| the place is bugged |
[06 Jun 2008|11:29pm] |
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mood |
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 exhausted |
] |
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music |
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assorted Aimee Mann |
] |
Turned on the hose to water plants today (yes, we have a hose, for watering plants in actual dirt!) and noticed something large and black scurrying away from the spigot. I looked back toward it just in time to see the red hourglass on its underside before it hustled into the service hatch in the wall.
...I'll have to tell maintenance about that, I think.
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| buzzed |
[02 Jun 2008|05:52pm] |
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mood |
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 worried |
] |
Today I found a bee hovering around the kitchen light fixture. Having seen plenty of bees outside in the patio, and figuring it had just come in as Kelson left, I swatted it and made breakfast. Moments later, the refrigerator stopped making noise, allowing me to hear the buzzing and tapping sounds coming from the general vicinity of the stove fan. Like hundreds of bees knocking against things in the ceiling...
Oh fuck.
I went to the office and reported my suspicions, remembering to impart the lessons learned by K's parents when their compost bin became a hive, i.e., those suckers build FAST. The leasing manager promised it would get investigated tomorrow. Best she could do, so I had to say okay.
At lunchtime, there was another bee hanging around. I swatted that one and then noticed that the buzzing and tapping was louder. As if it had invaded the whole kitchen ceiling. It was even audible in the living room on the other side of the wall. Not only that, but I actually saw a third bee appear from nowhere, in the vicinity of the light fixture. Great, they have a direct doorway into the apartment. So I informed the manager, who promised to roust out the maintenance supervisor (who wasn't on site today) to have a look. A couple of hours later, there was some banging and scraping in the ceiling area, but when I went out to see if I could catch the guy, there was nobody.
Since then, I've found a fourth bee sort of vegging on the counter (swat) and learned that bee corpses are very hard to wash down a drain. In a similar vein, ants love bee corpses. I'm now trying to figure out whether it's possible to lure the ants up to the light fixture so I can sic them on the bees. Insect brawl, no holds barred. I'd sell tickets if I were more sure we should even be staying here tonight. :p
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| i scream |
[27 May 2008|10:41pm] |
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mood |
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 happy |
] |
Albertson's is my hero for carrying this stuff. It's like crack. And the fact that they have a cat for a mascot is the hot fudge on top.
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| pennies from... |
[15 May 2008|11:30pm] |
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mood |
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 thoughtful |
] |
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music |
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Vienna Teng - City Hall (headmusic) |
] |
Today, while sorting through junk that had accumulated in a box better used to tote heavy books, I found a birthday card. Well, actually I found several of those, but this one was from my late grandmother. It still had $25 inside, which probably means it was from 5 years ago; that would have been the last birthday that she would have been coherent enough to write to me on her own.
I don't want to go so far as to say I'm being watched out for, but "fortunate" I'll take. And fortunate to have all you guys as well.
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| playing doctor |
[18 Apr 2008|12:35am] |
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mood |
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 determined |
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Pathology's not really my normal cup of tea, but seeing as I'm still unemployed and have both a) movie gift cards and b) a husband willing to ferry me to the Spectrum, I'm going for it. I feel an obligation to my fellow fans, as it's only showing at 100 theaters nationwide. WTF? Do the execs not realize that more than 20 cities harbor hordes of drooling fangirls?
I've told ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kelson that he may be equally likely to find me on my third margarita at Javier's or sitting with a gaggle of high-schoolers in the food court. I want the movie to be good, really I do, but...I'm not getting my hopes up.
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| walking in o.c. |
[25 Mar 2008|04:45pm] |
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mood |
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satisfied |
] |
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music |
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Queen - Killer Queen (headmusic) |
] |
Highlights of today's 3.2-mile walk:
- A guy out watering his lawn asked me whether I did, as my shirt said, really love nerds. I said I was married to one. His reply: "Rock 'n' roll!"
- Apparently the new trend in women's sunshades is to hold up a jacket. No less than four women on my route were using hoodies as parasols. Whatev.
- While in the T-Mobile store, I got a call from a shady-sounding recruiter. I'd been to a Primerica recruitment meeting about 6 years ago and been roundly unimpressed, and this woman's refusal to tell me anything about the positions available didn't do anything to alleviate that. I think I will actually call the "Bill" person whose number she gave me, just to tell him that "Barbara" appears to be terminally out of the loop when it comes to the actual jobs she's trying to recruit for. I'm sick of sales offers that are packaged to sound like they're not sales.
- Having unearthed a $10 Starbucks card, I stopped in at the local store to spend a little of somebody else's limbo-cash and heard the employees ragging on the Robeks next door. So I went to Robeks instead.
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| nice going, jeanius |
[15 Feb 2008|04:19pm] |
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mood |
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 disappointed |
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I am currently wearing the infamous skinny jeans. They claim to be size 14 but fit more like a 12, or at least that's how I remember it--the tag no longer has writing on it. They are also from my UCI days, meaning they're Lee brand and ride at the waist. Only, the place they're now hitting me is more in the vicinity of my last rib. I don't remember them being that high before, but that could be a side effect of wearing lower-cut styles on a regular basis. But even considering that, they really don't fit. The front rise is too high, leading to the above-mentioned rib problem and major 'toe. And even with the extra height, they still gap in back. So not bothering to get the mystery stain out before pitching these with the Goodwill.
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| unbe-levi-ble |
[10 Feb 2008|09:13pm] |
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mood |
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 blah |
] |
I am currently wearing my first-ever pair of honest-to-goodness Levi's jeans. Ten pounds ago, at a size 14, I tried on the new 529 "curvy" cut and was, as expected, disappointed. Last week, the 12s in the same style had room for not only my thighs but also my butt...and I didn't need to be wearing a thong. They do need a belt, but my waist-hip ratio is such that any "modern" pants style is going to gap a little. This pair was the best of about 10 I tried in 4 different styles/brands. I'm still pretty amazed.
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| weirdest circle ever |
[22 Jan 2008|04:11pm] |
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mood |
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nostalgic |
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In the summer of 1997 I was waiting for college to start again, passing the time the same way as I had the year before: by playing Exile II till my fingers should have dropped off. And also writing fanfic for it, which I'd been doing off and on since discovering the game the previous summer. And watching Roar, pretty religiously. Heath Ledger, I thought, was possibly even cuter than Noah Wyle.
For the last two weeks I've been deeply ensconced in Avernum 2, the update/remake of Exile II, and am 40% done with the game-winning quests. I've also been engaged in a search for the fanfic I was writing way back when, both on paper and on the computer. There was one piece I couldn't find, no matter what terms I searched with or how much I made myself sneeze by digging through old paper stacks. I found it today in my computer archive, along with several other pieces, within an hour of reading this. True to form, I was looking for something else: my old save files.
It's not poetic. Poetry doesn't make me feel old and sad.
But when Avernum 5 comes out for PC, I'm naming my tank Conor.
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| toying with my affections |
[11 Jan 2008|11:48am] |
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mood |
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 mischievous |
] |
Heroes action figure prototypes! At least, they better be prototypes because (as it's been observed) they look kinda iffy in the faces. Which would probably satisfy that person who posted that the characters aren't pretty, but is rather a disappointment to my highly immature slash-loving self.
Of course, just as big a disappointment is not having a measurement for these puppies. What's the fun in making a wish list if you can't include a 6-inch Peter?
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| days of old hang sign |
[01 Jan 2008|12:04pm] |
As of today, I am officially unemployed. Considering the alternatives, this doesn't make me too unhappy. We'll be fine for a while on the PTO cashout I deposited yesterday. *boggles*
We managed to miss all the toasting and ball-dropping and other such nonsense by virtue of being in a movie theater at midnight, watching Sweeney Todd. Yes, we are the kind of people who do the midnight kiss while people are getting killed on-screen. We also enjoy singing along to Barenaked Ladies in empty outdoor malls at 12:20-something in the morning.
Sometime soon, we need to conduct a serious survey of gingerbread lattes available in the area. We've already determined that Coffee Bean's is far superior to Starbucks'; last night we learned that Peet's also has one that we have not yet sampled. (I also learned that "Hey There Delilah" is not that guy's only single, which is pretty pathetic information but at least helped make sure that finding out Halo is now canon wasn't the first thing I learned in 2008. Wonder if Jack and Adrian followed up on their threats of long serious talks.)
Today I need to finish the scarf for my aunt that I started last night, bag up a ton of newspapers we haven't been reading, and eat nothing but vegetables. New Year's parties are not good for the hips.
Pretty happy so far. Let's see how this goes.
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| maybe not spicy, but still tasty |
[18 Aug 2007|10:15pm] |
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mood |
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silly |
] |
So who's interested to see me bake these cupcakes for September 24th? And who'd help Sylar us eat them?
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| hallows or horcruxes? |
[22 Jul 2007|12:32pm] |
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mood |
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satisfied |
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My original plan was to save Deathly Hallows to read during Comic-Con so I wouldn't be fighting kelson for the computer back at the hotel. That, however, got blasted all to hell in what started as a 5-chapter-at-a-time measured allotment and ended up as a marathon sprint through the whole damn book. I believe I actually finished it within a 24-hour period. And while I did catch myself skimming in places, I also forced myself to go back and reread every time that happened. (Darn faulty eyesweep.) For a huge book, it goes pretty fast.
Advice for those who can still take it: do go back and reread HBP, or at least the Wikipedia summary. (Warning, though: I just removed a spoiler from the article, which has been heavily edited over the last couple of days and may contain other spoilers.) You'll feel like less of a dope at some of the reveals. And if you're reading this without air conditioning, please remember to be considerate of your neighbors and close the windows at 11 pm or so. No matter where you are in the book at the time.
And now for the spoilers.
( Hallows or horcruxes? Telegraphs or ass pulls? Friend or foe? )
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| cookies are go |
[10 Jul 2007|11:46pm] |
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mood |
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happy |
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Made the sunflower seed butter cookies, using my tried-and-true PB cookie recipe with mini chocolate chips in both for flavor and for distinguishing them from normal PB. They are GOOOOOOD. Very sandy in texture, probably because of my choice in brown sugar (365 dark brown) and the higher fat content/lower protein content of the SS butter. Oddly, they smell like peanut butter both in and out of the oven, but taste less like it. Just the opposite of the SS butter by itself. But I'll work on the mysteries of the universe later. Now to get these puppies onto a cooling rack. Preferably intact.
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| trader joe's is made of win |
[01 Jul 2007|02:53pm] |
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mood |
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jubilant |
] |
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music |
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something from the Star Trek VI soundtrack |
] |
Picked up some sunflower seed butter at TJ's last visit, to see what I could come up with using it as a substitution. It's been burning a hole in the pantry for almost a week now, and today I finally cracked it open. Smells like sunflower seeds, tastes like not-quite peanut butter. Add some toast and boysenberry jam and I'm in nostalgia heaven. Wow. Frakkin' awesome. I can't wait to try cookies with this stuff.
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tired
