Catchy Name Needed

It's funny, we've had U-Verse since the beginning of February, and it's only gone out a few times, which means it's probably more reliable than Time Warner/Comcast was, on the whole - but I don't know, the times that U-Verse chooses to go out seem to be more showy, or something. I had gone out to run some errands, and I got home about the same time that Rob got home from work, and when we started turning everything on we found that the TV, internet and phone were out. The phone came on after a while, but the TV and internet stayed out for several hours - but finally, after a long time on the phone with AT&T, we got it to reset. The tech said that the signal was there all the time (well, all the time I was on the phone with her - I suspect that it had been out at some point) but that something somewhere in the system was blocking it. She tinkered with things on her end and I hit a lot of reset buttons on mine and eventually - about the time she was about to submit a ticket to have a tech come out to the house - it decided to cooperate.

In other news, I have finished reading the chapter about the urinary system - lots more about glomeruli - and I am planning on taking the test over that and the respiratory system tonight, and after that there's only one chapter and one test to go, not counting the final. I need to pay for the coding class soon, so that when I'm ready for it I have the materials. If I understand the syllabus right, I have to complete it within 4 months, so that means that around Christmas, I'll be done. Well, and then after that (hopefully very soon after that) I'll have to take the certification test. Which means I'll end up being out of work for just about a year, assuming that I then get a job very quickly - and everybody keeps telling me that I will. Everybody I talk to in the healthcare industry makes it sound like the shortage for coders is nearly as bad as the one for nurses. (Nobody has said that outright, but that's what they make it sound like. Like they're pretty much desperate, really.) I hope they're telling me the truth, and not just trying to make me feel better!

We watched a couple of Buffy Season 4 episodes while we had no other TV. We have been gradually working through S4 recently, but I have also been cheating during middle-of-the-night study sessions and have worked ahead to S5. There may be a Buffy post in the offing (sooner or later when I get around to it).

I'm going to try to write an entry but my internet is being kind of wonky this morning so let's hope LJ doesn't eat it or something. (I started to say "eat it for breakfast" but it's already getting to be a litlle late for breakfast!)

I have just been looking at the calendar - we are going to Ohio in three two weeks. And taxes are due the day we get back. Yike. I am running very behind on the taxes - it's not mine I'm worried about so much, but we have to do that last tax return for my mother for 2007, and then, I dunno, do we have to do one for the estate, also? I didn't even think about that one until yesterday. Well, I am clearly going to be filing some extensions, anyway. I'll probably just do mine online like I always do, but I'm not confident enough about what I'm doing to do my mom's that way. (But damn, I probably have to do mine before I leave, then, because my in-laws do not do the online thing, unless I go over to my sister-in-law's house or something... which I guess I could do if worse came to worst!)

Let's see, what did we do this weekend? Not a whole helluva lot, actually. Saturday we went to the mainland, and Sunday Col and I played GuildWars almost all day, and squabbled a lot but managed not to kill each other. Rob went off to see some horror movie but I don't even remember which one it was. -- Oh, we did watch some DVDs over the course of the weekend - we watched Labyrinth, which amazingly, neither of us had ever seen. I liked it but I can't say I really adored it, it was too much of a kids' movie for that. (Not that that always stops me, really, but I dunno, it did somewhat with this one.) And we finished the Torchwood disc that we had, which was season 1, episodes 3-5 - Cyberwoman, and the fairies one and... I forget what the ep we had already watched before that was. Oh, Ghosts, I think it's called. The one with the alien cell phone thingamajig. I really like Torchwood generally - much more than I expected to. More than I like Dr Who, to tell you the truth. I like Dr Who but I have never been a huge, huge fan. Torchwood - well, we'll see how I feel when I get through the rest of series 1. But I like it a lot, in any case. I think I like that it's darker.

Well, we did finish watching the old "Lost" in time for the new "Lost" and I was pretty glad we did. It appears that we stopped watching right about the time the show started improving. And god knows there's not much else to watch right now, anyway!

Partly in service of improving the "nothing to watch" problem, I finally went onto netflix.com and reported the "House" disk that disappeared while we were moving as lost. (Heh, maybe it'll turn up on the island!!) It gave me a message when it went through that you can return the lost disk for a refund if it turns up within a year, which is nice - especially since I keep expecting it to turn up any day now. I know I saw it when we were packing, so unless we accidentally gave it to Goodwill, it ought to be here someplace! The problem is the boxes full of papers - mostly my mom's stuff - that we haven't gotten around to scanning/shredding yet. If it's in there, no telling how long it will be! The next thing we need to do, Netflix-wise, is either watch or return the two X-Files disks we have had out for ages.

This weekend is Mardi Gras (that is, the Galveston version, which is largely confined to the two weekends prior to Fat Tuesday), and the weather is supposed to be pretty nice for the Momus parade, which in turn means the traffic in Galveston, and especially getting in and out of town, will be horrific. We don't ever go to the parades, mostly because neither of us is big on crowds. One of these years I need to buy us grandstand tickets so that we will obliged to go to the big parade. It's supposed to be pretty nice, and I know that a good many people I know are probably actually in the parade, since it's a big deal in certain circles here. (Mostly the kind of circles that have money. Krewe membership is expensive.)

My sinuses are still making me crazy. It probably has to do with the ever-changing weather we get this time of year - one day cold, the next day warm. Quite literally. Yesterday morning it was pouring down rain; yesterday afternoon I got out on the porch and watered the plants barefoot. But this morning it was cold again.

I got my hair colored again yesterday even though it'd only been about six weeks, I think. But my bangs were way the hell down in my eyes and the gray was already visible in my roots, and I thought, well, if I'm going to go get my bangs trimmed I might as well do the whole shebang and get it over with. But I can't make a habit of doing it that often, it costs too much. I did make sure the guy trimmed the front shorter this time. Last time we were chatting madly about something-or-other and I forgot to pay sufficient attention to the haircut. I need to watch that. The haircut as a whole looks good, anyway, and so does the color. I look about 10 years younger with my hair colored and cut right, I really do.


I have to quoteursulahitler because this cracked me up - from a political discussion the other day: 'Look at this way: whoever wins, we'll be trading way, way up. The mayor from "Buffy" would be an improvement! Pre or post ascension, either way, he'd be better than W!'


Other linkiness:

I have been reading "Wicked" and I finished earlier. I thought it ended awfully abruptly, although of course you knew all along how it had to end. (Although don't I recall somebody saying that they tinkered with the ending for the musical?) Anyway, I had had a previous try with it as a Book on Tape, and I only got about halfway through - but Books on Tape are problematic for me due to my very short commute. It takes ages for me to finish anything if I'm listening in the car, so I don't think it was that I didn't like it, exactly, I just lost steam. With the paperback I plowed right through it in a few days. I will have to start again and go slower. (I think that means that I liked it, don't you?)

Also, I never got around to saying that we went to see "Sweeney Todd" on Sunday - neither of us had seen the musical so we didn't exactly know what to expect, but we both liked it. But then we have always both been Tim Burton fans, and of course Rob loves things like Hammer films so that kind of Grand Guignol stuff is really right up his alley. I didn't have any problem with the singing - Johnny Depp turned out to be a better singer than Ms Bonham-Carter, definitely, but I thought her little wispy voice worked pretty well, on the whole.

We have shiny new digital cable so we have been watching BBC America and things like Indieplex, some. We watched two Torchwood episodes Saturday night, and then Graham Norton afterwards, which was really a hoot. I am not a Doctor Who fan in a huge way like some of you people on my f-list, so I wasn't sure whether I would get into Torchwood or not, but I like what I've seen so far. More X-Files-ish than Doctor-ish, on the whole.

And thennonelvis went and linked elsewhere to the trailer for the new series, which I couldn't bear not to watch. I know all the big Torchwood fans have seen it already, but there may be some Spike fans who have missed it, so I will see if I can get it to embed correctly (my first YouTube link!):

I was looking at that picture I posted yesterday, and in case anybody is paying attention: yes, those are part of the seasonal decorations I was talking about liking so much that are visible in that picture. However, I have to add a disclaimer, that those damn scarecrows are not the part I was talking about, cause I hate those things. Ugh. Luckily they are not really in my line of sight. You can see my gargoyle in that picture, incidentally, but "Gene Simmons" (I think - I am not really up on my Kiss) is mostly hiding my skull wreath with her head - you can see just a bit of it sticking out on one side. I suppose I have to take those down now - although maybe I can get away with leaving them up until tomorrow and saying it's for Day of the Dead.

Darnit, the icon reminds me that I meant to watch Nightmare Before Christmas last night and I forgot, by the time I pried Rob away from the damn live Ghosthunters episode. (Which was boring as hell. Oh, look, the ball rolled across the floor by itself. Scary!)

And I better save any more rambling for the NaBloPoMo entry that I will have to do later, I suppose. But I figured I better not complain about those scarecrows in a public post, since one of my co-workers (who I am otherwise very fond of) bought the stupid things.platypus said that she might do Holidailies instead of NaBloPoMo, and try to write real entries instead of just rambling. Which is what I usually try to do for Holidailies, too - and I am still doing both, but NaBloPoMo will do good to get rambling. I think I just consider NaBloPoMo to sort of be a warmup!

I've had an ambien and I am hoping I will be able to go to sleep in a while, and then conceivably get my sleep back on schedule. Cross your fingers.

This may well be a sort of "bits and pieces" entry, since my mind is going off in a bunch of different directions, as usual.

I want to record something actually useful that I heard somebody say on CNN today. It was some expert talking about the evacuations in California because of the wildfires, but it would apply just as well to our kind of evacuations - it was what to grab if you have to evacuate in a hurry. They called it the "six P's" although there were really more than six. Luckily they said it a couple of times so I was able to get it all scribbled down:
-- people and pets
-- pills or prescriptions
-- papers, the important kind
-- plastic, as in credit cards, or money
-- your PC - I don't think they meant the whole thing, really, but your data burned to a disc
-- pictures

Also, I am watching "The Dresden Files" which I sort of like, although I don't quite understand why. It's not great, but it's oddly watchable. (I'm told that everybody does not agree with this opinion.)

Oh, and when I read back over what I wrote in the last entry, it reminded me that my 6-year-old cousin Laci really did not know what to make of the box of ashes yesterday. She has presumably been indoctrinated into some varation on evangelical christianity, and I know at least some of those types think that you have to preserve your body after death, because you'll get your same earthly body back when you go to heaven. (Which personally I think is a really appalling idea. Yuck.) Anyway, from the questions Laci was asking, it sounded like maybe she had been told some version of this story. Her mother had to explain to her that Aunt Billie Dell wasn't in that body anyway, she was in heaven and she had a whole new body which wasn't sick any more. Stephanie (the mom) also said later that she figured that my mom and my grandmother were up in heaven watching us and laughing. All I know is, if they were watching, she would be right. They would totally be laughing. Both my mother and grandmother had a fine sense of the ridiculous.

I don't want to go to work tomorrow. I want a day to recover from the weekend, dammit. But I guess I'd better go to bed, since I'm not getting it.

Dervish dance
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

You know I can only go so long without a GuildWars picture. This is Sharzad the Dervish, doing the whirling thing in her very, very expensive new armor. (I know it looks like a party dress, but it's armor, ok? That's just the Way of Guild Wars.) I gather that columbina was not terribly impressed by Sharzad's armor, after all the talk about it - it had its own thread on the guild forum, no less - but I love it and I'm the one who has to look at it all the time, so that's what matters, right? I guess it's all that detail on the skirt that appeals to me so much.

We went to see Letters from Iwo Jima yesterday (which was really, really good, by the way), and we missed the first quarter of the Super Bowl because of that. I don't usually get all that excited about football these days, and even the commercials have been pretty lame the last couple of years, but I have to admit that what I saw of it this year was fairly entertaining. The game was close enough to be in doubt until pretty close to the end, and at least some of the commercials were funny - even the Kevin Federline one, much to my surprise. (Some of the other much-ballyhooed ones were pretty lame. Go Daddy - yuck. Career Builder's "office jungle" stuff was off-putting. And the men licking the HHR was just plain weird.) Oh, I also liked "connectile dysfunction" - was that Sprint? - they hit just the right straight-faced tone with it, I thought.

(No mom news to speak of. She's just the same.)

I can’t sleep. I got up and took a benadryl and I’m hoping it kicks in soon. I’ve felt fairly crappy all day today and I really don’t want to miss work tomorrow. Especially since I am going to be gone Tuesday in any case, in order to have the damn needle biopsy that I put off last week because I was so sick. I have now been sick for just about two weeks, and I am awfully fucking tired of it.

Until today, I had actually been feeling better. The last couple of days I had still coughing some, but not quite as much, and I felt quite a lot better. Well, I don’t care - if I still feel this bad tomorrow, I’m staying home. They can manage without me for a couple of days, and I can stay home and lounge around in bed and read Harry Potter and take naps, and hope that  that makes me feel better, because I’ve had it with being sick.


Did y’all see the piece on Netflix on 60 Minutes? It made me want to watch all the Netflix DVDs that are lying around my house so I can get new ones. I had already watched one on Friday - the first four episodes of the Christopher Eccleson season of Doctor Who. Then tonight I watched another one - the last disk of the BBC Bleak House from last year. (I really do need to read that book.)


Yesterday we finally got the license plates for the new car, and since the check for the down payment also finally came through the bank this week, I finally feel like we actually own the car. I mean, really, if somebody wrote you a check for over $2000, would it take you three weeks to cash it? I was beginning to think they lost it.

Here's the rules:

Bold the shows you've watched at least three complete episodes of.

Italicize a show if you're certain you've seen every episode of it.

Strike through if you've never even heard of it.

Asterisk if you have some particular fondness for it.

Hey, look, Battlestar Galactica has a wiki! I don't know why I should be surprised, actually, since everything seems to have a wiki these days. I, of course, am all about GuildWiki myself right now - except it's not really quite true to say that I check it constantly or anything, because actually what I mostly do while playing Guild Wars is follow Columbine around. (I think I've already stopped thinking of Columbine as Columbine - not the name, I mean, but the physical features. Instead of a really tall guy with curly brown hair, I now think of him as a really tall warrior chick with silver hair. And somehow I bet he doesn't mind that!) Anyway, it's sort of the lazy way to play, all that following. Except that I went to bed with a sore neck last night, so I guess it's not as easy as it sounds. I think that sooner or later I probably ought to make him let me navigate, just the same, even if I get us lost some of the time. (That's not to say I'm not having fun, you understand. We got up to level 10 last night! Yay us!)

I really haven't done much else. I went to the quilt retreat Saturday, and I wrote about it over here, if you're interested in knowing more. I finished my quilt! that was the big news as far as I was concerned. Now I have three weekends to finish the other one. The deadline is because they have to be done by April 27th for the quilt show. (And if you happen to be interested in that, there is information here.) (Although I have trouble accessing that site from work, for some reason. I think that's a problem with the system here, though, not the site.)

And it's baseball season! Woo-hoo!