It’s been decided. On October 20th, 2010, we will wear purple in honor of the 6 gay boys who committed suicide in recent weeks/months due to homophobic abuse in their homes and at their schools. Purple represents Spirit on the LGBTQ flag and that’s exactly what we’d like all of you to have with you: spirit. Please know that times will get better and that you will meet people who will love you and respect you for who you are, no matter your sexuality. Please wear purple on October 20th. Tell your friends, family, co-workers, neighbors and schools.

RIP Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh (top)
RIP Justin Aaberg, Raymond Chase (middle)
RIP Asher Brown, Billy Lucas (bottom)

It necessitated emptying out the rest of my winter trunk to find the turtlenecks buried at the bottom, but I am indeed wearing purple right now. And two rainbow bracelets just for good measure. (And no pants, but that's cause I'm still getting dressed for the day.)

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not that he reads LJ anymore, but a very happy birthday to anothermurray.


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Also it just dawned on me that my phone is missing and has been since Saturday night, which should tell you how much I get calls. Do me a favor and if you have my # call and text the hell out of it until I find it? I'm thinking it's still in my purse from the wedding, but I can't seem to find that either.

(ETA: Found it, though not my purse. Hmmm.)

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pants now. More coffee. Work, Sons of Anarchy and SVU. Bells later. I has a plan.

deliriumdeva's birthday was awesome! Happy 23rd, you! I like Panda East - I don't know, it's like Taipei and Tokyo in Northampton - not the best chinese food in the world, but the restaurant is nice enough, the food is decent (and decently priced) and it's been there long enough for me to have some fun memories of the place.

I'm apparently late to the party but there's a fairly new candy store next door to Panda East which not only has fou-fou-chi-chi specialty chocolates, but also Things That Make Andees Happy. Like black cherry blow pops and nerd ropes and JELLY BELLIES. NOM.

Not having a phone temporarily is actually kind of a relief for me, which is why I'm not super worried about getting it back on right away (not that I can right now). Of course, this goes to shit upon realizing that other people are completely nonfunctional at "WHAT U MEAN UR CELL PHONE NO WORK HOW DO I COMMUNICATE WITH U." Lets just say I had an incident last night where I did my best to work around my phone not working and was met with a brick wall of not being listened to regarding game plan and people were perhaps too graciously not defenestrated. Le Growl.

Drinking with a gang of friends is always hilarious and amazing. Things like "BUTT-TELLA" and "PANCOCKS" happen.

I was able to scrape together 1.75 yesterday and got thread. Bowser is back underway. Hoping to finish at least the weaving bit by this weekend, hopefully I'll manage to figure out what all I'm doing with him when I'm done by then too. Also have an idea as to how much bulk bead orders will cost me. Some project and supply planning needs to happen.

aradiadiane is treating me to BAD MOVIE tonight. I'd normally be horrified that I'm actually going to go to Hot Tub Time Machine willingly, but I'm a sucker for going to bad movies with company.

And off I go on another work filled daily adventure.

in no particular order, today I...

• got my insurance quote for the year. Looks like Webber&Grinnell's offering the best price right now. Still, 2K just to insure the car... *whine* Explain to me why i need to drive again? Oh yeah, office in Westfield. And I really like doing it. I mean, goddamn... a crack habit would be cheaper. *whine moar* More reasons to quietly curse my mother for not letting me take driver ed in high school.
  
  
• managed to get through the first half of today with a killer headache. Coffee and a nap upon returning home fixed this but christ, when I got back it was bad enough to have me in tears.
  
  
• Worked. Ugh.
  
  
• cranked about the state of the house, especially my room; it's something of a cesspit, and I never really got up the wherewithall to clean it. Pretty much all I was up to doing today was getting the chicken made, which turned out fine because it came out delicious. I think the secret to getting it absolutely perfect was using actual onion instead of onion powder. Must remember that for future reference. And it was pretty cool hanging with Chris, jaicat and veestah tonight, epecially since the evening involved telling stories, Mario Kart, and trooping outside to see a satellite flare. Thank you, Chris, for leaving me the web site that predicts when and where they are, too, that was WICKED cool, and I will be doing that again. Really need to see if I can find my old telescope when I head back to NYC, this place is pretty damned awesome for stargazing and associated things. May have to take up a bit of an astronomy habit.
  
  
• had two massive(ly hilarious) text message FAILs today. Upon being asked what was for dinner by jaicat, I texted back "Orange juice children, rice and peas." The second one was me texting cell23 "Got plenty left over. want me to wrap up a slave for you?" ("slave" and "plate" are both 7-5-2-8-3.) I think I'm done texting until sleep and more coffee are had.
  
  
• Do any of you Squillage folk by any chance have a can of WD40? I got the curtain brackets up for the front window, but the rod's stuck at too-short.
  
  
• Wrapped up the day heading over to cell23's to bring him the aformentioned slave/plate (shut up) and to hang a little with the kids before they went to bed; had a lot of fun showing them the pictures from last week on my iPod and showing them how to flick and zoom through them. I found it super hilarious that after being shown how it worked, instead of using his own hand, Mr. Lovebug instead picked up my hand and used my finger to move through the pictures for him. Also grabbed a little chill time with cell23 after they went to bed, which was pretty awesome as I hadn't seen him since Monday.
  
  
• Have Boobyhaven to myself for the second night in a row, due to Cara being stuck in Vermont, and, due to nap earlier, am only marginally sleepy. I'm thinking shower, WoW, Soup, clean and work.
  
  
  
• ETA: Timberland.com will allow you to custom build your boots. OMG COVET COVET WANT COVET WANT!

So that new phone I got on Friday? Yeah, in the immortal words of Antoine Merriweather and Blaine Edwards:

Hated It!

No seriously, I was sitting with my old phone charger in my hand earlier trying to figure out what to do with it and looking at the new phone, and quite suddenly realized that if I had to put up with it for the foreseeable future, I would go bugshit. So I went back to the AT&T store, dutifully received my clowning from the brothas on staff (one of whom I think is another one of masteradept's Brothers from Other Mothers... helloooooooo Mr. Dimples and Lashes!), paid my "ooh shiny" tax, and left with the phone they tried to sell me in the first place, which was the next model up from my old phone. I'm already much happier, and hey, I can has spare charger now. Win.

That said, do not get the Pantech Matrix. It is shiny blue crap on a stick. The camera sucks, the screen is huge but the graphics are painfully awful, you can't reprogram the center buttons so you risk non-consensual connection to Media Net every time you bump it, the navigation is clunky, and the button that actually lets you make calls? invisible. The list goes on and on. Pretty much once the Oooh, QWERTY keyboard! wore off that thing had nothing going for it. New hotness, I'm amused to find, has the same resolution on the camera as the camera I used to borrow from inle_rah when I wanted to take "really good pictures" six years ago. *shakes head* Technology.

Well, at least I got the phone book update and ringtone making out of the way last time around - all that's left is upload and assign. Hopefully this will be the last time for a while.

Back to work, South Park, and cleaning like a fiend.

This ID4 was mostly quiet for me. I spent most of it doing laundry, watching season 2 of South Park, cooking Dad some dinner for the week and designing bottledgoose.net, all while inhaling the scent of July 4th in Flatbush, which is an odor mostly comprised of lighter fluid and firework ash. *shakes head* Seriously people, you can set off an M80 with no trouble whatsoever, but you require half a can of propane and a flamethrower to get your Weber grill started? Nigga please.

I miss my old phone. This piece o crap replacement is annoying me. Oh well... just buckle down, see where my finances are this time next year or the year after that, then whatever gen iPhone's out by then will be mine. That's the plan anyway. I'm kinda half regretting not getting one yesterday. At some point tomorrow I have to take it into the store anyway, as it won't connect up to the AT&T network properly (and thus I can't torment my facebook and LJ lists with random crappy pictures).

I walked through the Park earlier to return a book to the library (no it wasn't open, but there's a drop box outside) and was rather impressed by how many people managed to cram in for barbeques. Seriously, there was NO grass space left; it was kinda awesome and terrifying all at once. After the library I went to Ruthy's to hang out for a while and watch MJ DVDs, since she's kinda still in hardcore mourning to the point of having quite the evolving MJ shrine on her dining room table. I shake my head a bit. But the evening was fun and I had never seen all of Moonwalker before. It makes absolutely no ding dang sense, by the way. That aside, it was kinda hard not to get caught up in it, simply because MJ looked like he was having WAY too much fun making it. You could kinda see what maybe went on behind the scenes... "Ooh ooh! so for this scene, lets have me chased through a city by California Raisins! And then I wanna turn into a giant rabbit! And then me and the rabbit will have a dance off CAUSE WE CAN! Then lets grab that guy from Monty Python and turn me and my life into a giant carnival ride! Then lets have Joe Pesci with an improbable hairdo show up as some sort of Spider Weirdo King and have his robot minions chase me and then I turn into a car, then change back into me wearing 30s gangster clothes and then after I dance some more OOH OOH CAN I BE A GIANT ROBOT? PLEEEEEASE? THIS IS GONNA BE THE BEST MOVIE EVAR."

Yeah, you know... I think he really did have an arrested development issue, because that is the best movie ever, if you're an 8-12 year old boy... and he was 30 at the time. It kinda dawned on me as I was watching that MJ was pretty much exactly my age when Moonwalker came out. Yikes.

Anyway. I'm home now, a bit overstuffed from having both the dinner I made Dad and the dinner at Ruthy's, and actually not feeling so great. I can't actually tell if the spasmy soreness in the middle of my back is digestion or period related, but regardless, I'm going to try to be very nice to my digestive system for the next few days. Honestly I've been feeling a little sluggish and under the weather for the past little while now, so I'm hoping the break in the weather and some efforts towards keeping myself better hydrated will sort it out.

Plan for rest of the evening - finish the laundry, start slicing and coding the new bottledgoose design, more South Park, and listening as Flatbush pretty much explodes around me.

Happy 4th y'all.

So apparently every time I edited a number on the old phone, this created a whole other copy of said contact on my sim card. I've spent the last three hours or so trying to get my phone contacts into some semblance of order and I'm only on the Js. And this is is because I'm going through, entry by entry, updating phone #s and email addresses, copying things from sim card to phone, organizing things into groups, and in a few people's cases assigning ringtones and pictures to people. Also in some cases making brandy new ringtones, cause I can.

The other thing is that when I deleted an entry off my phone, it stayed in the sim card. The refrain of Lily Allen's "Fuck You" makes an excellent ringtone. Sure, it's probably less catty and healthier to just roll my eyes and redelete certain resurrected numbers, and at some point I probably will. But for now, I'm getting a giggle out of it, so nyeh.

SEE ALSO: the very beginning of Ludo's "Love Me Dead."

Silliness aside, I'm feeling a little better. organizing one's address book is oddly therapeutic. Go figure.



ETA: and then there are the people that aren't in your address book anymore cause they're no longer alive. Ouch.

I dislike being hit in the communcation cortex. It makes me ornery.

Yesterday, amid various and sundry slow internet issues, EPEEN BSOD'ed. Restarting it went to chkdsk, indicating a dirty volume, provoking much sighing and stalking off to play through a couple decks of Set to calm myself down. When it got through and Windows started up again, Pidgin refused to load. It woud draw the buddy list window and then "Pidgin has encountered a problem and needs to close. NO IMS FOR YOU." Looks like I'm stuck using Meebo until I can take a few minutes to paw through the registry and reinstall.

This afternoon my phone started acting up. First of all it's been shutting down spontaneously all week. Today it froze when I tried to send a text message. After scratching my head, I managed to get it shut down and rebooted. Then while diving for an incoming call from cell23, it froze again and wouldn't come back.

GREAT TIMING, I'd like to mention. *fume*

I needed to get out of the house anyway, so I went to the AT&T service center in Manhattan, which is entirely staffed by hot black techies. Every cloud has a silver lining I suppose. Unfortunately, they pronounced my phone dead at 5:56PM EST. Alas, they do not actually sell cellys there, so back on the train with me, where I went to the AT&T store around the corner from the House and picked up this new blue thing that I'm not quite sure I like yet. Oh yeah, did I mention these folks kicked my free upgrade option back six months when I got my phone line severed from Stacey's account? So I had to pay the early upgrade fine on top of the phone. Fuckers. So now I'm back under contract to AT&T for two years. Oh the fuck well. I had no interest in switching anyway. Silver lining #2 - apparently I'd never set my old phone to store new numbers to the phone rather than the sim card. So I didn't actually lose any of my #s. Woot. Also we likeses the qwerty keyboard.

Maybe I should go off the grid for a bit. I have been feeling a bit of the communication overload lately. I just don't really like being forced off, you know?

Plans for the evening include phone setup (here's hoping I can force my bluetooth thingie to work one more time), Season #2 of South Park, The Soup, and HATING EVERYTHING.