Oy vey.

So… per the bowl of water-bed thing below… guess who I dreamed about last night? VICTOR. He has never so much as made a cameo appearance in one of my dreams before! Hmmm.

New Computer!!!

Lil’ Bitch came over yesterday to build me a new computer. I figured the time had come; my old computer had been acting annoying for a while. So, we went to micro Center and I bought a new motherboard & processor and some kick ass RAM that was on sale:

(it’s so shiny!)

We got it all home… and the power supply on my old case wasn’t compatible.

AND, the new motherboard didn’t have enough IDE slots to accommodate my 2 hard drives + DVD-ROM drive.

AND, it didn’t have an onboard video card, like we thought.

AND… what else? Oh yeah, we went and bought a SATA – IDE converter instead of an IDE to SATA converter by accident…

So, after several false starts and 4 trips to Micro Center I now have an awesome new computer that runs and is even running Windows 7, which seems pretty OK so far. Yay! It’s SO FREAKING FAST!!!!!

superstition!

Intellectually I know that Halloween is just another day of the year. It falls between the autumn equinox and winter solstice, which is why the Celts and other cultures celebrated it; why All Saints’ Day is tomorrow and the like. However, there’s a part of me that is still superstitious about it. It’s the same part of me that fasts on Yom Kippur, compulsively wishes on stars, and always feels up the backs of wardrobes looking for secret doors to other worlds that my intellect is fairly certain don’t exist.

This part of me was into witchcraft in my early teens, mostly because my intellect knew that it was all crap, but the other part of me (I’m calling it the superstitious part, even though most people think “superstition” is a negative term and that’s not how I’m using it) thought that it would be cool if there actually was something to it. Incidentally, nothing came of any of the spells I cast, except for the fact that the one person I put a larger hex on (she was supposed to, like, stutter every other Thursday or something) became a wiccan and is all into paganism and stuff now. Hmmm!

So this is the part of me that lights candles on Halloween to put in the window per an old Celtic tradition that says it will lead your recently dead relatives home. Not that I particularly want my recently deceased grandmother hanging out in ghost form to let me know how fat I am and how she doesn’t like my hair, but it always seems like a nice idea. According to Celtic tradition, the walls between the otherworld and this world are the thinnest on All Hallow’s Eve, which means it’s ripe for divination. So, if you put a wooden bowl of well water under your bed while you sleep, you should dream of the person you’re going to marry.

This year I managed to find well water (previous years I have used lakewater, tapwater, spring water and the like) AND a wooden bowl (pyrex and aluminum didn’t seem to cut it) AND have a bed that I can put stuff under (putting it next to the mattress on the floor I used to sleep on wasn’t very effective) AND remember to do it (a number of years I just plain forgot, or had the stuff ready and then forgot)! I started trying to do this when I lived in Ireland… I think that was 1996. So, it’s taken me 13 years to get all four items in place at once. Let’s see if anything happens! In previous years I haven’t remembered any dream I had that night, which always led me to believe that I was never getting married (pretty safe assumption!).

Gay Rob predicts that tonight I’ll dream about Seth Green (::swoon::), since I keep getting phone calls from the future where the caller says “Mrs. Green?” when I pick up the phone. Of course it has nothing to do with the fact that Jack, the Man Of The House where I work’s last name is Greene. Of course not! There is no Mrs. Greene! Laura didn’t change her last name when she married him! It is obviously someone calling from the future when I’m married to Seth Green! So, we’ll see. Heh.

Music! Dancing! yay!

I just got back from the Simian MObile Disco show, which was AWESOME. it was basically a DJ set, but still ruled. That’s exactly what I needed– to drink tequila and dance my butt off. That always makes me feel better about stupid things.

What stupid things do I ened to feel better about?
well, let’s see…

1. The Little Dude has been being exceptionally cranky lately. That is, his default mode is crying and being generally pissed at everything, and it requires a lot of energy to make him un-pissy. You can’t put him down ever, but when I hold him, all he wants to do is scratch my face off with his baby claws. Yesterday he got a claw in my eye making it difficult to see, never mind it being fairly painful. Not looking forward to tomorrow.

2. health insurance. I called about it today and they told me that, even though I paid them a month ago and theoretically your insurance is activated once you pay, my insurance will not be active until November 1st. I got my card in the mail today, though… maybe I can convince the pharmacy to give me drugs anyway! Truthfully, I’m sure that if I called back 5 times tomorrow, I’d get 5 different answers about things. that’s the nature of red tape, nobody knows what is going on ever!

but anyway, show = awesome!!

Kind of addicting

This makeover thing is really fun. Here I am looking actually better than when I began (I stole Susan Sarandon’s hairdo)! Although, I look seriously cadaverous in the original, so that really isn’t much of a stretch!

TAAZ.com : Virtual Makeover. Real Beauty.
http://www.taaz.com/makeover/180087991547280-af350c4b8e30ff803d70d08c6c5282af/70178407.html

Before

After

…And here I am as a middle-aged Miss Piggy with Liza Minnelli’s hair:

TAAZ.com : Virtual Makeover. Real Beauty.
http://www.taaz.com/makeover/180087991748280-a0d2043adcef27246fc77b7ce6fef9eb/70179543.html

Before

After

In other news…

A while ago I wrote about a game of Giant Squid that I played with Tanya & Terrence and Jesse & Didi and Tanys’s and Jesse’s cousin from Germany. She thought the “Hitler” card was so funny she took a picture with her camera and sent it to friends. I uploaded the picture to Photobucket.com so I could show it on here… and apparently it violates Photobucket’s terms of use! Here’s what it looks like now:

Here’s what it looks like in the real world (some material may be inappropriate for sentient beings):

I’m tickled. Really I am!

Grown-up pillowcases!

I decided that the time had come to get new pillowcases. My Hello Kitty pillowcase was worn and almost completely threadbare. My Batman one was a little worse for the wear; somehow getting paint splattered on it as well as being faded and old. So… I thought about Darth Vader, contemplated farm animals and other such things… and decided to get Real Grown-Up pillowcases! Yes, I went to Target and spent $15.99 (an unheard-of, ridiculously huge amount for such things in my world) on two greenish PLAIN pillowcases. They have no design whatsoever on them. The color is understated (they were the only ones that weren’t a lame color like white or beige). It looks nice with my sheets (either pink or orange) and my blanket (I just retired the lightweight quilt I made and am using the winter fuchsia down comforter)– everything is a nice rainbow sherbet-hue.

I got them home and agonized over whether I should take them back or not for about 2 days. Finally, I decided that these pale mint-green pillowcases would stay. They are made from bamboo and are like 300 thread count or something insanely decadent like that. But… they are way too huge and baggy for my ancient floppy pillows. I don’t like pillows that arent totally limp and made with feathers (as opposed to foam), so the poor things are these flaccid lumps. Oh well. At least Batman isn’t present. I suppose the whole maturity-thing is totally negated by the fact that like 50,000 stuffed animals are in permanent residence on my bed, but it’s a step, right? baby steps. baby steps.

Here they are!

Bad cat owner

When I cat-sit for my landlady, I give Lulu 2 teaspoons of wet catfood in the morning and two in the evening. If she hasn’t eaten the catfood in the morning, you dump the old catfood down the garbage disposal and give her fresh food. Her water bowl gets changed every morning.

My cats, on the other hand, get new food in their bowl once they’ve finished all the (dry) food and eaten all the old food off the floor that they’ve managed to kick out of their bowls during feeding frenzies. I fill up their water bowl when I feel like it, mostly because they never drink out of it, as they prefer the cool fresh water in the toilet. I clean their catbox when it gets smelly. However, they do get unlimited access to their favorite piece of furniture (me) when I’m home and when I’m not insulting their lack of intelligence, I pet them and generally dote on and spoil their undeserving fuzzy asses. Maybe this is why they choose to cough hairballs up onto my pillows!

Sucka MCs be tryin to fade this shizzle, what.

OK, “Shizzle” was a little anachronistic in the above headline, but you hear what I’m sayin, dig? 80s hip hop slang, I realized, plays a big part in my vocabulary, and in the speech of many nerds I know. Why is this? We most certainly didn’t talk like that back in the day, no that would have been mad wiggety-wack. Why are we suddenly illin’? Allow me drop some science: I think it’s because we look back at the slang and said “whoa, people really called each other HOME SLICE?” and thus it becomes a part of our vocabulary for the retro-ironic value. Also, hip hop slang gets outdated really quickly, which makes it even more fly, because each word is a frozen little moment in time. So, currently the slang is enjoying a second life in nerdese.

I never really thought about how much I use the term “home piece” to address friends, and pretty much every other sentence I say contains “word” until I was texting Victor the other day. The conversation went something like this:

VICTOR: I’ll call you when I get back from my parents’ house
ME: word.
VICTOR: What word?
ME: Word to your mother! (and dad)
VICTOR: ?

It’s always interesting seeing language through the mind of a non-native speaker (OK, that’s a politically incorrect term, as is English as a Second Language, I don’t know what you are supposed to call people who learned English later in life as opposed to as babies).

Word to that.

An interesting factoid: apparently Vanilla Ice’s catch-phrase “word to your mother” started out life as “word to the mother” as in Motherland, as in Africa. Yup-yup!

TGIF, Dude!

Today finally ended hell week with the baby. He still has pooping issues and his bowels hadn’t moved significantly all week. Poor little dude! However, when he’s like this all he does is cry, get pissed off at everything and refuse to sleep. The only thing that brings him solace is causing me physical pain in the form of grabbing at my nosering and laughing when I wince in pain, or pulling my hair. Argh! It was a short week, too!

Tuesday all the old BoFo folks got together at Underbones for a reunion. I hadn’t seen most of these people in 4 or 5 years– it was pretty fun! Victor came out too and I think managed not to scare anyone too much. Let’s see, what else is happening in my exciting life? Hmm. Victor and I went to Ikea. I guess it’s serious! heheh. Seriously, you just don’t drive 30(?) miles to Ikea with mere casual acquaintences.

Otherwise, I just have a litany of requisite whining: the weather is cold and sucky making it so I can’t ride my bike to work, my allergies are driving me crazy, I have massive insomnia…