Catchy Name Needed

I know I hadn't even gotten around to posting here about Ike yet, but it looks like we are not evacuating unless it makes another unexpected turn. (They expect a turn, they just don't expect it to be enough to bring it up towards us.) Yesterday we thought there was a high chance that we would be. I guess I need to call my aunt and tell her not to buy any extra groceries yet.

In unrelated news, columbina  linked to this column of Scalzi's and I really, really think it's right on the money. Every Democrat/liberal/progressive in America needs to stop and take a deep breath and refocus. Including me. (And possibly Obama - although considering that he's practically being ignored in the news right now, it's hard to know.)

The storm sort of came in all wonky, to the east of us. (Tropical storms tend to be a bit unpredictable. I can tell you that from long experience.) It's raining hard here but it's not all that windy. We are clearly going to have a stormy day, and I don't know if the power is going to hold up, but I think we'll be fine.

(I mostly picked the 'just breathe' icon because my nose is all stuffed up, bad enough that it woke me up. Stupid sinuses.)

It was horribly foggy this morning, and it kept getting worse as I got further down the island. Actually I say "horrible" because I don't like fog, but it was never quite so bad that you couldn't tell where you were or anything, so it really wasn't as bad as all that. Still, I want it to go away, and it looks like I will get my wish, because there's a cold front bearing down us at this very moment. I don't think it's supposed to get incredibly cold or anything, but at least it should be enough to blow the fog away. I hate fog, can you tell?

Once again I have written an entry and left it where I am not. So you will get that one later, I imagine. Meanwhile, I am kind of upset by something that happened - not to me, but sort of a family thing - and I am having trouble thinking about anything else. It's not something that I feel free to write about, though, since it concerns somebody else's life and not mine! But suffice it to say that it upset me. My mental state has been sort of precarious lately, anyway.superplinwrote an entry where she mentioned the word "limnal" and it keeps popping into my head that that's how I feel these days. I was talking the other day about my life being in transition, and I guess it's part of that. I feel between. Between being happy and sad, a lot of the time. I veer back and forth but I don't spend too long in either place. I guess it could be worse - if I'm not spending a lot of time being terribly happy, at least I'm not spending a lot of time really UNhappy, either.

We went to see The Golden Compass yesterday. I knew the reviews weren't especially good but I wanted to see it anyway. And the reviews were about right, it wasn't great. It wasn't terrible either, it just didn't seem to hang together very well. I think it would be confusing if you hadn't read the books, although Rob hasn't and he seemed to be following it ok. It was pretty to look at, though, which is basically why we went.

Even though it's been 80 degrees here in the afternoons, part of me seems to think it's fall - at least, I went and took the bright colored batik quilt (which is my mom's handiwork) - and the purple-dotted sheets I bought to go with it - off of the bed last night, and put on the one I consider my winter quilt and slightly more subdued sheets instead. Although then it occurred to me that I also have Mom's big Christmas quilt, so I guess I will have to switch to it soon. Or just add it on top, if it ever actually gets cold. I had better use it, one way or the other, because I went through a little mini-drama to get to keep it. I had told a certain extended family-member that she could have some quilts, and she tried to take that one with her and I said "Oh no, I was intending to keep that one," and removed it bodily from her pile. I felt sort of bad but I was perfectly entitled to do it, and I would be kicking myself now if I hadn't.

We got the easy part of the unpacking done pretty fast - the dishes and books and things like that that had obvious places to put them. Now we're down to the hard part. I think I probably need a filing cabinet for all the papers - between estate stuff and our own finances, there's a lot of stuff I'm going to want to keep for the near future, at least. And I need to get back to all that scanning and shredding I was doing before the move. We still really have papers out the wazoo. The sewing room is a mess, too, because on top of all the sewing stuff I have all of those quilts - some of mine, some of Mom's, and some that came from my grandmother's house that I don't even know who made them! (Although I'm pretty sure it wasn't my grandmother.) And clothes. Jesus, I have a lot of clothes. I hung stuff up in the half of the closet that doesn't have quilt stuff in it, and filled up all the storage things I bought for clothes (several of them) and I still have clothes overflowing. And I already threw away/donated a whole bunch of stuff! Who knew I had so many clothes?


Oh, so that was the Catacombs of Kathandrax I was babbling about at the bottom of my entry last night - not that anybody but Col cares, and he probably knew what I meant, anyway. I shouldn't post when I am sleepy, I either go off on some incoherent rant or just plain babble incoherently! Anyway, it's a GWEN dungeon with three levels and it was pretty difficult. We had six people from my guild and two monk heroes - and later five real people, because one player was in Europe and I guess he didn't realize it was going to take so long! It took... well, I'm not sure because I don't know what time we started. Two and a half hours, maybe. (They almost went off without me in the beginning. Apparently nobody was paying attention when I said "brb"!)

It is supposed to actually get cold(ish) sometime tonight. Rob said it wasn't here yet when he went for his walk an hour or so ago.

(Starting right out with the random:)

I saw a woman with an armful of roses - definitely a dozen or more - walking into work this morning. I wanted to ask if somebody gave them to her, or she was giving them to somebody, or what. She was not quite in earshot, though, or I might have.

Wow, my computer has shipped already. They originally had 11/2 as the shipping date, and I'm not surprised that it shipped earlier than that, but one business day? (It looks like it shipped on Saturday, actually.) That's pretty amazing.

Weather is still beautiful. I don't know how long it'll last - it's already been a week - but I sure do like it. (Although it's freezing in my office. We always have this problem when it's cool outside.)

I woke up at 4 this morning, stayed in bed for ages and tried to pretend I was sleepy, and finally gave up at 5:30 and got up. I was going to go to work at 7 but it ended up being 7:45 before I got there. Which just goes to show you that, as I have long maintained, I am incapable of being early. (7:45 is when I am technically supposed to be at work these days, when we are doing the flex schedule thing.)

We got a lot done this weekend. Rob did some more cleaning on the old apartment - he volunteered, I was going to hire somebody to do it - and I unpacked. There is now china in the china cabinet and books on the bookshelves and all that kind of stuff. Not to say that everything is unpacked - it's definitely not - but the number of boxes is definitely shrinking. We have to get one dresser/bureau thing out of the old apartment by next weekend - and one bed and one couch out of my mom's townhouse soon, too, though there's no definite deadline on that. We put a sign up by the mailboxes about the dresser and we will see if anybody bites. (I put "vintage" dresser on the sign - I think c. 1960 counts as vintage, don't you? It certainly would if it was clothing.) I am spending next weekend at the quilt show so I need to get that taken care of pretty soon.

It rained on us off and on most of the way up to Austin on Saturday, starting the very minute we got in the car. (If we hadn't left exactly at 9:00 like we said we were going to, we would have gotten very wet. It's very unusual for us to be right on time like that, so we were lucky.) There wasn't any visible flooding in Austin, but all of the electronic traffic signs around town said,

FLOODING POSSIBLE
THRU SUNDAY
IF WATER ON ROAD
TURN AROUND
DON'T DROWN

The Brazos river was visibly very muddy, even on Monday, but the Colorado wasn't at all - we figured maybe it was because the Brazos was coming straight down from where all the rain was, while the water in the Colorado had been through a couple of lakes and over Mansfield Dam and so forth, in between. (Or it could just have been a difference in the soil upstream, I suppose - that east Texas red mud.) Anyway, both of them were really high, you could tell that very easily.

And gee, it's raining again now. So much for rockets' red glare for the 4th, unless this stops.


(More on the trip to Austin later, if I can get around to it!)

Have I talked about how the weather has sucked lately? It's either been cold - which is okay - or cold AND rainy, which is not. And lately it's mostly been the latter. Sunday when we came out of the movie the sun was out and we were like, Huh? What is this? Because we hadn't seen sunshine in I-don't-know-how-long.

columbina asn't around yesterday (I'm guessing that this may have had to do with spousal birthdays) and I was sort of bored since he wasn't there to play with and nothing much was going on in the guild that interested me, so I came up with a new project: getting really really expensive armor to my dervish. (Vabbian armor, to be exact, which looks very much like this outfit from one of the early previews.) It costs 5 platinum for each piece, but the bad part is the crafting items you have to have: cloth, plus a certain kind of leather, plus rubies plus sapphires. Now rubies and sapphires don't quite cost what they cost in the real world, but they are currently running at over 4 platinum each, and you have to have up to six of them for each piece. I already had one of each that I'd acquired somewhere along the line, though, and last night I sold some stuff I'd been hoarding (not even all of my good stuff) and bought three more of each, giving me a total of 4 each. I have enough cloth, and almost enough Elonian leather for the whole thing, so I have all the stuff to buy one piece, at least, but since it doesn't match the armor I've currently got at all, by any stretch of the imagination, I'm going to wait til I have enough to at least buy the 4 basic pieces. (I usually hide my headgear anyway, so there's no rush to make that match.) I just will have to go somewhere and farm to get some more money. (I might could buy everything I need from my existing cash hoard, if I cared to, but I dunno, this is a silly luxury item - it doesn't get you any additional stats or anything at all in game terms - and I feel like I ought to do a little extra work for it if I really want it.)

This picture is the last really expensive armor I got - Rima the elementalist's 15k Kurzick armor, which those of you who pay attention to these things may remember seeing before. It's just changed color.)

Kurzick 15k elementalist armor
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

It was actually chilly outside today. It was around 80 a couple of days ago, but it's somewhere in the 50s today, which means I actually wore a coat this morning. In Galveston, this is a big deal, the first coat day of the season. (Some years it comes considerably later than this.)

Galveston is due to be invaded by some 300,000 bikers this weekend - it's something called the Lone Star Rally and it's been going on in Galveston for several years now and seems to be growing exponentially. Coincidentally, I am going to be out of town a good chunk of the weekend, which seems fairly fortunate. I have no problem with bikers but any of those times when there's an extra quarter of a million people on the island tend to get a little crazy.

I am going up to Houston for the International Quilt Festival, which I do every year, but this year for the first time I am spending the night. A couple of years ago they built a Hilton adjoining the convention center, and the temptation to book someplace to be able to go and collapse was just too much.

I know most non-quilters seem to have trouble even imagining what a quilt festival is like, but let me assure you, a lot of you artier types would like it a lot. They have literally thousands of quilts on display - both traditional and art quilts, and even a certain amount of clothing and dolls and so forth. Then there are the vendors, which go on for 20 aisles or so. They sell fabric, yes - but also antique quilts and all sort of sewing stuff and beads and gifts and well, you name it. If they think it will appeal to women - because a good 95% of the attendees are women, I would say - then somebody will be selling it. There are also classes and lectures and things that go on all week, and which usually fill up way, way early. I have never bothered with those.

So it's huge and really tiring, and I have developed this habit of taking hundreds of pictures to post online, so spending the night and going for two days sounded like a good plan. Last year I spent a whole day taking pictures and never even really looked at the vendors at all - I didn't really need to buy anything, god knows, but still I felt like I missed an awful lot. So - two days. Expensive (well, sort-of-expensive) hotel room. Camera and lots and lots of batteries. I'll get to test the limits of my memory card at last - maybe. (I have a really big memory card. That might be another one of those things I couldn't really afford. As is the camera itself, probably!)


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We are going to start having the option to do "compressed schedules" at work - things like working 4 10-hour days every other week and having a day off. No way I am doing 10-hour days - it doesn't make any sense for my job really, anyway - but my boss & I discussed a modified one where I would have a half-day off every week, which would be nice. I'm trying to decide if I could manage to get to work at 7:30 - then I could work 9 hours and still get off at 5:30, which wouldn't be bad. (I could also theoretically switch to 30-minute lunches, would be another option.) All that is still up in the air, though. We're not even implementing it till at least after Thanksgiving, it sounds like, anyway.

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I mentioned Holidailies yesterday - it makes me a little sad to look at that website. There's nothing sad about Holidailies, you understand, it's my entries there's a problem with. I'm up towards the top of the list of participants because I actually did update every day - but all those entries are gone. They were on Diary-X, and Diary-X blew up, for those of you who don't already know the sad, sad story. There was some sort of incident with a crash and bad backups, and everything that was there is just gone, gone, gone. (I may have drafts of some of those entries. To be quite honest, I haven't really checked. But I know that I would tinker with my entries after I put them up and I never would bother to save them again. So there's definitely no record of exactly what I had up over there. I even tried to look in the Internet Archives - whatever they're called - and nada.) I guess I should have learned from that. Do I have good copies of what I've written on Livejournal? Heck no.columbinahas an echo of his entries on his personal website, and I really should do something like that, but the odds that I will are pretty damn low.

 

Somebody on my friendslist wrote a "where I was" entry, and it reminded me that I've sort of been meaning to talk about this all day. I've talked about it before, but I think that entry is gone.

The thing is, I practically missed 9/11. (Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.)

I had called in sick, because I woke up with my usual sinus crap, headache & dizziness & all that stuff, and I slept late and then I read the rest of the morning. Nobody knew I was home (well, except my co-workers) because I didn't realize how bad I was feeling until after Rob had already left, so nobody called me to tell me, they just assumed I was at work & I would already know. I don't remember what I was reading, but I must've been really engrossed in it, because it was 2:00 before I got up. (It's possible that some napping went on somewhere in there, too.) When I did get up, I turned on the computer, not the TV - but I had AOL in those days (yeah, yeah, I know) and the picture of the burning towers was on the welcome screen. Some welcome. So then I turned on the TV, and I saw.

I remember that my first reaction was disbelief. And it's funny, I watched the CNN replay of the original coverage today, and it seemed like that was everybody else's first reaction, too. Not really surprising, but I missed all that at the time, see. Even after the 2nd plane flew into the towers, the commentators were still discussing whether it could possibly have been a mistake - some kind of terrible error  with navigational equipment. Yeah, right. Even though it was a perfectly clear day. And it was also very clear that when the first tower collapsed, nobody was wanting to believe what they were seeing. Even after the dust cleared enough that you could clearly see that there was no tower there, nobody would say it. Finally they started saying that part of the tower might have collapsed, that was as far as they went in the coverage I saw. And I mean, I'm not saying that that was an unnatural reaction to a huge event like this one - I'm just saying that I really didn't even know until today that that was the reaction at all. Even after all the years and all the press coverage, there are still big gaps in my knowledge about that day.

They also kept talking today about how beautiful the weather was that day, and I don't remember them saying that at the time. - They probably didn't, actually. It's the kind of thing you think about afterwards. It was beautiful here too. The only reason I went outside at all was because I had a 4:00 psych appointment. (This was during my Psycho Depressed Woman period.) I remember that the sky was very blue and that the dragonflies were swarming - something they do this time of year, but I've never seen as many as I saw that day. Now whenever I see a lot of dragonflies I always think about that day.

I've always thought that having missed all the early coverage of that day made it just the slightest bit easier to get through. Or maybe it was just partly the depressed state I was already in - my emotions were pretty much encased in cotton-wool already, at the time. I mean, I was still somewhat traumatized, definitely, but not to the degree that a lot of other people seemed to be. And at least by the time I found out what was happening, the worst of the uncertainty was over. I do think that was a help.

You know, though, there was another thing going on there. Maybe I'm just a more skeptical person by nature, because I always believed that there would be a terrorist attack in the US eventually. Do you remember people saying things like, "Oh, that'll never happen here"? I do. And I never believed them. I certainly didn't imagine the horror and the magnitude of that attack, but it didn't surprise me a bit that there was one. (I mean, hell, there had already been one. 1993, wasn't it?)

(This is sort of rambly but I'm sleepy and I don't have the patience to edit it any more. I hope this makes some sense.)