anagram of brat

This has become a kid weekend favorite around here - if the kids need cheering up or a reward for good behavior we'll sit in front of my computer and watch OK Go videos. Especially this one. I'm still agog at how they managed to train up that many shelter dogs for it. But the best moment of the morning was sitting here watching the video for "Here it Goes Again" and singing along with both kids. There is nothing cuter than three and six year old singing. Well okay, maybe momonga:



Those are some precious little fuckers, you have to admit.

Not much on the agenda other than attending a Geoffroy gathering later with the kids and picking/hooking up a scanner from stormslegacy so I can put up some pictures on the MSFC facebook group. Also planning out my week. There is Stuff To Be Done, as always.

~~

Hmm. Need a new icon for them, lol.

It's not even about the game, or the award show, or whatever is on the TV. Sometimes it's about having a kitchen full of food and a living room full of friends, and having any old excuse to have both at any given time.

Thanks for coming, gang. :)

A large window, overlooking a swath of street well trafficked by both pedestrians and cars, mounted high on the wall.

Warm red walls, a six inch sill by the window.

A raised table flanked with high bar stools, level with the windowsill, tucked around the corner from the door, protected from the draft by a glass box vestibule, creating a sort of alcove for this table by the window.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and maybe if my phone camera had been working or I had brought the Hatemonber with me as I waited for grinninfoole to arrive for our lunch date, I would have captured this empty spot at Bueno y Sano in between its lunch rush occupants. It's a prime people-watching spot, so catching it empty is a rare thing indeed. Likely I could use far more words to describe it - the beige, evenly spaced slats on the chairs, the green cushions, the speckled, faux-stone plastic inlay on the top of the table. But I won't. I only know that I spent about five minutes staring into that corner, caught up quite powerfully in a very pleasant memory of another time, another lunch date, and catching myself smiling. Funny what will do that to you sometimes.

I need to go back and take that picture sometime.

It's been a long tiring day, and lunch with the Foole was one of the two high points of it, the other being running into Phil driving the B43 and catching up with him after not seeing him for a year. One bad thing about driving so much last year is that I miss all the PVTA drivers, so it's nice to see them when I do have to head to Northampton for something these days. Alas, the day post-lunch has been meh at best, due to being somewhat under the weather, intestinal cranky, and learning some sad news affecting friends. But I've been home for about an hour or so, and I'm about to head downstairs to make dinner for myself, the Manbeast, and the McGurk (see, it's alliterative!), who is coming over for Smallville shenanigans later. So I am not writing off the day just yet.

So they're moving Dad out of the stroke unit and into the rehab one today, which is awesome news.

I'm meeting jaicat for lunch later on.

Maybe today won't be as much of a gloomfest as I was fearing.

Good:
KIDDOS! Who are adorable in their new fuzzy Christmas pajamas. Well, really, they'd be adorable in miniature rain barrels, lets be frank here, but the PJs are pretty awesome. We showed up at Anna's to pick them up last night, and I swear, Kidzilla POUNCED me and went on a half an hour tear about dragons. O_o lol. I'm glad I've finally managed to isolate something she's obsessed with on the level that Lovebug is with Thomas but holy crap. I suppose it could be worse, it could be pink fluffy Barbie unicorns. I have to admit, after reading Rampant I've given unicorns some severe side-eye. Anyway a good chunk of this morning was spent organizing her scroll and helping her catch a few more. And being very amused about it.

I had planned to go in to the office yesterday, but didn't make it in. Aside from having a hectic and yet productive day I got pinged by drklrd1922 and we went up to the Dove's Nest for breakfast. Here followed a chat about kids and mental illness that's got me thinking - I also have a number/recommendation for a psychiatrist close by when I'm ready for that.

Among other things that were done yesterday, I managed to stop by the Jones and return some stuff (I've been doing pretty well on keeping up with my overdue fines at least) and pick up other stuff. I've still got two doorstops to read, but I'm frankly ignoring them to read Sarah MacLean's latest. Can I just say it's still a profoundly weird experience reading books written by someone you know? Especially the dedications because you actually know to whom they are referring! It's cool, but weird, you never get that sense of the book author being some amazing omniscient voice far away somewhere.

Bad:
Stressed about money, per usual. Also sick in the intestinemeat + period = super anemic and not fun. Also kinda feeling eaten by my to-do lists again.

Ugly:
This has been the week of vivid, nasty nightmares, dredging up all kinds of fun stuff. Ex drama and mental health mostly but there have been some monsters up in there that I haven't seen in a while and having to contend with them after a few years was unsettling. And while I'd don't precisely remember last night's round of completely unrestful sleep, it must have been a doozy, because I woke up exhausted to the point of down a die for the day. Huzzah.


Oh well. Today's been decent thus far, and there's another trip to the library planned for later and the rest of today is shaping up reasonably quiet as well, so I'm not too worried about the tired.

Just briefly:

avalon616 throws an excellent party. :) Also, omgwtfaninja and bloodandsmoke should just hang around in togas all the damn time, they look scarily good in them.

No major aftereffects to be had, I think I had all of one drink due to my intestines crying havoc and letting slip the dogs of... I could continue with that metaphor, but it's gonna go somewhere gross. Nonetheless, it was good to see everyone in one room, the ball dropped, I got kissed at midnight (and again at 1, which was midnight somewhere, right?)... I'd say New Years was a success.

New Years Day sees me up and procrastinating hard from cleaning up the kitchen (I started, but it's pretty daunting, as cell23 made stuffed dates and hot wings for the party and thus the place looks like a bomb went off. D:) and other housecleaning stuff. Eeegh, starting the year with procrastination, this is not a good sign. Also the other big to-dos are some major hair stuff (involving conditioner and yarn, since I got a new skein yesterday. "Cherry Cola." Hmm. Appropriate.), a good portion of which will involve plopping myself on my couch and knocking a few things off my netflix queue. Company is welcome for that. Also some work and projecty stuff.

I have resolutions, though when asked last night they all flew out of my head. Mostly they can be summed up by the wisdom of a certain dog:



Also see dedicating a lot less time and brainspace to the Internet, certain people that shall not be named, drama and bullshit.

Eggs though. Girl has to have one stupid internet indulgence.

~~

Anyway. Off to do things.

So one of the things I would like to do in the first half of 2011 is clean up/upgrade and tweak EPEEN. I am not good with config and hardware; I admit to being lost nigh until twirling compass when it comes to doing more with the computer innards than occasionally adding a drive or a ram stick or replacing a CMOS battery. Anything other than that I haven't really bothered with, so I'm going to need a hand.

EPEEN Stats:
It's a Dell XPS 410, purchased in January 2007. From its spec sheet:

• Processor, 6700, 2.66, 4M, Core Duo-conroe, Burn 2
  
• Dual In-line Memory Module, 1G 667M, 128X64, 8, 240, 2RX8 (x4)
  
• nVidia GeForce 7900 GS PCI-e 256Mb Video
  
• Sound Blaster X-Fi card, SB0467 - F7710

I put a 1/2 T drive in last November; it came with a 250GB drive.

What I do and do not want to do:
I'm not interested in buying a new box right now. I get... attached to my computers and tend to use them until they either die or there's a game I really want to play and it Just Won't Run. Plus my next compy like as not will be a laptop.

I do want to upgrade to Win7. I realize this is going to give the LINUX fans on my f-list heart attacks, but I'm perfectly comfortable with Windows and have no desire to stick it to the proverbial man by using an OS that has made me want to defenestrate all in my path, which my encounters with Ubuntu and its ilk have invariably made me want to do.

Not really interested in anything huge, just generally tweak it so it'll run things like Cataclysm, LOTRO and whatever else the gang is playing with a minimum of fuss. It already mostly does this (i've been able to run LOTRO and WoW with all the sliders up with no problems), but it IS a four year old computer and it's slowing down as it approaches decrepitude, likely due to OS bloat. All my personal crap is on HD#2 so wiping and reinstalling shit on HD#1 is an option. Also I am well out of warranty so if taking a blowtorch and a pack of specially trained weasels to EPEEN's innards is what needs doing, so be it.

I also want to look into backup storage, as I've got a lot of music and pictures I'd be very upset if I lost for whatever reason.

This is a "Not Right Now" project, but definitely something I want to do before June, so I'm putting it out there as a "hey, something to think about, y'all, any advice, volunteers?" sort of call.

In other news and "things to think about for the coming year" sort of things, cell23 and I were invited to join renegadethumper and deliriumdeva for dinner last night, which was delicious. It got me thinking about the social schedule among the squirekids and excuses to throw parties/events, especially since I do have that set of good dinnerware Dad gave me for Christmas in 2009 and I have yet to use. Course I can't exactly throw a dinner party until cell23 and I manage to get some actual chairs, but it is something to consider. Definitely need to work on not hiding under my rock so much in 2011 - being cooped up in the house all fall and winter has definitely warped my fragile little mind more than I'd like to admit.

So yeah, computer stuff, and chairs. Pretty much the sum total of my 2011 musings for the day.
~~

That is all.

Geist tonight was not spent playing Geist, as two of our players were missing; the remaining four of us instead shot the breeze for four hours, which turned out to be incredibly fun, interesting and oddly therapeutic.

Also? I am boggled anew by the crazy web of interconnected, interlocked, richly layered and sometimes boggling incestuous craziness that is the Valley. I'm also at times incredibly O_o that I've spent almost a decade and a half kind of orbiting its edge. I mean, lets be frank, most of that time I spent kinda crawled up the ass of my own relationships and not doing much else, so I missed pretty much everything directly. But I know, at least at the acquaintance level a few people present at each so I've heard about everything at least once. And y'all know how I live fitting together puzzle pieces of people and stories and situations. The Valley is a neverending geyser of puzzle peices to a giant four dimensional puzzle that I'll never solve in my lifetime, but it's fun pulling patterns out of the pieces I have.

Also? I find it funny that I seem to have this pattern of encountering people throughout my life who eventually become close and/or important to me, and yet when I first meet them I don't remember them (but they remember me!), the next time I meet them I hate/am annoyed by them, and then one to four years later we're either really close friends, in a relationship or both. Life is weird. *shakes head*

Friday continued to be a very good day, what with a lovely latish dinner at Bertucci's with J&J and some of the squirekids followed by drinks and movies and gamernerditude at The Great Race War. Goddamn we need chairs, lol. But it was good to have a living room full of friends again this month, though both cell23 and I were glad it was a much lower key gathering than his birthday bacchanal earlier on.

Funny note, I had put on Fraggle Rock as afterparty background noise, and someone - cell23 maybe - pointed out that Doc was the same old dude in The Boondock Saints. So after a while we had to put that on because no one could shake the image, and well. I hadn't seen that movie in almost a decade, I'd clean forgotten most of it. I was rather amused at the conversation that arose about "funny looking but could still get it" men in hollywood, since it was generally agreed Willem Dafoe was on that list.

Saturday I inexplicably slept until 1, which is appallingly decadent for me, but I apparently just needed the sleep. The remainder of the day was spent in various Christmas shopping adventures with cell23 and deliriumdeva around Hadley and Northampton, which included excursions to A2Z and Ben&Bills - ALWAYS fun. It seemed to mostly be a scouting mission as I ended up only purchasing something for Kidzilla and something for Dad, but I have some other ideas for the remainder of folks on my gift list. May have to knock the rest of that out tomorrow.

Late Saturday night, cell23 and I decided we were in the mood for a light, silly movie, and we ended up watching the 2005 musical version of The Producers, which I'd been avoiding out of some weird loyalty to the original or something. Course I see my folly now, as this version is hysterical. I kinda want to have a Mel Brooks marathon now. That may have to happen one weekend soon. Have giant TV, will watch movies. Or something. Be nice if I had a working DVD player though, lol.

Sunday was extrajoker's Werewolf game and apparently their game group's Christmas party, in which I was super touched by people I had only met a week or so ago including me with gifts as well. Also it's very hard to outdo extrajoker in terms of thoughtful well-chosen presents, as I happily went home with purple legwarmers, a brandy new coffee mug with "Write your own story" on it, and a box set of Roald Dahl paperbacks. We did get a wee bit of actual gaming done in amidst the in-joking and silliness and Christmas cracker pulling, enough to get to the major cliffhanger/plot hook. After which extrajoker drove me home and sat in my living room for an hour for a much needed gossip/shoot-the-shit/whatever happened to x-person session. Good times.

Alas, the day went downhill from there as the blue cheese turkey wrap I'd gotten for lunch turned vicious on me. Spent the remainder of the evening curled up in bed feeling like someone was digging out my intestines with a rusty spoon, running to the bathroom, and sleeping fitfully. Fuck food poisoning, seriously. At least it wasn't bad enough to warrant puking, but there were a few rounds of OW OW OW MOTHERFUCKER OW that I could have done without. This was mitigated somewhat by my making progress through The Magicians and cell23 coming in to hug and fuss from time to time, and sleep apparently helps everything as I'm mostly recovered from all that this morning.

This week will alas mostly be dedicated to stressing over Christmas and the accompanying trip home, some token celebration of The Longest Night after Geist tomorrow, and work. Also see trying to score '09 and '07 Christmas eggs from the Cave. I don't have high hopes for the latter, but the AP ought to be reasonably flooded with the former late tonight.



And speaking of work, back to it with me.