i suppose i've been taunting you long enough

with the promise of a real post that is. one with meat, although i hope the photos were a decent stopgap. and wow, i just noticed how long since there was meat, and it was mid-november. sorry, folks!

the short version is that work has been verra busy and i love the holidays but not my ovaries.

1. work? dull but busy.
2. holidays? because of #1 and other things like ARTIC BLAST 2008 i did very little decorating and our tree was out in the snow a little longer than it should've been. and i baked sugar cookies! which are also not decorated. mom made the frosting finally, last night, so i anticipate sprinklage this evening.

also worth a highlight is my earlier christmas present, a new camera and yes it is pink and no i would not have picked that color on purpose since i am not smitten with my X chromosomes. more on that later. however, it was the last one, a discounted floor model, which is probably why it is now broken. worked fine for a month and then on christmas day, wouldn't boot up. as soon as i find all the packaging, back to the store...

btw, for the most part, i loved our 14-inch snowpocalypse because a) i love snow and b) it made less people drive but c) i'm glad it's all melted now, thanks.

ok so on to #3: the reproductive whirlygigs.

i have never been a big fan of the reproductive whirlygigs. it's good i never planned to be a baby factory, since there's a history of defective whirlygigs on both sides of my family. now that i think about it, it's surprising we've reproduced as much as we have. :-D

but i digress. oldtimers may recall i have this bit of fun which - for the most part - has not troubled me too much the last few years thanks to modern prescriptives. in the last year, though, it felt like one of those gigs was whirling too much, so i went to the doctor. turns out one of those recurrent cysts decided to get a little wacky and so - presumably sometime next month - that cyst and corresponding ovary is going buh-bye.

at first i hestitated. i was annoyed at the thought - and expense - of surgery for something that was not that big of a deal. then the cyst decided to pitch a fit (primadonna) and so fine, i got the surgery ball rolling.

but apparently that was not good enough, because starting christmas eve, i got a nasty, impromptu period. thanks to my aforementioned support of the pharmaceutical industry, nasty, impromptu periods have not happened in over 3 years.

friday afternoon, i called the (on call) doctor. long story short, "it happens" but follow up with your regular doctor next week. over the weekend it got worse, and i started to worry, so sunday we went to the ER. long story short, "it happens" but follow up with your regular doctor this week.

turns out my regular guy is out til next week. meantime things are a little better, and hopefully all these symptoms will die a quick death soon, but this whole 'sometimes whirlygigs go bananas' explanation is really damn annoying. if any of you have experience with this, please feel free to share.

i will say this -- i'm really looking forward to the surgery now, if only to put a stop to this monkey business. three cheers to being sansa-monkey!

merry christmas, you're fired

or i would be if i were on deadline for finishing this stuff. anyway, i bring to you our hordes of pictures from our trip to mendocino county. enjoy!

since that trip i've been working, sleeping and eating like crazy. astoundingly i have not gained any weight although i have no explanation for that, maybe it's the crazy work canceling it out. speaking of that, i'm off to santa cruz today for more freelance work. bring on the scrilla!

oh and sadly i no longer have the Christmas Camera. while i'm very grateful i had it for a while, and the pictures shown above are all *much* better in quality than my cameraphone or the old olympus i had, ultimately this one was deficient and i returned it to fry's yesterday. the shutter was fucked up -- took too long to close or set for a shot, so a lot of the pictures came out grainy or blurry. even so, ended up with 60+ good ones! and of course, will be on the hunt for a replacement one very soon! me camera addict.

trippin!

thanks to rashenbo:

Your Personality Is Like Acid

A bit wacky, you're very difficult to predict. One moment you're in your own little happy universe... And the next, you're on a bad trip to your own personal hell!

What Drug Is Your Personality Like?

in other news, i really have been working on the photos from our trip, and when i *finish* posting them all, i'll include a link here. meantime i'll taunt you with the fact that the set includes a picture of santa, and martians.

salutations from the land of the bleary!

i've been getting up an hour earlier each workday, for maybe 3 weeks now. there are a couple of reasons for this but receiving immediate benefit is my employer, who has seen fit to keep me insanely busy, and of course, starbucks. i really don't understand why i'm still so sleepy when i'm making sure that caffiene has been properly installed but here i am, yawning at noon just the same. or perhaps i'm yawning at this unix script poking across my screen.

ah well. i hope you all have enjoyed some festivus of late, and a bit more this weekend. we are considering going to grace cathedral on NYE, there's a free concert there. min loves to rave about how beautiful it is, and perhaps i will finally see it on sunday!

as to what else has transpired in the last few weeks: other than the usuals and working like a bandit, i was graced with a minibreak to the coast. we rented a house because we wanted a full kitchen for a full christmas dinner! rather i wanted the full dinner since i was the main one eating, but min ate a little. =) plus the requisite apple cranberry sparkliness, mmmm. oh and for christmas i got some emily goods, starbucks AND toffee crack GC(!), an exercise mat (so sweet!), short exercise dvd i look forward to trying, cute notebooks and i forget what else, i'll have to doublecheck when i get home. but, all good stuff.

anyway the rental house -- i researched all over the bloody coast of california for a good deal, and after much calling and cajoling for pictures (first, second choices not available, but we have alternates. ok fine, send us pictures!) we finally ended up here. it wasn't until we drove up to it that we found out it was for sale and now that i'm back where the internet roams free, i'm a little surprised to find that they're including the furniture. some of it was quite nice, but otoh, some stained and broken.

oh..i get it now. the owners have abandoned it. see, this explains the bugs.

yeah, bugs. granted, it was mostly potato bugs, but when you have to:

• check the floor before getting out of bed
  
• get rid of at least 3 every time you cross a room
  
• brush them off of you because THEY DROPPED FROM THE SKY (ceiling)

it doesn't leave you feeling very relaxed. no, you probably even dream about bugs, or mysteriously harmful goo, dripping from the sky. not that i would know.

that aside, it was a gorgeous house. wonderful views, plenty of room and only a few minutes from one of my favorite restaurants ever, which unfortunately was not *quite* as good as normal but still very excellent. we ate lunch there on tuesday and planned to find a xmas gift for our neighbor penny, but across the street is gallery bookshop and as i probably should have predicted, it sucked up most of our afternoon and of course, a good deal of scrilla. that store has the best per-square-foot selection of books of most any bookstore i've ever been in, and i've been in a LOT.

by the time we escaped, it was probably only 430, but most of the other shops we wanted to hit were closed and several appeared closed for the week. tuesday night there was a nasty storm - wind howling, things clattering outside, lights flickering, the whole shebang. wednesday we figure we'll hop up to fort bragg, maybe more stores will be open there.

and maybe they would've been, who knows. however the storm played havoc with several trees across the region (would you like to wear this tree as a hat? how about doubling the thickness of your fence?). as a result, power was out in most of fort bragg. great. luckily we found that out *after* we had lunch, at smart-enough-to-have-a-generator silver's. wow that website is from 1997. anyway, we’d planned to dine at the next-door Chapter & Moon…but no one was there. and there were oh, 50 cars at Silver's, so we decided to go with the safer bet. we were *so* not disappointed, especially with the clam chowder.

incidentally i am a clam chowder snob. this is because i grew up on the best chowder in the friggin free world and everything else pales in comparison. god just seeing that building, on the website, makes me feel homesick. and ack! it burned up! i hope they can rebuild! :( anyway i am VERY happy to report that silver's chowder? almost as good as dory cove's! and much closer so i bet we'll go more often. yum.

after lunch we found all the closed shops (boo), then just enjoyed the afternoon, driving along the coast and drinking in the ocean air, before heading home. still no pics (probably get around to uploading this weekend) but all in all, a nice little getaway. and i really needed to get away, so, yay. =)

hello, internet

i didn't forget you, i've just been busy working and then spending time near albion.

and yes, internet, pictures are coming. because santa brought me a digital camera for christmas! a replacement canon a430, cheaper than the first time around even.

more soon...