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Friday, May 16th, 2008
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3:32 pm - WOOOOOOO
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The house in Ohio has been sold, baby, and at a thoroughly decent price for this soft, collapsing market. Officially closed on it this morning and washed our hands of it.
That means that the only thing still tying us to Ohio is our cell phone numbers, and we'll change those over fairly soon.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
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| Monday, May 5th, 2008
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1:58 pm
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Re: Iron Man:
Yes, actually, that was quite a lot of fun, despite the villain of the piece having all the depth and personality of a piece of typing paper, and both things were due pretty much entirely to how much depth and personality got lavished on Tony Stark--I WANT TO SQUEEZE HIM.
I-I think that's the first movie I've seen since... August? And yes, I stayed past the credits and then got squee on everything. Also I totally teared up during the preview for the new Indiana Jones movie. I don't even care if it's probably going to suck by the numbers. Iconic movie themes make me go all A BLOO BLOO BLOO.
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| Sunday, May 4th, 2008
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3:10 am - not that I'm bitter!
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| Thursday, April 24th, 2008
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10:02 pm
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| Monday, April 21st, 2008
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7:48 pm
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| Sunday, April 20th, 2008
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10:13 pm
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My aunt, in a heroic and selfless gesture that will ring down through the ages or at least through next week some time, made and sent me a low-iodine chocolate cake to nosh on while I was on my limited diet. The cake in question is actually an American World War II recipe called 'Wacky Cake', originally developed to allow Americans to have cake without free access to butter or eggs or other rationed commodities; since it doesn't contain butter or eggs, it's definitely low-iodine in nature; and while I'm certainly not an expert in such things, 'Wacky Cake' also appears to be vegan.
It's also really, really good. Startlingly good. And easy. Gooey and cakey and delicious, it's all made in the same pan it's then baked in, and then (in my case, at least) browsed upon in little inch-sized squares, directly from the same pan. I picked the recipe out of the low-iodine cookbook, because I want to have it forever and ever, and here it is!
WACKY CAKE
1 1/2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
3 Tablespoons cocoa
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
5 Tablespoons vegetable oil
1 teaspoon white vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup cold water
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Sift together flour, sugar, cocoa, soda, and salt into an 8 x 8 inch baking pan or dish. Mix thoroughly. Make 3 holes in the dry ingredients. Place oil in first hole, vinegar in second hole, and vanilla in third hole. Pour water over all and mix well. Spread batter evenly in pan and bake in the dish that batter was mixed in. Bake 30 minutes or until center is firm. Cool. This can then be sprinkled with confectioner's sugar.
They also recommend crushing raspberries or strawberries with a little sugar, which would be good, I'm sure, but I have no time for such niceties.
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| Saturday, April 19th, 2008
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10:18 pm
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You guys, you guys, they made an anime out of Chii's Sweet Home, you guys, adorable animated kitten antics for the masses T^T
They're getting fansubbed now, and pretty quickly, since the episodelets are only three minutes long. Here is the first one. You must all watch it. This is not optional. Chii will make everything better.
There are currently twelve up on YouTube with subs:
Chii's Sweet Home, Ep. 1
Chii's Sweet Home, Ep. 2
Chii's Sweet Home, Ep. 3
Chii's Sweet Home, Ep. 4
Chii's Sweet Home, Ep. 5
Chii's Sweet Home, Ep. 6
Chii's Sweet Home, Ep. 7
Chii's Sweet Home, Ep. 8
Chii's Sweet Home, Ep. 9
Chii's Sweet Home, Ep. 10
Chii's Sweet Home, Ep. 11
Chii's Sweet Home, Ep. 12
and this guy appears to be the source for MOAR.
It is not exaggerating to say that I find this the most exciting anime news that I've heard in months. kittenhead T^T
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| Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
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9:50 pm
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As my nuclear doc was careful to inform me, one of the most severe (but, fortunately, rare) side effects of the radioactive iodine treatment is the potential to permanently lose your sense of taste. Like, forever. You see, what happens is that the radiation drifts an inch or two and settles into your salivary glands, and if it is not expressed quickly, it will just hang around in your glands, killing them, too.
Fortunately, knowing that, these days there is a simple precaution that prevents the side effect in all but the rarest cases: starting twenty-four hours after your irradiation, you are required to have a piece of hard candy every hour that you are awake. Sucking on the hard candy pulls the NUCLEAR SPITTLE from your salivary glands as fast as it can form and washes it into your digestive system, which will snap its little metaphorical fingers at it and send it on its way, i.e. as NUCLEAR PEE.
That's right, one of the steps to beating my loltumors is to eat a lot of candy. You guys only wish you had a disease this cool.
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| Friday, April 4th, 2008
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2:37 pm - my thoughts on cancer, let me show you them
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Many of my relatives have had one form of cancer or another. Some of them have died from it. I've grown up thinking that cancer would make you feel unwell all by itself; that the fear and cancer-related activity would take over your life, making you live with your cancer every damned day; that the surgery would be painful and sometimes crippling; that you would spend weeks in the hospital, recovering; that the radiation would make you throw up and lose your hair; and, finally, that if the grueling process of beating the cancer did not kill you, you would remain a cancer survivor all your life.
Now I've had cancer. I still have cancer, actually. And I've found it boring and annoying, but largely irrelevant to my actual life. Like the neighbor's cat insisting on peeing near my trashcans.
Okay, that's not fair. Trust me, it's really not fair. Thyroid cancer is not one of the more serious cancers until it hits stage four, even with the whole string of lymphomas attached, like I had. I can easily live without my thyroid--try saying that about, say, the lungs. And while the throat area is pretty vital, it's also easy to operate on, and easy to protect after the fact. Thyroid cancer is a lot like having someone fire a bullet at you and having that bullet clip off a chunk of your ear.
Plus I'm young, strong, and healthy. So I'm lucky. Seriously, I've been really lucky. But that doesn't change the fact that I don't think of cancer the same way any more.
Many forms of cancer would put you through the wringer I listed above. Mine? I spent two days in the hospital after my surgery, in mild discomfort at worst. My doctor told me I could go home after the first day, actually, but I elected to stay an extra day, as I was still having some trouble swallowing. I went home, I spent a week or so puttering sleepily about, I got my stitches out, and then I got out of bed and spent two months organizing a complicated cross-country move, complete with the purchase of a new house and the marketing of an old one. Every day of that two months was an ongoing 'fuck you' to the cancer cells still living in my throat.
During that time I could go hours without thinking about my cancer--the only reason that I couldn't go days was that I had to take my pills every morning and see my scars in the mirror every day. I felt fine. I'd felt fine before my surgery, too. I haven't been living with my cancer, just babysitting it. My ongoing series of doctor's appointments, in reality, worked out to about four, and I looked at them as exasperating obligations to be worked around. Now I'm in the process of preparing for my radiation therapy, and it's just annoying. I have stuff to do! I have a book to write! Stupid cancer, I resent having to waste a month on you! Go home!
My doctors provided me with a stack of literature for cancer-survivor support groups, including one just for thyroid cancer. While many people would doubtless benefit from such a thing--while they might need it--I tend to look at those groups askance and then put the literature away. I don't feel like a cancer patient, and I doubt I'll ever feel like a cancer survivor, any more than I feel like a flu survivor, or a strep-throat survivor, or a salmonella survivor. My own personal cancer is, so far, an annoyance, not any sort of life-changing event.
Now, if the cancer spreads, or recurs, then I'm going to have to go through a lot more shit, and boy, won't I feel stupid about having written this entry. I'm also on the fast track for breast cancer in my mid-forties, given my genetic record. Maybe after I have breast cancer I'll be a cancer survivor right out of a weepy Reader's Digest story. Right now, I'm just fucking irritated.
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| Friday, March 28th, 2008
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3:27 pm
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Last night we unpacked the box full of Random Old Gaming Shit.
Our old entertainment center had two big drawers in it, see, and anything we weren't currently using got stored in those. If it didn't get pulled back out later, it got pushed farther and farther back in the drawer, where it was left to rot until the moving guys emptied those drawers and packed their contents.
It was a trip. I found the old GameBoy Advance and the GBA SP, of course, and all the games for those systems, but I also found:
1. an old gray Playstation.
I have no idea where it came from. We went through a couple of PSXes in our time (goddamned melting laser mounts) but I thought we'd gotten rid of them once we got our PS2. I don't know which one it is. For all I know, it's not ours.
2. my Neo-Geo Pocket.
Talk about your flash-in-the-pan handhelds! Sheesh! I've even got five or six games for it. I should find out if it still works.
3. the Guncon.
Holy crap. I'd forgotten all about this thing. I'd also forgotten how cool it was. Giant gray plastic gun for the Playstation! We bought it to play Elemental Gearbolt. If I took the cords out and spraypainted it silver, I'd have an awesome cosplay accessory.
4. my GameBoy camera and printer.
Oh, jeez. There's nothing like taking dinky pixellated 2-bit pictures of cats and printing them out on thermal paper to liven up your day--I'm going to have to fire these little bastards up. I know there's an old GameBoy Color in the Sin City lunchbox. Hell, I might still have my old original GameBoy. (You know. The big gray brick.)
5. the PocketStation.
Envy me: I own an imported PocketStation. Furthermore, I actually got to use it while playing Final Fantasy VIII--the embedded PocketStation game was the only way to get a Ribbon (and certain other rare items) in FF8. I loved that stupid little doodad, and I was sorry that it never really took off or got officially released in the US. I still kind of want to cuddle it: it's a miniature games console the size of a PSX memory card! It's adorable! It's like a Tamagotchi with actual functionality!
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| Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
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2:46 pm
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Yesterday I managed to both skin my knuckles on a fridge shelf hard enough to draw blood and dip my elbow and sleeve into my own soup while trying to poach a bit of Boyfriend's dinner.
I have also recently stepped on a cat, tripped on the stairs and spilled apple cider on the wall, skinned one of the same knuckles on something else, and hurt a muscle in my arm wrestling empty cardboard boxes downstairs.
I keep expecting Boyfriend to pop out of a closet, go WOOP WOOP WOOP, and doink me in the eyes.
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| Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
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6:32 pm
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Notes of the (Seattle) day:
1. The other day, while happily enjoying a delicious sandwich and cinnamon roll, I heard a fellow behind me exclaim in a loud and plaintive voice, "But I thought you were gay!"
I am pleased to say that I neither started laughing nor did a spit-take with a mouthful of roast beef and bleu cheese, but I'll admit it was kind of a close thing.
2. Continuing on this theme, I believe the house next door--the one with all the animals--may be owned by a nice middle-aged lesbian couple. Further bulletins as events warrant!
3. Abandoning this theme, I got a shiny new Sanyo Katana II, because obviously my old cell phone wasn't aggressively trendy enough.
4. As you may or may not have heard, Seattle is populated by coffee places like some other cities are populated by, you know, people. There are three Starbucks in the University Village shopping center alone--yes, and a single place where you can stand and see all three--and tiny espresso shacks that, like parasites, occupy any parking lot large enough to harbor a plastic garden shed. I keep expecting to learn that I am allowed, under the law, to knock on the door of any Seattle home and demand espresso, which they must then furnish.
That being said, there is a tiny coffee place called Gretchen's in Sand's Point that claims to have the best coffee in Seattle, and so far I cannot disagree with them. Dear God, the coffee, it's fantastic.
5. The food in Seattle is tremendously good in general, with one glaring exception: Mexican food. There must be a good Mexican restaurant around here somewhere, but so far, I haven't found it.
6. Conveyor-belt sushi is the bane of anyone with an impulse-control problem, which, sad to say, includes me. (NOM.)
eta Bonus Son of Note:
7. Two minutes after I finished writing this entry, one of the folding doors in the hallway flew open. The problem? Our aggressive new washing machine, set to maximum spin, had seen fit to go for a walk. If I'd let it be, it might be halfway to 65th Street by now.
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| Friday, March 21st, 2008
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7:22 pm
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| Friday, March 14th, 2008
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11:44 am
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| Friday, February 29th, 2008
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1:37 pm
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Not dead! Really! Despite the universe's semi-serious best efforts!
The only thing left in Ohio is the clean, empty Clintonville house; we're actually living in Seattle now. Well, Redmond, to be precise, in an extremely anonymous temporary apartment. The house in Ohio is being shown to prospective buyers--although not at the moment, since there's, what, fifteen feet of snow on the ground in Ohio? (HA HA HA IT'S SIXTY DEGREES IN SEATTLE um ahem.)
We've also bought what is pretty much my dream house over in Seattle proper, in the Ravenna area. Seriously, it's like the universe conspired to give me this house. I've always had a real weakness for the clean, geometric, open-plan eighties-modern style of architecture, with the high vaulted ceilings and skylights and stuff; the house that we ended up buying is a perfect example of that type, only it's also highly informed by the Japanese aesthetic and, to top it all off, it's adorably wee and has a tiny, perfect rockery for a backyard. It was the second house we looked at and I was pretty much damned to lust after it after that. (It was also quite reasonably priced for Seattle, which is to say that we paid about two and a half times what we paid for the Ohio house for about a third of the space.)
We're having bamboo hardwood floors installed on the first floor now; we move our things in on the fifth and will live in a maze of boxes for a few weeks thereafter, until we can get proper bookcases. Pictures will follow once I manage to take them.
Once we're actually settled into the house, my life becomes a hell of doctors! Because the universe hates me, in late November--literally two days after Boyfriend accepted the job in Seattle and gave notice at his old job--I was diagnosed with stage-three thyroid cancer with a heaping side of lymphomas. I had semi-major surgery in early December, which seems to have gone well, and then, yes, dragged my cancerous ass out of bed and masterminded the move to Seattle. Now that that's taken care of, I get to have radiation therapy. Oh boy.
For the record: as far as cancer goes, thyroid cancer is about as non-serious as it gets. When my doctor was initially breaking the news to me, she told me that people with thyroid cancer generally only die because they get hit by buses. So far, I have avoided buses. This seems to be working out well for me, and I feel pretty much fine.
I was a little leery of mentioning this publicly for a while, partially because I was actually dealing with it and I do not handle sympathy well at all, and partially because I've been a member of fandom_wank for years and as such have paranoid fantasies of being accused of fabricating my cancer for sympathy and readership. Which, you know, ahaha, I wish I was only making this shit up.
In short, 2007 did everything it could to break me, although there was a certain terrible unthinkable sense to the order in which it made its efforts, and 2008 appears to be shamefacedly trying to mop up after 2007's ungodly mess. If I were crazy--and I might very well be--I might think that the entire thrust of the universe's implacable 2007 campaign was to get me the hell out of Ohio before Ohio killed me. Because I can read it like that, if I try.
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| Friday, February 15th, 2008
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9:32 am
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While organizing my half of the cross-country move, I was always careful to build a little extra time into each part of my schedule, in case some contractor or another was delayed thanks to weather, illness, or acts of dog. The only scheduled appointment that I didn't pad--because I really couldn't--was the maid service that I hired to clean the place from top to bottom right before I left.
Which was the only appointment to get delayed? If you said 'the maid service', you'd be right!
The woman who was assigned to my house called this morning to let me know that she was feeling sick, and she wanted to reschedule for this afternoon or 'maybe tomorrow'. I let her know that this afternoon would be fine (because, really, it is, as long as shit gets done today) but tomorrow was kind of out of the question--because I'm leaving for Seattle in the morning.
I'd grit my teeth and clean the place myself (in between frantic errand-running) but, uh, we've moved out! All our cleaning supplies are gone! Out with the trash! I don't even have paper towels any more, let alone mops, brooms, vacuum cleaners, cleaning fluids... the maid service was supposed to provide those, as well.
Here in half an hour or so I'll call our realtor, let her know about the issue, and make arrangements for her to come let the maids in on some other day, should that be necessary. It can all be handled, everything will eventually be fine, and I do sincerely hope that the woman from the maid service is going to be all right, but at the moment? AAAAARGH
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| Saturday, February 9th, 2008
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3:24 pm
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| Friday, February 8th, 2008
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1:15 pm
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This house--let me tell you about this house.
This house is so empty that it echoes. Entire rooms contain nothing but little drifts of orphaned cat hair and dust. The upstairs reeks, not unpleasantly, of paint and plaster; the downstairs smells mostly of cleaning products. The basement still smells like dust, but then, it always did.
Some rooms don't look all that different. The kitchen looks pretty much normal, albeit bare, until you notice the nailholes in the walls where pictures used to hang. The bathroom is the same. The bedrooms, though, my beloved little hobbit-hole of an office, the dining room--these places are empty and somehow accusing. When I walk from the main room to the downstairs bathroom, I still automatically detour around the place in the dining room where the table used to be.
In the large front room there is still a couch and large overstuffed chair. The couch is for sleeping, and the chair is for reading; where the television and entertainment center used to be, there is a narrow folding card table, now serving as a makeshift desk for the laptop. I have a suitcase full of clothing stashed in the downstairs bathroom. That's it. That is where I live now. I only go upstairs to use the shower; that's all I need up there.
It's eerie. Not as quiet as it used to be. Empty, the house creaks and shifts in a way that it never did when it still had furniture to weigh it down. It's colder, too. Sometimes I fancy that I feel resented.
But for the most part I find myself almost completely content, now that the hardest work of the move is behind me. I miss my husband, of course, and the cats, but at the same time it is nice just to be able to accomplish things without having to work around someone else. I can go wherever I like for dinner, whenever I like, by jumping in the car and going. I can run errands whenever they need doing, and never have to worry about leaving one undone because someone else just wants to go home. I am in sole charge in Ohio, and after some initial muttering, I have grown to like it that way.
I have one of the DSes, and the PSP, and my laptop and cable modem--I kept the tablet with me, even though it is difficult to use with only the laptop's screen--and my library card, which allows me to go to the library two blocks away and pick up piles of books to read. It's hard to bore me in any case, and I'm certainly not bored now. But I am not living here, per se. I am existing here. I am waiting here. My life has moved elsewhere.
A week from now I'll walk out of this house for the last time, leaving its clean shell behind. I don't think it'll be all that upsetting, despite having bought this house and lived in it for four years. Having watched this house fade into nothingness around me--having watched it go, slowly, from my home to my home, only startlingly clean and anonymous to a house, filled with cardboard boxes to an empty house--has blunted the potential trauma quite nicely. I have been weaned off this house. I can't put it any other way.
Another house waits for me in Seattle, although it is not yet officially, truly, legally my house yet, and I hesitate to mention it without knocking on wood. It is as different from this one as night is from day. I am excited. I am moving forward. And yet sometimes I wish this quiet, breathless Ohio limbo could last for just a while longer.
Only sometimes, though. Only sometimes.
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| Thursday, February 7th, 2008
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8:18 pm
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| Saturday, February 2nd, 2008
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10:48 pm
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And in other news, I actually gave in and did one of those ubiquitous art memes that's been floating around the internet! I stole it from ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) gallo_de_pelea, who apparently stole it from halcyonjazz, who got it from Agnes, who got it from Jim... uh. Original characters meme!
I was desperate to kick back and do something, anything, just for fun--between the move and various and sundry other issues, I haven't had much time to do stuff just for the hell of it. So when this came along and caught my fancy, I jumped on it and spent the next few days stealing an hour here and there in order to complete it. And it was fun! My art skills (such as they are) are pretty rusty, but by the time I got all the way through I'd significantly de-rusted--of course, I still can't ever draw a character the same way twice, so Simon and Jeremy look a little different in each question, and I abused copy-pasta significantly in order to keep even some semblance of order. I'm reasonably pleased with the results, though.
Uploaded to dA, because the full size is huge: 12,000 pixels long and about 1.4MB of semi-crap art. I totally do not want to rape my own bandwidth just to host it.
Zelle-Sama's Original Character Art Meme: Shadow of the Templar, Simon and Jeremy
Collin Thorbiornsen is his own man and answers to no one.
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