Catchy Name Needed

"A witch, in the Dark Arts astute
Quickly transforms you into a newt
But soon you get better
And write a stern letter
That threatens her with a lawsuit."

I keep thinking I have an LJ entry to write, only by the time I get here, I forget what I was supposed to be writing, and anyway now I have had an ambien and if I write for long, things will start to get very very odd very soon. Can't have that. So I will only say that it's hot as blazing hell here and I can't wait for fall (but at least the tourists are mostly gone since school has already started in these parts) and I have had a bad week with parts of my body that are meant to bend refusing to bend properly, but I have good drugs so I'm muddling through. And amazingly, I have actually gotten some work done in the process.

I'm still playing too much Kingdom of Loathing, and I have also been rereading the last three Harry Potter books - the two together resulting in very odd dreams where KoL games are suddenly filled with Potter and company. -- Of course I had already done some muddling-together of those two fandoms anyway, in the real game - one of my characters has familiars named Hermione (a goat, I believe), Harry (who may be a blood-faced volleyball, I forget) and Cedric, the Cheshire bat, who is my favorite all-time familiar I think. I have taken various tacks on familiar-naming at different times. My original character mostly has familiars named after towns - I named my mosquito after my hometown because that just seemed right since it's mosquito-infested as all hell, and then I just kept on going with the town names after that. My third, post-ascension character has familiar names all starting with E - Elaine and Elspeth and Ernest and godawful victorian inventions like Euphremia. I don't know why I decided to do that, but it was sort of fun. It took a while to come up with "E" names that I liked for all 17 or so of them.

KoL is in nightly rollover so I thought I'd write for a few minutes. Yes, I DID get some sleep last night. I went to bed at 10:45 (after rollover, not completely coincidentally) and slept until 7 - so something approaching 8 hours of sleep! Yay me! I woke up several times but always went right back to sleep. What a relief.

I still feel like I didn't get as much done as I would have liked at work today. But apparently nobody else felt like working today, including the boss, so actually I was probably the productivity queen for the day, since I did get some work done, and nobody else seemed to do much at all.

I also burned CDs. I had this bright idea of doing an exchange of holiday mix CDs, which went over very well and we have 19 people participating. Unfortunately I failed to consider that mailing out CDs by the first of December meant I was going to have to listen to Christmas music in November in order to make the damn CDs. I hate listening to Christmas music before Thanksgiving. It's one of my unwritten rules. I think I ranted about this some during Holidailies last year - there just isn't enough Christmas music to listen to for very long. So if you confine it to a relatively short period of time you get much less sick of it.

I still have not started packing. That just seems to be meant to do tomorrow. Oh well. When I think about it too much I always overpack anyway. I also need to look and figure out what time we need to leave Sunday, because I don't really remember. I think maybe we're going to have to leave around 6 to be at the airport around 8. We don't get to Columbus until 4pm, and then we have to drive to Bowling Green to see some Suspects. Then back down the freeway to Rob's parents' house. Rob gets that part of the drive, because he's the one that was determined to get to his parents' house on Sunday. I said we should just spend the night in BG, but no. Anyway, it's going to be an awfully freaking long day, but we'll manage. We can rest up on Monday.

I said something about my mom's diagnosis in chat today, and they took it as a terrible horrible thing, which really wasn't how I meant it. I see it as a good thing - or at least, not as bad as it could be. We already pretty much knew it was a tumor by now, so "probably not malignant" is sort of a best-case scenario at this point. Well, of course "definitely not malignant" would be better, but still, not so bad. I should have my mom around and in decent shape for some time to come, and that's what I had been most worried about.

One reason I haven't updated much this week is because I have given in to the lure of the Kingdom of Loathing. I'm totally obsessed with this game, and I'm not even that much of a game person in general - well, at least, I don't run out and play every game that comes along. But damn, this one is fun. I did finally give in today and read a bunch of spoilers; it gets boring trying to combine things at random. Having some tips about what I'm supposed to be combining really helped.

So many people at TUS are playing this game that there's a Back Alley thread called "The Kingdom of Creepy" (thus the title above). But we have a clan! Clans are wonderful things. So are Mr. Accessories, which you get when you donate money - and since I'm crazy about this game, donating money to keep it going seemed like a good idea anyhow. And somebody gave my second character (yeah, I have a second character, I'm a great big dork) 60,000 meat! (Meat is the currency of the Kingdom. Don't ask me why.) I don't know what the deal is with that, but I'm not complaining.

Umm, let's see, what else... I've been really busy at work. Astros play at home tomorrow, which hopefully will go better than the games in St. Louis did. Roger is pitching tomorrow and Oswalt Sunday, so that helps.

Aside: at the beginning of the baseball season last year (so a year and a half ago, now) I had a dream that I slept with Roger Clemens. I was really puzzled about it at the time, because I've never even LIKED the guy. But now it seems sort of prophetic, doesn't it? -- Uh, you know, not the sleeping-with-him part - but jesus, who would have guessed that he'd be in the NLCS as an Astro this year?