Long time no blog.

I know, I've been derelict: mea culpa.

First of all, James is fine. We were both pretty shook by the whole ordeal, but no one is dead, only two parts fell off the bike (which we retrieved, one from a nice homeless guy that James gave all his money* to) which starts. James himself had a badly-sprained hand and some scrapes and a rude** awakening. I had awful anxiety for the next few days and James had his first-ever panic attack. I should bake him a cake or something.

I actually got so anxious that my neck, shoulders, and upper back broke out in hives. No shit. They're fading now. Also, I've been fighting an eye infection. I'm not too worried; I used to get them all the time (stress! graduation!), so I can deal fine.

Since then, I have had a streak of good luck. Who knew?

Go Team Me:

I felt able to audition for the first time since That Whole Thing Where I Got Screwed Over by My Theater***. It was for a Macbeth and I have a callback tomorrow.

I got a commission through Etsy. The client is awesome and will give me dollars. In return I will give her hours of my time spent poring over yarn and button samples. Oh, and knitting. Can't forget the knitting.

I got blogged about re: Etsy and how awesome I am and why haven't you bought something from me? Just kidding. I know that only dudes read my blog. Not that I couldn't make you something nice too, you know.

Kidding!

I actually got a freakin' interview for a day gig. An e-mail interview, but "there's a good chance for a fit". And they wanted writing samples (copy and client communication stuff). This was my first interview, literally, since the last time that I needed to interview for a job that I got, which was...oh...three years ago? And since December I've sent out my resume out dozens of times. Lordy, lordy.

In other creative news that may or may not happen:

I'm thinking of writing a novel. Hm.

[Male friend's name redacted] and I are seriously considering a podcast. Hey, we're both smart, we're both wonks/geeks, we're both kind of cranks (him more than me), and we both think that we could do it better. Some of the topics we're considering: geekery& women (so...much...material...), geekery and knitters (I'm also forming a blog on this!), Israel and the Middle East in general (yeah, we'll narrow that down for you), and fact that BSG is clearly a product of the Bush era while Babylon 5 is clearly a product of the Clinton era****. Oh, and [redacted]'s name is redacted because he doesn't want to use his real name, for various reasons. If you know me well, you probably know him, too, or could at least hazard a guess. He does not, for some reason, read my blog (and/or keeps forgetting that it exists), so it's probably not you.


*A dollar.

**Read: terrifying.

***There may be an satisfying coda to this in the next year or so. That's all I can really say right now. No, I am not going to blow up the theater, even though I have thought about it. Repeatedly.

****This is a real coversation that [redacted] and I have had, which may, in fact, count as the nerdiest thing I have ever in my life considered in this here my brain. Additionally, please do not talk to me about the series finale of BSG. I have not yet seen it for reasons and reasons and don't want it ruined for me any more than it already has been by virtue of spoiler-ish posting on Facebook. Curse you all.

"A man is like a deck of cards..."

"...sometimes you get a King, but most of the time they're all Jacks."

James crashed his bike about two hours ago.

Let's start with this: he's fine. Mostly. There's probably nothing broken.

It's his own fault, but that doesn't make me feel any better. He was drinking at his usual, the Twilight, and he rode home, not following the adage "two wheels, two drinks". At some point on Westlake (not far from our place, about a five minute drive away) he got confused by a car driving too close to him, took a turn wrong, and hit a road divider going about 40-50 mph. He flew about 25 feet, so we're lucky that he just had a sprained wrist and a few scrapes. And then he rode home. I got out of a late-night bath to find him wandering around our kitchen with fat, bleeding lips, so I cleaned him up and put him to bed, over his protests that he wasn't good enough for me -- which are usual when he's drunk, now even more so. He's just in a lot of pain* (and minor shock) now but resting.

I'm surprised by how freaked out I am. Also tired and hungry.

Probably more later.


*And he's in bed moaning, so I'm trying to decide if I go to bed or sleep out here on the couch. Both have tactical advantages.

Fun with dressing warmly.

So, James' bike (casually called Motopsychobaik, a name coined by my lisping toddler nephew) is up and running again, so we took it to Ballard to grab pho at Than Bros. Wheeee! ...it's still pretty cold out.

Also, my plans to get more items up on Etsy have failed, possibly for this weekend. I forgot to turn off James' camera last time I uploaded anything, so the battery ran down. Poop. And I have so much to do!

Death Virus 2009 (Spring Edition)

So...I still suffer from the death virus, which means nothing much has been happening. I'm stuck at home and I'm even beginning to be bored by the internet. It palls after, say, two weeks. Or less.

In good, non-sicky related news, I made some more stuff for Etsy and I'm hoping to get out and do a photo shoot this weekend, if the lovely, lovely sun holds and doesn't turn back into the freak snow we got night before last. Seriously, Winter, what the crap? Anyway, it's not knitted. And I love it so much that I wanna keep one or two pieces for me! Which I think is a good sign. :) Oh, and I wanna get my men's vintage pieces up, too.

James is wanting to get in on the Etsy action with his art pics now. I think we're going to put our heads together over that tomorrow. Oh! And I bought seeds (40% off Lilly Miller Organic seed packets at Fred Meyer yesterday!) and starters so that we can start our garden! I love spending time with this man. Plus he's getting me back into playing music, which has been really good for me since I'm so disgusted with Seattle theater politics anymore.

I may also be doing this awesome project. It looks pretty exciting, and I can see how it will be good preparation for the extended version of Hungry Ghosts (which I've given myself a two-year timeline on). I think it'll be a great way for me to stretch my wings and stuff. And I miss collaborating.

Oh, and...

...James takes all my Etsy pictures. It's handy having an art photographer in the house!

Dept. of Inconvenience.

My hard drive died a horrible death yesterday morning, making a sound no hard drive should ever make. I woke up, tried to boot up my machine, and waited. And waited. And finally got an error message: one of the .sys files (which turned out to be a HD driver) was "damaged" and needed to be repaired with the XP setup disc. Fine, except my computer is a custom box that Devon built me for a Christmas present a year ago or so, which means that I don't have a copy of XP. My brother-in-law does, and Ian has a ghetto hacked XP disc (for instance, one can install Windows sans IE if one so chooses...), so my sister and Ian came over and we (mostly Ian) fiddled with the machine for a bit.

After several hours of inspection by Ian, my sister, and myself, we pronounced it DOA. I had feared that James, mystifyed by techmology, had accidentally given my computer the flu...but, actually, my hard drive is just dead of a hardware issue. Kaput. Oh well.

So now I'm on a backup machine; being my father's daughter (and the only one in the family besides my mom that doesn't code) I have three other working computers in the house. This is the one that my bro-in-law gave me that I was going to set up as James' school computer...for now, it will have to be the house CPU.

What this ultimately means is that I may have lost ALL of my notes for the new project for which I am writing a grant. Shit. Ian is going to perform some rudimentary forensics to attempt to recover the files, but they are very likely lost.

Again, blerg.

My work space.

James pointed out that the area surrounding my computer contained, at some point the other night, rice cakes, Midol, and Hennessy VSOP.

This is a fairly accurate assessment of my current mental state.

Update: for the record, it is a (nearly) full bottle of Hennessy and the rice cakes are caramel flavored.

Drunk James and the tree.

Here's the "after" picture of the ritually-sacrificed Xmas tree.

Arson, gussets, and my boyfriend, the Luddite.

James and I had our first Xmas tree. Naturally, since it was our first Xmas together! Yay team us!



We got it at the Market; tiny, tiny tree! About 4 ft. tall, and we carried it home on the bus.

And, in what is sure to be an annual tradition, we burnt it after New Year's Day.

I wish that I had been less panicked when it went up because I would have loved to capture on film the twelve-foot flames that shot up when James lit a Lysol plume into the dry branches. However, panic we both did; I screamed, "Put it out! Use this!"

Fifteen minutes before the ceremonial burning commenced James had found an old fire extinguisher under the kitchen sink. I assumed that it wasn't good any more (they go bad, right?) and discounted it. But James, investigating it for the (missing, as we will discover presently) safety pin, accidentally shot the extinguisher off straight at the window. Our kitchen suddenly exploded in sweet and slightly carcinogenic-smelling white powder.

I mentioned he was drunk, yes? No?

So it was the (now confirmed) fire extinguisher that I rushed out the kitchen door to James, which he used with drunken gusto. Darby, our next-door neighbor, walked by on the street, twenty feet away.

"You guys need some help there?"

"Uh, no...we're good. We're fine."

Humans fear fire. I don't know if he and his girlfriend will come over to drink with us again.

Anticipating calamity (and rightly so), James and I had prepared a couple pots of water on the kitchen counter. We doused the remaining flames and vowed to do this stupid, not smart, very bad thing again next year. A new tradition born!

James cleaned the kitchen, too, apologizing profusely. He then told me that the same thing had happened years ago with his father (who looks and sounds like Fat Elvis), right in front of him. But with a gun.

I told him that I didn't want guns in my house. Funny, I never had a problem with them before.

So that was my Monday.

In less flammable news, today (Wednesday!) I taught myself how to knit thumb gussets! For non-sartorialists, that's the fancy term for the widening of a glove in preparation for the thumb part. It was so easy that I don't know why I never did it before. Anyway, I now can make actual fingerless gloves instead of just tubes with holes in them for your thumbs, which are dumb and don't keep you warm. For some reason when I wear "gloves" like that, it seems like 99% of the heat I lose through my hands is through my thumbs. Anyways, this first pair is blocking right now; I'll post a picture of them tomorrow as long as I remember to.

Finally, this evening (while sitting on the couch finishing the gloves) I taught James what the Refresh button on a web browser is used for.

"It's that thing with the two circling arrows*. Next to the red X, that's the Stop button. No, where the browser buttons are. Where the back arrow is. It's between the Home, the picture of the house, and the red X. Okay, you got it. Good."

I've never had to be the techie one before.

*On IE. I'm having download problems and can't get Firefox on my laptop. Probably because the laptop is so old that it predates the written language.

Had myself a merry little X-mas.

The Great Storm of 2008 has now passed, as has 2008. The snow is gone and we've emerged from our holes, blinking in the sunlight, to return to work.

Most of us.

I'm taking some time off. From working, from my day gig, which has been at the Pike Place Market since April. I've really enjoyed it, but the first day that the snow came the buses from my house stopped running I was overwhelmed by relief that I didn't have to go in.

So I never went back. I didn't burn any bridges, I have a lovely mom-like boss who is very understanding (and saw it coming), so I'm okay.

This has been a long time coming. I'm tired, I need the breathing room, and I think I finally learned this year just how bad the SAD componant of my health is. Being outside when things are getting dark, not enough light...yuck. I was coming home in tears since October. I actually really enjoyed the snow: it reflected light into our windows and made everything seem so much more cheerful. I miss it...but I don't miss the fact that the entire city stopped working for two weeks.

However, the reason that I can do this is because of my amazing partner, James. We're living together in Fremont. It's not exactly the neighborhood that we want to be in, but we both love the place itself. Neither of us has ever really been homebodies, but it's easy to enjoy our house now. I feel safe to balance my medication and get my life back together now.

Also, we're online now! So being in contact with life will be a little easier for me.

More later...now that I can!

James.

James is sitting right next to me, watching me write this. He's refused to read my blog until I write about him.

Look, here he is:

See him? He's right there.

He says to mention that he's really good at "doin' it". Doing what, I'm not sure, but he's great at it. Or so I'm told.

Now he's just told me to go to hell and that we're breaking up.

Anyway, I am deeply in love with this guy and now we're living together.

And that's the short update. Long update comes later. Everything is fabulous* for a change.

Mmkay, must dash.

*His choice of words. Over "fantastic".