old theatres. |
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| Keep up the good work. |
[Mar. 24th, 2009|04:23 pm] |
School holidays have finally begun (shortened somewhat by the fascinating events of late). Next quarter in... six days.
WG informed me yesterday that his limp is getting better. The pain is definitely going down.
Whatever you guys are doing, keep it up, it's working.
He's scheduled to go in for oral surgery next Tuesday (the absessed tooth is related to a bridge he had put in after his teeth got smashed in a car accident years ago -- long story). It would be great if he could be back at work by April 6th. His boss called yesterday. The boats are starting to pile up. WG's willing to postpone that appointment if he has to.
Next on the agenda: writing Out Of Bounds. *g*
WG is now chivvying me out the door to see the Watchmen. |
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| Hiding. |
[Mar. 21st, 2009|04:32 pm] |
I have cocoa, cookies, and some leftover cookie batter.
I have an overdue paper I'm picking away at by proposing my zaniest theory (the theory is called "pure dumb luck" or "delimited options" -- historians, how mad am I?). It's guaranteed to get completely shot apart by my professor, but after the shitty week I've had, I don't care.
I have the next chapter of Out Of Bounds rewritten and (probably) ready for reposting. I have WG here reading the Watchman. (I figured he'd better read the novel first or he'd be bewildered and frustrated by the movie.) I'm making minor edits to the epilogue. The music for the short program is queued up.
I have two movies on hand. I am fully equipped to ignore all RL disasters for the weekend. If all this doesn't work, there is also popcorn.
And oh, look, this quiz result surprised me with a writer that I...
a) know, and
b) respect.
How unexpected.
 | I am:Ursula K. LeGuin Perhaps the most admired writing talent in the science fiction field. |
Which science fiction writer are you?
And now... dive! *The yellow Icarus submarine burbles beneath the surface of reality* |
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| Newslfash: 7-Up has fizz. |
[Mar. 19th, 2009|02:42 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | home, wg | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | amused | ] |
WG: It's amazing how much fizz is in 7-Up.
Icarus: Hmm?
WG: I poured this a minute ago, and the fizz is going about three inches above the cup.
Icarus: It's the simple things in life....
WG: I'm not bored. |
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| My kitty smells like ... dirty socks. |
[Mar. 18th, 2009|03:49 pm] |
My kitty smells like ... dirty socks.
Guess who's been sleeping in the laundry? |
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| WG update. |
[Mar. 17th, 2009|01:41 pm] |
To those of you who asked how WG is doing:
He's hobbling around in a walking cast. He goes in for a CT scan and a bone scan on Friday. In an ideal world they won't find anything and it'll just be sesamoiditus.
The root canal? It appears to be infected. He goes in on Thursday for oral surgery.
His back? A constant needle-like pain but nowhere near as bad as it was. Acupuncture was very effective.
He can't work, which in a way has taken a lot of the stress off of him. But at the moment, he's quite bored. Quote, "I feel like a prisoner." |
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| Star Trek, time travel, and the Ides of March |
[Mar. 15th, 2009|09:46 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | home, st | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  bleary-eyed | ] |
I want it to be May 8th, now.
I just saw the 3rd Star Trek trailer. The first one just showed the ship. This gives you an idea of the action and plot and special effects and -- oh, oh, I want to see it now.
In other news, it's snowing today. In Seattle. On the Ides of March. I took video that I'll upload once I figure out how (again).
Three essays in two days. I can do this, right? |
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| Get your doom right here, extra, extra! |
[Mar. 13th, 2009|08:30 pm] |
It's turning into the daily doom and gloom report around here, isn't it? |
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| Behold. The floor. |
[Mar. 2nd, 2009|06:35 am] |
Behold. The floor.
There is something very satisfying about putting together furniture. I know it's not heirloom quality if it comes in a kit. But somehow, screwing the hinges on yourself makes you feel like you could fend for yourself in the wild.
Even when the holes are predrilled.
WG threw in Dolph Lundren's Retrograde (every fan of MST3K must see this movie), and it took most of Saturday to put the cabinet together. But between it and the bookends, the books are off the floor.
Our place is starting to be fit for human habitation. It's a shock. |
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| The clouds over Rainier today. |
[Dec. 19th, 2008|05:31 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | home | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | calm | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Duran Duran - the chauffer | ] |
Cool or what?
( Ooops. Cut-tag. Eheh. )
Plugging away at another chapter of Out Of Bounds. |
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| Snow day! |
[Dec. 15th, 2008|02:46 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | home | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | cheerful | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | David Arkenstone - Angels in the Snow | ] |
Snow day!
![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) wildernessguru's home today. It's thirty degrees out and brilliant blue skies. The Olympic mountains are white and magical. The ice is crunchy on the ground and not melting. In Seattle.
We went out for lunch at a Thai restaurant. We bought a little Christmas tree! Kitty thinks we got it for him. It's leaning in the stand and I don't care. I'll have to futz with lights and decorations later. :D
Now WG and Monte are snuggling in the chair. WG's going to get a massage later.
Progress on Out Of Bounds is a little, er, scattered today. I'll get more done once WG heads out for his massage. |
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| Who's more important, cats or mice? |
[Dec. 2nd, 2008|03:21 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | home | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  busy | ] |
Cutest kitty ever.
Exhibit A: I have the mouse on the couch next to me. Kitty has sat down next to me (after frustrated attempts to sit on my and my keyboard). He is now scootching closer and closer to the mouse, soft as a cloud, stifling said mouse usage.
When called on this, "Monte...." he looks up at me with luminous eyes. He reaches with a paw and touches my arm.
Petting must ensue. I don't care if I'm rewarding feline distraction.
(The mouse has been knocked off the mousepad.) |
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pitying