Going Crazy - Know the Way?

I'm feeling a little better, but still couldn't sleep. So no sewing day here.

My sis is here, so she is helping distract Rowan from playing "Mom is a jungle gym" for a few hours. She also picked up my scrips.

I'm in my hurty place.

EDIT: I was wrong. There's much more hurty to go. Ow, fuckin' ow!!!

math5 sent me a link for a Roomba for $99. For that price, I had to have it.

*INSERT GEEKY SQUEEE*

Honest - I had been shopping for a small chest freezer. Not nifty housekeeping robots. And part of the motivation was certainly not wanting to see it chase the cats.

Nope nope.

What's also kinda nifty is that the same company (iRobot) makes a gutter-cleaning robot. I mean, how awesometastic is that?

Kidney infection.

Primary doc hasn't called back.

EDIT: Still no call back. *sigh* No fever, and I'm not feeling "must go to ER" bad yet, so hangin' in there. But I'll say that I'm less than comfortable.

Just sucks that I will likely miss the wedding. :(

Had a lovely breakfast with Roland prior to leaving for work ridiculously late - a pleasurable and naughty feeling of playing hooky.

We got word yesterday that a professional acquaintance of mine, someone who is an institution in engineering, died of a massive heart attack while on travel - sadness with a poignant shiver of a goose walking over your grave.

Pawned most of my work off on my padewan Trigirl who should properly be called a journeyman, but George Lucas never made up a word for that - pride and relief.

F.I.N.A.L.L.Y got one of the new padewan I've been promised to take over some of this crushing load of shiftwork - amused relief with a stern reminder I must not treat the wide-eyed naive like cat toys.

Interrupted three times, and thus made quite late for lunch, by teammates saying Look, I know this isn't directly your problem, but I know you'll go make the chiefs do the right thing and fix it, so would you please... - resigned exhaustion mixed with that tinge of flattery for being assumed competent at everything.

Made it to lunch so late our usual eatery had a line out the door; randomly, we tried a new option and wasted twenty minutes obtaining the worst Jamaican food I've ever eaten (and I *like* oxtail soup) from a staff that had real trouble grasping we wanted a small soda - exasperation edged with a headache from bad regaee music.

Happiness for new comics augmented by leaving early enough to recapture the feel of playing hooky with Roland. A nap, a snack, a showing of Prince Caspian with the man who loves and understands me enough to excitedly chant Reepicheep! in unison as the lights went down.

(It must be said that Reepicheep's fights were the only one Roland didn't complain about; no spinny-show-your-back-to-the-opponent nonsense, no bravely tossing off the helmut so the director can get a better shot of the actor's face. Reepicheep just went straight for slashing their throats!)

(Nia always said Roland and I saved two completely normal people by marrying each other.)

Having managed to miss dinner hours, we bought chips on the way home and naughtily had snack food for supper while the DVR played back Battlestar Galatica - exasperation that is BSG doesn't get somewhere soon with this plotline, I will abandon hope as the series is starting to take on a Robert-Jordan-is-writing-this ethos.

She asked me to sing her a lullaby last night, so I tried out St. Judy's Comet. She liked it. Then she sang one for me.

It was Henry Nilsson's Coconut: (Her version had cheese and candy, though.)

She put the lime in the coconut, she drank them both up
She put the lime in the coconut, she drank them both up
She put the lime in the coconut, she drank them both up

I almost died. :)

My mom called today and told me that she saw singewulf's recent post about his mom/my MIL being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

As I don't routinely read his LJ, I didn't see the post until she told me. :(

Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.

We haven't been watching alot of TV lately, both because there's only so much "Bob the Builder" I can take and, in the short time between putting the kids to bed and putting ourselves to bed, my preference is to send some emails, and play City of Heroes. As a result, we had accumulated several hundred hours of TV that we're going to watch "as soon as we get around to it".

So about two weeks ago, as we were watching TV, our TiVo froze up and crashed. It then started an endless cycle of rebooting -- it would almost complete its reboot, then start over. Not good. A night of web forum research pointed to a serious disc error. The tenor of the help posts seemed to be "well, here are a few things you can try, but they probably won't work, and you're probably screwed." I tried them, they didn't work. Not good at all.

The last ditch fix was to unplug the external hard drive I used to increase storage, and "divorce" it from the TiVo. In theory, if the disc error was on the external drive, getting rid of it would take care of the problem. And it did, and now we have a functional TiVo again.

Except, in removing the external drive, we lost 75% of our saved programs. All those shows I was "saving" for "sometime" -- gone.

And you know what? It's liberating. There are afew losses I regret (the last 8 episodes of BSG, the first half of this season of House). But it was starting to get wearing, seeing this enormous list of programs that, in theory, I wanted to see, but couldn't begin to tell you when I'd actually watch. And feeling guilty because I wasn't watching enough TV is ridiculous.

So the TiVo is filling up again, but I haven't replaced the external drive, so the library of stuff remains small -- older programs age off the machine. I thought that would bother me, missing all those shows I (in theory) wanted to watch -- but not so much. And as long as we have a dozen episodes of "bob the Builder" saved, we're ok.

My twins have different blood types, so I'm taking it they're fraternal. Even though they are, everyone still has a tough time telling them apart. My old method was using  a hospital bracelet but it started getting snug so I cut it off.

What did you ladies do?

This Sunday... sewing day...

Lemme know if you're interested. :)



EDIT: Might as well post this early - I'm celebrating Rowan and my birthdays on May 25th, the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. If you are available to join us, just let me know.

I can't believe I shot a 21 on the 40 yard target yesterday. Unfortunately, I can believe that it was my best score all night and was not accompanied by equally nice scores on the 30 and 20...

Dracula's Ball is coming up in Philly (Shampoo Nightclub) the evening of May 24th (9:00PM-2:00AM), would anyone care to join me?? I've wanted to go for years, but don't want to go alone.

http://www.draculasball.com/

Finally got to see Iron Man last night with fosveny and math5. It was perfect. I loved it. Seeing the Mark III armor on screen... SQUEE!!!

It was nice seeing a major storyline from around the time I started to collect the comic (Obadiah Stane plot), with references to other storylines (armor wars, etc).

The cameo after the credits was spot-on perfect considering the Marvel Ultimate universe books. (But I already knew about that casting choice.) I also gave little squees the first time I saw Rhodey ("That *HAS* to be Jim Rhodes!") and Happy.

If only all comic book-based movies were this good!

I started a fight today by bounding into the test bullpen and exclaiming loudly Eddie Izzard is playing Reepicheep! Reepicheep - the coolest character ever!

Argument raged all day about what fictional character is, indeed, the coolest ever. I stood by firmly by Reepicheep - that bravest of the brave mouse whom has strangely come to remind me of Syr Christian. Some plebians took the ridiculously mainstream stance that the coolest-character-ever was Indian Jones or Die Hard's Bruce Willis for which I blame advertising and testosterome, though I had to lean slight toward the Bogart's Blaine (Casablanca) lobby.

One idiot even lobbied for Tom Bombadil, whom I've always thought should be entirely deleted from the Lord of the Rings universe.

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Not sure what Justus and Colin are on about, but I'm sure having them over for dinner, pouring a bit of scotch and poking a bear with a stick would provide popcorn worthy spectator sport because I like watching fighting.

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I think these things up because I am a bad, bad woman, though I didn't incite the C-C-E fight on purpose.

Feel free to lobby for your own CCE, or be wise and join the Reepicheep contingent!

Am I crazy? What is it with eating, as a toddler? Why does it have to be so complicated, and how do they remember all their rules? I don’t think they can. I think they are, like their mother, making it up as they go. Take a simple circumstance like a PB&J sandwich.

As the Nourishment Providing Parent (NPP), you can do whatever you want -- cut them up into cute little triangles, squares, dinosaurs, hearts, “fingers”, or plain old circles. It doesn’t matter, use whatever cookie cutters you’ve got in your arsenal. Because with toddlers, you have odds to beat. I’m not sure of the statistics, but I know that your chances of success are on the low end of the spectrum. This is evidenced by my children’s ongoing eating strike. You have these possibilities: success (if you’re lucky, this is every few days); it’s the wrong _______________ (fill in the blank, size, shape, color, vessel, etc.); and utter and complete failure. And within the “complete failure” category, there are a multitude of causes for said failure: not today (they ate it like gangbusters yesterday, but not today ); never ever (they won’t eat it on any day, Sam I Am); because he/she isn’t eating it (this is where the twin thing can really bite you in the butt).

NPP can also play the ruse of “airplane coming in for a landing”, or in our family, it’s the barn door opening for some hay (or some other weirdness my MIL used to say to my husband). But the affluent toddler can smell you coming with that one. When that game starts, it is my belief that the NPP has started to give off some pheromones -- FEAR pheromones. The toddler smells the fear, which turns into a cue to start flinging food.

DUCK!!