This was something I answered for a swap I did, and I had so much fun with it, I thought I'd share the answers with y'all...
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Would You Rather...
Drop your favorite book in the toilet -or- watch it fall into the wood chipper? You know what? I was going to say toilet, but changed my mind. I'd rather drop it in the wood chipper, because I can buy a new copy for myself AND the shredded book can become compost.
Read only 1 book a year but remember everything -or- read 100 books a year and remember nothing? Yeah, I'd rather remember what I read, so I'll go with the one book option. Unless it's a shitty book I've been given… LOL
Read only the first page of a book -or- read only the last page? First page only. I need to be hooked and interested, not spoiled…
Get locked in a Library -or- locked in a bookstore? While both have their merits, I'd prefer the library, as there's more than just books there to work with.
Read a book with a cliffhanger ending -or- read a book with a heartbreaking ending? Screw cliffhanger endings! I actually tend to despise those with a white hot passion that is hotter than the sun. Gimme some tears and a solid final ending.
Read an awesome book -or- watch a movie? Honestly, it depends on the book and movie. But for the most part, I have preferred books to the movie adaptations, so I guess I'll say the book for now.
read only series -or- only stand alones? This is predicated by how much money and time I have. If I have enough of both, series. If not, then I'll go with standalones, as they're easier to consume in the long run.
Professional reviewer -or- famous author? Famous author, hands down. I have so many stories I want to tell people…
Favorite book become a movie -or- tv show? I've had both happen and it's a toss-up. Movies are usually more finite and able to stick to the canon of the books, whereas TV shows can run way off-canon, as it were. But TV shows have more of their own extant canon to work with… Honestly, I really can't choose here…
Would you rather your eyeballs be located next to your bellybutton -or- have to quote Scarlett O’ Hara 10 every day? A bellybutton view of the world could be interesting. And far less painful than anything to do with Gone with the Wind.
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I should know better than to start trying to get caught up on reading my circle & flist at this time of year. FemSlashCon is this coming weekend, and all my time seems to have been sucked up into that. I'm about a month behind now, if not more. So this is my request for y'all to leave me a comment with anything that's happened that you think I should know about...
Once con is done, I'll post an updated "State of the AJ" and get back into the habit of staying caught up on the daily...
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So I haven't been reading my circle/flist pages since the 23rd of May, for a variety of reasons that I'm not willing to get into just now. There's no way I can easily catch up on that, so if there's something important that I've missed, please let me know or link me up...
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I was trying to be better about keeping up with my circle/flist pages this year. I was doing better for a short time. And then I got behind again. Right now, it would be a minimum of 2 weeks that I'd have to go back. And I'll be honest when I say that I just don't have the spoons to devote to doing that right now. So I'm going to start with a clean slate. Again.
So if you have something important that's happened that you feel I should know about and I haven't commented on it, please feel free to comment with the appropriate link(s) for me to read and I'll get to it. And I know I have prompts to fulfill for people, too. I'm getting to those this week.
I'm also hoping to do an actual update post for y'all. Hopefully that'll be tomorrow.
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I will be doing my one card draw on Saturday to celebrate the March new moon. I'm planning to use my newly made "chiclets" rune set. As Saturday is also my 13th anniversary with shatterpath, I am hoping to make some tips to take her out for a nice dinner.
On a related note, if you are interested in buying a reading from me, you can do so either on DW or LJ. I am hoping to set up some readings for sale over on etsy, as well, but that probably won't happen until next week to be completely honest.
Feel free to pimp out the draw. It'll likely be 0900-1700 or 1100-1900 Pacific Standard Time, depending primarily on how I feel when I first get up on Saturday.
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The wifi at the nephew's house is completely dead right now. I am getting wifi access by hitting either McDonald's or the library. This means I'm only checking things once day on weekdays and probably not at all on weekends until i get home on 19 April. Unless things change, of course.
This also means that all of my poems for National Poetry Month will be getting backdated probably on the 19th when I get home, but they're getting written on paper daily. But I may post them more frequently. It really depends. Right now, they're at the house, rather than on the external drive to post now.
The weather has been absolutely gorgeous though here in Oregon. It hit 71 on Easter Sunday, and we took a nice 1+ mile walk with one of the nephew's grandparents' dogs. I do love me some Tigger, Astro, and Piper though. Even got to see the little garter snake that the boy caught and released into the garden.
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Favorite song lyric? Only one? Hmm... Everybody tries to break my dreams to break through, They don't believe in my words, they don't believe in my world. "Oh you're lost in another world, Oh you're lost you Saturn Girl, oh you crazy girl, Oh you Saturn Girl"... -- Paula Cole, Saturn Girl
Best part of the day? I really like when dusk fades into night. There's something about the power of the darkness of the night taking over that I really like.
In terms of writing, what's something you haven't done yet but would like to try? Well, top of the list is being published. I had a couple of things published in fanzines/fanclub 'zines/newsletters in the past, but I'd like to try professional publication. Other than that, I'm not sure what I'd like to try that I haven't yet...
Any dish you're *really* good at making?Avgolemono. I haven't needed a recipe since like the second time I made it, which was at least 6 years ago. I can make this in my sleep, and I've NEVER screwed up a batch yet. The only time it came close was when I almost put in too much lemon juice. But it's my favorite meal, and even a double or triple batch of the stuff [which is what I normally make] is lucky to last 36 hours in our household. It's one of the very best comfort food recipes I've ever made...
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? You know, I could list a lot of things that other people think I should change because they think it would make me happier/healthier/whatever. But I think the only thing I really want to change [and I'm working on it] is my negativity, both internal and external. I have too many tendencies that lead toward negativity, whether it's tearing myself down or doing so to others. Both are not good for the karma, and I've enough karma to deal with already, so I don't need to be adding to it.
Do you have a favorite artwork? I am a HUGE fan of moonvoice's work. My default icon on Dreamwidth is her "Spotted Hyena as Totem" [see current icon]. Her "As Totem" series of pieces are incredible. Her "Wandsuna" series is evocative and really grabs you, sometimes in less than nice ways. Her "Australian Animal Oracle Deck" is so very beautiful and magical. When I have the money to do so [like when I win the lottery], I'll be sending a LOT of money her way, in that art patron kind of way. I'll want artwork from her, of course, but I'll also just send the money for her to be able to do her art and NOT worry about bills. End of story.
What are your political views? I'm Green party all the way, and lean toward the environmental side of things. I suppose if I had to go with the bipartisan way of thinking, I'd lean closer to the Democrat side. That is my "backup" default setting when I don't have a Green choice.
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So, after spending the vast majority of the day out of the house, running errands with the nephew and his mom, finally got home this afternoon and got online again while the nephew watched some movies that his mom picked up at Goodwill. [And yes, I made some big scores during our errands today, but that's for another post.]
So about 1800 PDT or so, the nephew finished watching The Mask and wanted to get online for a little while. No problem. I finished what I was doing, logged out of my user account, then logged into his mom's for him. Even set up FireShepherd to run in the background for him. And then I went off to crochet and watch movies [3 Ninjas & Bram Stoker's Dracula]. About 2300 PDT or so tonight, I got back online, after shooing the boy off to shower and go to bed at 2230 [I had to finish my movie and the project I was working on, then clean up after my crafting and shut off the lights in the main room].
So I get everything up and running and open up my ariestess email account through cpanel, right? [This is what I do when I'm not at home, so I can access my email without leaving BS on the server to download when I get home again.] Not a problem. I can see that the account's gone from 1mb of email to 2mb and figure that either I was really close to 2mb already or someone's sent me something to that email addy that was unexpected. Turns out it was neither. I open said email account to see that my inbox has 172 new/unread messages in about 5 hours' time. This is up from the 12 new/unread messages I'd left it with when I got offline. 159 of those messages are all "Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender" for a yahoo email addy that I've never heard of. All of these messages show as being returned to me between 1817-2254 PDT tonight. You know, when I wasn't on the computer? Nothing in my sent folder shows up. I even logged into my MSN hotmail account that's associated with this email address [as that's how I'd signed up for MSN Messenger AGES ago] to see if it was spam sent that way, like the issue I'd had back in January [and yes, I'd changed my email and MSN passwords back then]. Nothing in either spot.
And yet, all 159 messages appear to have been returned to me while the nephew was online via the other user account on the computer. There's no crossover of my logins/passwords on that account AT ALL. I'm assuming this is all spam or a hacker of some sort, but I would assume that actual spam would go to all email addresses in my email account/MSN account, like the last time. But these all went to the same email address. When I googled said email address, it basically came up with one entry of someone leaving a spam comment on a blog with that email address attached to it.
WTF?
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Because I am stuck on the phone atm, waiting to ask my questions of an IRS customer service rep, I am going to take a page from sharpest_asp and list this info here. It's easier to do this while on hold than try to work on one of the 17 writing projects I have due between now and 1st February.
Can you tell when I was in college after reading this list? Jeezus, but I had a lot of jobs back then, sometimes two or three at a time, plus college work. *shakes head* And no real career goals out of all of that. Kinda pathetic...
And for the record, I've been on hold or gotten transferred around for 35 minutes so far, and I STILL haven't talked to anyone for more than the 30-60 seconds it takes for me to explain my issue, then get told I'm being transferred to someone else. Jeezus fucking Christ! Can I just TALK to someone and get this figured out? It's not like I can figure out what to do on the website, which is usually really intuitive and easy for me to figure out.
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So havocthecat was talking about costuming for a LARP, and it got me thinking about my big foray into costume design in college.
As part of my theatre major/minor [it vacillated during the entirety of my college career], I had to take a costume/makeup design class. It was intended to give us the basics of doing costuming and makeup for theatre. I was hyped for it and, despite a fear of sewing machines, threw myself into the class wholeheartedly. Amusingly enough, I ended up doing better with the costuming than the makeup. Go figure... LOL! This was also when I fell in love with sergers. When I have the money, I will have one of those babies in my craft room, damn it!
Our final costume project was to design and make a dress for a 1/2 size mannequin. I ended up with THE most difficult dress of the whole class. Why, you ask? I was designing for Lwaxana Fucking Troi. I'd watched all of her eps from all 6 seasons of TNG [current at that point -- you do the math] and did basic sketches of Every. Single. Outfit. she wore. I swear, I had probably at least 30 different designs that I'd sketched out, if not more. Then, from those sketches, I designed a composite dress. It was all done in lamé [gold, peacock blue, and fuchsia], black lace, and a white polyester material with "polka dots" in an iridescent material. It had Cinderella sleeves, a split skirt with a lacy underskirt, an inset diamond in the low-cut bodice, and a train. A train! It was supposed to have a Peter Pan collar, too, but that got dropped when my prof [a professional costumer] said that they're a bitch on normal sized clothes, let alone this size.
I worked my ass off for the entire portion of the semester we were allotted to work on it. No one else had a dress that complicated. I raided the fabric closet the very first day for ideas and found all of the lamé and the iridescent polyester stuff. I may have found the black lace then, too, but I don't 100% remember if I did at that point or within a day or two. It was finding that material that gave me my idea, as I'd initially been planning to do something relatively simple. Yeah, that idea got thrown out the fucking window the minute I laid eyes on that lamé. LOL! Not only did I do the multiple sketches, then design the composite dress, I made the pattern and did a muslin mock-up before touching my lovely materials. I would speed through my classwork on making costumes for the current production [but didn't skimp on that, as it was part of my grade, too], so that I would have extra time to work on that dress.
I had that dress all done and looking so fabulously beautiful. I'd planned to get a doll in that same size and get it all done up to look like Lwaxana, then present the whole thing to Majel Barrett at a con. And then I just wanted to present her with the dress. And then I ended up no longer having the dress due a series of unfortunate circumstances surrounding my move to TX and my father being a dumbass about forgetting my stuff in the garage's attic when my childhood home's last mortgage got foreclosed on. I still miss that dress. It was so damned awesome!
I never got pictures of that dress, outside of what my prof took [as she took pics of all of our projects]. Though some of my classmates might have taken pics, too. I should check with them on FB to see if they did and still have them. If not, I may have to see if I can redesign that dress again, just to have the drawing of it, if nothing else. I loved that dress. If I EVER get to do some sort of costumed affair and lose some more weight, I totally want to wear that dress.
*melancholy sigh*
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What are the fucking odds? My sun lamp's bulb is failing, which means it's flickering like mad. I don't have the $30 to replace it, but I have the $6-ish to get a regular fluorescent replacement. But what are the odds that my SUN LAMP fails on Yule/Winter Solstice? You know, the longest night of the year? CMU!
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Over the weekend, Lorre and I made a couple of discoveries that might make my internet access in Oregon better. Part of it involved an issue with the firewall on her desktop. Part of it involved a "line of sight" issue for her wireless adapter.
It's a BAAAASIC connection that isn't 100% reliable [particularly because it's using a neighborhood unsecured wifi connection], but it's enough for me to hopefully connect at least once a day to check email and such now.
Yes, we're still looking into other options, as we don't honestly know how long this particular wifi network will be around [though we're on 3 months in a row so far], but for now, this is as good a start as we're gonna get.
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Found this via racethewind10 on tumblr, and I just had to share it. It's blown my mind in ways that I can't quite explain right now. I shall be pondering this for a while...
I'm at ariestess on the AO3. Subscribe to me - fandoms in the immediate queue include Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica (2003), Birds of Prey, Criminal Minds, CSI: NY, Glee, Harry's Law, Hebrew Bible, Hellcats, Leverage, Princess and the Frog (2009), Private Practice, Star Trek: The Next Generation, & Stargate SG-1! (You'll need to log in to see the subscribe button.)
Have started to post all stories written to AO3 in recent months, and will start working on backlogged stuff at some future point, which means more fandoms in my queue eventually.
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So this morning, somewhere between 0800-1100, I dreamed that I was visiting with moonvoice and her SO Glen. We were clearly in their house, tho it looked nothing like the pictures I've seen when she's posted pics of her cats, Moet and Maybe. If Moet and Maybe were in the dream, they didn't make an appearance that I remember. But they did have a little boy in the house, around 2-3yo. moonvoice and I were doing art things while watching Stephen King-esque movies and discussing their similarities/differences to the books they were based on. There was something really -- I'm having trouble with the right word, as it's not spiritual or magical, but they're the closest things I can come to what it was -- about their son. He switched back and forth between blond and brown hair, and he had a fascination with having everything in its place, which he would monitor by putting it all in his "backpack of holding" before moving it to where he thought it should be. He didn't touch the artwork or the entertainment stuff, but everything else in the room [and the bathroom, actually] got rearranged several times, including the furniture -- and it all fit in that backpack. He had a bright smile, but he was very intense at the same time, and he never once spoke. Just before I left, he gave me a picture he'd drawn and something else that I'm blanking on atm, but it was really important in the dream, then gave me a hug. moonvoice even made the comment that he never hugged people like that, and never gave away his artwork. All I remember of all of the artwork in the dream was that there was a lot of water symbology. In fact, moonvoice was drawing something that had seaweed/sea grass, kind of similar to the dugong piece she completed recently, but it wasn't that piece. And in giving me those gifts, the boy [whose name I NEVER got] was giving me something important that I needed to have. I just wish I could remember what it was.
It was a really fascinating dream, and I have been pondering it most of today, hoping to remember what it was the boy gave me. The water symbology makes me think that this might somehow be related to the download that Poseidon gave me last week. And I also think it was somehow related to the earthquakes and tsunamis that happened in the last 24+ hours.
Other than that, I've been pretty quiet lately. I've been fighting a mid-grade headache/low-grade migraine most of the week, thanks to the weather. And now, on the first nice, non-rainy day we've had in a week, I've got a raging headache. Go figure... *sighs* I did manage to get some rosaries up on our etsy shop, and hope to get a good rhythm going with shatterpath to get the rest of the jewelry, crochet, and spa stuff up this next week. I definitely need to f ind the lucky penny keychains and post them up in the store.
Yesterday shatterpath swapped out the fish tanks. Unfortunately, we lost two of our fish in the swap: the ghost cat and the smallest of the three bleeding hearts. Granted, the two that died were the two oldest of the four we had left. But still... *sighs* Well, we're keeping an eye on the remaining two bleeding hearts and letting them fully acclimate to the other tank before we add any new fish.
And now, I think it's time to finish up my Daily Pages and go the fuck to bed, try to sleep off this headache... Hopefully tomorrow I'll get the zoo post and pictures posted up...
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I got this from a fellow HHer last week and kept forgetting to post it up. Considering our house was broken into 3 years ago, I thought this was apropos to post up...
The email also had a section about using wasp spray instead of pepper spray, as a deterrent but Snopes had something to say about that snopes.com: Wasp Spray
Sources: Convicted burglars in North Carolina , Oregon , California , and Kentucky ; security consultant Chris McGoey, who runs crimedoctor.com; and Richard T. Wright, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, who interviewed 105 burglars for his book "Burglars on the Job".
So, as the subject line suggestions, this is a post of some random weird shit that I've been saving here and there for posts, but haven't gotten posted yet...
In bullet format, because I like it...
Amusing Email Subject Line from a BeliefNet subscription :: Your Body Wants Your Loving Attention I'm quite sure it does, but how did they know that??? Are they spying on me over the intarwebz???
Random IM convo w/ darkhawkhealer from earlier this week....
ariestess: Did you know cats have coochie boogers? darkhawkhealer: *blink* darkhawkhealer: That's disgusting. darkhawkhealer: Thanks, my day wasn't complete until I knew that... ariestess: We're watching a show called "In the Womb" on cats. And it's talking about female cats having a mucous layer that the sperm need to get thru before getting to the eggs... Hence coochie boogers
I guess you probably had to be there, but the whole concept had me completely and utterly in tears from laughing howling like a damned banshee over this. Like seriously crying from laughing so hard over it. I'd love to have something to blame the gigglefit on, but I got nothing....
Random IM convo w/ shatterpath from earlier this week [earlier in the same day as the above convo w/ darkhawkhealer, actually...
Clearly, too much time with shatterpath can be a bad thing... *veg*
will_i_am_oak & his mother were relatively successful in getting me hooked on that TAPS ghost hunting show on SciFi while they were here. We watched several eps together on Giftmas Eve. I was rather hooked, but now that they're gone, maybe I'll be lucky and that will get out of my system. Tho' that kind of paranormal work is something I'd actually be quite interested in doing. And that show actually was interesting in that it went about things scientifically, but would never outright really say "You're lying about your paranormal shit happening here", which I thought was quite awesome...
I WILL BE COMPLETELY HONEST FOR 24 HOURS... You can ask one question; any question, no matter how crazy, sinister, lewd or wrong it is. I will answer no matter what and you will have my FULL honesty; so don't ask if you don't want to know the answer.
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