GeeCee's Not-Entirely-Original Miscellany

It was a gorgeous day today, so what did I end up doing with it? Sleeping solidly from a little after 5 AM (hooray reflux!) until around 9:30 or so, when the cat started stomping on my head and chewing on my hand. (Better the hand than last weekend's stunt of chomping on my ear to make me get up and feed him.) Another half hour of broken sleep while I tried to hit the snooze button on a hungry cat, then up for good. Showered and started to get ready to go out to ka_crow's reading at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, sat down on the couch...and proceeded to sleep like the dead from about 1 PM to a little after 4:30. Did not see the poetry reading, did not do any housecleaning, did not do any laundry, did not clean out the fridge and/or go grocery shopping yet. So yeah, a productive day. =( Now I've got about two hours of work I have to get done for tomorrow morning because I couldn't stand to stay in the office after 7:45 on Friday night; at least I can start some laundry while I'm doing that. Assuming, that is, that I don't fall asleep again; it's looking pretty tempting at the moment.

10-second commentary: "In the Name of the King", despite having nearly everybody in the world in it, is so terrible that it wraps back around into awesome. In contrast to "Transporter 3", Jason Statham doesn't take off his shirt even once, at least not that I noticed--and I like to think I would've. (I read a quote someplace once about how Statham can act, he just doesn't generally have to.) To be fair, it's an Uwe Boll movie and I didn't exactly expect "Citizen Kane", but sheesh.

I'm annoyed that the majority of my XM presets are now either dead air or redirect to some pale imitation of the stations they were before. Lithium, in the time I've listened to it, sucks and I want Lucy back. Fred > First Wave. I didn't care much for listening to Billy Zero babble on XMU, but his playlists were good; the updated XMU isn't quite doing it for me. The System is gone. Fine Tuning now redirects to Spa, which from spot-checking seems to be crappy newage background music instead of the eclectic mix that Fine Tuning had been playing. Vox is gone. XMX is gone. X-Country is now Outlaw Country and the jury's still out on this one since I haven't listened to it much yet. (No puns intended.) People are acting like having his show available is a benefit, but frankly I will pay money to not listen to Howard Stern.

The only additions on the new lineup that are looking appealing right now are Little Steven on Underground Garage, and BBC Radio 1 pretty much only for Pete Tong's show (which I can listen to online anyway). Maybe an occasional flip to the Grateful Dead channel. And of course I'm going to have to listen to the 80s Hair Metal channel.

What I'm really annoyed about is that there was no notice sent to subscribers, at least as far as I can tell. I got an email the day the lineup switched pointing to a web page with the new station listing. A little warning would've been nice, guys. I'll admit it though: I'm not planning to my subscription even with the annoyance because terrestrial radio is so close to completely unlistenable, so this is just me shaking my tiny fists ineffectually at my new merged satellite radio overlords.

Had time to stop for a gingerbread latte on the way to work this morning. Yay.
Promptly spilled coffee all over my white sweater. Boo.

Got a slice of their yummy pumpkin loaf for breakfast. Yay.
Turns out someone mixed up the batter and used banana bread batter instead of pumpkin loaf batter, which I discovered after taking a bite out of it. Eating banana in any amount makes me very, very unpleasantly ill. Boo.
Starbucks in question is 25 miles away in Fair Lakes so can't go run back in there. Boo. I should probably call them though.

[Edit: Called them, they responded with what seemed to me the appropriate amount of concern and offered me tomorrow's drink on the house. I never have time to go in there in the mornings so I declined, but points to them for taking it seriously.]

STRESS LEVELS STILL V HIGH STOP SEND BEN & JERRY'S CREME BRULEE STOP NEED REAL VACATION STOP

My 23:10 flight to DC has now become my 01:15 flight to DC for some weather-related reason, apparently. (My sources near Dulles, however, say "Buh? It's been really nice today, it's not raining.") My driving today has been for crap, and I've pulled a couple boneheaded manuevers that could've caused damage to my rental car and/or someone else, thanks to sleep dep; fortunately everyone escaped unscathed, but not through any effort of my own. I had spicy food for dinner, I'm out of antacids, and everything in the entire airport is closed. To quote Beavis and/or Butthead: "This sucks!" I also got the super-special-security-screening, complete with patdown and swabs of every piece of carryon luggage I had. Yay. Good thing I showed up way early.

On the brighter side: I had a really good couple of days, I failed to fall asleep and drown in the hot tub this afternoon, there was a tasty Ethiopian dinner tonight with brian1789, patgreene, cyan_blue, and S. and K., and now I'm headed home (eventually, I hope) to my sweetie and my cat and my very own bed.

Where's my snow day, damnit?

[Edit: Office closing at 2:15. Half-day off is much better than none at all.]

Heavy snow out here of the good, wet, sticky variety perfect for snowball fights. ("Good" depending entirely on whether you have to shovel the stuff, I guess.) Too bad that here = the office. :-P

It is supposed to get nasty and icy later this afternoon though, so maybe I'll get to go home early where I can restock the bird squirrel feeders and then curl up with some hot chocolate and a fuzzy blanket. And a book that isn't "The World is Flat", guh.

Tonight I am moping. Seriously, my bottom lip enters rooms before the rest of me. Eh. Bed is in my future soon, and I'm sure I'll be perkier tomorrow morning. There are a couple of things that are lightening up the mood now though:

1) The Fark Photoshoppers take on Rogue from the Crüxshadows. *dies* (ganked from anmorata)

2) My copy of The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse showed up yesterday. There are some absolute howlers in here, like this fine example [edit:] which one probably isn't surprised to learn should be credited to someone named Bulwer-Lytton (Robert being the son of Edward, who brought us the immortal "It was a dark and stormy night"):

( Check to Song )

There are also entries from Wordsworth, Byron, Longfellow, Tennyson, and others known more for their Good Verse. It's nice to see even they could turn out some real clunkers. XD Even better than the poetry though is the index. Picking some at random:

German place-names, the poet does his best with, 54
Italy, not recommended to tourists, 125; examples of what goes on there, 204, 219, 221
Manure, adjudged a fit subject for the Muse, 91
Rum, grateful strains inspired by, 8
Stud-farms, essential to the Empire's continued existence, 252
Truffle, love-lorn, 108
Wives should wash occasionally, 63; a modicum of intelligence desirable in, 158; but not too much, 211

Right shoulder and elbow absolutely killing me? Check. (I hope it's just because I had to switch back to a mouse on my home desktop since my trackball died, because that little ergonomic problem is fairly easily remedied.)

Air conditioning in the car suddenly not working on a high-allergen day when it's already 82 degrees at 9 AM? Check.

XP user profile on the work computer completely corrupted? Check.

That's three; from now on the day will look up, right?

Friday night was a lovely social evening of the sort I haven't had in a while. aroraborealis was in town and nminusone and I met up with her and the lovelytikva (and Brodie) and dragoncrunchies for mezze at Zaytinya (another restaurant run by the folks behind Jaleo and Cafe Atlantico). The food varied from "this is pretty good" to "ohmygod, I could die happy right now", the white wine/vodka/pomegranate juice cocktail was tasty (and dangerous, it didn't taste alcoholic at all), and the company was a lot of fun. I'm reminded of how much I really enjoy going out for dinner with friends and spending the evening talking and laughing and enjoying good food, I don't manage to do that nearly as often as I should.

After heading home and making a quick stop at Wegmans, Chris and I went to go see "V for Vendetta". I actually thought it was reasonably well done, but then I'm not a purist about these sorts of things and can be happy without a direct book-to-film translation. I had some quibbles with a couple of changes they made, but overall I didn't find it particularly disappointing.

Yesterday Chris and I decided to raid Tyson's so we could hit The Body Shop for smelly stuff for him and Sephora for "make your skin look better and minimize wrinkles" stuff for me and then continue with the mezze theme and have dinner at Lebanese Taverna in Tyson's II. After dinner, we came home and curled up on the sofa to watch "Matchstick Men".

Today's accomplishments have consisted entirely of cleaning off my desk a bit and shredding a bunch of paper and doing a little bit of gardening just in time for the possible snow on Tuesday. Sheesh. Given the time, I doubt there will be much more accomplished than that. Perhaps some laundry and hopefully clearing out the guest room a bit, and definitely cleaning up after the various pets.

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I've noticed I haven't felt much like writing here lately, and I've been particularly bad about commenting and even worse with responding to email. My moods are up and down, mostly down. I suspect it's in large part hormonal, but there've been some changes in my supplements lately that probably aren't helping much. I've been pretty grumpy today for various reasons; digging in the dirt helped, but it's getting too dark to continue and that leaves me with housework that I really don't much want to do. Meh.

I rarely come down with anything serious or annoying enough to keep me home sick from work, so why does it have to happen on the day I was planning to hang out with indyansel? Grump. Hopefully it's a 24-hour bug and I'll be okay to go have dinner with folks tomorrow evening.

I blame NASA for screwing with my horoscope. Last week it said "you'll hang out with an out-of-town friend and have an excellent time", and now it's changed to "you'll skip work and socializing because you need to stay home in your jammies in a cool, dark room (when you're not busy whining about being sick on the intarweb)". Why, I oughta sue!