Post-holiday weekend ennui

I suspect it will lead to a series of top 10 posts.

I’m thinking Top 10 books I read this year, Top 10 albums I listened to, Top 10 films I watched, Top 10 gadgets Top 10 TV shows. I know. Scintillating.

In the meantime, Dave’s dog is howling in my face which makes me think I should go to bed.

Mom has probably landed safely in Detroit (my phone is upstairs) and tomorrow is Hump Day. Saturday begins a new year! Isn’t there something about a year that starts on a weekend being lucky?

No? Fuck it. I say it will be.

Today’s most ludicrous overheard comments

Guy 1: Are you a Democrat?

Guy 2: Hell no! I WORK for a living!

Me: *boggles* *flails*

Let’s be clear: the Republicans are the ones who are willing to completely fuck all three of us in order for billionaires and approximately 100 family businesses to make more money? WHO works for a living?

Random and Miscellany

Yesterday on NPR I heard an interview about Metropolis Symphony, recorded by the Nashville Symphony orchestra. There is no part of it that wasn’t awesome. It’s on my h$liday list.

Weird: in Denver, saw a super cute coat at Target by Mossimo but cannot find it anywhere online. Otherwise that would be on my list too.

Speaking of Target, at the end of next week part of Justin Timberlake’s fashion line will be showing up in stores. I’m more enthusiastic about this than I should be. By a lot.

I feel there’s a good likelihood of renting Inception in my immediate future.

Potentially also a re-coloring of the hair. I cut it shorter again this week which makes it look even more red than it did before. I’d been hoping for more brown, but go figure – chestnut on me is not ‘chestnut’ so much as ‘auburn’.

Now is also the time that I need to figure out if we’re sending a h$liday card. Crap.

Today is also coney dog day at my house. I am VERY EXCITED. I bought an epic package of Hebrew National for this express purpose.

The house project is essentially done. There’s a single canister light that needs wiring and then I’ll be able to stain the new woodwork. Our house seems much larger and it created an excellent place for the h$liday tree.

In TV news, I’m not sure what’s going on that USA is running Burn Notice right now. I guess it’s one of those shows I’ve got pigeonholed at summertime and maybe that’s why I’m not nearly as into it right now. Grey’s Anatomy is maybe turning the corner on this season. I’ll admit that the reruns on Lifetime are helping keep me hooked in. They’ve just gotten to where Izzy’s sick and Hunt is wicked PTSD man.

Castle made a triumphant return this week. It’s one of the shows I’m enjoying most (along with The Mentalist, Medium and Human Target).

Modern Family, if you’re not watching it, is the funniest thing on TV. By far.

Not much in the way of reading, of late, what with the writing. I’m almost done with my webcourse this semester which should make my schedule a lot more fun very soon.

Why Kerby’s Koney Island kicks ass

Anyone from the midwest can tell you that a coney dog and a chili dog are NOT the same thing. There are chili dogs out here in Colorado but there are no coneys, much to my dismay. My mom is coming out to visit for Christmas, so I texted her to ask if she could get me a bucket of Kerby’s Koney sauce and bring it out.

There are a lot of coney chains out there and Kerby’s is just the family favorite. When  I was growing up, we lived in the city and there was a locally owned place we frequented (Pete’s!) but when we moved to the ‘burbs Kerby’s was the best choice. It’s a Michigan chain, still fairly small, but the food is always good and so is the service. Kerby’s is the place I learned to appreciate onions. Literally every trip home from college and, since we moved away from metro Detroit, every visit to my folks has been punctuated by a trip to Kerby’s.

It turned out Mom had JUST walked out of the place, so she went in to ask. They gave her the email address of some dude with the company and she sent a request because it’s not something they just sell over the counter (yes, it’s like a drug. IT’S THAT GOOD.). She’d forgotten about it until she got a phone call from an unknown area code yesterday.

Some guy from the company was calling her back about the request. I guess she’d put in the email that her daughter had moved to Colorado and wanted coney sauce for Christmas. Yes, I realize this makes me sound like a COMPLETE FREAKSHOW. On the other hand, delicious delicious coney sauce! The guy asked where in CO and actually knew where I am because he skis in Aspen. He told my mom to go to the local place, that he was going to call the manager (of the place my mom visits most often) right that after they hung up. My bucket o’ Koney sauce is a gift from Kerby’s Koney Island and he said to tell me Merry Christmas.

How awesome is that?

So Mom is overnighting my coney sauce fix and I’ll have Koney dogs for dinner tomorrow.

THAT is customer service.

NaNoWriMo postmortem

So National Novel Writing Month. First, I don’t think anyone expects you’re writing a full-fledged novel in 30 days/ 50,000 words. The goal is to put as many words on paper as you can and stick with it, even when it sucks. It’s an endurance test. It’s a habit-former.

I finished with 51,000 words. I’m less proud of that than the fact that I wrote every day. Every single day. I didn’t always make my wordcount goal but I did get words down – even when we went to Denver to hang with friends and party. There were days I exceeded the wordcount goal – sometimes by a lot. Sometimes it was easy and sometimes it was painfully hard. But I did it, and that felt good.

When I went back through my online archive, I found the last time (the only time) I attempted NaNo was in 2004. I got to 10,000 words before calling it quits. In fact, the last time I did any writing regularly was in 2004. Most people know that was the year my dad got sick. Well, he got diagnosed. He got sick later – November and December were his last very good months. The next year was hard, to use an epic understatement.

There were a lot of changes between then and now. I changed menial jobs a few times, went back to school and then ran my own business. Spouse was ready for a change so we began looking for a new place and he found work in Colorado. We picked up and moved, sight practically unseen. And it’s been excellent.

I missed writing. Today I was reminded that I wrote my first ‘book’ after reading Call of the Wild. There was also a serious melodramatic  novella in junior high about a parent with Alzheimer’s. I won the high school writing contest my sophomore year and was hooked. In college I got a story published AND I got paid for it. ‘Over the moon’ just about captures it. I’m not naive enough to believe that my NaNo project is good enough to get published – especially not without a lot of revision – or that it even should. But I like the release of a makebelieve land where I get to tell the stories that occur to me and writing them down makes them more real, keeps me engaged and is just NICE. I’m sure at some point I’ll try publishing again but for now, getting back in the habit is just what I needed.

OMG, y’all.

I finished! Ahead of schedule! And now I’m going to make a proper dinner. Literally the only homemade meal I’ve prepared in the entire month of November was Thanksgiving. My husband is a saint.

Not that you’re wondering, but it’s not actually DONE. I’ll keep writing through the end of November in NaNo spirit (and for about 20,000 words after that really) but I’m stoked that I actually made my wordcount goal when I thought I could. Not only that, the pressure is off so that I can actually do my homework for tomorrow without sweating it.

The process of NaNo was interesting and I’ll probably post about that, just not until DECEMBER.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This year I have a number of things to be thankful for but first and foremost is my husband.

In the last two months, we’ve been working on a home construction project and for the last week (while he was on vacation) Spouse has us within inches of being complete. Not only that, when I got home from work on Wednesday he’d cleaned the entire house – not just his construction cleanup. But those are the little things.

My husband is an awesome dude for a multitude of reasons:

He’s secure enough not to care when I come home with a new tattoo/piercing/incredibly short hair cut without warning him in advance. He puts up with my craziness with an incredible amount of calm. While I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo this month, he’s tolerated an epic number of frozen dinners. He’s smart, he’s sexy, he’s funny and he’s still my favorite person to hang out with. We have great conversation and though we don’t always agree, we keep talking. He’s got a great sense of humor, a generous spirit and an infinite capacity to surprise me with loud sneezes.

He’s still a Lions fan (a testament to his patience), which makes me glad we live across country and very rarely have to suffer the torture of watching them fuck up another game on TV. While we don’t have all the same taste in music, we share an appreciation for watching people blow shit up on big screens, Modern Family and endless comedies whose most (least?) redeeming feature is bathroom humor. We share an affinity for good crime procedurals, zombie apocalypse TV, interesting serial killer fiction and Glee. While we diverge at NCIS and Twitter (me) and Fox News and technophobia (him) we make each other laugh and get on each others nerves and, at the end of the day, still choose to be here.

I wake up every day knowing how blessed I am for that.

Love you, babe.

A brief note

To explain why it’s a brief note. If you follow my twitter feed (to the right over there) you’ll notice that I’ve been tweeting NaNoWriMo updates almost daily. NaNo is eating my brain and between that, work, school and attempting to feed my husband pathetic freezer food I have had zero time for anything else.

That is all.

Damn you, Emma Watson

I’ve been growing out my hair. It hasn’t exactly been an enjoyable process and I’ve done it before, so it’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into, but I’ve been gutting it out.

Right until the internet discovered all the photos of Emma Watson’s haircut.It REALLY started with Carey Mulligan having cut off all her hair when she ruined it for  a film role. I collected photos and put them on my phone on the off-chance I decided I couldn’t hack the grow. At any rate, I managed to HOLD OFF.

And then came Emma. A pic of her new ‘do showed up on her Facebook page, which quickly made the web rounds. Then she made the cover of both British Vogue and Marie Claire for December, which meant that Jezebel AND Dorothy Snarker lit her up and it was just too much for me. I’ve never made any secret about how much I enjoyed having my hair über-short. This was exacerbated, of course, by Spouse deciding about a month ago that if I wanted to go back to shaving my head if I wanted.

What? YOU CAN’T WAVE A RED FLAG IN FRONT OF A BULL.

Anyhow, I decided I was going to try to keep growing until all these pictures were suddenly everywhere and the temptation was just too much. I posted a link to the pics and thought I’d maybe be able to think about it a couple of days. Then I woke up the next morning and new that the hair had to go. My regular stylist was sick yesterday so my options were to hold off until Monday (original plan) or go elsewhere. I managed to hold off for about four hours before I decided that I needed it done today.

I called Salon Axis in Edwards and got a 4pm appointment. Alexis did a great job and was, per usual, suitably cautious. “It’s going to be really short. Are you nervous?” No. “Are you sure you want to go this short? We could start longer.” No, really, CUT IT OFF.

This is where I should point out that I try to tell stylists right away that I’ve shaved my head before. It’s a cue that really, you don’t have to be scared of me flipping out about my hair being to short or too bad because shaving it is ALWAYS an option at that point. This doesn’t always set them at ease and I can understand that. In a business that’s largely word of mouth, you don’t want a client badmouthing you for giving them exactly what they asked for.

Her other funny concern was that I was trying it this short in the winter. Did I really want to do that? “Are you kidding? This is the best cut EVER for winter weather.” She looked at me. “No hat in the world can fuck it up!” She laughed and relaxed at that point. My hair turned out a bit shorter than the pictures I gave her as a guide, but that’s okay.  Right now I can’t figure out why I ever wanted to grow my hair again. Clearly I’m just no longer a Long Hair person. Additional funny – Alexis seemed pleasantly surprised that the cut looks good on me.

Skins

Kindle 3 skin from DecalGirl

I think my favorite thing about various media devices is being able to customize them. I’m not much for hacks (too cautious) so skins are one of my all-time favorite things to shop. Shopping does not equal buying so I spend a disproportionate amount of time LOOKING at tons of them before I finally commit. DecalGirl had some sweet options so I actually picked 2. This one looks even better than I’d hoped, so I’m saving the other for a rainy bored day.

Robot Dreams

Everyone at work was highly amused that I was super-stoked to find the first season of The Bionic Woman on DVD this week. I’m not sure why it was so hilarious, but I had mad love for Jaime Sommers. I’m a little too young to have seen it in its original run, but I loved it on repeats. Jaime was (from my recollection) kind of a normal girl who had a crazy accident and then got the best skillz ever.

What I remembered most was that she was SO normal. She had a regular job and was like a super hero on the side. She could run incredibly fast and was always knocking people around with her wicked strong bionic arm. She’s the first female super hero I remember besides Wonder Woman but, unlike Wonder Woman, Jaime Sommers wasn’t a princess. She was kind of a jock who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Could’ve been anyone.

Looking back on it now, she’s kind of the original Sydney Bristow or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. No one saw a good looking girl and thought ‘she’s tough’ or ‘she’s a spy’. She had a handler and a seekrit identity, but she also had a LIFE. She had a sense of humor and was laid back. Her clothes were (by 70s standards) the shit.

I accidentally started livetweeting the first disc of the set – mostly because I was so stoked about watching it AND my husband was out of town so I had no one to mock my epic nerdery -which was all the Six Million Dollar Man crossovers. Jaime got introduced as Steve Austin’s childhood friend and love of his life. I’m not gonna lie, I was a little shocked by all the terrible Lee Majors emo songs which were clearly penned specifically for the episodes. They were just AWFUL. I was also surprised by the amount of unshed tears in the episodes! Maybe they created the Jaime storyline just so Steve could show his softer side but it was a pretty impressive display of emotion from my 80s TV recollections.

I think the best part about the episodes (aside from the clothes and the decor) was that Jaime was just as cool as I remember. She had a successful career before the accident and she wasn’t okay with coasting – she wanted to pay her own way. She wasn’t having any of this ‘protect the girl’ nonsense and was insistent that she could be just as helpful as Steve in making the world a safer place. So yeah. The Bionic Woman kicks ass. Because of her, I’m maybe the only kid who was hoping for a horrific car accident so I could get robot limbs.

Weirdest fact of the accidental live-tweet: A random dude who’s into a Bionic Woman porno following and retweeting me. Ick?

Let it Snow

First real snowfall has hit and like most mountain-dwelling Coloradans, I’m happy to see it. I’ve been looking forward to winter – something unique for me and definitely a result of our new locale. While I haven’t missed all the folk who can’t drive well in snow and the Nervous Nellies who make it more dangerous for all of us, during the drive home I got to see the wind shoving clouds over some mountain peaks at close range.  It made it look like the mountains were shaving off bits of cloud with each gust and it was just generally excellent. Immediately I was less annoyed about the painfully slow drivers in front of me and enjoyed the slow cruise home.

The last couple of posts were of the home improvement progress. With any luck this weekend will see us nearing completion on the project.

I’ve got new Kindle skin love rocking right now, too. Since I’m contemplating a NaNoWriMo stab next month I’m trying to wrap up Dreadnaught and not get sucked into any of the ridiculous number of books in my Unread folder.

Random TV notes: I’m still really enjoying The Mentalist, Medium, Castle, Criminal Minds, The Big C, Modern Family, Community and Gray’s Anatomy. I find myself fast-forwarding through Chuck more than I’d like and I’m still utterly on the fence with this season’s Supernatural. To be honest I’m rather wishing they’d actually ended it last season, as this is feeling a bit like Buffy season 7. Related, Lifetime has been replaying old Gray’s eps  (I discovered this as my DVR has its own brain and recorded them) and I had forgotten how much awesome used to be jammed into every episode. This season is feeling like that. I also have to credit the Spouse for making me watch Modern Family. Without fail it is laugh out loud funny in EVERY episode and will invariably leave me chuckling long after. I feel like an idiot for missing it so long.

In film updates, Splice. What a fucked up, creepy and skeevy film. It was engrossing, however, unlike – say – IRON MAN 2. What the hell happened with that? It’s like they decided in lieu of a plot to insert Mickey Rourke and 10x more guns than the first one. Oh, and a whiny nagging Pepper. Ugh. Spouse says: I guess we won’t have to worry about seeing the 3rd one. It’s the second major film disappointment in recent memory (up there with Robin Hood) but made me feel good about not having shelled out cash to see it in the theater. I am, however, still wanting to see RED on the big screen.

Kindle 3 redux

So my disappointment with the Kindle 3 (3G +WiFi) was primarily because they seem to have reduced the size/quality of the antenna, resulting in less 3G connectivity in my rural area than I received with the Kindle 2. Annoying. That said, when I purchased the Kindle 2 I also used it to check my email with some regularity. Since I’ve gotten my HTC Eris, I never use the Kindle’s connectivity for anything but buying books. My phone is my primary internet mobile device and I like it like that.

The Kindle 3 is definitely lighter – something that’s not as noticeable at first as it is when you’ve been reading for 20 minutes. Using the alt+top row shortcuts for number input has also solved one of my other tiny complaints. I’m still finding the five way controller to be a bit too sensitive but it’s a pretty minor annoyance.

I don’t travel that much, honestly. I mean I commute to work but if I’m going to download a book I generally do it from home anyhow. The WiFi connection is great and I haven’t had any issues with it. For travel purposes, it’s not like every Starbucks, McDonald’s and bookstore don’t offer free WiFi these days so I’m not too concerned about lack of connectivity. Along the I-70 corridor the 3G signal is very strong as I’m sure is the case for more urban areas. Even in my small town there IS connectivity, I’d just been spoiled by the K2. What I discovered through this experiment is that the WiFi K3 is more than sufficient for my needs.

The reason I decided to keep the Kindle 3 – not just keep it, but I grabbed a WiFi only version for myself and gave the 3G version to my husband – is because of the changes in clarity. Not only are there three font choices and additional options for line spacing, but the color gradient improvement is shocking. Black is much blacker, white is much lighter. Reading experience = vastly improved. I’m also tempted for the first time ever to actually utilize the .mp3 function on the Kindle.

Don’t get me wrong – I love my K2 and I’m tempted to keep it as a backup but it makes more sense to me to let someone else try the e-reading experience at a lower cost. I don’t have any doubt they’ll be converted.

Directions

All that stuff they tell you you shouldn’t do at home to your hair? I do it. All the time.

I get bored with my natural color (blonde) and experiment with other shades in order to stave off shaving my head – even though Spouse has said it’s okay. It started a couple of years after we were married. I went red (at a salon) and a couple of years later I decided I’d try on brown. I went from a really dark shade to a medium brown with red undertones over the course of a couple of years. Once I found a shade that looked nice, I found a comparable version in the drugstore (usually Feria) and did it myself.

I never had any problems with my hair color. In fact, when I got a new stylist they invariably thought it was my natural color. This is partly because I do that thing they tell you not to on the box: color my eyebrows. At a salon they’re going to charge you $20 for this. I’ve discovered that if I’m careful, I can use the same thing I’m putting on my hair and not blind myself. Go figure.

This is all apropos of last week when I bought I light amber brown hair color. I know better- honestly I do. Anything that’s got reddish tones in it is going to be sucked up by my hair and come out predominantly red. For this reason, I bought a backup color. When I came out looking like Ronald McDonald, I dried it and promptly redoused it with a darker brown dye. I was pretty happy with how the end result looked. Right up until I washed it two days later. Lo and behold, all kinds of red, a lot less brown.

I decided to start over. I got a hair color remover and a darker shade of brown (because I knew all the red wouldn’t come out) and hit the rewind. By the time I got the remover out, my hair was an apricot shade (kind of cool if I didn’t want to have funny looking skintone). I let it dry and then colored it again. It’s back to being a darker shade of auburn (more brown than red) and it lasted through its first wash last night.

I did all these processes within a week. Actually both sets took place within hours, just a few days apart. My hair is just fine – not fried, not falling out, not some hideous lump on my head. Sometimes following the directions is just overrated.

Technical Difficulty

I got paid for my teaching gig and I thought HEY NOW, maybe I’ll pick up the Kindle 3 I’ve been lusting after. I can sell the K2 or maybe give it as a gift and I’ll have a shiny new (lighter! brighter! faster!) gadget. Since I was running some other errands, I ducked into Target and picked it up. It’s safe to say I was pretty excited.

Once home, I got it charged and then put a screen protector on it (because I am a nerd) and THEN decided to turn it on and use it. The contrast is definitely better than on the K2. It’s smaller, which for me is neither here nor there, and supposedly lighter though you can’t prove it by me holding it and the K2 in opposing hands. It feels about the same. The keyboard is a little offset because they moved the 5-way navigator, which is a little annoying but a small blip. More annoying than that is that they did away with the number keys. Especially if you have to enter passwords.

These are things I knew about though. I’ve read reviews and had an idea what to expect. I knew some of  these things would just be glitchy habit-breaking issues. Then I tried to register it.

Pretty much immediately it tried to access my wireless internet connection. Due to the lengthy password which involves capital letters (an epic PITA on the Kindle it seems) I thought I’d try to get it to access the 3G, which I obviously use all the time on the K2. No love. I go into the menu to make sure the wireless is on and that I’d bought the right Kindle (which I’d checked BEFORE I bought it but, you know…) Right Kindle, no access. Now I’m a little annoyed.

I turn on my K2 which promptly shows me 4 bars of access. I call customer service and then have to explain to the very nice man on the phone in India that I haven’t registered the device because the GD wireless won’t work*. When I mention that I might return it because it doesn’t work, he points out that it has global coverage so I can use it in Canada and the UK among other places. I politely tell him that I don’t give a shit about that if I can’t use it IN MY HOUSE. He registers it for me over the phone and has me restart it. When it reboots, it says EDGE and varies between 1 and 2 bars. My K2 shows full bars. WTF. He can’t explain it. I think maybe it will be enough or whatever so I hang up with the very nice support guy and go back into the basement.

The Kindle 3 promptly shows no wireless and wants me to connect to my wifi. My Kindle 2 still shows 2-3 bars. WTF.

Eventually the K3 shows up with EDGE again, but no bars. What the fucking fuck.

I’m going to give it another day or so to see if this resolves itself but then it’s going back. It’s too bad because I was excited about the new device but it’s useless to me if I can’t get the access I want where I need it most. What’s worse is that there doesn’t seem to be a logical reason for it: why would the earlier device work and the latest device doesn’t in the EXACT same place and time?

*Yes, it will connect to wifi. However, if I wanted to use the wifi I’d have bought the GD wifi version. I love the whispernet coverage, the wifi was just going to be a bonus.