Ordinary Day

It is good to know that the Onion can still bring the Funny: Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress

I particularly like this part:

Carrying a majority of the popular vote, Obama did especially well among women and young voters, who polls showed were particularly sensitive to the current climate of everything being fucked.

( Some contemplative election thoughts )

I'm seeing this all over my Friends list already, but let me add my voice to the chorus of sorrow at the passing of George Carlin.

I have very early memories of Carlin being a favorite of my father's, in no small part because Dad was frequently told by people that he reminded them of George. They were correct. Dad had the same sort of lean, wiry build that George did, the same sort of attitude, and many of the same habits and sense of humor.

We had two old Carlin albums in Dad's record collection: On the Road, which has some of George's most hysterical material ever, and Take-Offs and Put-Ons, notable for the "Wonderful Wino" sketch as well as "Indian Sergeant". Later on I picked up a tape of What Am I Doing in New Jersey?, and A Place For My Stuff.

I still snicker at "A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it!" and "Now, an announcement from the National Apple Institute: FUCK PEARS!"

But really, my favorite sketch of his ever, which is sadly apt with this news, is the one he did about death on On the Road: "I don't wanna be buried when I die. I don't wanna be cremated either. I wanna be BLOWN UP!" And, "There's a little known--and less understood!--portion of death called the Two Minute Warning."

Gonna miss you, George. I hope you used those two minutes, man.

Okay, I might have me some breast cancer, but all things considered, I'd much rather have that than the BRAIN EATING AMOEBA. I mean, damn. I've SEEN those episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

Here are some other things I am grateful for, in the meantime:

• jessicac came over last night, armed with a piece of apple pie and an entire peach pie, and some Haagen-Dazs cinnamon dulce de leche ice cream. That ice cream is, I'm here to tell you, ecstasy in a spoon. Also, Jessica's little girl is unbelievably cute with solarbird's red house slippers jammed onto her hands, and crawl-clomping all over our kitchen floor, babbling nonstop in fluent Baby all the while. I'm just sayin'.
  
  
• For round two of Snacks and Cute Babies Therapy, kathrynt came over today with her cute child and a box full of cupcakes. Lillian is not quite as fluent in Baby as Moira, but she's got that speed-crawl down now. She also clued in very quickly to the Find Anna's Face Behind Her Hand Game, and she was absolutely fascinated by each and every object on our coffee table. Most of which were not baby-safe in the slightest. Except maybe the wooden coaster. We let her have that.
  
  
• Tomorrow there will be Russell Crowe and Christian Bale double-barrel-shotgun goodness in 3:10 to Yuma. This movie could suck like a great big sucking thing (not that I think it will, 'cause Russell's generally pretty good about not being in movies that suck), and I'd still enjoy watching these two boys for two hours.
  
  
• Tomorrow there will also be a Murkworks Kitten-Finding Expedition. Given the current circumstances, spazzkat has bumped up the priority of getting some kittens into this household. We're in definite pet shortage around here, and we've got a multi-kitten situation at hand, definitely. If we're lucky, we should have cute kitten pictures to share with the world in the next 24-48 hours.
  
  
• Sunday, hopefully, there will be a meeting of some cross-section of our household and technoshaman's to make music. There are plans to play around with the recently released songbook of Heather Alexander songs and to indulge in the snacks kindly provided by the aforementioned Jessica and Kathryn.
  

And I made me a new version of my "Something Beautiful" icon tonight, partly because Alan Doyle is always good for the easing of my heart, and partly because "Something Beautiful" is a song that's really called for right now.

I don't have any immediate kith and kin in Minneapolis, but for those of you out there who do, after reading about the bridge collapse tonight, I'm very much thinking of folks there tonight. From what I'm seeing in the articles coming over the news sites, that whole situation is just absolutely unreal and scary.

I've always been a tad bit nervous about driving over bridges, just because I can't swim worth a damn. It's never been a real phobia, mind you--just an occasional little nervous thought. But a little nervous thought is one thing. The actual reality is something else entirely.

I know I've got folks on the Friends list who are in that area, so please know, again, I'm thinking of you folks. Hang in there as best you can and take care of yourselves.

I'm just sayin', after plowing through the DVDs of most of Season 2 of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, all I can think after reading this story about a robot that's going to explore a hole into the Earth's crust at the very bottom of the sea is "this has giant radioactive submarine-grabbin' sea monster written all over it".

I mean, seriously, the rock down there is even dark green. Irwin Allen couldn't have asked for a better setup!

And now, to make up for last weekend, I'd like to post about some things that don't suck.

I have once more begun to try to cut down on my soda. I am trying not to get too ambitious about the goal here or to make long-term plans, since my luck with that lately has been kind of sketchy, but for the last two days at least I've limited myself to two cans of soda a day. At the same time, I'm trying to take myself off the Trazodone since I have reason to believe it's messing with me, and I've stayed off that for the last two days too. So far I have noticed an immediate lessening of the general background noise of tension I've had in my system for a while. This is a very good thing indeed. And I need to remember this feeling for the next time I start getting way too interested in the diet Dew.

I got a surprise letter from the College of Veterinary Medicine at WSU yesterday, informing me that Ravenna Animal Hospital had made a donation to them because of Polly. And Polly has been added to the list of pet names here. That was an incredibly sweet gesture of the vet, and made me feel rather misty.

A story on our site made me feel kind of misty, too. A couple of days ago we'd run this article about how lack of dental care is leaving the poor in agony, and as part of that article a picture had been run of a guy who was sobbing in the dental office since his blood pressure was too high for them to give him anesthetic. Apparently this prompted an outpouring of offers to help from Times readers to get this guy the dental care he needs. That really made me go "awww". Sometimes, every so often, people don't suck.

As y'all have seen over the last week, I've been more aggressively reading. Which has meant that I haven't listened to stuff on my iPod as much, and that means I have yet to actually listen to the new podcast from Great Big Sea! *blush* I really must correct this little problem this weekend. I may lose my GBS fan cred if I don't. ;)

What I have been listening to, though, is Carbon Leaf. I am seriously grooving on Ether-Electrified Porch Music. I may even like it better than Echo Echo; so far every single track on it is striking me as potential repeat-play material, which puts it out ahead of Echo Echo. This will require a few more plays to give it a proper judging. And I've been slurping up the classical music compilations I've got, too; I have found that they seem to unwind me on a fundamental level. The same level that's been feeling quite good with the hard cut of caffeine over the last two days, in fact.

TV-wise, although I have not yet posted an in-depth post about it, I did like the second episode of the Dresden Files. I don't think I'll do in-depth posting about it this weekend just because I want to focus on getting some writing and editing done, but I did want to at least note that yeah, the episode was good. I liked it a little better than the premiere; it felt more like a Harry story to me.

Movie-wise, courtesy of boxer_ferret I hear tell that Russell Crowe has been signed in a new take on the Robin Hood story--playing the Sheriff of Nottingham. As a good guy, even, investigating a string of murders for which Robin Hood is the suspect. This should be entertaining. And this weekend I hope to meet up with mamishka and go see The Painted Veil, which promises to be full of fun socialness and English-Patient-y romantic angst with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts.

Last but definitely not least, I'm slowly closing in on the five-month mark with Faerie Blood in the e-slush pile at Baen. And trying to remind myself that this doesn't mean much, since their turnaround time is like 9-12 months... but still. It feels satisfying that they haven't told me no quite yet.

Miles from 1/20 up to today: 31.1
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1730.4
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 421.4
Miles to Isengard: 62.6

So since I'm running low on leeway for time I can not be at work, I promised to come back in this week and start acting like I have a job again! Here I am, therefore, at my keyboard and slogging through two weeks' worth of backlogged email, trying to figure out what the hell I'm going to do to be productive today. Especially since the one major project that's on the board for attention seems to have slipped. It is very strange being back in now--there's a temp that they've brought in to help cover for me, so now I need to work with him. And I'm all "oh right, I WORK here". And I'm trying very hard to not faceplant in the keyboard, especially since I've already managed to spill a soda this morning all over the keyboard on the Mac. Fortunately, we had a spare keyboard.

I can at least start getting back into posting about more normal things, though! For example, I have to just giggle and giggle that I am a big enough web testin' geek that I sent in a bug report to the greatbigsea.com tech people to inform them that they had a layout issue on the OKP in all browsers except IE. I even sent them a screenshot. I got a kindly note back from one of their folks pledging to send the report on to their tech people, so yay. Definitely the geekiest thing I've done all month, though. ;)

I have of course heard about Pluto's demotion from planet to dwarf planet, which is still making me kind of boggle. I'm vaguely disappointed--I think it would have been way cooler to bump Ceres, Charon, and 2003 UB313 to planet status. It'll be fun to see if the ruling gets reversed; I've been seeing references to pissed-off astronomers all over the world bitching about the vote being hijacked.

I have also heard we've finally gotten the first hurricane of the season, and about the jet crash in Lexington. Yowtch. One of my Lexington friends says his company lost three people on that plane.

solarbird-wise, we're waiting on the word as to when we can move her from the hospital to PT. She really, really wants to do something outpatient, but from what the social worker was telling me this morning that isn't really going to be an option, since they're recommending inpatient PT. Which means she can't come home quite yet, but what can ya do. Dara flat refuses to do inpatient in Tacoma, anyway, so I also told the social worker that we need to push for the Everett facility. And even though we'd all prefer to get Dara home, this'll be better not only for her but also because my boss just went on vacation, so I can't really make her authorize letting me work from home (and therefore be available to take Dara to and from PT).

Dara is at least online this morning and has been IM'ing me every few minutes with "goooooooo hooooooooome home home". Though as of the last little bit, she said a PT person had shown up, so hopefully we'll have some new news soon.

ETA 10:47am: Dara reports now that she has in fact been cleared for water and normal food! Hurray! She also says she passed a cognitive eval as "high end normal (har)". Translation, Dara is still Smart!

Still no word from Bantam, not even my postcards. I hope they've actually opened the manuscripts. I'm starting to get paranoid about whether they actually got them, and whether I didn't somehow forget to include postage on the postcards and envelopes.

And here, have a miles to Rauros Falls update!

Miles back on the 16th: 2.3
Sunday miles: 0.4
Monday morning miles: 1.4
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1301.5
Miles out of Rivendell: 843.5
Miles out of Lothlórien: 381.5
Miles to Rauros Falls: 7.5