Catchy Name Needed

 I'll quote what I just said about Last Jedi in my own comments:


(I was trying to hurry so I could make the Holidailies cutoff at midnight, but then I realized they're unlikely to have the cutoff be Central time, anyway, unless they have a rolling cutoff that uses each person's own time zones. I'm just not going to worry about it.)

We saw the aftermath of a horrific-looking wreck on the way to the movie theater (a car basically underneath a pickup) and when we came back through three hours later they were still clearing it up. It looked like they basically had cut the car that was on the bottom apart. I'm trying not to speculate about what happened there.

I stayed up until well after daylight the last few days. I have to go back to work on Wednesday so I need to shift my bedtime at least a little earlier than that! I have no sense of time, that's basically my problem. Sitting here in the living room facing away from the windows I don't even necessarily notice that it's getting light until I get up to go to the bathroom or something.

Which reminds me, I don't really make resolutions, but I want to stop feeling guilty, somehow, for being a night person. People get so judgy about it, and I'm sick of that shit. I like to sleep in the daytime, so what. (I'm not really talking to you guys, of course.) Oh, did I mention that my sister is now on the exact same schedule? She sleeps til the middle of the afternoon just like I do. Apparently at her previous job - which she has now quit - she was mostly working evenings, too. We used to seem so different when we were younger but now we are exactly alike in a myriad of ways, so much so that it's slightly alarming. (What, is my entire personality just genetics?)

I posted a video and some links about the music of 1983 yesterday, and then, because the embed code is apparently wonky, I published another entry with another video. It had a paragraph of text so I went ahead and used that for a Holidailies entry just now, even though I really think that's cheating. It's not cheating by Holidailies' own standards, I know - I remember Jette saying ages ago that you can just post a picture every day if you want to.- but it's cheating by my personal internal standards of what constitutes an entry. I guess I'm a little old-school about that. I don't necessarily think you have to have five random things, as they used to say, but I feel like I have to have at least, say, two or three paragraphs of random drivel before it counts. (Or one long paragraph would do, too, I suppose.)

I'm not even sure how long I've been doing Holidailies. More than ten years, for sure. I think I started in 2004? Or was it 2003? It was 2003 at the earliest - I had no journal before that - and I'm pretty sure 2005 at the latest. It was so long ago that I started out on Diary-X, for god's sake. (I could check my Livejournal, or check the old LJ entries here, for that matter, because I know there was a point where I mention on Livejournal that I was doing Holidailies on Diary-X, but every time I go look at the old entries I fall into an hours-long wormhole, so that would probably end any chance that I would finish this tonight. I have to go to bed before dawn tonight.)

Oh yeah, that - the staying-up-til dawn thing, I mean. I literally watched TV all night last night. That's not really terribly unusual for me, if it's baseball or some movie, but it's unusual for me to watch MSNBC all night and end up going to bed during Morning Joe, at least it is nowadays. I stay up that late a lot, but I don't usually stick with MSNBC that long. I really do love MSNBC, but usually when it starts over with some show that I already paid attention to the first time, I turn it off. But I was transfixed enough by the Alabama election results that I just turned off the sound when they started repeating Chris Matthews' midnight hour (I guess that was at 3am) instead of turning it off, and turned it on again at 4 when the early-morning news started up. I'm not really sure what time I actually went to bed - maybe at 7? I was very sleepy by then, and I got up at 1:30, I know, so that's not really enough sleep. I got through the day ok, but if I do it again I'm going to be very sorry.

I should be studying. I also need to wash my hair. Maybe I will alternate these things and get them all done at some point this afternoon. (Later: I did, except there wasn't enough studying in the equation, really.)

I slept for over 9 hours last night/this morning. This would worry me, except that I didn't get enough sleep Saturday night so I suppose I was just catching up.

In school news, I finally finished the Chapter From Hell. Apparently I am not the only one who calls it names to that effect. I haven't gotten my full grade back yet, but I made an 88 on the test so hopefully it will at least be some sort of passing grade. (The average grade on the test was 83; I don't remember exactly what the average grade on the homework was, but it was considerably lower than that. So I'll be happy with passing, in this case.)

Oh, my husband would like you to know that Zombieland is very, very funny. I refused to go with him because (a) I don't like zombie movies that aren't Shawn of the Dead, and (b) I can't stand Woody Harrelson, especially in large quantities. (The example I used was that No Country for Old Men was ok on (b) because( spoiler! ).) But Rob liked it a lot. The kid's narration was what made it so funny, he said. And he liked the Surprise Guest Star, which I won't spoil in case you don't know who that is. (I looked at IMDb to see who else was in it and of course found out the answer to that in the process. So don't look there, either, if you don't want to know. Evidently it has a very small cast if you don't count all the uncredited zombies.)

I tinkered with jewelry a while yesterday, while Rob was at the movie, and I declared my skull necklace finished, finally - although then when I showed it to Rob I started thinking about rebalancing it because the one stone bead on it is heavier than everything else and is making it lie funny. I intended to put a lot of charms on it and I put exactly one charm on it and then looked at it and decided I liked it that way. So there may be a Halloween necklace #2 because I have all these charms that I didn't use. (There are pictures of some of this stuff on Flickr, if you want to see.)

Alright. Off to study.

Sunday night random:
I hardly got any sleep Friday night, so I made up for it by sleeping 12 hours last night. I don't know, is that even good for you? Now I won't be able to go to sleep until the middle of the night again tonight.

I'm watching Independence Day. I don't know why. I have to say, even after 12 years, though, it's still pretty entertaining. I only know it's 12 years old because I looked it up, by the way. 1996. (I guess that makes it 12-1/2, actually. I'm still doing  math in my head based on it being 2008.)

Packrat - it's a Facebook game, I don't know any way to link to it directly - is driving me crazy. I guess it's a mark of a good game that it drives you crazy and you keep going back, right? (Here's a page with some examples of the cards you collect for it.)

Monday random:
Sleep still kind of all over the place. I woke up at 5:30 and stayed up til Rob left for work at 7, then I conked back out for several hours. I guess I need to just start getting up early and if I can make myself do that then going to bed will probably sort itself out.

I said I was going to start applying for jobs starting today, and I actually did: I applied for a part-time library job at U of Houston. (Not at UH-Downtown, profrobert , they must've filled that one - at least, I didn't see it when I looked.) I am still unsure about what I really want to be doing, but library jobs sound more attractive than secretarial ones at the moment. And ideally, I would like to be working something like 30-32 hours a week, but I know that may not be an easy thing to find.

The Idiot's Guide to the Texas Speaker's Race (from Texas Monthly) - I had no idea that the R/D split in the Texas House was so close. It's 76-74. I mean, think about that. Even with that incredible job of gerrymandering that DeLay and his buddies did after 2000, that's the best the Republicans could do.

Good lord, Waterford Wedgwood is bankrupt. Is nothing sacred? (That's right up there with the Boston Globe discontinuing their classifieds, which Col linked to earlier today.)

I was going to post the results for the "What metal are you?" quiz - mostly because it's been days and days since I posted a meme - but I lost it. I know you're crushed. (My answer: copper.)

Oh, and prodded by Col, I watched Wall-E last night. I have to say that it was better than I remembered; however, I stand by what I said in this entry about the part on the ship being relatively weaker. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it's more conventional.) The parts with Wall-E and Eve alone - or just Wall-E and the cockroach - are the parts that are really extraordinary.


(I picked that icon in order to be random. Besides, I like it and I never remember to use it.)

(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's 6:15, and I've been up for a while. I don't like getting up this early, but I woke up around 5 and was laying in bed making myself depressed, as I am wont to do, so I thought I would get up. What I really want to do is take the other half of my ambien from last night and sleep another 4 hours, but instead maybe I will go get breakfast somewhere, or at least coffee. (I am developing a bad Starbucks habit.)

I didn't do a damn thing yesterday except play Auto Assault.( And a bit of GuildWars. )

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.

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.)

I woke up at 5am and couldn't go back to sleep - which means I got a whoppin' 5 hours of sleep, total - so I finally gave up and came in to work early. I did have stuff to do and I'm leaving early today anyway so this just means I can leave a little earlier! Hooray for haircuts. (I'm presumably also getting my hair colored, actually, which is not all that much fun but I like it once it's done.)

I posted a bunch of nattering about Lord of the Rings over here, in case anybody's interested. Although it's really only about half of a rant. I ran out of steam before I got to the rest of it.