But Where Does the Rabbit Get the Eggs????
Posted on March 21, 2008
Filed Under Bruno, family, holidaze | 3 Comments
You know how sometimes you want to talk to someone so you call everyone you know and none of them are home and then finally one calls you back and you have nothing to say but you still kind of want to talk to someone? This post is like that.
I’m going to visit my family this weekend because my mother is all “Easter is IMPORTANT and FAMILY and WHY DON’T YOU COME HERE MORE OFTEN SO I CAN TELL YOU HOW INADEQUATE YOU ARE?” And if I don’t go there will be heck to pay. And while the psychodollars it costs me to visit are pretty steep, heck is also quite expensive. Also, I get to hang out with my nephew, who thinks I’m hilarious (I’m a big hit with the under-five set).
This is said nephew. We shall call him “Bruno”, because it amuses me to have a nephew named Bruno.
Okay, he was moving that time.
Probably scared of that My Three Sons thing happening in the background. Let’s try again.
Hmmm…There’s got to be one in here where he’s standing still….
Ooooooor not.
Kid moves around a lot, in case you couldn’t tell. And I am a mediocre photographer at best. I think I have some kind of photography block — you can tell me over and over what I need to do to take better pictures and when picture-taking time comes I will forget all of it. Digital photography is FABULOUS for me because if I take eleventy pictures there’s a chance of one or two of them turning out okay, and that gets very expensive with film.
I suppose one solution would be to get better at some flavor of graphics editing software, but 1) I am too lazy and b) I get distracted and spend the whole time playing with the effects and turning my pictures in and out of oil paintings and never improve.
So, sorry I’m a crappy photographer, but you come here for the articles, anyway, right? *snicker*
The only way we could get him to hold still was to preserve him in carbonite.
Don’t worry, once the hibernation sickness wears off he’ll be fine.
(Come back soon and see what new heights of geekiness we may attain here at Story Value. I think I freaked myself out with this one, to be honest.)
In which I Present a Miscellany of Thoughts
Posted on March 16, 2008
Filed Under life stories, me me me, teh blog | 1 Comment
Note to self: Do not check blog stats after you post something that nobody reads (I suspect that either my blogstat software is lying to me or there was a problem with the last post, because I know Theresa is a diehard stalker even if nobody else is paying attention.)
Theresa and anyone else who may wander in may notice some slight changes to the blog template. The sqooshedness of the post text against the sidebar has been getting on my nerves for a while now and I suddenly found myself with a bit of time to hammer my way through some CSS editing. (I can read manuals all day but the only thing that really works is: change this variable, see what happens; change that variable, see what happens. Personal learning style or just plain stubborn?) (Don’t answer that.) Also, my eyes are getting old and the font was seeming smallish and while there are ways to change that in one’s browser I thought increasing the default might be nice. And then I came home from school today exhausted (because I am so hardcore I go to school on SATURDAYS, dammit) and fell asleep at, like 7:30. So midnight was wide-awake time for me!
Unfortunately, my favorite design consultant is off chasing giants in the sky so I am left to my own judgement, such as it is. I sense more tweaking in my future.
Finally, because Theresa wanted to see the final version and why just email her something when I can use it here:
When I was in fourth grade, our class would have weekly visits to the school library. As an avid reader this was my favorite day of the week and the librarians and my teacher liked to advise me on what to read next. When I showed particular interest in a subject or genre they were very good at finding me something in a similar vein to read next.
One week the book they suggested I read was about an African-American girl around my age growing up during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. For a child who had spent her entire nine years living in a lily-white suburb this story was eye-opening, to say the least. The title of the novel is lost to me, but I still remember my big “a-ha” moment, a scene where the main character was sitting in the dark with her father and couldn’t see either of their hands. That night at bedtime I closed the book and lay in bed looking at the dim outline of my own hand, trying to imagine what it would be like not to be able to see it when the lights were out.
I’ve read a lot of books since then and learned a lot of things from them. But that one story from my fourth grade year still stands out in my mind as the first time I really understood what I was learning, and to a degree why, and wanted to go back for more. My life and my relationship with books has never been the same.
My Funny Valentine(’s Day)
Posted on March 13, 2008
Filed Under holidaze, me me me | 1 Comment
Last month I had one of those birthday things (don’t worry, this isn’t to hit you up for gifts) and a funny thing happened: I had to confirm my birth date with someone and they didn’t comment on it. This is quite unusual — I’ve never done a formal count, but I’d say at least half of the time I’m asked for my date of birth for whatever reason (I go to the pharmacy and the doctor a lot) the person doing the asking makes some kind of remark about my birthday being on Valentine’s Day.
It seems to strike people as an unusual birthday, though I suppose that might just be because winter birthdays are less common in general (my friend Google gave me a couple of citations saying that February is the month with the least births but I’m too lazy to verify that with statistics or check to see if that’s just because it’s shorter). Maybe you’re supposed to conceive babies on February 14th and not have them? In truth, though, I’ve only ever met one or two people in person who were born on the same day as me (Happy Birthday, T., wherever you are).
The funny thing is that people don’t even know what to say when they remark on my birth date — they just seem to feel compelled to do something more than just recognize the date. “You must be…” usually falters, because there isn’t really any broadly recognized quality of people who were born on that date (unless you get into the astrology of it, which is a whole ‘nother thing). Some people tell me my parents should have named me Valentina. Yes, that would have helped me fit right in. (My parents gave me the ordinariest name they could except they were about a generation off, so it’s already odd.)
At the very least there’s the assumption that it must be fun to be born on Valentine’s Day, as if all the hearts and flowers and candy are for you, at the most there’s some presumption of my sweeter-than-other-people disposition. To which I reply “No” and “Bite me”, respectively. It’s a “holiday” where many people are either focused on their romantic relationships or depressed because they aren’t in one. Not to mention that it’s goddamn winter in New England so I’ve had more snowed out birthday plans than I care to count.
As to the sweetness, I did try. (My Hippie College friends who are reading this should please stop laughing.) I used to send valentines even when we were no longer required to bring them to school. I was all about sharing the love, spreading the joy, la la la la I’m Cupid’s assistant by some accident of birth timing (the 14th was not my mother’s due date; I can never remember if I was early or late). I liked being called “sweet”, especially by guys I was interested in.
It didn’t last.
And now…and now…. I don’t know. It’s taken me weeks to get this post up in part because I get to this paragraph and I don’t know what my point is. Hi, I’m a bitch and it’s because of my birthday? Birthdays suck? Made-up commercial “holidays” suck? Nothing seems appropriate. So I’m going to go with the old standby, stealing from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. I hate to be so trite, but you have to admit that breaking things down to five stages is handy. Plus, these work for so many damn things. So with apologies to EK-R, The Five Stages of a Valentine’s Day birthday:
Denial: Oh, another teddy bear with a heart-shaped pillow that reads “Be Mine”! Just what I wanted! I love having my birthday on Valentine’s Day! Here, have a Valentine from me! Because I’m so sweet!!!!! You think I’m sweet, right? YOU THINK I’M SWEET, RIGHT? TELL ME HOW SWEET I AM. TELL MEEEEEEEEEEE!
Anger: Don’t even think about giving me that gorram valentine, and if you come near me with that box of candy I’m going to shove it down your throat. AND YOU CAN TAKE THAT $^%*# TEDDY BEAR WITH THE PILLOW THAT SAYS @#$%$& “Wuv from me” AND [redacted, because the sweet isn’t quite gone yet].
Bargaining: No, it’s fine that you can’t do anything on my birthday; I totally understand that your boyfriend is more important. Everybody else’s boyfriend is more important, too. We’ll do something the Saturday after, unless the 14th falls on a Saturday, in which case we’ll do something the Saturday after that. Oh, sure, that gives you a chance to get me a teddy bear with a heart-shaped pillow that reads “I Luv You” for half price. Yay! (Alternatively: Please don’t let my party be snowed out…please don’t let my party be snowed out…please don’t let my party be…rats .)
Depression: Waaaaaaaaah I HATE this day! Waaaaaaaah I HATE my so-called friends! Waaaaaaaah no *hic* bod *hic* dy *hic* looooooooooooooves me! *sobs all over assorted teddy bears holding hearts with slogans on them* Waaaaaaaaah! (Lather, rinse, repeat.)
Acceptance: Yes, I guess it’s sort of an unusual birthday. No, I’m not doing anything special — it’s the middle of February; the main thing I’m doing is trying not to freeze any important body parts off. I’ll probably celebrate some time in May or something [with my friend Blondie, who also suffers from Winter Birthday Syndrome]. Yes, you can give me something with hearts on it and I promise not to burn it. You still can’t call me “sweet”, though.
0 Hit Points
Posted on March 10, 2008
Filed Under current events, life stories, me me me | 2 Comments
Before TEH CHRISTIANS started trying to ban Harry Potter books, they spent their time trying to ban other things. Things like Pokemon, and Rock & Roll, and OMG THE HOMOSEXXXXULS. And Dungeons & Dragons.
(N.B.: Some of my best friends are Christians. It’s TEH CHRISTIANS who scare the bejeebers out of me.)
I learned to play Dungeons & Dragons when I was in fifth grade. I was in my school’s (at that time very small) gifted program, and while I imagine my classmates thought I was being taken out of the classroom to read big dusty books and take tests and stuff, the five or six of us in the group were playing with one of the school’s two Apple ][ Plusses (I kicked ass at Lemonade Stand) and making our way through The Chronicles of Prydain and The HarperHall of Pern Trilogy and playing D&D. (It was a perfect geek incubator, which honestly never occurred to me until I started writing this. Heh.) (And yes, we also learned to program in BASIC and did projects on local history and toured the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale (*swoon*) (read the stuff about the building itself — marble and granite and does amazing things to the light), so the community’s tax dollars were not used solely to keep us entertained. Though I suppose that was kind of the point.)
ANYway, D&D was a treat for when we’d gotten through all the academicy stuff we were working on that day, and I’m sure it was educational somehow. If nothing else, it got this serious and shy girl involved and relaxing and owning the boys’ butts at least part of the time (did I mention I was the only girl in this outfit besides the teacher?). I know it’s meant a lot to a lot of people (and I don’t even mean those for whom RPGs (that’s Role-Playing Games to the non-geeks in the audience) have become a way of life). D&D has helped many people find kindred spirits — sometimes even to do stuff with that doesn’t involve 20-sided dice.
Gary Gygax, one of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, died last week, so if your local geeks are a bit sadder than usual this week (if all you have are emo geeks you won’t be able to tell, sorry), that might be why.
We’ll miss you, Gary.
(and speaking of geeks, start reading XKCD if you aren’t already — make with the clicky on the (resized cuz it woudn’t fit good) comic above to get there)
Bitch Is The New Black
Posted on February 24, 2008
Filed Under hee, politicking | 2 Comments
I know I promised real posting but I had to share this. And I did promise politics, too.
I’m mostly suffering from election fatigue but I do love me some Tina Fey. It’s true: Bitches Get Things Done.
Be Excellent To Each Other
Posted on February 23, 2008
Filed Under teh interweb | Leave a Comment
“Real” post coming, but I had to share this video. It should be required viewing at SO MANY of the places I frequent on the interweb. NOTE: Some of the language in the video is NSFW (Not Safe For Work) unless you have a very casual workplace.
How To Behave On An Internet Forum
Short version:
Don’t feed the trolls. (I need to work on this.)
Don’t be annoying.
The specific-to-gaming parts translate to any other…pastime…that people obsess about.
Think before you speak.
It’s not all about you.
And for the non-techies among us when he says “ask-ee” he’s talking about ASCII, computer codes that represent text characters.
Ten Things That Are Related in That They Are Totally Unrelated
Posted on February 18, 2008
Filed Under current events | 2 Comments
1 ) I don’t know anything about that Charlie Bartlett movie except for one of those DVD previews that I was not allowed to skip (you can refuse to let me fast forward through your previews, movie studios, but you can’t keep me from going to get a snack while they’re playing), but in the tv commercial (which I can’t find — YouTube has failed me) isn’t he basically doing a bad impression of Ferris Bueller? Save Ferris; avoid Charlie.
2 ) How come my cable interweb connection goes down but my cable teevee connection keeps working? (I could probably find the answer to this somewhere but I prefer to consider it an unknowable phenomenon.)
3 ) The Texas Sex Toy Ban has been overturned. Just in time for Valentine’s day! Now Texans can go back to setting their cell phones to “ring”.
4 ) Whenever I’m behind a driver who doesn’t seem to understand that slamming on the brakes is not the only way to slow down their vehicle I am reminded of an episode of Car Talk I heard a while back. One caller was asking if it was unusual to have one’s brakes replaced more than once a year.(!) Click and Clack said that yes, it was unusual and asked the person if they slammed on their brakes in order to stop. “Isn’t that what the brakes are for?” was the reply. Sometimes I wonder if that call was a joke, and then I get behind one of those drivers.
5 ) I’m researching a paper for school (cuts into one’s blogging time, that school thing) and came across someone named Kuhlthau. Which I keep reading as Cthulu. Which is totally incorrect. And inappropriate. But this kind of thing keeps the research interesting.
6 ) Recently I was chattering away to someone about the relative merits of local libraries and I suddenly thought, “Oh I must be totally boring her with all this library talk!” And then I remembered that she was in my program. A lot of my conversations are with people who aren’t in grad school with me, obviously.
7 ) I just finished reading the new biography of Charles Schulz, and was going to write a review of it but I’ve changed my mind. I’m too depressed. It’s a very thoroughly researched and detailed biography (sometimes a little too detailed — it’s 566 pages long not counting source notes and all), but Schulz is such a jerk that I don’t even want to see commercials for my insurance company for a while. See — what a rave. It’s good, but you’ll never look at Peanuts the same way again.
8 ) 8 8…I forget what 8 was for….
9 ) Speaking of 80’s music, I was doing so with a much younger friend of mine the other day. “It’s all horrible,” she said, “except maybe vintage Madonna.” My head exploded. Did any of us think we’d ever be talking about Vintage Madonna? Let those words wash over you for a moment: Vintage. Madonna. Eeep.
10 ) 10 10 10 10 for EVERYthing EVERYthing EVERYthing EVERYthing. (Sorry, #10 was going to be something profound but now I have the Violent Femmes in my head so it will have to wait for the next round of Deep Thoughts. You’re welcome.)
Sanguine, Part the Second
Posted on February 10, 2008
Filed Under blood, life stories, me me me, pleas | 1 Comment
(Sorry it’s been so long. I got distracted by etsy and school. (Did I mention I went back to school? More on that another time.) I really am going somewhere with this. Bear with me.)
So at the end of my last post I had just gotten over the sqeems. Then a couple of years ago (ye gods…nearly three now) I developed a physical problem. It wasn’t a big problem — it was annoying, but it didn’t seem like a big deal. I even put off doing anything about it until I had a conversation with my friend Buffy during which she realized I’d been mentioning the same problem for a couple of weeks and suggested I see a doctor.
So I did. He ruled out anything immediately life-threatening and suggested that I have a physical since I hadn’t had one in several years. So I found myself a primary care physician (this is how we live when we are relatively young and do not pursue dangerous sports — we do not necessarily have a primary care physician at hand from whom we can request a physical) and got myself checked out.
Something was off. Not a huge something, and not hugely off, but just enough that they sent me to a specialist. He poked and prodded me and soon pissed me off with his horrible bedside manner and his wild guesses about what might be causing the problem. (”Have you ever weighed twice what you do now? Because that could have started it.” Um, no.) I finally dumped him for another doctor, but not before something else turned up wrong.
And that’s where this long, convoluted story turns back on itself, because instead of coming to the conclusion that going to specialists was clearly making me sick I toddled off to the next one and learned that the latest Something Wrong was with my blood. Squeamish Girl has to pay regular visits to a hematologist. Squeamish Girl has had blood draws as frequently as every week. Squeamish Girl had six units of blood transfused and lay there watching it drip into her arm. (NOTE: If this is the first you’re hearing of this I’m sorry and I’m fine. I had a little speed bump recently but I’m fine. Mostly fine. Fine enough.)
But one of the many things that got me even close to the neighborhood of fine was the blood. Well, the blood and Theresa, who literally saved me all the way from Norway by convincing me to call a doctor at a time when I was too confuzzled to realize what bad shape I was in — but aside from giving her mad props and embarrassing the hell out of her one cannot replenish Theresa. One can replenish the blood supply, however.
I’ll be honest with you — I’ve never given blood. First I was too squeamish and then I was too anemic and even if I wasn’t still anemic they don’t really want my blood right now. So I know how it is when you’re someone who can’t give blood and people start talking about it and you feel kind of guilty and have to explain why you can’t possibly and you wish you could and and and…. I don’t care. You can’t, you can’t, and nobody should judge you for that. (Though it turns out that the Red Cross, at least, is always looking for people to volunteer at blood drives.) But if you can, or you don’t know if you can and have never bothered to find out, please….
Please. Donate blood. You know that any day now your local hospital, or your workplace, or a site near you will be having a blood drive. I’m not going to turn this into a contest or ask you to report back or anything like that. But everyone reading this knows someone who’s still alive because of donated blood (if you didn’t before you do now).
So…please.
Sanguine or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blood
Posted on January 30, 2008
Filed Under blood, life stories, me me me | 1 Comment
When I was a kid I would faint at the sight of blood. BAM! Out like a light, with hardly any warning. Didn’t even have to be real blood — the first time I remember doing it was when two characters in one of my grandmother’s soap operas were in a car accident. They came on screen with fake blood on their faces (a trickle; this was the seventies), and I was down for the count.
I kept the fainting shtick up for years. Not that I keeled over every time I scraped my knee or anything (roller skates + steep driveway = ow), but I had to be lying down when I went for a blood test. And I couldn’t handle it when other people were ill — I once fainted because I saw another kid faint. Movies with any kind of gore were out of the question, and I had to avert my eyes if I was surprised by a bloody scene. It was a running joke in my family, especially when you compared my squeamishness to my mother’s raised-on-a-farm earthiness.
It got less intense as I grew older and I learned how to hide it better, but this went on until I was about 20 years old. The day I had to leave the room during a childbirth video we were watching in my child development class I decided that there must be some cause for this behavior (I was a psych major at the time, so there was a cause for every behavior). I realized that I fainted when someone (real or fictional) suffered an illness or injury near me that I couldn’t do anything about, and decided that this was the root of the problem.
Lo these *mumble* years later, I think I may have been at least partly right. The whole thing does beg the question of why I was able to read gory scenes in books (even nonfiction ones) without keeling over when I couldn’t watch clearly fictional gore on screen, but that’s not important. The important thing here is that I finally did what people had been telling me to do all my life — I got over it. (NOTE: Results not typical. Your mileage may vary. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.) It wasn’t overnight, but a few years after my Childbirth Video Revelation I became a home care aide (talk about a trial by fire — I can’t even begin to tell you the things I’ve done to help other human beings’ bodies function to the best of their ability) and did it for three years.
Everybody’s heard this kind of ironic twist — Einstein is bad at math as a child but becomes a brilliant physicist (I hear that isn’t true, actually), Squeamish Girl gets over the squeems, blah, blah, blah. I may not have changed the world, but I seem to have changed me just in time.
to be continued in part 2
Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!
Posted on January 28, 2008
Filed Under teh blog | 4 Comments
Hi!
If you’re following me here from my WordPress.com blog, you are indeed in the right place. I know things look a bit different, but I hope you’ll get used to it. I’m still tweaking, so right now the blogroll is incomplete (so don’t panic if you aren’t there) and all lumped together instead of being categorized (I’m trying to cope with the lack of categorization as best I can until I figure out how to fix it. It is a struggle.) (Also, how come the spellcheck in WordPress doesn’t recognize the word “blogroll”? Or “WordPress”? Or “spellcheck”?)
If you’re not following me over from the other blog and just stumbled across this place accidentally, I wish you the best of luck. My mind is a strange world at the best of times, and even when edited for public consumption it’s not necessarily fit for public consumption. Godspeed!
I’m pooped from the move, so that’s it from me for now.
Bliebe, reste, stay! (Will write more as soon as I get this song out of my head. Damned show tunes.)