Dec 26 2008
Dad: So are we going to Lexington this week?
Mom: Why do we need to go to Lexington?
Dad: I got this Starbucks gift card! There’s no Starbucks around here.
Mom: Why do you need to go out and use the gift card the minute you get it?
Dad: I can’t drink the card, dear.
Dec 24 2008
* I wake up way too early because the house is freezing.
* There is a holiday-related thing I need to do before one of my sisters wakes up - this would be a good time to do it. I forget, turn the heat on, and go back to sleep.
* I get up at 11:00, feeling sick because I slept way too long. My sisters are both awake already.
* I realize that I forgot to call the Japanese consulate yesterday to ask where the heck my visa is - it should have shown up Monday at the latest. I call.
* They never received one of my forms, and they need it - in the original - before they can issue the visa. (I spent like $35 bucks sending all this crap two weeks ago, did I mention that?) Upon being told that I’m leaving the country in less than two weeks - about half of which are vacation days for the consulate, and several of which are vacation days for the post office - the woman I talk to says that I fax them the form today, she’ll try to get it out in the mail before they close. But I really need to mail in an original, too.
* The printer is fucking broken.
* We don’t have a fax machine anyway. The eighties have been over for like at least fifteen fucking years, I checked.
* I call Mom and ask if her office has a working printer and fax machine - it does - and say I’ll be there in a few minutes.
* And the car is gone. 
thegeekgene took it someplace. I break into her room and eat her N64.
* I call Mom and ask her if she can come get me.
* It occurs to me when we’re halfway there I could have just done the fax part of this from the house, because we do have a working scanner, I know how to use Photoshop, and FaxZero.com exists.
* After faxing the form, I go pick up some stuff for Mom, then go to the post office to mail the hard-copy. I lock myself out of the car. I call Mom and discover that this car has only one key. Two expensive and highly cold-sensitive presents are trapped inside.
* I go into the post office to mail the form. Just as I’m handing the envelope across the desk, my cell phone rings - the original copy has just shown up at the consulate. I haven’t paid yet! Hurrah!
* I sit in the post office and play Professor Layton and the Curious Village for twenty minutes until Dad shows up with a key he somehow got made.
* I finally manage to finish my orc’s Chief Brigadier armor set! But it’s more revealing than I realized.
Cut for overly sexy orc:
Continue reading “What Happened Today (or, yesterday, by now)”
Dec 17 2008
Really interesting post involving World of Warcraft in China. I wish I could read the Chinese message board entries…
Background for people too smart to play WoW:
Dec 13 2008
My laptop’s broken and the back-up drive Mom ordered me is late showing up and they cast a bunch of white kids for the Avatar movie (and actually I don’t acknowledge its existence, so forget I said anything) and I forgot to give the dog his pill this morning and the pants I ordered don’t fit.
But Dad’s arch-nemesis outbid him at a Christmukkah charity auction, and it was hilarious. Everyone else there found their feud so entertaining that the bidding was much higher on subsequent items than it had been on earlier ones, and they set a record for the auction. (Dad to the organizer: “Make sure his check clears.”)
Broken laptop means I am re-reading old books, because I am saving Flora’s Dare for some time when I’m not all grumpy. Yesterday it was Son of the Shadows, one of Juliet Marillier’s Sevenwaters books, which are fantasy-romance novels involving froofy Druids and curses and really bad dialog.
The first book, Daughter of the Forest worked pretty well as a romance. I think this is partly because the heroine couldn’t talk. Marillier’s a good writer in a lot of other regards, but for some reason, she can’t seem to handle dialog between her heroines and their love interests. Here’s how Liadan and Bran, the heroine and hero from Son of the Shadows, talk to each other:
“No! You can’t do this! You can’t just - finish him off as if he were some snared rabbit or a sheep to be slaughtered for the pot. This is a man here. One of your own.”
“Where did you learn of life? In some fairy tale? We live by the code. We have no names, no past, no future.”
“Already you believe me some kind of monster. You are indeed quick to assess a man’s character.”
“As are you to judge a woman.”
“I need not know you, to recognize what you are. Your kind are all the same. Catch a man in your net, draw him in, deprive him of his will and his judgment. It happens so subtly he is lost before he ever recognizes the danger.”
See, Marillier has a pretty good sense of how melodramatic she can go without sounding ridiculous most of the time - she can do the wise old spirits of the earth and guys getting turned into swans perfectly convincingly. But the romantic parts of the book are persistently and aggravatingly awkward.
Probably the biggest problem here is that the love interest’s characterization doesn’t make any sense. We’re supposed to believe that Bran hates women because one betrayed him in some terrible way, and that he distrusts Liadan in specific because her father did something terrible that caused him to lose his family and become an outlaw at a young age. A lot of suspense is built up about what his terrible secret is, but when we get to it, it’s literally incomprehensible (spoilers below the cut):
Dec 10 2008
I went outside for the first time since this morning to get firewood, and realized it was nearly 70 degrees out.
I let the fire go out and opened all the doors instead.
Dec 03 2008
* About 80% of the area has histoplasmosis, a disease caused by inhalation of a certain fungus. Mom is among that percentage. The doctor she saw said that the evidence it had left was “impressive.” (It is not, however, why her chest suddenly started hurting - that’s the pleurisy. The histo is apparently just decorative.) The fungus in question is known to grow particularly well in bat guano, to which Mom was exposed in large quantities as a child. Her Bats In The Attic bedtime story apparently has an epilogue.
* The inside of the people across the road’s house is kind of cute.
* A difference between Japanese and Kentuckian liquor stores: Kentuckian liquor stores keep the small bottles behind the counter to make them harder to shoplift. Also, Baileys is cheaper in Japan. (My presence in the liquor store had no bearing on Mom’s prognosis, which is fine.)
Dec 02 2008
You may find it difficult to convince someone that your chest pains “aren’t that bad” when you are found wrapped in a blanket on the couch at half-past midnight, answer questions about why only after long pauses and with much shiftiness of the eye, and have the Merck Manual open in your lap to the section about coronary artery bypasses. Nor does it inspire confidence to hide the book under the blanket.
We eventually got Mom to go to the hospital last night. It turned out to be pleurisy, a lung thing, not her heart. She complained that pleurisy “is something Victorian people got,” which she, a sophisticated modern person whose mail arrives mostly in the form of zeros and ones and whose kitchen contains three separate electrical devices dedicated to the complex challenge of mixing things together, should not be required to suffer. She then went back to her crocheting.
