It was everything I missed while waiting all year. I had such a wonderful time at ProgDay 2006 that I have essentially been excited all year about ProgDay 2007. And I was not disappointed.


Panoramic view of ProgDay stitched together with my Canon SD850IS & software. Best viewed in Large.

( Road Trip! )

Saturday morning came quickly, and I had not had enough sleep! But knowing I could snore under my tent if necessary I pushed Jack around and was generally a nuisance and got us there by about 10:30 (supposed ProgDay start time being 10:00) where we found that, of course, the early bird gets the good tent spot. I was not too worried about this because a) being further away meant Jack could pleasantly read and more easily ignore the prog bands he didn't care about and b) the venue being what it is, if you are truly enthusiastic you can trot up front any time you want to see the band up close and personal. So we set about making camp and after a few lessons about tent stakes and the loan of a hammer from our neighbor were good to go.

Saturday Band Reviews:( read about Saturday's bands )

Day one was over, and we were beat from the sun. Even with some cover, it's still a tad grueling if you're not used to it - and it was WAY cooler (temp-wise!) than it was last year! We retired to the hotel, enjoyed a steak, and kept to ourselves. I was feeling a bit sad not to feel more a part of the "community" but as noted above, maybe next year, etc. We finished off GA season 3 with a hearty "WHATEVER". I am not discouraged! Surely they will not ruin my favorite character. (ha!)

We arrived on the scene (having left our folded up tent with another kind progger) to realize that hey, most people just left their tents set up all night. We should have done that. Another lesson learned! Us untrusting northerners, sheesh. Just as we got things put to rights, the pleasant sounds of grinding fiddle and rocking drums-and-bass burst forth upon the scene.

Sunday Band Reviews:( read about Sunday's bands )

And that is the last band I have to report on, due to the fact that I had heard 3 open for Porcupine Tree (well, admittedly, through the wall of the Ram's Head Live since I was eating dinner) and wasn't really moved. So, being exhausted and sunburned and fretting about my tattoo (you are not supposed to put on sunscreen in the healing period) we packed up and went back, saying adieu to the beautiful, bucolic Storybook Farm for another year. In retrospect, I also kind of regret not sticking around for 3 after reading some writeups of their performance (plus, apparently amazing drum feats were performed). OH WELL. I was crusty and cranky and dirty!

A side note about my tattoo: It was extremely weird to be somewhere where EVERYONE knew what my tattoo was about. And cool. Extremely cool. "You must be a big Genesis fan." HA! Even the prog fans think I'm weird. Next year, I vow to endure to the bitter end. The long walk across the field is always so sad, and I think it will be less sad if I have listened to every single damn band and wrung every last bit of wonderful music and pleasant views out of the experience. I was also a little more social on sunday and met a few people from Progressive Ears who encouraged me to get to RoSfest, which is certainly on my list, but I have missed due to rock camp.

I have tried and failed a few times now to get into words what it is about this particular fest that makes it so calming to my soul - the right people, the right setting, and the right music. I find it hard to imagine anyone would be disappointed in the experience, even if they didn't like the music. It is a great place to just be, and to have the sensory input of expertly played, inventive tunes layers on even more atmosphere.

We got up Monday morning and headed home by way of Richmond, stopping in for a nice long visit with Jack's sisters. One of whom is probably having a baby right... now! So send good birthing & new baby thoughts and vibes in that direction! And since then I've been back in the real life stuff full force and had my first BIO quiz and so on. Weee!

WE DON'T COME WHEN YOU CALL US ANYWAY

Spent the weekend in Virginia, various parts. Friday night took a long, long drive down to Norfolk via the Fun Back Roads without incident. We enjoyed the audio book of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. When we got to my parents' house, a fantastic meal of spaghetti awaited us, and cool clean sheets for resting.

We got up on Saturday and had a long breakfast and ran around to the Farmer's Market and Barrett's Antique mall. Pictures of such are linked above. It was unbearably hot, but nonetheless dad made some elaborate pork ribs for dinner. My parents surprised me with A NEW CAMERA!!!!! I have been hoping for this for a long time, and immediately ran around taking a bunch of arty-farty test pictures. It will take a while to learn this one! Please expect me to be constantly photographing everything from here on out.

Sunday we had to depart after an all-too-brief visit. We stopped in Hampton to have lunch with the Sinclairs, for which I am grateful we made the time! And then toodled down the road to Richmond, and when I say toodled I mean drove really slowly. We were never in any storms this weekend, but it seemed like we were right behind them alot. We attended a birthday shower for Jack's sis and played some Cranium and ate vegan cupcakes before getting back on the road. Bill Bryson kept us on the edge of our seat with information about quarks and dinosaur bones all the way home!

Then I stayed up way too late further messing around with my camera. My tattoo was flaking and gross all weekend, not the best time to try to get my parents used to the idea.

Per the urgings of geniealisa I have signed up for Twitter. I think I will use it as a dumping ground and that way I can pick out the really good stuff to make it here to LJ. I am not sure. I just like new toys and I can text to it. And there's this.

- The kitties appear to have survived with their attitudes intact. It's like we never left.

- I am a beach person once more. I just needed 12 years off.

- My family and Jack's family are, fortunately, good at getting along together.

- Being out in the further reaches of anyplace - well, I can just say I thought about my imaginary tiny house a lot this week. There is nothing really to say about it, but I am courting the loner in me.

- Ironically, the "cottage" we stayed in in Southern Shores was enormous. It was really generous of my parents to rent it. I am grateful.

- Christmas not at home: not all that depressing at all! Particularly when my dad packed a fake tree and it was practically 65 degrees out all week.

- I forgot what day of the week it was countless times.

- Jack said that he learned a bit about what a vacation is for this week. That is interesting to me. He's a tough nut to crack, sometimes, even though he's really very simple. Right now he's happily plugged in to Dawn of War which he finally got installed. :) All week he has been reading Gone With The Wind and giving me updates every time something happens. It's cute. He was the only one of us to actually submerge himself in the ocean, by the way. Only because there was a hot tub, mind you.

I am still a little disconnected. There's so much to unpack and clean up around here, and then my back is still giving me hell. Yes, I am going back for more doctoring. I am going to try to make my bag lighter. I have been concious of how I move and walk and sit. I did just read as much of the 500 post backlog as I could (incidentally - taking a forced break from the internet is not so bad for clearing one's head) but probably missed commenting on a great many things. I have to get to bed soon so I can do drum lessons in the morning. So I'd better go though I am brimming with observations. I loved my time away but I am also happy to be home.

p.s. in case you didn't see this... too funny, the youtube of the week.

Hey, it's monday and I have time for a ( weekend wrapup! )

Ant problem: Solved. Like, as far as I can tell, within 24 hours, there are no more ants. Whoah.

Weekend: kicked off with some tabling at the Red Emma's Radical Bookfair for the Women's Prison Literacy Initiative. We made a few contacts and saw lots of awesome tattoos. More of that tomorrow - potentially 8 full hours, we'll see. Hopefully a little more traffic for the saturday programming.

Softball: This week we won both games. The other team took it overly poorly. Hey guys? We've lost before. We're not trying to be assholes.

Drums: Inching along with everything due to not practicing enough. He has me doing a Backstreet Boys song for lessons. UGH.

WoW: Reactivated. I started up a new druid on Lethon and zarobi is helping with supplemental powerleveling. I even had to fill out an application for a guild. So insane. But at least it's fun right now.

Parents: visited last weekend. We had dinner at Donna's (in the torrential downpour) and brunch at Clyde's. I miss them a heckload when they are not around.

Smoking: I have gone 48+ hours without a cigarette. I can't call this quitting because I'm going to be going to the last night of Alchemy at Nation and, well.

I had a simply lovely weekend. Jack and I had a leisurely trip to Norfolk beginning with fajitas and ending with me collapsing into my happy comfy bed. I'm not sure what was so exhausting about chilling with geniealisa & puck_eater and my parents, respectively, perhaps all the driving. We watched V for Vendetta at the Military Circle theater, a place I surely haven't been in 15 years. They cleaned it up - it looks really nice. The movie was fantastic - all the good reviews I'd heard were right. I hope to see it again next weekend.

What else - Jack found a new video game to be interested in (Oblivion, I think?), and I jammed a fork tine into my hand; saturday night we ate at Rockefeller's by the water and I tasted some of my dad's fried flounder... and here's the kicker... I liked it. So maybe things *will* turn around for fish the way they did for shellfish for me.

I need to figure out how to get a half ton of slate that's sitting around in my parents backyard into mine in the form of a patio. :)

On January 30th my parents celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary.

Way to go guys!!!! I love you mom & dad!!!

Hey friends... thanks to everyone for their well wishes. Please forgive me if I don't respond to each right now - I'm catching back up with life.

Everything this weekend was really nice, even if it was hard on everyone. My uncle delivered a beautiful eulogy which I wish I could recreate here in detail. I got to see my cousin again, and her mom, who both looked great, I have not seen them in years. I was impressed with what a beautiful young woman cousin J has grown into. It sounds cliched, but it's true. One thing I know from this weekend is that I'd really like to learn something about preserving photos so that I can properly store and mount in albums the ones we have from grandma. Jack was wonderfully kind all weekend... I don't know how he puts up with me.

At the funeral, I was moved to see several people, friends and peers and proteges in the real estate business, stand up to talk about my grandmother. I don't think I ever appreciated how hard she worked and how much respect she'd earned from her colleagues. It was only a few years ago that she closed her last deal. That's something like 50 years in the business. When she started, she was the only woman in her office - quite a different story from today. I try to imagine what it was like, running the house, cooking for her family, all the while waking up in the morning and putting on the armor for the business day - the makeup, the suits, the heels. It's hard to wrap my head around.

There were a few bright moments of fluff over the weekend. One was as we were driving home, about to hit the tunnel when I saw a Geo Metro that had been modded to have a pickup bed in back... in the sense that the guy had chopped off the cap of the back half of the car. I flashed the peace sign at him and mouthed "awesome car dude!" and he nodded knowingly. Seriously, this lifted my spirits for a full half hour. It really does take simple things to make me happy sometimes. :)

My grandmother - Josephine, Jo, or Grandma as she was almost always called by me - passed away yesterday. She was 87 years old, says dad, although she never talked about her age, not ever. When we celebrated her birthday it was always unstated. The impression this left on me was less "it's bad to get old" and more "my family are weirdly secretive". Somehow the secretive gene didn't get passed down to me; or perhaps that's my dad's genes talking. Either way, my grandmother kept her cards close. She did like to hear about what I was up to, and I definitely didn't provide her with that often enough. Like I said to my parents, often in your Big Plans for Having an Important Life you forget about what it means to put physical distance between you and your family. Naturally that means different things to different people; to me it means a certain sadness for my family has always been kind to me.

Grandma sold real estate. I have mentioned it to some of you before, but my family on my mother's side was hip deep in the real estate business. She even had her own agency for a while; I distinctly remember going to the office there and enjoying playing with the office supplies and typing on the typewriters way on back in the 80s. My memory of anything before I was 20 is completely hazy - I have a terrible memory - and that's getting right frustrating right now. I can remember settings... I can remember small physical details about every room in the house my grandparents lived in most of my life. I remember that she'd read to me when I'd have to stay over because my dad was on a 6 month "cruise" for the Navy and my mom was at the Thalhimer's selling fine jewelry. As I got older, first my sullen teenagerdom, and then my big plans got in the way of being able to see that it would have been good to try to talk to grandma more, to try to draw her out and enjoy her company. Or maybe I didn't understand until recently the fundamental things about life, like sometimes your elders really have been through a bunch of things you might be interested to hear about and they might be interested to tell you.

Hopefully this weekend sparks more memories for me, and reveals a little more about who she was, before things started to go poorly.

I went to the Five and Below. I figured it would cure my shopping fever in one of two ways: either I would be able to purchase some small but useful thing at a nominal fee and thus feed the beast, or I would find everything such horrifically garishly abundant crap that I would decry my entire career as a compulsive consumer and never want to contribute to the culture at all again ever. It kind of did both. I got a brown satin purse for five bucks and I hate everything. Win-win!

Itunes has decided the Play Count file is corrupted and asked me to run chkdsk utility. I did, and this changed nothing. Now it won't update the ipod. WHY GOD WHY.

( This Animal Emits Indescribable, Horrifying Stink From Every Orifice )

Last night's dream was a body-snatcher affair that has something to do with getting infected through terrible music. Terrible music like Green Day. Was extra terrified for some reason that the cat would get infected. Kept the parents and the cat at arms length at all times. Unfortunately had to see devolutionary get snatched; we had to shoot him. It sucked. Then the cat woke me up by batting me directly on the nose.

Finished up Goldmine class; everything about administrating Goldmine seems incredibly straightforward. Back next week for Crystal Reports, which is bound to be infinitely less straightforward.

Friday my uncle wants me to think of hip places (in DC, specifically) to go for dinner, and hip places to go afterwards. I am utterly bereft. I never go into DC anymore! Nerves already on overdrive.

Mother's Day weekend, parental visit, was really nice! There was alot of eating. Here's how it went down: Friday night, try the Bay & Surf on rt 1. The food was ... well it didn't live up to my expectations, and I expected a great deal since the prices there are pretty steep. Also there was a VERY LOUD child right behind us, which wasn't bothering me too much, but was making conversation difficult. Sat morning we hit the diner and then the metro for our staple trip to the Navy Museum down in SE. It was pretty dang awesome although I think metroing was a mistake. Our feet were very tired out by the end. We then headed to Ballston, because that's the only place I can be confident I know the restaurants within walking distance. Flat Top Grill was had. Everyone was happy. We went home to chill, then had kebab and watched Rat Race. I had a feeling that one would be up mom & dad's alley.

Sunday was The Summit - the E's and the S's met up to determine whether this whole extended family thing was going to work out. Unsurprisingly it was very pleasant and everyone got along. :) We went to the Jazz brunch at the Ram's Head, and of course I had forgetten about the Jazz part so it was more like Annoying Loud Music brunch. Jack's dad brought some livestock (I should have taken pictures) which he traded to my dad in exchange for my betrothal. We parted ways in good spirits. Mom wanted to go to the Patuxent Wildlife Research center, which is like right around the dang corner and I had never been there! I'll have to go back and do the trails sometime, or the tram tour they have. We finished up with dinner at El Charro which completed the tour of Incredibly Noisy Restaurants as they had their jukebox set to 11. The neat thing was, we ran into cheetahmaster and lilmymble and their fam who were on their way out. I love it when that happens. :)

I hate how we have to cram everything into a weekend visit, and at the end it always seems like it will be too long until we see each other again. But I'm glad we managed to cram alot of activity into this one! Also, all restaurants should be quieter so people can actually talk to each other.

It should be illegal to be this tired. There could be a tired breathalyzer test, and when you are leaving for work you have to take it, and if you are too exhausted, you get a note and don't have to go to work. Of course people would abuse the system and ruin it for the rest of us.

So how far back do I have to reach to account for my weekend... gosh, all the way back to Wednesday, when I had a "lunch" break with oontzgrrl and didn't document it. It is nice to be able to see a friend during my work day... it's been a long time since that was even a possibility. Let's see... then there was karaoke. cheetahmaster already did a much better job covering that particular story than I could, but suffice to note that of my three entries I was only called on to sing one, the Shania Twain classic "Any Man of Mine". I should have bought the karaoke dude a drink so I could have snuck in some more Britney Spears, dammit. Afterwards, since Jack and I are the most nocturnal of our bunch, we hit Denny's together and ran into danalog totally by chance. His hair was alot longer than when I met him and I almost totally did not recognize him.

So Friday morning. I had to drive down to Norfolk on very little sleep. On the way down I listened to some country stations and heard a few songs that screamed karaoke. Once I arrived, swartzdk (which I will here use to refer to my parents, collectively although my dad is the one who maintains and upkeeps) made a fine meal of meat and potatoes which has been traditional for us since oh, forever. It was awesome. I wish I could create a wormhole so that once a week we could sit down and eat together without a 3 hour car ride. I was in bed by 10pm and woke up at 4am... yikes. Not cool. (Apparently dad came downstairs to find mom and I snoring on opposite ends of the couch like bookends.)

It occurred to me as I drove down that this visit to the beachy area was the perfect time to look for a bike. Not only are cruisers popular in that area, but I knew that someone down there carried Electras, so saturday morning mom and I set out to find a bike. And lo, not only did I find a bike, but I found the bicycle. And for a cut rate price, I assume because of the season. I left Conte's with the bike, a rack for the hatchback, and a sense of satisfaction and a slight twinge of guilt knowing I'd spent more money than I should. And a box cutter blade in my left rear tire. Weee! (The tire appears to be OK, I drove home on it, but yeah, getting a new one ASAP.) So for the record people, I have a bike rack that holds three bikes. Anyone who also has a bike and would like to go riding, anyone who has been thinking about getting a bike and would like to go riding, please please please let me know. It would be fun to find some nice liesurely trails and wander them on two wheels apiece. Right now, of course, since I am insanely paranoid, the bike is sitting IN my room. I'm scared to lock it up on the balcony because believe me, that bike got alot of attention the minute I drove into the parking lot of my complex with it. Probably mostly fond, harmless attention, but still, since my car got busted into I'm paranoid.

Spent the rest of the afternoon lunching and shopping with mom and dad, and getting increasingly anxious about the reunion. I didn't need to be. The reunion was pleasant, and organized by the sort of people that don't really care who you were ten years ago to them, because they are just incredibly nice people. For the most part, even though I actually hung out with approximately two people that were at this reunion, I felt very welcome. No one recognized me. I attribute this to the fact that I have a few things I didn't have back then; things like poise, style, and confidence. There were virtually no other tech geeks there. But lots of PhDs and MDs and financial types. The location for the event itself was a swanky private men's club, the kind of place I would never go if I wasn't attending a high school reunion for a swanky private school. I continue to be grateful to my parents for sacrificing god knows how much to send me there. When the old St. Elmo's Fire types started jockeying for social gatherings I wouldn't attend, I rolled on home, removing all my urban hipster frippery (I was dressed as a black and white photo of a modern Velma) and putting on my halloween PJ's, and settled in to try to stay awake all night. Naturally I failed. Even Anne Rice's deplorable but suspenseful book couldn't keep me awake.

( denouement )

( last night )

other than that weirdness, yesterday was a fine day. amber and i went to various thrift stores and tried to find party frocks; i'd say it was a mildly successful venture in that we both found some things, but not necessarily things we will be wearing to the party. when i got home we sat and kibbutzed with meercat and casted some aspersions. ahem. when that wrapped up, in a magic timing incident, bizarrojack called to ask me to go get a shake at the diner where we patched things up. and ran into, unsurprisingly, jwiv and traceracer. i noticed that there is virtually nothing on the silver diner menu that i feel confident is good for me to eat so i had a scrambled egg, whole wheat toast and a banana. dull, right? anyways, today i go back to check out the designs that the tattoo guy came up with. i won't have time to get the tattoo today, but it'll be interesting. i got a christmas check from my grandmother - one i feel is far, far too generous especially considering i didn't see her yet or give her a present. i will be sure to make up for that as soon as i know i can go home for a weekend. but i'm guessing that if i do end up keeping her money, it might get me a tattoo. i bet she wouldn't be thrilled about that. one bit. gah, i need to go to norfolk ASAP.

I have alot to be thankful for this year. My parents are terrific and made an excellent dinner, of which as always I only partook of the turkey, potatoes, and corn. Some things never change. I ended up driving all night to get here and then sleeping for 6 hours this morning, which was nice. I listened to 3 hours of prog rock (Genesis, Fruupp) and the stereo sounded awesome. Although WHY were there so many cars on the road at 4 in the morning?? Grandma came and is looking fragile and forgetting alot. I had a talk with mom about how things would be when she got to that age, and we agreed that it would be easier between us because well, we are actually willing to talk to each other about our needs and wants.

I talked to my uncle on the phone; he didn't come from california after all. He thought I was still engaged, heh. Oh well! He said he comes through DC alot and will call me. We'll see about that.

The SPCA volunteer crew is not mad at me for being a slacker! I am so relieved. There have been alot more reflections but I think I should go back downstairs and talk to mom about clothes and boys some more.

a very little. i'm at work and it's dead silent in here. Number One just told me i could leave whenever i want and i think that will be real soon now. i can get to mom and dad's before they even wake up and scare the heck out of em! not to mention the roads being totally clear if i do that. aww, yeah. i hear i will see my uncle, which will probably be interesting, i haven't seen him since he moved to california, a decision that had left everyone (everyone being my mother and grandmother) feeling quite concerned. not about him, i don't think. more about his mother and children. but anyways...

today i was going to do laundry. oops. i didn't. they sent out the roster for my camarilla chapter and i'm STILL not on it. for some reason i feel like if i go to any effort to be a part of the club that they should be ever-so-grateful which is stupid, i know. i just remember back in the day when it was this desperate struggle to keep the roster long enough to be a valid chapter, and here i am a paid (heh) member, and no one's noticing! maybe it's because i attend absolutely nothing related to the camarilla. yeah, maybe that's it. other than that i went to visit jack. it was grand. ridculous as it sounds even to my overly-romantic ears, although we will see each other in two days i will miss him. considering all my friends that have to deal with long-distance hoo-hah, i should shut up.

Number One reports that there are scary drunk people at the 7-11! how will i get my snackage for the road?? the Boss just gave us a verbal warning about sleeping on shift again. it's ironic since the only person that does that isn't here. if he wanted to warn me about something it really ought to be posting too much to livejournal. i just spent 15 minutes composing an impassioned response to something on the feminist community. heh. that said, i think i'll getup and go!!!

i guess i must be somewhat out of the woods, because i'm updating my journal. i'll just take that as a good sign although i keep guilting myself about whether anything i could post would be "good" enough. saturday mom and dad and i had some quality time at buddy's crabs and ribs; we got 4 tons of food and i think i almost singlehandedly ate it all. we then went to the home depot in search of a "shelving solution". we found it in the closet organization area, and i now have massive wirey shelves on my wall holding up all my stuffed animals. while we were at the home depot i also purchased a space heater because lately i have been constantly feeling cold everywhere i go in the house. and elsewhere, apparently, because i am freezing right now at work and no one else seems to feel cold. i'm already wearing gloves and a scarf and a hat while most people i see are just wearing a jacket. anyways, we're standing there staring at the various space heaters having a typical family debate, and up walks my very own Home Depot fan.

see, there's this guy that works at the home depot that ever since he saw that i knew my way around the tool section has jumped all over me (figuratively) every time i go to that HD. that's been a total of about 5 times now. he seems to always be working and he seems to always find me. he has these freaky blue eyes and looks (and sounds) like the biggest pothead since uh... some really big pothead. not that i mind that. it's the eyes that get me. he does that thing where he looks like he's staring into MY BRAIN. maybe he is. that'd be kind of cool. anyways, he ran up to talk to me and my mother, being clueless that this guy was my personal HD stalker, started asking him questions. AGH. anyways, i ran off, probably rudely, which was fine since all i wanted was shelving anyways.

later we went to the mall. i love taking my mom to the mall. for obvious reasons. poor dad had to suffer the mall but hopefully he didn't mind too much. we were still full from lunch and didn't even bother to have dinner. i said goodbye to them, feeling like we'd hardly seen each other, and then endeavored to stay awake all night. oontzgrrl called me from the party i was feeling too shy and lame to go to and that cheered me up a bit. i made it to about 5am (thank you, diablo ii) and then shut down. unfortunately i only slept until 10 or 11 which left me like, 24 hours i needed to stay awake. terrific.

sunday was spent... at the home depot again, at the thrift store, at the silver diner, and at telf's. the thrift store on a sunday is, trust me, one of the last places you want to go apart from maybe the bottom of the ocean. well, some of you may want to go there... but i digress. the place is full of people and man, it was not full of the nicest people this sunday. the highlight was tooling around the corner of the women's coats only to see these two chicks stripping down to try on clothes right in the middle of the store. now, i applaid their comfort with standing around in their underwear in public and all, but my god, putting on thrift store clothing without washing it? EWWW!! anyways, it didn't yield anything good, although i almost impulse-purchased some pin-and-string horse art. i forget what that's called, where the pins are pushed into black velvet and the picture is made by wrapping the string around it. anyways, jack pooped out on going to breakfast with me, and i didn't want to eat alone, so i called tzel and offered her some lunch. we shot the shit then i went to help her clean out her closet. then back home, then to work.

chris was talking to me alot at work and we narrowly avoided fighting; i think he was feeling bad and i was feeling tired and grumpy or what have you. i was so very tired by the time i got 2 hours into my shift that i declared then and there that i will work 5 8s this week. and actually, for all my bitching and moaning, only working 8 hours a night after working ten for so long makes it seem like it just flies by. i found out that last week we missed some outage and everyone was flipping out and they want to fire my manager, etc etc blah blah. we may even have a higher manager babysitting our shift. christ almighty!! maybe if their monitoring systems actually appropriately represented the severity of a problem, we'd have taken it more seriously. not that it wasn't our fault for not investigating it more thoroughly, but still. sheez. so anyways, today i slept and made myself macaroni and played diablo. totally lame. i should have been making my ultimate plans to start an anti-ageism organization or writing a novel (no, i'm not doing nanowrimo - moving sucked the energy out of me) or playing my guitar or harp or SOMETHING. as far as i'm concerned, playing diablo is about as productive as sitting staring at the corner.

most exciting word i used in ticket notes today: languishing
thing i have planned for tomorrow evening: bowling for columbine watching
experience i have never had: punching someone right in the face
important things i'd like to get done this week: my closet, registering the car, vote???
horrible realization: i probably can't go on a vacation next year because of my insurance payment
fabulous revelation: i might actually be getting a christmas bonus
black lining to that silver cloud: if that's true i won't get another bonus for 1.5 years
silver lining to that black lining: if i could stay employed here until 5/04 that would rock

man, last week i was nuts... i think i may still be a little on the off side, but i feel alot better than i did two days ago. mom and dad are here and the new car is awesome, it will suit me nicely, although i'm a bit disturbed by how the brakes feel, but any issues with that will come up during inspection. i've been dreaming alot; thursday night it was the intense nightmares, most of which i can't remember but i vividly remember having a dream in which there were splinters in my eyes and breasts and i was trying to pull them out. last night it was the long, drawn out dream that i went to a giant camarilla game and saw all these people i hadn't seen in forever. for some reason in this dream i took a 4 hour nap on telf's kitchen counter. and there was some guy, i think he was based on a guy that actually exists, that was grabbing my arm trying to tell me that women belong subservient to men. weird.

last night we went to the cafe de paris; it was good, and jack treated us all, because he is the best. they did something to their gratin potatoes which i hate and they were not serving mashed potatoes with the pork chop. tonight i am hoping to convince them to go to buddy's (crabs and ribs). maybe they will also help me discover a shelving solution for my stuffed animal collection.

more on the car later, maybe a picture. well, that'd be alot later since i don't have a digital camera.