Catchy Name Needed

 I mentioned yesterday that I was feeling a little sick. Well, we are both sick - pretty mildly sick, I think it's just a cold - and furthermore, my sister and her husband are too. So I guess maybe somebody that waited on us earlier this week was sick, because meals were mostly when all four of us were together. (I believe one server on Christmas Eve mentioned that they were sending her home because she was sick, in fact.) But anyway, I'd rather have a cold than a severe allergy attack, because the cold will go away in a few days. With allergies you just don't know.

Rob went off to see the Halloween movie at the dollar theater. I just stayed home. I'm watching the MSNBC shows from earlier today (what the heck is the stock market doing?) and futzing around on the computer. I bought two more candles from Bath & Body Works (I always want to say Bed Bath & Beyond, but that's wrong) because they have the 3-wick candles on half-price sale again. I bought another Fresh Balsam candle and a non-holiday one that was Eucalyptus Mint or something like that. I thought that sounded like it was pretty safely something I would like.

I'm obsessing about Zoya polishes at the moment - not the new ones, but the old ones - like, the ones so old you can't figure out all the information on them. I suppose this is a stupid thing to obsess about, but I am just the same. (I have this spreadsheet with a lot of holes in it and I was trying to figure out some of the missing ones. I have names and Zoya's polish numbers and I'm trying to match those up, basically.)

Last night I finished the book that I was reading - one of the series that I didn't get around to talking about earlier, the October Daye books - one of Seanan McGuire's urban fantasy series - so then I had to decide what was next. I have unread stuff that I could have read without spending more money, but I really wanted to either get the next book in that series or the next Expanse book. That was book 9 of 12 on the October Daye books and I've only read the first Expanse book (Leviathan Wakes) - there are a bunch of those too, at least 8 of them, I think, from what I saw when I looked on Amazon. I like both series and I'm not in any particular hurry to finish one or the other. If the October Daye books seemed to be heading towards some particular ending, I would probably be wanting to finish, but as far as I can tell, they're mostly just serials and could possibly go on forever. I'm not far enough into the Expanse series to have any idea about that - it did have an ending to the first book, they're not just cliffhangers like, say, Lord of the Rings, where it's really just one book divided up. But there's plenty of plot to go on with, too. Anyway, I bought the second Expanse book, which is Caliban's War. It seems to pick up maybe a couple of months after the first one ends, from what I've read so far.

I think I intended to talk about baseball tonight. Or about television - I think that was because I talked about movies last night and television seemed like the next progression or something. My brain is kind of pinging all over tonight, though, so I don't know what you're gonna get.

If you read the entry from yesterday, but didn't read the comment that was added late in the day, MissMeliss reminded me that the actual title of the book that I was talking about at the end of that entry (although it's not the original title) is normally And Then There Were None, not Ten Little Indians as I was thinking. I think I just had the name for that poem - as I think I must have learned it - stuck in my head. And I read the Wikipedia entry and she is also correct that there's no Poirot, but I won't say any more than that about the plot. It's summarized at that link if you want to know. I can't believe I forgot, actually, now that I have been reminded, but in my defense I think it was somewhere in the range of 30-40 years ago that I last read it.


What I was going to say about television, really, is that I don't seem to be any good at binge-watching. I can watch maybe two or three episodes of something and that's usually where I'm ready to stop. And then I don't come back to them for weeks or months or sometimes more. (I'm still on season two of Agents of SHIELD, for example.) I'm trying to finish Iron Fist, even though it's not all that good, just to be completist, I guess, so I can eventually watch The Defenders. But I also haven't finished season two of Daredevil so if I'm really being completist I need to go finish that also. (I was watching Daredevil with Rob, but I think he's lost interest and I should give up on that part.)

I had watched one episode of Victoria and one episode of The Crown, and I liked them both a lot, but I had never gotten back to watching either of those. But last month when Rob went to Ohio to see his brother, I went to see my aunt for the weekend - she's always telling me to come visit more and I hardly ever do - and she and I bonded over The Crown. She is apparently a big watcher of Masterpiece Theater, and so she had seen Victoria (season 1, I mean) but she somehow had not heard about The Crown even though she has Netflix and when we looked it popped up on her recommendations. So we watched the first episode - I'd already seen it but I figured I could use reminding anyway - and then went on and watched a couple more. And I did watch some more of Victoria since then and I need to go ahead and watch some more of both of those because they're really good.

I really don't watch much series TV, when it comes down to it. The Netflix Marvel shows are probably the most of anything I've watched in ages. (Rob & I both watched one season of Daredevil and then Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and part of season 2 of Daredevil before we played out on that.) We watch a lot of MSNBC and a lot of baseball for six months a year - or seven, this year. (I'll probably come back to that subject another day. It's all I can do not to start typing about it in all caps, shall we say. If you read my Twitter you've undoubtedly already seen that once or twice.) ...And so those two between them take up a lot of TV time. We both work the evening shift and when we get home we typically watch Rachel Maddow and then Rob goes for a walk and I usually start watching baseball, if it's that time of year. (Sometimes I watch the whole game and sometimes I don't. Since I generally know already whether they won or lost that plays into how much I watch, quite often - if it was a blowout and they lost, for example, I sometimes don't bother at all! But this year that didn't happen much.)

Anyway, Rob watches stuff that I don't - I stay up much later than he does, and he gets up much earlier and watches a lot of TV then, I think. (Our bedroom walls are thick so we don't hear each other doing this unless the TV is turned up very very loud.) Rob also watches The Walking Dead (and now Fear the Walking Dead also) on Sundays but I gave up on that after season 2 - it wasn't really the violence per se, it was the worrying about who was gonna die next - and so now I go in the bedroom and let him watch and come out for Talking Dead afterwards. I can deal with Talking Dead just fine, a nice nerdy show that I know what to do with.

I joked to Rob that I am like those annoying commercials for that Microsoft Bing! or whatever it's called - where people start spewing all that random information on a certain keyword. Only mine's not really random, and of course I hope to god I'm not that annoying about it! But I'm full of all this newly-acquired information these days, and I'm dying to share. Where I am Bing-like is that if you say, oh, Parkinson's disease, you elicit an immediate brain-dump - I really did do that one the other day, but it was only Art, and he's increasingly deaf these days and won't wear his hearing aid, so I don't know that he even heard it. -- Which reminds me, Col asked for a brain-dump about nerves and I haven't gotten around to doing that one yet, so if I'm really as gung-ho as I say, I ought to get on the stick, shouldn't I?

The next chapters in Anatomy were two subjects that were at the end of the other book - the senses and the endocrine system - and so I am sort of sick of them and I decided to skip them for now. I will come back to them later. The next chapters were the one on blood (thus the "buffy coat" term the other night) and the one on fluid regulation, which didn't have its own chapter in Med Terminology. Something new, yay! (And blood is a very complicated subject so I certainly needed a refresher there.)

(I am tempted to talk about Michael Jackson or LOTRO but I think I will go study instead. The former subject, in particular, does not need any more input. I had to turn MSNBC off because they have abandoned politics for the evening in favor of 24-hr King of Pop, and it was making me nuts.)

Exactly one TV truck on the Seawall this morning. Which suggests to me that the Houston media haven't gone on full alert about this yet. But....

Our forecast takes the center of the storm about 50 miles south of the Louisiana coast today, then inland into the upper Texas coast near Galveston mid morning on Tuesday. Squalls are beginning to affect the southeast Louisiana coast this morning, and will spread westward along the Louisiana coast during the day, reaching the upper Texas coast tonight.

That sounds, um, kind of ominous. We haven't decided whether to do the wait-and-see thing or whether to preemptively get the hell out (at least as far as Houston). Stay tuned.

So, I went to bed thinking this tropical storm was about to hit us (although not terribly worried about it, admittedly), and it did rain quite a bit after I was in bed, but it never was bad enough to wake me up... and before I could really process the fact that that was a bit odd, Rob came in this morning and said that Humberto had turned further east during the night and became a hurricane - nobody at all had predicted that - and gone in just across the mouth of the bay from us, at High Island, and was wreaking all sorts of havoc over towards Beaumont, where nobody expected anything much and probably hadn't, y'know, even brought in the lawn furniture.

But that put us on the dry side, so once it went past us, we were done. The water's all calm this morning and everything. We did get quite a bit of rain, though. It started raining about 4:30 yesterday afternoon - I got really wet getting home - and rained steadily up until the thing went past us around midnight. Not much in the way of wind though, and the power flickered a few times but never did completely go out. (It did turn my computer off and back on a couple of times late in the evening, which can't possibly be good for it, but oh well.)

(Incidentally, the forecaster-types did say that Humberto had the potential to become a hurricane if it stayed off-shore long enough, but nobody seemed to expect it to, really. Predicting what the heck hurricanes are going to do is still a very chancy business.)

I just saw this little blurb, which I am pasting in in its entirety because I know some of us had been interested in this case:

New Trial in Teacher Porn Case
A judge granted a new trial to a former Norwich, Conn., substitute teacher who was convicted in January of letting students view pornography on a classroom computer. Julie Amero faced a sentence of up to 40 years in prison. She denied clicking on pornographic Web sites that appeared on her computer screen while teaching seventh-grade students in October 2004. The case prompted a national debate over spyware and other adware programs. Prosecutors didn't oppose the motion for a new trial.

I was dreaming, just before I woke up, about being at a conference - actually most of it was at somebody's house, but it was supposed to be a conference, you know how dreams are - and being left out of everything. (Or maybe just feeling left out of everything.) That's one of my very deep insecurities, and it keeps on rearing its ugly head from time to time. There was this very odd mix of work people and online people in the dream. It was weird - but then it was a dream, so I don't know why I should be surprised about that.

Anybody else notice that the two big news items of the day yesterday were that (1) Anna Nicole Smith did drugs (and died from them) and (2) Pat Tillman was killed by his own men? Neither of which is exactly a big shock. Now I have to admit that the complexity of Anna Nicole's drug cocktail fascinated me a bit - nine different prescription drugs? Man oh man. I think that's a person with some serious enablers around her.

My personal drug cocktail was apparently not quite up to par yesterday - or maybe it was just forgetting to take my drugs on time, or maybe it was just that I was tired - but when I left work yesterday, that walk to the car was a very painful thing. Very painful. I was shuffling along like a little old lady by the time I got out to the street. But I went home and got in bed and rested for a while and felt better.

Rob watched Flyboys last night - luckily, since I didn't really want to get interested in it, it turned out not to be a very good movie. One big bundle of cliches, was what it was. I was only half paying attention and I was still telling Rob what was going to happen before it happened. (Last week's Monday rental, Invincible, was much better. I liked that one quite a lot. I am not usually a huge fan of football movies, but I still liked it. It was sort of a football version of The Rookie - made by the same people, actually, I think.)

Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Apparently Merck has been spreading its money around really wisely, because our ultraconservative governor just signed an order requiring girls to have the HPV vaccine before they can start 6th grade. Wonder how much of a shitstorm this is going to stir up.


There has been no further bad Mom news today, at least so far. Oh, I don't guess I told you guys yesterday's bad news, which was that she wasn't eating. The hospice nurse says unless she starts again, that means we have about 10 days. I probably should have gone up there this afternoon, because I have been having to restrain myself from calling to find out how she's doing. (Which would probably be fairly useless, because Art wouldn't be home and never keeps his cell phone on.) I am going tomorrow, anyway.

So (deep breath) we are now dipping our toes into the wonderful world of funeral planning. We have gotten as far as deciding on the basics: cremation, memorial service at her church, etc. She has a plot next to my grandparents, if we decide to bury her ashes, but it seems like something of a waste to me. We are going to see what options the cemetery will give us. (Apparently my grandfather gave very generously to the cemetery association, so hopefully they'll be appropriately grateful to his family.) I was thinking that planting a rosebush or something by my grandparents' grave and putting her ashes under it would be rather nice. Also, the hospice nurse gave us a phone number for a guy who negotiates with the funeral home for you, and I haven't called him yet, but I think I'm going to on Monday, because I sure don't want to be dealing with those people by myself. I told my boss that I was going to try to work half-time next week, depending on how things develop. I don't think I can just sit at Mom's bedside all day, anyway.

I think I (unwittingly) was very mean to my sister earlier - I had called and left a message, because I wanted to make sure she wasn't going to pitch a fit about the cremation thing, and when she called back I said what was on my mind about the funeral planning, and I forgot that she didn't know anything about the 10-day business or that we had started talking about funeral arrangements at all. She took it fairly well, but I think she's kind of quietly going crazy up there by herself. (And she was fine with the cremation. She said the same thing I always say, which is that embalming is gross. It's funny, now that she's been away from her superconservative ex-husband for a while, she's changed her tune about all kinds of things. I was afraid she would have some sort of objection of religious grounds or something.)

I love Livejournal. I really do. I mean, how else would I ever keep up with you people? But Livejournal does not always make itself easy to love. Like, when you actually want to use some of their features? Well, it's not exactly intuitive, and the Help is not always so helpful. I spent a good little chunk of the morning trying to figure out how to filter my friendslist. All I wanted to be able to do was filter out all of the newsgroups and things when I'm in a hurry. And now I have it done, and yay! but my god, getting there was not easy. (I finally found this page after I got done - if you click on "read more" and scroll down some, it pretty much tells you what I wanted to know. But like I said, I only found that after I did it.)

(I started to just ask you guys instead. It might've been easier. But no, I had to go & try to figure it out myself.)

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Isn't it interesting how conservatives are all hot to limit awards on lawsuits until it's their house we're talking about?

This piece goes on for way too long about how all Buddhists aren't really so peaceable, but otherwise makes some good points. Did you know that there were two Buddhists in this Congress? I never heard a word about that, myself. No, all you heard about was Keith Ellison and his Koran. (I thought using Thomas Jefferson's Koran was very clever politically, though, as well as just being cool. It sure shut some people up, didn't it?)

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My cough is finally mostly gone, but my boss is sitting behind me coughing away. (This stuff has just been going round and round at work.) It makes my throat tickle just to listen to her.

(Livejournal does seem to have its Autosave feature back, at least. It's the small things.)

From Jon Stewart, of course:

If we're not winning OR losing in Iraq, are we at least covering the spread?

(see teh_daily_show for more)