i believe the lottery of blog posts has spared you the saga of my bloodyloud neighbors… that was a near thing on your part… on my part, it means that i will be spending May moving, again… the saga in a nutshell: one set of downstairs neighbors was really (i mean, seriously, really) loud. like, heartbeat in my floor loud. so i asked them to turn it down. the one dude asked me why i was always down there causing trouble (because asking once, politely, apparently constitutes “always causing trouble”) and the other dude tried to smarm me and offered me a beer. nb: i don’t drink. at least, not beer. at least, not with jerks who have only the bass line of their songs playing, and that so loud as to rattle my floorboards. two weeks later, they had it up again. at one thirty AM, saturday. and again at 2:15 AM, saturday. i complained to the management. management told me to call the police. so, when i was woken up the following tuesday by someone’s even louder bass, and when i came home that tuesday to find that the volume had, if anything, gone /up/, i called the police. police came out, knocked on their door (a knock which they did not answer until the third knock) and finally the jerks shut the hell up. at this point, they must have gotten mad though, because not even five days later, they had it up again. when i asked them to turn it down this time, they slammed the door in my face. so the next time i heard it (3 AM, by the by, monday morning) i didn’t even give them a warning knock, i called the cops straight off. i don’t know what happened that night between Them and The Cops, because as soon as i could, i went straight back to sleep, but the following week, i walked past their apartment to find the place vacant. haHA! you think, problem SOLVED! but alas, no. the people who live in the apartment immediately below me, the same girls who agreed with me that the jerk’s loud music was annoying, the very same girls who told me they did not own audio equipment of the caliber required to produce bass that could be heard in the next apartment, those girls had their music up loud enough to wake me up on a sunday afternoon. and then my upstairs neighbor had his TV up that afternoon. and mondays have mysteriously become band practice night or something around here. i swear i saw my other upstairs neighbors take mixing equipment and amps up to their aparment some weeks ago, and for the past couple of weeks, i’ve heard (what i assume to be) them, practicing. so i decided enough was enough, it was time to get out of here. i looked at a couple of places, most of which were financially impossible (not necessarily because of rent, but because of application fees and deposits and the like. i really wasn’t expecting to move out until /next/ spring), and finally i went to my rental office here and asked if they had any townhomes available. why yes, they just happen to have a nice new one with brand new carpet, shall we take a look? so, epic story somewhat short, i took a look, it’s right up near the front of the complex, the neighbors seem to be in bed circa 9:30, 10 pm on weeknights, and there’s a lovely tree right out front. i signed up. they approved my app, and now we’re waiting on word as to whether they’re going to waive the $200 get-out-of-jail card i would normally have to pay in order to weasel out of my lease. part of me is secretly hoping they’ll decide not to let me weasel out. i really am not interested in moving, i’m just interested in having more quiet evenings than noisy ones. and repainting this dr-pepper colored wall is really gonna be a drag… in the new place, i’m going to put of canvases instead of painting. i’m buying some rolled canvas and some 1x3s or something and making my own. in the living room, it’s going to be a massive reproduction of The Wave, that famous japanese painting, you know the one. i’m hoping to make it 8×6 feet. then i’ll set my tv up in front of it, so it’ll be like wallpaper, but cooler. and upstairs in the craftroom (actually the front bedroom, but there’s only going to be me there, so i’m taking full advantage), i’m thinking a giant beech tree. (because the boc part of notuboc literally refers to beech trees, which is what the anglo-saxons wrote on, which why the word later evolved into book.) i think it would be awesome to have all my product shots include a giant beech tree! (^_^) so while i’m waiting for that whole fiasco to blow over, i’m dunking entire book blocks in hot coffee. hence the little black spots on the pages. i swear i’m not letting my bookblocks get all buggy. i would never treat the little dears so poorly. but soaking them in hot caffinated beverage for several minutes and then tossing them out on the porch is perfectly fine! all’s fair in love and art. (^_^)-b speaking of art, music. dude. i’ve been listening to all sorts of odd stuff lately, and trust me, i’ll listen to just about anything, but my sisters seem to have become my main source of ossum lately. my youngest sister got me listening to Two Door Cinema Club, which is like pop+rock+8bit-video-games, and is just as fun to listen to as that might lead you to believe. all their songs are similar, fast tempos, guitar arpegio/rhythm things, and some of them are quite short, but their clever lyrics and catchy melodies more than make up for it. the other thing i’ve been listening to lately (besides my neighbors) is Universal Hall Pass. speaking of clever lyrics. only this girl? meshes it all together. check her out on youtube and then head over to amazon, or cdbaby, or your chosen other digital download area, because you’re gonna want some. Dragonfly is very good, Six-Step Dragon is very cool, if a little non-sensical, and there is this song called Katrina Josephina that will make you listen to it over and over and over. you will be compelled. so set aside a little while, coz you’ll need it. in other news, i’ve signed myself up for the next fiction project over at the art house co-op. (their site’s in the midst of a reboot, so it’s a little jacked at the moment, but check em out, their cool!) thank god they’ve extended their deadline to the middle of may, because with all this noise, i’ve been constitutionally incapable of writing anything coherent. (the two bedroom has a tiny little closet of a room in the basement that i instantly pictured my desk and typewriter in. ooo can’t wait!) my last fiction project was The Aftermath, which was about a dude who survives the plagepocalypse and how he deals with the general loss of humanity and the specific loss of his (ex-pregnant) girlfriend. this time, it’s Oasis, which is about a nuclear-physics scientist cum scavenger who (wait for it) survives the nukepocalypse (ha! fooled you!) and how he deals with the loss of his family and his part in bringing humanity’s end upon us all. it was supposed to be a (fairly) regular short story, but thanks to the influence of script frenzy, it became a script. i’m going to write it on my 1980s brother ep43 thermal typewriter. why? um… i had a good reason. why was it again? (FLCL ftw~) it was something about heat transfer and the fire that consumes his family. and the way it’s a totally obsolete piece of equipment that’s finding new life in the same way that our scavenger is. but mostly it’s because i <3 my typewriters. i can't wait to write NaNo on this thing! maybe i could host a tiny write-in this fall, if the two bedrooms's big enough once i get all my furniture into it...

i’ve been taking my sister’s photo course with her — well, really, what i’ve done is stolen her password and viewed her online lectures and stolen her textbook and scanned that sucker in. (^_^) well, not really. she let borrow both of them. i’ve been taking photos for the projects that the regular students are supposed to do. i haven’t been able to take as many as i’m supposed to, but i think they’re not turning out horribly. so i thought i’d upload some of them. they’re all taken with a canon powershot a75 or something, a little 3~4 megapixel camera that first came out in 2004 and used to belong to my brother. (^_^) for all it’s lack of flashy stats, the little thing is a trooper. and it’s not the stats that make a good picture, right? … right? (^_^) anyhow, the first project is supposed to be about color and shape. we were supposed to take five pictures, so here they are: taken one beautiful sunset on my back porch. well, my only porch, but it is in the back. (^_^) this one is my carpet and the legs of my tv tray. (^^;) because i will take a photo of anything if i think it looks mod enough. (^_^) i especially like the interplay of lines. | / – i’m not so fond of this one. it’s sufficiently geometrical, but there’s not enough color. i don’t know if you can tell, but the background is a lightly textured silver affair, and i like the monochromatic color scheme on this one. i wish my camera didn’t bow out so much around the edges though… speaking of monochromatic color schemes. i have bamboo everywhere, even in my cubicle at work, so it seemed natural enough to take a photo of it. well, that’s the five we were supposed to take for color/shape. the first ones were better, and that bamboo one wasn’t bad from a technical standpoint, but the middle two sort lacked interest. one of the later projects is about portraits, and since i know a) i suck at those and b) i have no great need to improve my portraiture, i shall insert the single portrait i have taken thus far into this post. it’s a self portrait, and i like nearly everything about it. it’s wicked creepy, it is actually me, and, not to put too fine a point on it, i haven’t got a lick of clothing on in it. wonder how much spam that’ll get me. can’t be more than i already get. (X_X) .

or, at least, a life where you don’t get to relax that much. (>_<) nonetheless, i have been making efforts to reduce my stress level. last month, as you may have guessed (^^;) i engaged in that crazy-seeming (okay, not just seeming, it is crazy) feat of literary abandon, as they call it, NaNoWriMo. i wrote about a small group of scientists who build an android that’s so lifelike, even they begin to forget it’s a machine. it’s like pinoccio w/ a scifi twist. i got to 56000 words and decided that was enough, i’d neglected to fill enough plot holes that any reader unlucky enough to drive his readermobile over my story would break his neck inside of 20 minutes. in order to recover from the stress of this realization (yeah right, as if it’s ever been any different any other year…) i’ve been turning to the photos in my etsy shop and my artfire shop. i’ve gotten a slight up-tick in views, which is always nice, of course, and the items that i’ve updated the pictures on are the items i get more views on. it’s not a whole lot, but i do notice a sizable uptick in the number people clicking on my pictures out of the site search, so maybe all this time i’m wasting on clicking the shutter isn’t really wasting after all. (^_^) you be the judge: before: after: before: after: before: after: yeah, i think i’d better keep clicking. (^_^) i’m retaking shots of all my books, so (hopefully) my shop will be totally made over by the new year. it’s hard for me to find a happy medium between shots that are so experimental as to be unintelligable and shots that are so boring as to make them unclick-on-able, so i’ve been erring on the side of bizarre angles lately. i figure online selling is entirely visual, so i’d better make my pictures interesting. if people wanna click, they’ll click. in the meantime, i just want my shop to look awesome. plus, i like the bare sort of pictures i’ve been making lately. i like geometries, shapes, big blocks of color, and the pictures i’m taking lately is all about big blocks of BOOK against big sheets of WHITE. (^_^) in other news, i’ve been working on another arthouse co-op project. i signed up for the sketchbook project a couple of months ago, and haven’t touched the poor thing since. (^^;) my theme is “This is not a sketchbook” which is fine, because i don’t sketch. (^_^) i was going to fill it with some words of some kind, but lately i’ve been making a lot of paper, and so i thought that might be something cool to work on for the sketchbook project. so i’m making a bunch of paper of different kinds, and then i’ll mount squares of each one onto watercolor paper and label each one according to what they represent. so like, i have a nice blue one that looks just like denim, and i’ve got one that’s a nice blue with white chunks in it like clouds like the sky on a summer day. it’ll be like a tour of the world through paper. (^_^) i have of course a crap ton of paper left to make, and it has to be mailed out by the 15th, which is wednesday, for those of you keeping track. yeah. nothing like a deadline to get me up off the couch… and then i’m going to sign up for the next fiction project. (^_^) ps. for those of you who are here looking for tips on papermaking, here’s one: i use screen printing frames for a frame and deckle (like this: dick blick frames). i got two of them and removed the screening from one of them. that screen is perfect for straining paper pulp, because the screening is designed not to stick to wet things. when i used other types of mesh, the paper pulp would stick to the mesh, but it pops straight off of the screen printing mesh, and doesn’t stain easily. then you use the frame from that one as your top frame and the one with the screening still attached as your deckle. hopefully i’ll use my brain and take some pictures here tonight. we’ll see. (^^;)

powered (or not, as the case would currently have it) by a battery. (X_X) flashback to: several days ago. meredeth turns her car on and the battery and brake light both flash on. great. coz she has plenty of other ways to get to work, and she always has tons of cash on hand with which to fix even the most expensive of repairs on a 13-year-old pile of rubber and plastic already held together only by the thinnest of wire and even thinner good karma. the truth: many many bills all happened to be due at the same time this paycheck, relieving me of all but $18.53 of my hard-earned wages, half of which i’ve already spent on such frivolities as groceries. i was super hoping my car would at least muddle through for another 10~12 days until my next paycheck arrives, at which point, i would have happily skipped over to the nearest trustworthy(ish) car repair establishment to have my battery replaced, my brakes checked, and my muffler put back on, thus making almost as quick work of that paycheck as my rent and student loans made of this one. apparently, however, my car had other ideas. it almost didn’t start up on the way home this afternoon, so i decided not to take the highway, thank god, and instead tranversed the city on its main streets, hoping at least to make it to a suitable pulling-over spot before my car completely exploded. flashback to: last year right around this time. meredeth attempts to drive home from florida but has A TINY SPOT OF TROUBLE… the symptoms were the same. car engine dropping out and then deciding it didn’t want to stall out after all. which, now that we mention it, it has been doing ever since then. i was stopped at one red light early on in the journey and almost didn’t make it, so i knew it wasn’t looking good for me and my battery. i decided that i would give up on trying to make it home and shoot instead for the auto parts store. i managed to hit all the lights down High St just right and even turned the corner onto 161 (the highway very near to which i live) without having to slow down all that much. but there was still one traffic light between me and the auto parts store, and sure as my karma was wearing out, i hit it while it was red. i didn’t even make it to a full stop before my car threatened seriously to cut out, so i quick shifted into the turning lane and took off during the green arrow, thinking only to keep my car going as long as possible, knowing damn well that it wasn’t gonna start up again if i turned it off. well, i turned the corner, i turned into a mcdonald’s right there, the parking lot lead out to a service road that would have taken me straight to the auto parts store, but it was just then, AS I WAS TURNING THE CORNER WITH ANOTHER CAR LOOMING LARGE IN THE ONCOMING LANE THANKS VERY MUCH, that my car decided it had had enough. the power steering cut out, the power brakes cut out, in short, the car turned straight off and staunchly refused to have anything else to do with me or my ignition key. i managed to coast myself off to a quiet berm and turn the thing off before cursing it’s mother, it’s mother’s mother, and it’s battery’s mother. i could see the auto parts sign from my driver’s seat. i could have walked there, if i had thought it would have done me any good. i called my fam(ily, that is) (awesomely functional at times like this) and had my padre come to pick me up. i described my (car’s) symptoms to him. padre: that sounds like the alternator, actually. me: oh. padre: yeah. remember my saturn, before this one? it did the same thing. i had to have the alternator replaced. me: oh. … that doesn’t sound cheap. padre: no. oh. so we head down to the auto parts store, dude says can i help you, i describe my (car’s) symptoms. dude: that sounds more like the alternator, actually. me: ah-hah. long story short, new alternator = ~$80 (which i don’t have) + self installation skills (which, seriously, i don’t have). we left the store empty handed. we headed home, we got my mom’s 1998 CR-V (a honda suv thing with amazing shelf life and a tow capacity we have been previously forced to verify) and took the long slow road back to my parents’ house. my father can do some things to cars, but replacing alternators is not among them, and so we turned to other options: option a) mom’s employer’s husband’s son. wow that was a chain. a couple more people and we could have reached kevin bacon. in any event, this young man does mechanic work and will possibly be able to fix my car. if i’m lucky (not hitherto indicated) he’ll also be willing to wait a couple weeks on payment until i get my next paycheck, thus allowing me to make my rent payment on time instead of 5 days late. option b) mechanics garage. if option a doesn’t work out, i’ll be calling around tomorrow morning to see who’s open and who’s cheapest and then choose based probably on the former rather than the later, since i have no other way to work and definitely do not have enough time off to spend the whole of the next two weeks at home. as nice as that sounds. so at the moment, i’m in a holding pattern until we discover whether or not the near-kevin-bacon degree of separation mentioned above will result in a repaired car and a rent payment made on time. if yes, we may be able to avoid any serious potholes in the road of Life ™, and if not, hopefully it will manage to confine itself to one of those nasty potholes you get after the snow, and not the guatemalan kind. ~meredeth. . flashback: this post brought to you by stage direction.

my weekend was so busy, i had to go back to work to recover from it. friday was mostly normal, exept i didn’t head over to my mom’s place to do the laundry. (that’s right, my mom’s place. because the laundrymat at my apartment complex costs $1.50 per load, that’s why.) no, i took the opportunity to take it easy on friday night, because i knew it would be the only moment that weekend i got to do so. (^^;) besides, i have recently rearranged mine livingroom, so i thought it was about time i got to hang around in it. i really only rearranged the craft section, the TV section hasn’t moved. it’s difficult to rearrange that area. the tv’s bolted to the wall. (^_^) but as you can see, i now have a nice little L shaped craft metropolis, complete with swedish towers in the closet~ (because of their blue, white and golden colors, that’s why.) i pulled The Machine (that grey monstrosity next to the Errant Chair) out of the closet, where it wasn’t fitting anyway, and now i can actually use it! now i just have to invent a reason to. (^_^) unfortunately, all this saturday-prep meant no friday-night anime, a tradition my sibs and i have recently re-establed after a too-long absence. we’re working our way through Chevalier D’Eon (so far not bad, but not especially awesome) thanks to that great and wonderful god, Netflix. but this week, meredeth had to go to bed early (!?) so she could get up early (!!??) saturday morning (T_T) at the hideously and not at all good time of… … 7.30. A.M. seriously. so what would cause me, she who loves a late wake up time so much she once slept through an entire day (not kidding), to wake up at a time normally reserved for going to sleep (at least in my world)? one of my friends was getting ordained! ok, so what does that mean? (seriously, i’ve had more than one person greet me with that awkward silence that says, “i don’t really know what that means…”) my friend Elise was mystically turned into a priest this past saturday~ (^_^) actually, she’s been studying for a long time (a lifetime of learning!) and she was ordained as a deacon last year, so this was the big final step. unless she’s thinking of being a bishop. (^_^) she’ll make a great priest though, she’s very thoughtful and so tactful! meredeth couldn’t be that tactful if her life depended on it. (^^;) elise is the one in the dark red on the left. my mommeh made her vestments~ there were seven people ordained that day, and it was pretty cool. a whole group of us from my church went down together. the church was in West Chester, and it was so WHITE and kind of sparse. i guess that’s protestantism at its purest, but we’ve got all the smells and bells at my church, and a fairly awesome piece of stained glass, and some really nice warm wooden exposed ceiling beams, so i tend to prefer that. a church isn’t a church w/out at least one piece of super awesome stained glass. they tried to liven up the place with that square plaque thing you see above the altar, but it just wasn’t the same. also in that picture, you might be able to spot (although maybe not, i had to take it with my phone) our deacon Douglas (over on the right in the red robe… oh wait. the one facing the camera and standing up. the one sitting down is bishop Briedenthal. who’s name i may have just misspelled.). the blonde lady to the left of him is TJ. she was a visiting deacon at our church for a while, she’s cool too~ well, after the service was a nice little brunch thing (we are episcopalians, after all, we have a tradition to uphold, people) and then my mother and i took advantage of the fact that we were in West Chester Ohio to visit the nearby (i mean like 6 blocks away) IKEA~~~ that’s right, that bastion of self-assembled, inexpensive and modernist furniture and other home goods~ i’m totally addicted, and so’s my mother. coincidentally, i had just been paid, so it was the perfect moment. we took along one of our fellow church-goes, who had never been and said she’d certainly never go on her own (gasp!) and we had a blast. i got a bookcase (BADLY needed) and a fancy ceiling-mounted curtain track (wherein you slide your curtain back and forth like a vertical blind instead of drawing them back like a normal curtain) and some more bamboo. because i can never have enough. it’s the only plant i can’t kill. (^_^)b here’s our haul: that’s my stuff and my mom’s stuff together. kinda small by our normal standards, actually. (^^;) jane (our fellow church-goer)’s yellow bag of joy is on the other side of the picture (cut off~) and front and center, you will see the pepparkakors of song and story. that would be ginger snaps for the rest of you. these are thin, and flower-shaped, and totally perfect in every way. (^_^) the other thing that’s perfect (although not flower-shaped and not in any way thin) at IKEA is the cake: that thing sugar-fueled me for the 2.5 hours we spent in that place. (^^;) my feet hurt. jane fell asleep in the car for a little bit on the way back. (it’s about 1.5 hours back to columbus.) but it was super fun! and then i got to go home and put my stuff together~ see, some people would use this space to gripe and complain about trying to assemble furniture. now, i don’t know if these people are stupid, but i don’t find IKEA furniture, or indeed furniture of any kind, even the crazy wall-mounted TV thing i have with multiple shelves and a track and a sliding door, to be particularly difficult to assemble. also, i enjoy using screwdrivers and mallets and wall-mounting pieces of plastic, so that may have something to do with it. (^_^) in any event, here’s my bookcase(s): the one on the left, the tall one? that’s the bookcase i bought from IKEA, called BESTA, and it contains books that i have already read. the one on the right, the short one that’s full to overflowing? yeah. that’s the bookcase i’ve had for about 15 years now and it “contains” all the books i have not yet read. i repeat: yeah. i couldn’t get a good shot of the curtain thing, coz the light in my little nook is messy, but it was these: kvartal. we bought some clips that slide into the track and clipped my blackout curtain to it. now i can sleep till appropriate hours of the day. very cool~ then, i had to plan out sunday’s trek, because sunday was … MIDSOMAR~ here’s the story: a few years back my father got laid off right at thanksgiving. it was like, here’s your thanksgiving vacation, don’t bother coming back. thanks. (X_X) so, not surprisingly, we had a pretty rotten christmas. mom and dad were like, well that sucked. we need another one. so my dad was like, christmas in july could be more than just a phrase? and my mom was like how about midsummer, like our swedish relations? so it was decided! we had a second christmas, in june, and we called it midsomar, and we had a nice bbq out in the back yard and a nice dip in the pool and some gift exchanges and some movie watching and some family board games (which we super love at my house). it was awesome. the next christmas, we had an acceptable, some might even say good, christmas, but then that next june, we kind of all looked at each other like, how about another midsomar? (^_^) so we did~ and now it’s a tradition thing, we get two christmases in my house, in rememberance of one christmas that really bit. we like to thumb our nose at fate whenever possible. (^_^)b this year, it seemed to sneak up on us, but we still managed to come through with a pretty good sized display: yeah, not shabby. (^_^) i crocheted my brother a dalek, which he seemed to enjoy. he put it on his head anyway: i got a sake set: haven’t used it yet, but not for want of trying. (^_^) everybody got some cool stuff, actually, it was a terribly festive occasion. (^_^) the aftermath: we usually have a pool party, but it’s been raining here in columbus a TON (a ton) lately, and so the water was too chilly to get in. that didn’t stop my little sister, but it did stop the rest of us, thank you very much. and it was a little too late to get over to my apartment and hop in that pool (which i finally got to do the week before, finally) which is very cool, but closes at 9 pm: so instead, we took our new stuff inside and set about using it! actually, meredeth did her laundry mostly, but michael organized his new spices and spice jars. he’s a super cook, and he does pretty much every night’s meal now at that house, i hear. (^_^) so mom got him some lemon salt, some parsley and some dill (which i can’t find a link to) she saw at IKEA and some nice large spice jars with screw on lids and the ability to sit at an angle as well as straight up. (coz… um, it looks cool, i guess, that’s why.) so we were all standing around remarking upon how good the stuff smelled. the lemon salt was neon yellow, but smelled awesome! we were like, i thought the package color was an advertising exageration, but no. the salt actually is that color. the parsley was good, you know, parsley-ish. and then michael busted out the dill. and we were like, WOW! that’s some strong stuff. good, but strong. everybody wandered in and out of the kitchen, attracted by the smell. we were like, “smell, but not deeply.” unfortunately, dana-chan was the only one of us to have the right idea. she wafted, the rest of us sniffed. i myself sniffed, and i paid a heavy price. i don’t know if i’m allergic to it, or if the fineness of the powder just destroyed my nostrils, but i swear i sniffled and sneezed and used up literally half of a box of tissues over the next three hours. i could. not. stop. sneezing. it was CRAZY! we watched our friday night anime on sunday night, and by the time the allotted two hours had passed, i was surrounded by a white drift of used tissues. it was just as disgusting as you think it was, and the worst part was that it wouldn’t stop! i went home, i washed my face and hands, and i changed my clothes, and my nose was still running. i blew my nose so much that the inside of my nose hurt. when i woke up monday morning, my eyes were puffy and watery and oozing this kind of yellowy nastiness (i know, way tmi) and i was STILL SNEEZING! i was like, should i make a doctor’s appointment? jesus! thankfully, it let up over the day, but really, my nose still kind of hurts. i’m staying the hell away from that stuff from now on! (X_X) monday, after work, i decided to reward myself with a little swim. dana-chan (using her fancy new phone, a nokia nuron that is, i have to admit, moderately cool) had been texting me and i asked after the pool, which was confirmed to be slightly chilly, but much better than sunday night (thank you, 90 degree temps…) so i did the tiny bit of grocery shopping i hadn’t been able to do during the weekend and headed over: because dana is constitutionally incapable of being photographed w/out Striking a Pose, that’s why. (^_^) we had a great time, as we clones usually do when we gather together. (^_^) in other news, i finished a needlepoint QR code for one of my (other) sister’s friend today. carolyn’s always good for some pimpage, and this time it paid off, in the form of one @stylesmith, whose goodie shall be shipped off on the morrow~ also, hopefully, there will soon(ish) be some acceptable fictions available for your reading perusal here. i bought a couple of highly recommended books on editing from amazon (which came a full two days early! srsly!) and i fully intend to put them to use. i’m going to start with something smaller, with the intention of not overwhelming myself straight away, and then i’m on to past NaNoNovels~ so, i shall head back to that, and in closing, i shall give you a picture of the clouds above my place of employment about a week ago. this is what we have to deal with around here. ENOUGH RAIN ALREADY! ~meredeth. -who does not own even a single umbrella.

or more correctly, a procrastination story. (^^;) i have signed myself up for The Fiction Project, which, if you haven’t heard about it, is a delightful little thing over at the art house co-op where they send you a moleskine, you fill it up with, in this case, Fiction, and then you send it back. by May 23. yeah. well, at least i’m finished with the first draft. now to revise it, edit it, and copy it, by hand, into the little moleskine they sent me, and all monday evening, so that tuesday i can send it back to them priority, so they’re sure to have it by june 5. here’s what i’ve got so far: yeah. i’ve got a couple of art house projects going on actually. my favorite one so far is the free postcard art thing i did on a whim a couple of weeks back (yes, it’s been that long since i did a blog post!). the assignment was to make a 4×6 inch piece of art on the theme Dreams, and then mail it to them. here’s mine: (for a picture with the [outlandish] description, check the submission page. it’s worth it, trust me.) you can check out all my art house co-op projects over here, actually, and then you may even want to venture out into the rest of the site. if you have even thought about sketching, and especially if you’re one of those sketch-addicted people, your wallet may want to just hide in the corner now. (^_^) and just when it was the worst possible time to distract me, i found out that i won 1600 xbox points in this history channel contest. i was like, awesome! now i’ll never finish this story! (^^;) actually, i haven’t done too badly with it so far. i bought Braid (of course) and downloaded about every trial game in the entire indie games section. (^^;) the other game i’ve actually purchased was called Next Wars, or something. it’s a tower defense thing, only built like a little LED display or something. it would be so perfect on my phone, or my DS, or some kind of little hand-held thing, that i can hardly stand it. it is pretty awesome. i was surprised by how much i liked it, i don’t usually go for those kinds of games, but this one i can totally see myself getting addicted to. it’s like magnetica, but instead of clearing marbles by making threesomes, you clear bad guys by blowing them up with lasers. i know! lasers! … i also bought myself the most awesome scanner about two weeks ago. an epson … um … perfection v300 photo. that’s what it says on the side. (^_^) it’s got a little slide and negative scanner attachment (which is awesome) and if i was willing to wait overnight for a scan, i could do it at 4800 dpi. i don’t know what you could possibly need that for, maybe you need to study the strange bug you just killed in your bathroom and you haven’t got your electron microscope handy. at any rate, i’ll be putting my new baby to good use here before the end of the month, as i will be adding ACEOs to my etsy shop later this week. on a related note, does anyone else hate the picasa software as much as i do? i’ve been so busy running around buying groceries and scanners and yarn (oh my GOD the YARN) that i have completely neglected to purchase my long sought-after media pc, and it’s starting to really become a problem. all my ubuntu installation (actually, easy peasy installation) has on it is picasa, and that turns out to be about the worst possible software that man has ever designed. i long for photoshop. and please do not give me your “GIMP FTW” posts. a) i’ve tried gimp, i wasn’t terribly swayed one way or the next. b) my screen is 1280 by 600 pixels, i don’t think anything (even photoshop, sadly) will do much for that. also, c) whatever’s up w/ easy peasy 1.5 means that the thing throws me an error every time i try to install gimp. i guess i should just upgrade at this point, they just came out with 1.6 a couple weeks ago, but i’m far too lazy to back everything up and rewrite the whole thing. why, seriously, why, can’t they just build an upgrade that’s actually an upgrade and not an entire new edition. i will not completely wipe my computer and start over every time you feel like changing the chrome and sticking tom notes or whatever the hell it’s called back on my system, despite the fact that i remove it every time. seriously. and now my sister’s coming over, so i guess i won’t be doing any story revision at this moment, either. (^^;)

as in, between me and my apartment. (^_^) every time i talk about it, it makes me smile. and trust me, i find a way to insert it into every /single/ conversation i have. eventually, everything is about this lovely home. (^_^) speaking of… (^^;) the girls and i (that would be my mother and two sisters, aka (from now on, at least) The Girls) went on a thrift shop expedition this past saturday, during which i picked up a few lovely items for the home. (^_^) i found a scanner, complete w/ negative and slide functionality, which i snatched up. it was missing the power cord, thanks to the thrift store’s pointlessly annoying habit of seperating power adaptors from items when they arrive. i couldn’t find it in the Bin of Endless Power Adaptors, though, so either someone already bought it, or it didn’t come in with one. in any event, finding one on ebay for super cheap was simply a matter of using the search feature, so i’ve purchased one of those already, and it should be here as soon as the dude gets around to shipping it. :P i also found some of those icey mugs, the one that you freeze upside down in the freezer, and then they keep your drink cold while you drink it. perfect for smoothie-saving, by the way. since it’s apparently difficult for me to make only one serving of something… (>_<) i also found four rather nice burgandy silk pillows for super cheap. they go quite nicely in my burgandy living room (on my super black couch~) thank you very much. what i also found, and here's the cool part, for those of you in the know, is a :cuecat. (^_^) for those of you not in the know, it's a little barcode scanner that looks like a cat. ... yes. i know. but here's why i want one: librarything. and of course, other such inventory-ing things. so i spent much of sunday scanning barcodes and giggling when my library topped out at 335 books. when i get my power cord, i may even be able to scan in some covers for those naked books on my list. (!) also, having actually witnessed the sheer bookage in this house converted into arabic numerals, i am more convinced than ever that i need to find bookcases. and soon. .

so here i am on your regular old friday night, hanging out and eating pizza and UNPAAACKING~~~ that’s right, i’m all moved in, and enjoying the wonder and joy of not having anyone pounce on me the instant i walk in the door. “how are you~” “exhausted.” “how was your day~” “i just got home from it, can i relax a minute before i have to talk about it again?” (^^;) these days when i walk in the door, there is a blessed silence. (^_^) i can take my shoes off, visit the restroom, maybe get dinner going, and THEN turn on the skype and the gtalk and the whatever else. i’m in love. (^_^) ! except for the dude who just walked past my balcony talking all loud on his cell phone who just scared the crap out of me. (^^;) also, my insistence on good lighting means that my electric bill will not be cheap (^^;) BUT! i don’t care! because it’s MY electric bill, and if i really cared that much, i’d turn a light off. i’m the only one responsible, after all. (^_^) in other news, my control freak side comes to the fore with ever more delighted and craven grins. i’m still unpacking, and the sheer chaos of that process is driving me up a (gorgeously painted) wall, but i don’t really have any time off to spare, so i have to unpack when i get home from work, which generally means a box, maybe two, and then i’m too tired to do much of anything but veg in front of a PBS documentary or something. (^_^) i’m not paying for cable, so it’s netflix and the local channels for me. not like i (have time to) watch anything else anyway. at the moment, you can almost see the entire TV area floor. i have just one large living/dining area, but actually it’s a TV area and a studio for me, with a gingantic tumbled mess of cords under the TV. unlike my studio area, at the moment, which is a tumbled mess of boxes and crap on two desks that i have yet to really commit to liking the position of. ^^;;; not that i have anything due imminently. no. not at all. ^^;;;;;; tonight has been spent mostly attempting to find a one pound skein of dark brown yarn and ~25 granny squares i’ve crocheted from it that i seem to have LOST during the move. yeah. figure that one out, i dare you. i’ve looked pretty much everywhere in my house, and i’ve had my siblings checking every nook and cranny at that house, but so far, it’s magically disappeared. i guess my next solution is gonna be looking in the cars that we used that day. maybe it got left behind or something. the only other option is to buy a whole new skein, and that seems silly. ok, the other thing i’ve discovered here is that i own far too many lamps. there is literally no where else to put a lamp. there is a lamp, i swear, every six feet in the apartment. it’s like, LampLand. oh yeah, i also have no scanner. huh. i guess that’s alright, since i also have no media pc (T_T) but after a minute, that’s really going to get obnoxious. ok, i really do have to clean this desk off. i swear. UP A WALL. (this post brought to you by disorganized clutter, and my intense hatred for the same.) .

as my local etsy bookbinding list has just reminded me, the UK has declared today World Book Day~ great idea, the UK! (^_^) why today? well, it turns out that the rest of us celebrate world book day on april 23, which also happens to be cervantes’s birthday. but in angelond, that part of the calendar is usually already packed up with crazy anglican things like the resurrection of the lord or some such thing (^_^) so they decided to move the day of the book back a little, to march. which is okay, coz lent’s usually a little dry anyway, so we could use an extra reason to celebrate during the month of march, and an entire day being set aside for glorification of my personal favorite art form is just fine by me~ it is also, by some strange cosmic alignment of timetables and paychecks and possibly alien stars, the day before i sign my rental agreement! (exactly~) just the thought of myself, at home, by myself, maybe /maybe/ some music on, probably just sprawl myself out on the carpet and go spread eagle just laying there with the secure knowledge that no one will come up and try to trip over me, or be fake cute by jumping on me, or pretending to throw a cat on me. in fact! there will not be any cats anywhere within a cinderblock wall of my apartment. jesus that makes me happy. so to celebrate (and also because moving that many books will break my back) i am having a sale over at notuboc~ and it’s a serious sale, too, as in, “buy one get one”

serious. of course, you have to pay for the more expensive one and you get the cheaper one free, and you will be paying shipping on both items, but from now until march 14, if you buy one book, you can choose another for free. just check out with them both in your cart, and wait for an invoice from me through paypal. i’m joined to my internet-enabled phone at the hip, so you shouldn’t have to wait long~ now, go read a book! (^_^) .