A Twist of Things to Come

First off, via narniadear, is The Oatmeal's The # Most Common Uses of Irony. It's utterly fabulous, and renders meta discussions on what is or is not irony in the clearest terms I've encountered. I think I may post a link to this the next time such a discussion gets going. It's got to be better than stuffing my fingers in my ears and shouting, "Shut up, Shut UP, SHUT UP!"

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Speaking of Irony (via layla_aaron ), check this out: Church's Giant, Ugly 'Touchdown Jesus' destroyed by 'Act of God'. I'd have to say that the main reason churches make my navel pucker is extravagances like that... structure. I've been to churches that wouldn't spare one of their bajillion buses to bring people from 'poor' (read: largely immigrant) neighborhoods, because they really needed them all to shuttle people from their satellite parking lots to the main church, but they'd spend a million dollars on an advert to convince the already mostly homophobic population of Georgia that their children would be raped in the streets if they didn't vote for an extra-crispy gay marriage ban amendment to the state constitution.

Which is not to say that some churches don't spend their money to help people, because some do. Others build giant Jesus lightning rods to show people on the interstate how righteous they are.

Eep. Sorry for the rant.

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In the "Dudes, REALLY NOT HELPING" department, I give you this (via hedgegoth):

(As an aside, NEVER read YouTube comments. You'll end up thinking everyone on teh internet is stupid, evil and/or criminally insane. Just sayin'.)



Part of a vast, racist conspiracy to make the NAACP look bad? The one lady insisting she heard an 'r' reminded me of how I could almost swear I heard a 'ck' at the end of the beeps in this video:



Sometimes, just hear what you expect to hear, is what I'm saying. And it's really sad that people expected to hear that.

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Here's a cool story of a camera that traveled from Aruba to Miami, and how the internet helped get it back to its owner. Also with Video taken by a sea turtle along the way.

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Last but not least, over at GC Kitchen Jedi reports on A Gamer Girl E-Zine? Turns out it's SSDD.

Actually, sometimes I am. The weather here has shifted colder, and I frequently find my hands getting a bluish tint to them. Nothing so dramatic as the first time, and I suspect that this will be the new norm for me.

It happened last night while I was cutting up chicken breasts for dinner, and Big Boy asked me to reach toward him and say, "Braaaains..."

Heh. Such a wit, my Big Boy.

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It's ten in the AM now and I have already managed to mark three things off my To Do List, which is good.

I have some additional shopping to do, which will likely be the most time-consuming thing on my list -- at least the combined errands I must run using the car. Buy a blood pressure cuff. Drop off poo-cards at the lab and get the BP cuff calibrated. Buy additional foodstuffs for our new, healthy, vegetable-rich diet.

Now, while I agree that my doctor is a bit weird about the whole diet/nutrition thing (recommending an over-the-counter weight-loss drug, suggesting The Zone (a diet I believe is faddish and not recommended for a person with a family history of kidney disease, such as myself)as a diet option), this does provide a good opportunity for my Beloved and I to eat a better diet.

The single worst potential horror of my life would be to lose him, and if this will help him be more healthy, then I am all for it. Plus, so far we've been creative and really enjoyed our tasty food. (For lunch yesterday, we had peppadews stuffed with a nice lean tuna salad. Yum!)

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It's going to be an interesting week. Big Boy has a doctor visit tomorrow, and I have to take my Beloved to the airport Thursday morning. Hopefully it will be early enough to avoid too much traffic.

You heard me. What? It's not the day you wash your dog? But, it's Thursday!!

Seriously, our dog gets a bath every Thursday, plus medicine morning and evening, because she has mange. Luckily, it's not the sort that can infect people, and we caught it very early. She is a very bushy dog, so you can't even see the one hot spot with missing hair (about silver dollar sized), but she was losing the hair on one eyelid, which is how we caught it.

She submits well enough to bathing, but we muzzle her for it to be safe. (Her name IS "Bitey" remember?) Turns out that was a good thing, too. When I was trying to dry her off (it ain't easy -- she's got a lot of hair) she tried to nip my ear. I knew she was sensitive about her neck area, but she was so good last week that I foolishly assumed she'd be fine this week, too.

See, Bitey has PTSD, and hands around her neck area are a trigger for her, which makes petting her or letting her interact with people interesting. Still, in our loving environment she has begun to relax and, for the most part, be safe and act like a reasonably un-traumatized dog. We don't know the detail sof her abuse because we took her in as a stray, but there's the neck thing, a tendency to cringe around toy or air guns, and a fear of rope. Not leads or what have you, but anything that looks like rope.

Just having her around is a risk, of course, but she has never offered to bite the kids and is super obedient and fun. Just, yanno, don't touch the neck. Plus, I'm in kind of a unique position to appreciate the value of beings with slight irregularities. ;D

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Working through some Premiere Pro stuff. Brain has not exploded. Yet. I certainly hope to be up to speed on it soon.

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Cleaned the kitchen. Scrubbed the stove and everything. Collected some clothes to donate. Folded laundry. Planning on making cookies later.

Generally a perky, getting stuff done sort of day. Went to lunch with my Beloved for the first time in ages (just the two of us). Ran into a friend of my Beloved's, who commented on the fact that we were holding hands and called us "lovebirds, after all these years."

*snicker* You don't know the half of it, jack!

Also, I was really pleased with my skin and make-up today. I've been moisturizing with this really thick vitamin E oil, which is a bit of a pain because my hair gets stuck in it. Generally I do it at night and sometimes a dab in the mornings. Not only is my skin no longer dry, but it's looking really fresh. The make-up thing... I often struggle with wearing eyeliner or eye make-up. I think I need a bit of definition there, but I'm never really sure how to do it because of the Asian slant/fold of my eyelids. ( I was pleased with how today's attempt turned out. )

First off, this is partly for abrynne and narniadear, as well as any of the Twilight Love/Haters on my flist, and partly because I have recurring dreams in which I wash unkempt men. Usually in tubs with bunches of bubbles. These dreams pre-date the Very Secret Diaries and the Wenches' Tavern role-play by many years. Not sure what's up with that, since these are not generally particularly pleasant sorts of dreams. Anyway...
( Lolpicspam behind the cut )

Christian Kane has a purty mouth. He also he sings, though I have played this clip five times without noticing his voice at all. I get distracted by the aforementioned purty mouth.



Y'all were right. I lost interest in Angel way too early.

Also, for the SPNers, Ackles and Kane:
( Behind the cut because it looks big on some people's browsers, even though it looks minuscule on mine, and I have no idea why that is... )
*giggle-snort* Why is it the pretty ones never look terribly bright?

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The last few days have had highs of 70*F and lots of rain. Yesterday morning it was in the teens, with bright sunshine.

I sneezed for half an hour, solid, after I got up.

But at least my hair is having a lie down for the first time in a week. *snorffle*

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lab.drwicked.com

And so the work marches on. May be out of touch for a couple days, so have a Merry Christmas!

aumonae's brother was killed yesterday. Here's link to a news article on what happened:

http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=105184&provider=top

Those of you who are of the praying sort, please remember her in your prayers.

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I know how odd that sounds, coming from a relatively undefined believer, such as myself. I was raised Christian. I still believe in the existence of something beyond physical reality, something we might as well call "God" or "The Divine."

As nebulous as I feel about the true nature of the Universe, though, I believe in the power of prayer, the power of meditation, the power that comes from putting focused thought and the feelings in your heart together.

So, if you can, pray for her. Pray for each other. Pray for me.

We could all use it, I think.

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I intend to follow-up on yesterday's topic eventually, but we just dragged our Christmas stuff out of storage. I have a lot of cleaning and decorating to do, plus I've got to get out all my paper making, candle making, and ornament making stuff and get to it. :) That's always fun. :)

Also, Christmas cards! I have to do them, pronto, or they won't get done. Got a lovely one from micehell this week. Thank you, sweetie!

Orson Scott Card really enjoyed the movie, Mamma Mia!, but had some moral issues with it. That, in itself, should surprise absolutely no one, but at least one of the issues he had with it DID surprise me. As much as I hate to say it, The Stopped Clock Has a point:

( Excerpt from Orson Scott Card's review of Mama Mia! below the cut. It contains SPOILERS. )

Not saying I agree (haven't seen the movie, so I can't say one way or the other), especially with the bit about Dumbledore (I think it made his actions as a younger man much easier to understand). But the whole "Gay!" as a punchline thing is ugly, even if it is common in our culture. Also, I really enjoyed that he was basically chiding the writers for not including a gay romance.

Viral Marketting that seems like it would backfire, in a big way.



The message is supposed to be, basically, "Look at this hot girl licking stuff! because our rooms are sooo clean! *wink*"

The message *I* was getting? "Our rooms were really clean until some loony beyotch went around licking everything. Seriously! Everything in our hotel is coated with the dried saliva of a crazy person!"

I mean, EEEEEW! (Obviously not a marketing campaign aimed at heterosexual females with borderline OCD-ish tendencies. *shudder-gag*)

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By way of cristalia, I give you cristullmonster's Trent Reznor's Hair: A Retrospective.

MMmm-mmm.

So, inyadreams posted about a strange dream she had, and it made me think of a strange dream I had some time ago. The only thing the dreams have in common is Ewan McGregor, in case you wondered.

In this dream I was at a cocktail party-- it was all very posh and everyone was dressed to the nines. I was chatting happily with various people when I noticed Ewan McGregor walk by, totally naked. His behind was all rosy, as if someone had slapped it. My jaw dropped, but no one else paid him any attention at all, is if it were the most natural thing in the world for someone to walk around naked at a cocktail party. I asked a person standing next to me, "Did you see that?" I was sure I must be hallucinating. She shrugged, "Oh, that's just Ewan McGregor."

"Yes, but he was naked," I said.

The woman smiled at me and said in slightly bored tone, "Darling, if you haven't seen Ewan McGregor naked, you haven't been looking."

That was the end of the dream. It has that Irrefutable Hollywood Proverb sound to it, doesn't it?

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When I got to laser room, sat in the laser seat and pressed my chin and forehead into place in front of the laser, I had the strangest sensation of being Alice after she'd ingested something with a note on it. It was all very short and low to the ground. They had to adjust the seat up about a foot. The laser, too. He said I was by far the tallest person they'd had go under the laser that day. O_O I am no giant, so that was ... odd.

Also odd was when they strapped my head in place. Having your head secured like that is an unusual feeling.

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Big boy had a friend over today. First time I ever had one of my children's friends look down my shirt-front. O_O He's a good kid, and it wasn't a long look or anything, but, erm. None of my kids' friends have ever been a) tall enough to look down at my goodies or b) terribly interested. I guess this puberty thing is coming, whether or not I'm ready to face it. It's shaping up to be baggy t-shirt summer. *snort*

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Found out Big Boy and his friends have nicknames for each other that somehow resemble their real names. My son is called Robot Flowers, and his best friend is called either Mar-Kiss or Mark Ass Manchestnut. I was afraid to ask what they call Deiter or Jabron. O_O

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Started watching Criminal Minds thanks to micehell. The Dr. Spencer Reid character hits all my Geekboy hot buttons. He's smart and socially awkward, and he'll go on and on about stuff most people don't want to hear. But whatever it is, he's passionate about it and that is soo cute. Pale with just a touch of dark eye circles and gets all frowny when he thinks (which is pretty much always). Clean and neat but still poorly groomed. (I get the most amazing desire to wash his hair -- basically a primate grooming urge. I am almost positive that this is the same urge that my father aroused in my mother. Ha! The Geekboys need someone to look after them, see.) The character is a basic, pasty ectomorph with sharp-features -- except for his his mobile, soft-looking mouth. He has long fingers and delicate, almost feminine hands. Yet, the actor is not at all interesting to me out of character.

It's the Geeky-nerdy feel of the role that does it for me, obviously.

Basically, the character reminds me of a boy I knew in High School, and I SO would have done him if I'd had any idea how. The trouble with being a cut-ish girl is that the delishus nerd boys (the smarter ones, anyway) have either learned from experience to expect you to blow them off or they are congenitally oblivious to almost everything outside their current area of study, so you have to practically hire sky-writers to get your point across. I was never good at being that obvious, even when I tried.

About the time I finally got him to notice that I was talking to him on purpose I happened to see him eat. It was like watching one of those washing machines with the window in the front, only with a salami sandwich and several ounces of soda sloshing around inside instead of clothes. Sort of killed the mystique. Ah, young lust is such a fickle thing!

I've been sort of discovering a lot about myself lately (or realizing how odd some of the things I already knew about myself might seem to the world at large), and while I realize I'm not the most fascinating of topics, at least I am a topic I can write about with some authority. Heh.

1. I'm about one 16th Shawnee, Native American. Not enough to cry when people litter.

2. I have clear memories of potty training and what it was like to wear diapers, even though I was fully potty trained by the age of two.

3. My first favorite color was yellow, because it was like the sunshine. I still like it, but it's one color I don't wear well at all.

4. At this point in my life, I am both an unabashed pervert and a lifelong monogamist.

5. I like to eat comfort food out of giant bowls, with slightly larger than average spoons. I had no idea this was actually a habit until my BIL pointed out that I always seem to eat cereal and macaroni and cheese out of bowls large enough to cover my head. It's true that I do this, but I have no idea why.

Care to share Five Random Things about yourself?