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

Finished my work week today, now I get to relax and curl up with a good book or some RP taggage. My Christmas shopping is done, all I have to do now is wrap the packages and decorate our Christmas tree: we'll be putting the lights on it tonight, then I'll decorate it throughout the day tomorrow. I've also told myself, I am changing into my Christmas PJs (this lovely set of snowflake print silver-on-grey flannels that I found at Target: they look almost like something a certain albino energy vampire might wear) and not getting dressed till Christmas morning. And if I do get dressed, I may not go out except for a walk down the street to look at people's Christmas lights.

Speaking of which: my dad has reported seeing the most outrageous blinky lights display imaginable, when he took a detour to visit his friend "Hal" (not his real name) on the way home from work the other night. It apparently has every kind of blinking light imaginable, up to and including a red and a green spotlight blinking at a wreath on the side of the house, and said wreath has -- yep! -- blinking lights on it. Says Dad, "They musta done that on purpose to piss off the neighbors." Says me, "Seizure inducing levels of blinkage?" Says Dad, "Almost. Oh my gawd, you gotta see it t'believe it."

More crazy: We've been getting dustings of snow every day this week. The resident snow-haters at work have been calling it "rain". Funny-looking rain, if you ask me. Never seen white rain that stuck to the ground before.

Whether you celebrate it as the Christian feast of the Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Temple and the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, or you celebrate it as the Pagan festival of Imbolc, I hope you all have a blessed one!

I went a little mad putting up battery candles in our dining room, which boggled my dad a bit. And then began the annual funny argument over whether or not Punxsutawny Phil is right or not. I did a little research and come to find out that there appears to be a Scottish tradition involving hedgehogs seeing their shadows on February 2nd.

A little bit sad tonight as the Christmas season is now officially over, the way we celebrate it, so tomorrow the Christmas decorations have to start coming down. No reason I can't take my time doing it, though. :: Winks::

Still very much open to requests/suggestions for the 12 Fanfic Roses I've promised for Valentine's Day and I will be taking suggestions up to and through February 14th.

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Not a big fan of it. I mean, if you treat it as a celebration of love in all it's forms -- friendship, family love, etc -- or if you're giving cute penny Valentine cards to everyone you like, I'm all for it. But when it devolves into snoogy-oogy couples/jewelry and lingerie day, that's when I draw the line.

However... this year, Valentine's Day is going to be interesting: I'm spending the day with my best guy friend Mark, at a nice, romantic... science fiction convention.

It's been a wierd but good day: Wierd things included --

Insane traffic everywhere when I ran my errands.

Insane old lady on the bus doing back-seat driving and trying to tell the driver to just plow through the traffic in front of us.

A garbage truck plowing into a telephone pole and knocking out the lights in Wamesite, including the lights at Wal-Mart.

Internet going out for no reason out of the blue last night, though it was back up this morning as if nothing had happened (I suspect this may have had something to do with the numerous Verizon trucks chugging around this morning).

Good things:

Flowers and candy from my dad.

Candy and a Jane Austen dress from my mom (it finally came!)

A Valentine for all of you from me, courtesy of Neil Gaiman: http://www.last.fm/music/Neil+Gaiman

Celebrating with the lovely themed layout; I'd bought an electric menorah at the yard sale of a Russian Jewish family in Newton back in the summer, now I have it on my windowsill, with three blue flame-shaped bulbs lit.

Maddeningly busy day at work today. Hopefully I can blast away my woes in MxO tonight: I have an insane idea for a character like none other, though I might have to either go to Syntax or delete Sieges's brother to pull it off. Puck challenged me to write an MxO/Dresden Files crossover. I just might up the ante and create a Harry Dresden-like Redpill character...

EvE has a new patch today, so I'm steadily downloading that: had to switch from auto-downloading to manual, since they changed the graphics engine, and my two-year-old GFX card isn't too thrilled with it, but thankfully, the folks at CCP have opted to create an alternate version for folks with this predicament and created a patch just for us.

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...

Starting off with a quiz nicked from dark_puck:( Read more... )

Well, I seem to be kicking this cold to the curb: I managed to get through my shift this afternoon without passing out, even though I sure felt like I was gonna. I managed to scare up the energy to help my dad cook the turkey-pork hotdogs for our indoor cookout (We have so many bugs in our backyard, it's impossible to have a backyard barbecque, thus we wind up cooking the hotdogs outside and eating *inside*.) Mom experimented with a jazzy new roasted red potato salad.

We broke with tradition slightly: usually, we watch the Boston Pops concert on TV, but this year they were doing wall-to-wall country music... so, since Ronan Tynan, of the Three Irish Tenors (and my personal favorite -- us disabled people with talent gotta stick together!) was supposed to be singing in the "Capitol Fourth" concert on PBS, we watched that. At nine, my dad and I went out to watch our town's fireworks display -- and some nut over on Wayside Road decided to get in on the fun and shoot off some roman candles, thus we had dueling fireworks. By the time we got back, the concert on PBS was over, and my mom had switched over to the Boston Pops concert. I got in just in time for the "1812 Overture". Says my mom, "There was a guy in the audience holding up a big sign that read, 'I'm just here for the 1812'." Says me, "That makes two of us!".

The Boston fireworks, following the Pops concert, were really cool this year: some of them were in wacky shapes, like slightly flattened cubes and cock-eyed/upside down smiley faces. They even used a couple of my current favorite songs: U2's "Vertigo" (I have *got* to think of a way to turn that into a filk about DC/Vertigo comics...) and Aerosmith's "Dream On" (which gave me some ideas for a "Sandman" vidscript.).

Edited to Add: Here's a neat webtoy I ran across, for those of you who might have missed any fireworks: http://www.maylin.net/Fireworks.html. And it's a teeny bit late, but I now have a lovely patriotic/4th of July icon.

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't to forget make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself. "

Words to treasure...

HAPPY 2005!!!