Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

Of the house current type. I was curled up in bed reading this morning, when I glanced at the clock and decided that I still had a few minutes to finish the chapter I was reading. A few minutes later, I glanced at the clock again to find that the hands had not moved. I thought perhaps I'd kicked the cord out of the socket, but no such luck; that socket has been known to do random things, so I thought nothing of it. So I got up to check my messages...only to find the wireless connection was out and the laptop had kicked over to the battery power. I thought the plug had worked loose, so I went to flip on the light in the room...to find that light was out. Only then did the notion of a blackout dawn on me (I hadn't had my green tea yet...). Not sure why the lights went out: there wasn't any strong wind today, and we haven't had any storms, and it's not exactly summer, when people would be running their air conditioners.

Also feeling vaguely restless and scatter-brained. I have the itch to create, but my mind keeps jumping from one project to another: right now I have about three or four fics in the works (two for comment_fic, two for love_bingo) in the process of being written, and I have a backlog of RP tags, but I seem to be lacking the presence of mind to apply myself to any of it. Weird, after I've had a fairly productive period, unless I just need some time to recharge the creative batteries.

Crummy day at work yestday, between having an Aspie moment, then getting chewed out by one manager for it -- I'll worry about the damn holidays when we get to them; having an Aspie moment when its less manic does not presuppose that I'll have one later on. I never know when to expect them, and since That Time of the Month is imminent, I'm more likely to have a bad spell than when it It Isn't. At least the other front end manager was a lot more empathetic and got on her case for getting on mine.

But enough of that: I currently have a nice little pile of books I'm reading or have read recently, including:

*"Perdido Street Station" by China Mieville. Just the dedication alone and Neil Gaiman's endorsement sold me on it. Anyone who drew their inspiration from and dedicated their book in memory of Mervyn Peake has a lot going for them. And the Peakean influence shows: the city of Crobuzon could easily exist in the same 'verse as a certain ginormous castle. I would die happy if someone wrote a crossover between the two.

*"The Physick Booke of Deliverance Dane" by Katherine Howe. In some ways, it's rather like "The Historian" only with the Salem Witch Hysteria, but the writing is nowhere as good. I probably shouldn't compare apples to oranges, but while the descriptions are vivid and the history is interesting... the characters seem a bit thin. The fact that the various archivists and professors seem uniformly to have it in for the heroine reeks a little of Sue-age. At least said heroine is somewhat conservative and reticent helps redeem it, since if she was plucky and rebellious, I'd be sending her to a certain Mansion to be reformed...

*"Black Butler" aka Kuroshitsuji by Yana Toboso. I picked this gothic-Victorian manga as a way to tide myself over till the next volume of Yami no Matsuei gets translated and released in the States (a little bird tells me it may be released in February of next year). It's a lot of fun, reminds me quite a bit of Hellsing, only with some mild shounen-ai overtones, and with a dash of YnM -- Sebastian could be Tsuzuki's more competent twin brother, when he isn't reminding me of a kinder, gentler Alucard.

And our roof is being repaired! I got awakened at seven this morning by what sounded like giant woodpeckers hammering on the roof, so I moved to the couch to catch a few extra Z's... only to wake up a few hours later to find the daylight in the room had a blue tinge due to the blue tarps which the roofers had laid down on the lawn and draped from the roof to catch the busted shingles they were pulling up. Besides getting the roof reshingled, we're also getting rid of the very unnecessary hatch that was in the middle of the roof, which did little more than leak when we had a heavy spell of rain.

I was going to grace you all with a voice post... but that may not be happening any time soon. My cellphone does not seem to want to work. At first, I thought the automatic payment for the next month of minutes hadn't gone through, so I checked on the website. No such luck: the payment had gone through. Then I thought the battery was dying, but that doesn't seem to be the case, either.

Come to find out, one of my co-workers has the same phone and the same problem, and apparantly, the issue is a local problem.

You've probably seen the running "Peanuts" gag featuring Charlie Brown and the kite-eating tree. We've had the odd phenomena of the light-eating tree. A couple years back, about three or four sets of lights went out on our big Christmas tree, so we had to buy some new ones after Christmas, take all the ornaments off on one side, take off the blown-out sets and put on the new sets.

The same thing happened last night with my little tree in my room. I came into my room late last night after a long session on MxO (the winter holidays hijinks are in full swing, and I've been leveling Sieges's brother by running the winter holiday missions, aka killing winter weather programs which look something like the abominable snowman; and since he's a hacker, ie. the MxO version of a mage/wizard, he's been melting them with code hacks, which look a lot like fire, so I was joking IC about using "code-fire" to melt the "yetis") and noticed the tree looked really dark. I went to take a look and found two out of the three sets had blown out. I just finished replacing them with working sets, and frankly, the second time around, the tree looks better.

And oh yes, ye draggies:

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I was in my room last night, minding my own business and reading the manual for Hellgate: London last night, when I heard a commotion outside, including the sounds of teenaged boys whooping like monkeys and tree branches snapping. I looked out the window in time to see these three Australopithicines in tee shirts and jean shorts ripping a small fir tree up from the strip of land along the sidewalk in front of our house and toss it in the air. I emitted a roar worthy of the Morrigan and barrelled out of my room, down the stairs and out the door. By the time I'd got to the sidewalk (we have a long front yard) the biohazards had disappeared up the street, though I could still hear them whooping. I went inside and on being informed by my mom that this was not the first time this happened this week (my dad had found a thirty-five dollar pine tree uprooted Wednesday), I called the police. Two cruisers and two cops showed up within about three minutes to check it out. Unfortunately, I didn't get a good look at the hoodlums, so they weren't able to catch them, but they say they're going to step up the patrols in the area.

I'm asking you to pray that these idiots do something to get themselves caught and get their arses handed to them royally. Or that they come clean and turn themselves in for property damage and harm to the environment. Either that or that a tree falls on them and kills them. I just want them to get what's coming to them for ruining two little green leafy lives.

I've been tinkering with one of my paranormal romance stories again, specificly the one dealing with Vincent "the Dragon" von Pfeffner, the shape-shifting dragon-preternatural Mob family enforcer. I'm tempted to write a bit with him trying to literally bite the head off a teenaged gang-banger wannabe from an otherwise normal suburban New England town, but while the piece I wrote is funny in black comic way, I have no idea what the circumstances would be to trigger the scenelet. Except that I *KNOW* Vincent has a hair-trigger temper, I'm just not sure what would be the flash-point.

Purple bat lights, anyway... Dad put them up in the bald cypress in the yard, along with a bunch of very real-looking light-up plastic pumpkins. Also put up the infamous tin haunted houses which we got at HomeGoods, and we couldn't decide which one we liked better, so he got both.

In other news, next week I'm taking a break from the MxO since my folks and I are on vacation. Not sure how good said vacation will be since both my folks have had the latest of little "Angelica"'s little colds for the better part of a month now. I swear the CDC should take custody of that kid since she seems to spread plague ala Typhoid Mary. I wonder how many people with tertiary AIDS have died because they somehow got exposed to something from her. Nice, we just might be babysitting the Second Horseman of the Apocalypse... I've been taking Airborne every other day and at one point it looked like I might get it, but I seem to be shaking it off, thank heavens.

Had a hellish moment with the MxO software: for some wierd reason, I couldn't get the desktop shortcut to connect to the launcher. This after I'd tried tweaking the software after I couldn't get my guns to free-fire. At least someone else had the same gun glitch later in the same night, but I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Anyway... it was like the system just ate the file for the launcher. Scary as hell. This after a hellish day at work. But I managed to pull my wits together enough to run a System Restore. But then I was spooked so bad, I ended up having to tap someone for moral support on X-fire when I tried jacking in again.

Maybe this is the Old Scratch trying to throw me a beating for what I'm planning to do tomorrow:

I'm doing a "Sister Michael". For those of you who haven't heard of her, she's a British nun who unwittingly made international entertainment headlines for quietly sitting and praying the Rosary every day for 12 days outside one of the locations where the Damned Movie was being shot. I'll quietly show up at the movie theatre in Lowell tomorrow, when it opens, sit in a corner and quietly pray all 20 decades of the rosary (the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries as well as Pope John Paul II's Luminous Mysteries), then quietly leave. There's people organizing big protest rallies in other places, but that's not me.

Oh, and Puck, I've found something that topped both the DaVinci Tarot Deck and the DaVinci organic pasta: One of the tabloid-style women's magazines in the check out had a headline. "The DaVinci Code Diet".

Me: ::Internal, quoting my father:: "'I've seen all things'..."

Flood: ::In my headspace:: "Well, what does it entail? Eating the bloody felching book? That would certainly mess up your insides and make it impossible for you eat anything ever again."

I didn't get a chance to, but I am gonna have to see what it entails....

...while my mother was vacuum-cleaning the rugs downstairs yesterday. She was hoovering the rug in the dining room, and upstairs I was typing part of "This Shouldn't Be Happening..." when suddenly I hear this awful crash and my mother lets out a yelp followed by loud giggling. I run downstairs to see what had happened, and I find her paralyzed with laughter, the handle of the vacuum cleaner in her hand, papers scattered all over the floor and the middle part of the vacuum cleaner, the hard case that contains the bag and the filters, on the other side of the room. Apparantly, the clips that hold the case to the body of the vacuum cleaner had worked themselves loose and as she was vacuuming, the case came flying off. Says my mother, "I expected the bag to break open and the dirt to go everywhere. But it's still going and there's air blowing out of it, and there's papers flying everywhere!" We've had problems with an internal plug working loose in the thing so that it turns itself on and off repeatedly while you're running it, but nothing like this!

Aside from housecleaning and working a four-hour closing shift last night, it was pretty quiet yesterday. Oh, yes, one other thing: I got home early enough to watch the last hour of the movie "All the President's Men" on one of the local PBS stations; I've been wanting to see that for ages, especially since the identity of the real "Deep Throat" was revealed last summer. And I have to admit, the fanfiction-writing part of my brain wants to write a "Matrix" fic that uses the tropes of "All the President's Men" (Heh, I suppose if you think metaphorically, the whole mess involving the Watergate scandal was a manifestation of the Matrix that was the Nixon administration...). It could work: a young reporter could notice something odd about his world, he runs a story about it, then he catches the attention of an Exiled Agent (call him Agent Feld, in honor of W. Mark Feld, the guy who was "Deep Throat") who shares more information with him... then wierd things start to happen.

Yeah, I know some fans would whine at me -- probably the PvP wonks who are always spamming me with /duel requests at hardlines when I'm trying to run RP sessions or missions in the MxO -- for writing a NON-action oriented fanfic. They haven't read "A Path Among Stones" or "A Life Less Empty" in the "Matrix Comics" and they need to, though they'd probably whine OH TAHTZ TEH BORINGZZZ!!1111 WHERZ TEH KEWL FIHGT SCEEENZ??????/////!!111111

Just took down the Christmas tree in my room and started draping red and white Christmas lights over my windows; I'm cool with Valentine's Day this year... doesn't stop me from having that mischievous "anti-Valentine" icon here... Now I just have to take down the decorations around the rest of the house.

( Paradigm shift: the depressed Redpill )

You might want to make yourself a cup of tea for this... I'll be cutting this into bite-sized pieces, each behind its own LJ-cut.

( The latest on e-publishing and NaNoWriMo )

( Christmas lights and shopping )

( Like I need another time-sink... )

More to come in the next entry...