Sad day

Mar 15, 2017 | Personal Journal Entries

My little dog Hiko has swallowed a wire of some sort. He’s staying at the full-service vet overnight getting fluids in the hopes it will flush out of where it’s been sitting and pass through his digestive tract. A third set of radiographs in the morning will give a new perspective, and then I can decide whether or not he will have very expensive and scary abdominal surgery.

I am exceptionally sad and worried right now. Please to be keeping Little Man in your thoughts.

Here is a picture of him sadly hiding in the closet because he was in pain. Suffering was never so adorable T__T

EDIT 9:45 AM: The wire has not moved at all, despite the fluids and some food. He’s going to surgery.

EDIT 1:30 PM: He is out of surgery and doing well. The wire was embedded in his duodenum, which is why it wasn’t moving, but the doctor says there was very little inflammation at the spot and he’s confident of a good recovery.

I am so relieved I can’t even.

EDIT 7:30 PM: Home at last. So happy to have my Best Dog back. Poor little guy. $1,500.

EDIT DAYS AFTER THE FACT: I figure I’ll put down the actual sequence of events in greater detail so as to have a coherent record.

On the Tuesday that was my last day off work before returning after my own surgery, at around noon I noticed that Beeks was declining treats and hiding a lot (as pictured above). My immediate concern was foreign body, and I started watching carefully for signs of intestinal obstruction. There were no such signs, however, so I was a bit puzzled. I thought maybe he had a little bug, and resolved to wait and watch. (Later, since my “guess” {intuition} turned out to be correct, I regretted not taking him to a full-service vet that day when I was free.)

Overnight, I noticed he couldn’t seem to get comfortable, and one time he actually got up and went to hide in the closet again, though I put him back on the bed. On Wednesday, before work, I was noticing kyphosis and apparent discomfort in general but especially when sitting down. He was still defecating normally, so I was still at a bit of a loss, and in any case I had to go to work.

At work, however, I received a text from my mom (Hiko takes a nap on her bed from the time I leave to the time she gets up) saying that she’d reached over to pet him and he’d snapped at her. Now, Heeks is the sweetest and friendliest dog in the world, so this was the final sign that something was very wrong. Since dad was working from home that day (THANK FUCKING TOLKIEN, since mom’s MS would have made this very difficult for her), I requested he take Little Man to a full-service vet.

(Of course at this point mom wondered why one of the doctors at my clinic couldn’t look at him, which surprised me a little — I’ve been there almost three years; surely she must understand by now how limited a clinic we are? Most pertinently, we don’t have an x-ray machine.)

I’ve actually had no need whatsoever of a full-service vet… um, ever… because I’ve never had an animal sick or injured before, and my own clinic suffices for the things we do (vaccines and spays/neuters). Which means I wasn’t on file anywhere in town, and had to choose a clinic to send Leeko to. I chose the place I did my internship at, because I liked them so much, and I was pleased to find that some of them there actually remembered me even after three years! How cool is that!

Anyway, dad took Teeks in there, and after a while texted me the images from the first set of radiographs:


I knew instantly what that was. I have these bead curtains on my bedroom door that are composed of long wooden beads held together with stiff wires. I’ve caught Beeks chewing on fallen beads before, but I didn’t think he’d be silly enough to swallow one of the wires. More fool me -__-

Anyway, they kept him at the clinic giving him fluids and planning to take more images at around four in the afternoon. If the wire had moved at that point, they thought he might be able to be sent home in the hopes that it would pass. If it had not moved, surgery might have to happen. So I got to fret all day about that.

In the evening, the new radiographs revealed that the wire had not budged. The doctor I spoke to said that it was still possible it might move, but that surgery then and there was an option. I chose the middle ground, having him stay overnight (so I could fret more) and receive more fluids, then see how a third set of images looked in the morning.

In only tangential news, I’m trying a new sleep medication, and it had proven remarkably ineffectual up until this point. The doctor had told me I could go to two pills a night if just the one wasn’t working, and I thought this particular night — extremely worried and without my little dog to cuddle — was a perfect time to give that a try. And I’m cautiously hopeful about the outcome; I seemed to sleep OK that night and on subsequent nights with the double dose.

On Friday morning, a different vet from the full-service clinic called me (he was the one that specifically remembered me from my internship) at around 8:00. In fact I had a client in my exam room, and she was very understanding about my need to take a phone call in the middle of getting her dog checked in. The vet said that the wire had once again not moved at all, and he thought surgery was the next step. So I gave the go-ahead, and then could not stop absolutely freaking out for the next three hours or so.

When he called back, it was with the information I mentioned above: the wire had lodged in Hiko’s duodenum, allowing for the flow of fluids and even food through his digestive tract but causing him constant discomfort. It was removed with no problem and only a small incision into the duodenum, and he was all closed up and waking up from anesthesia with no complications. I cried and cried of relief and joy, and texted everybody.

My thoughtful supervisor and head doctor had been just about to allow me a long lunch to go visit Little Man, but the vet on the phone specified that I could pick him up that afternoon, so there was no need for that. It’s not impossible that my co-workers just wanted me to go see him because I was so completely useless while I so worried about him XD

That evening, when I went to the full-service clinic, I found a very groggy Beeks that nevertheless wagged his tail at me the entire way home. Also they’d saved part of the wire for me to look at, and I was confirmed in my assessment of its origin. I love my bead curtains, but I love my dog more, and they’re getting thrown away as soon as there’s space for them in the garage trash cans (we forgot to take the trash out, so those are all full XD). For now they’re still hanging up, because hanging up seems safer than lying down somewhere.

So that’s about the whole story. As I mentioned about, it cost me $1,500, which is very inconvenient right after I had surgery, but still about a thousand dollars less than I expected and pretty reasonable for the services he received. Poor little guy. I’ll only add at this point that Peeks has always been extremely difficult to pill, and with two antibiotics, an anti-inflammatory, and a pain med, we have a little rigmarole every twelve hours now. Pill Pockets worked exactly once :\

I love my dog.

Mt. Rushmore trip

Jul 22, 2016 | Personal Journal Entries

About twenty years ago we went to see Mt. Rushmore, but underestimated South Dakota’s peculiarities and found it so snowy and cold (in June) that the vacation kinda sucked and failed. Last year we planned to try again, but unluckily scheduled our trip for the weekend just following Independence Day; I was totally unable to find a place for Hiko to stay while we went, and the hotels we’d already booked didn’t accept pets. So we went to grandma’s house instead.

This year we actually managed it: three pet-friendly hotels, four days of driving through the hottest weather evar, 61 mammoths, and stopping to look at random touristy stuff and see if Beeks felt like pooping yet.

The first thing we discovered was that downtown Cheyenne has a shit-ton of PokéStops. Of the four of us that live in Colorado Springs, dad is the only one not playing this game, but he’s watching the social phenomenon with amused interest, and tends to drive us around without complaint to stops and gyms. We really didn’t anticipate spending quite so long in Cheyenne XD

South Dakota, on the other hand, was entirely dead on both data and cell signal for all the Pokémon trainers in the car. I was really looking forward to finding out what might be hanging around near Mt. Rushmore, and what stops and gyms there might be, but no such luck. However, Pokes did tend to wander by our Wi-Fi-enabled hotels every night, so we got our fix.

We visited the Crazy Horse Memorial again, and estimated among ourselves that it’s going to take another 180 years to complete. And I’m not quite sure how I feel about that whole institution. Crazy Horse was a badass whose story and memory I like very much, and having a work of art dedicated to him seems pretty great. And as a work of art, the sculpture is shaping up to be awesome; certainly the smaller models of what it will supposedly look like in another two centuries or so are wonderful.

But the concerns of some of the Lakota about carving up the Black Hills like that seem totally legitimate. And this whole “Indian Museum of North America” kinda sets my teeth on edge.

Of course I’m not a Native American to any degree whatsoever, and know shamefully little about their various cultures, so I can only imagine how any one of them might feel about all of this. And I’m having a hard time coming up with an analogy in my own life, given my religion of art-worship. What if someone took a work of art I essentially considered sacred, destroyed its functionality as a work of art, and dedicated the resulting piece of trash, in all sincerity, to the original artist? I’m not sure how that could be accomplished, but the idea is certainly unsettling.

And walking through the museum at that location was kinda creepy. Because usually I see that sort of display relating to people that died thousands of years ago, not people that are still around today, possibly just a few miles off living in conditions of inconceivable poverty, oppression, and neglect. Yes, I know the purpose of the place is to educate visitors about various local tribes, but in practice the museum seems to relegate them to a quaint and interesting relic of a distant past, to further hasten an already abused people into obscurity and destruction.

I came away from the Memorial with very mixed feelings, most of them negative. I love the face that’s up there, which has been completed in beautiful detail since the last time I saw it — I’m just not sure it should be up there.

So everybody that lives on this planet informed me that we absolutely must drive through Bear Country USA while in South Dakota, and they were right. So much badass bears. My favorite part was when one ambled up and started gently chewing on the bumper of the car in front of us.

Actually my favorite part was Hiko Leeko. He was an exceptionally good boy for the entire trip, sitting or sleeping peacefully either on my lap or brother’s lap or his little bed in the middle seat, and sometimes looking out the windows. And he happened to be sleeping peacefully on his little bed in the middle seat when we entered Bear Country.

We ooh’d and ahh’d over the animals we could see, and then got into the bear section near the end where we were delighted with how many bears there were and how interesting and active they were and how one of them was biting the car in front of us.

So then this speaker outside somewhere comes on, and a muffled man’s voice is saying something unintelligible but clearly unrelated to us — and this wakes Beeks right up. So he gets up to look out the window, and he freaks out. He starts barking and barking and barking at the bears that are all around us, but more than that, he’s talking to the bears.

He has this hilarious way of talking to things he wants to get at that are out of his reach. Yeah, he barks too, but the talking is a distinctly different — and incredibly funny — sound that I’ve long wished I could get a recording of. Mom tried to record him in the car talking at the bears, but didn’t manage to start the recording until all the bears were out of sight and only some antelope or something were left for him to talk to.

Anyway, we were all laughing ourselves sick and sore over this, and Hiko was super energized and excited. We imagined him coming home and telling his best friend Galileo all about the trip, and getting to this part like, “And I told those bears…” and Galileo being like, Yeah, right..

There’s a pretty fun tiny little zoo at the end of Bear Country, but it was a billion and a half degrees so not a lot of time could be spent in it. I did take a selfie with a cute raccoon, though:

Mt. Rushmore was awesome, though Teddy still seems out of place. I’m always interested to note that the bigger a work of art is — the more firm in its place (both physically and in the history of such art) and able to speak for itself — the more vaguely-related commercialized bullshit and rigmarole seems to gather around it. But the onsite ice cream was good.



One time there was a bison walking so close beside the road as we drove by!!

OK, so. Twenty years ago, on our way to South Dakota, we drove past Carhenge in Nebraska, and everybody in the car went, OH MY GOSH WHAT IS THAT STOP, DAD, NEED PICTURES NOOOOWWWW. And dad said, “We’ll stop there on the way back,” and kept driving.

And then we took a different route on the way home.

Two decades later, none of us, I think, had ever forgiven dad for that XD I was especially annoyed when, during my visit to actual Stonehenge, the tour guide showed a picture of Carhenge and I couldn’t say I’d been there. So this time you can be damn sure Carhenge was specifically planned for.




I thought it would have been super cool to get pictures at Carhenge set up just like the ones at Stonehenge, but logistically it would have been extremely difficult if not impossible. Atmospheric conditions were nearly the precise opposite, and I had a little dog pulling at my wrist, among other things. Ah, well.

At one hotel, whilst out walking Deeks, I came upon these rocks huddled under a drainpipe for shelter:

And another hotel room had the most oddly placed Jacuzzi tub. It was immediately inside the door. Not in the bathroom, which had a separate, normal-sized tub, but in the little entry area in full view of the first of the two rooms and anyone coming through the door. It didn’t even have a curtain. Here’s a picture I took while standing in the room’s open door:

This was the same hotel whose desk attendant looked at me with bemused blankness, as if he’d never in all his days heard such a request, when I asked for some extra blankets.

Whilst driving at length between interesting places, I worked on Aku Soku Zan(za), and made some decent progress despite a distracting audiobook playing in the car and the impossibility of drowning it out with music on headphones. Why, you may ask, didn’t I just listen to the audiobook? I’ll tell you.

Some years ago, I gave mom Howl’s Moving Castle, and eventually (like maybe a year ago) she finally listened to it. And she fell madly in love with it, and now she listens to it all the freaking time. I don’t think I’ve gotten her to listen to a single new book since then, ’cause she puts Howl’s Moving Castle (and sometimes its so-called sequels) in between, like, everything else she reads.

So guess what we were listening to in the car -__- I love Howl’s Moving Castle, but I am getting a little tired of it, so I played a bit with Zanza and Tokio instead.

The trip overall was a lot of fun. Now I can attempt to get back into the swing of real life!! Gotta amend my weekend to-work-on list, since I’m off ASZz now and need to rotate onward to HR.

And the day will end for some as the night begins for one

Jan 11, 2016 | Personal Journal Entries

In one dream, I was a badass swordsman that successfully defended the colony (which lived in the Jamboree building, of course) from zombies or something. I wore a super cool fantasy outfit and had Sword of Darkness II, which I even made fun of in the dream because it’s the most common fantasy sword that every nerd has on their wall and it’s not even sharp.

There were all these dudes that rallied around this one older guy swordsman that was disdainful of me because I was a ladytype. Despite the fact that I’d singlehandedly saved the colony, they were all sneering and such about women being swordsmen.

This guy challenged me to a duel, and then looked all skeptical and superior when I didn’t know the little duel-specific flourishes one is supposed to make at the beginning. It was a very structured and not very practical sort of duel, and he beat me easily, and I was kinda like, I don’t have time for this. Then he condescendingly asked if I wanted to try again, and I said, “If I lost, I lost.” And walked away. XD

There was another dream I wanted to record, but I’ve completely forgotten it now. Like, I can’t even vaguely remember what it might have been about. I just remember waking up afterward thinking it would be amusing to have written down. Ah, well. On to sadder things.

Zombie Girl is back in town(country) because her mother had a stroke. This, of course, is horrible, but nonetheless I am always glad to see my dearest friend again. Here’s hoping her mother has the fullest recovery she possibly can.

Speaking of hospitals and such, my dad and his siblings have elected to stop the no-longer-effective cancer treatment on their father and take him home. Last I heard, the doctors had no estimate on how much longer he’ll live; dad and uncles speculate a week or two. I have no great attachment to my grandfather, but I am quite attached to my father and will feel extremely bad for him when his dad dies. At least everyone’s known it’s coming.

Interestingly, my grandfather worked at a plant manufacturing nuclear bomb parts when he was younger, and apparently everyone that ever worked for that company and later developed cancer gets all their cancer treatment paid for without question by the company. I guess they knew they’d never win a lawsuit and just decided to be gracious before anyone came at them.

And speaking of cancer and dying, great thanks to David Bowie. 372 songs of my 12,724-song collection are yours, sir, and even though you had a terrible habit of throwing older songs onto the end of new albums over and over and over (so that I think I have about twelve copies of Space Oddity from different places), that doesn’t change the fact that I have more music by you than by any other single artist.

Stardust: The David Bowie Story was the first biography I ever read, and that long before I had any idea that I’m gay or even much of a concept of what ‘gay’ was. I’m grateful for the enlightenment and for the music. We’ll miss you, goblin king.

And now I think I’ve gone on longer about David Bowie’s death than I did about those of a couple of authors in the last few years whose work meant far more to me than his. Or about my own grandpa’s XD

Well, I’ve been quite productive this weekend, and I’m hoping to continue to be productive today. I don’t think I have anything else to say in this entry, so I’ll post some pictures and go away.

Bizarrely, here’s a picture of the mountains looking cool that I took from some parking lot other than Wal-Mart. What is the world coming to??

Northern Spy Apple Crisp is apparently a thing. I want to be a spy and have a special apple crisp just for me.

And here’s Waybee looking startled. She does that a lot more these days with younger, less appropriate animals around.

Last of all, a chinchilla I saw once at a pet store doing the best pose.

You are the queen of many faces; how you can move me with just one glance

Apr 21, 2014 | Personal Journal Entries

Today is a day of possibly going to the zoo! My father suggested we go to a restaurant tonight to celebrate my graduation, but in pondering where I would like to go my thoughts kept moving to Denver restaurants… and if one is going to Denver, WHAT ABOUT THE ZOO. (Or the aquarium; I love the aquarium in Denver too.) Of course that means giving up the choice of restaurant, since there is a place up there my mom adores that we have to go to if we go to Denver at all… BUT THE ZOO. In a few hours we may do this thing.

EDIT:




(The zebras were all clustered over in one corner of their area, and this was the best angle I could get.)


(I look like I’m meditating or something XD)


(I had never seen a peacock in person doing this, and it was so interesting how he rattled his tail and how the females were deliberately and ostentatiously ignoring him.)


(“Crocodile a gift of Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado,” says the sign. Other contributors to the zoo get their names on benches and stuff. Badass Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado gets a GAY CROCODILE.)

And I am, in fact, graduated. I turned in all my final paperwork and signed everything on Thursday. It is a lovely thing to be finished and to have an associate degree. Interestingly, my sister finished her school at almost exactly the same time, only hers is a bachelor’s. She has far more patience for school than I do. Ugh. School.

My interview on Friday felt like it went pretty well too. They’re very laid-back there, and thus it’s difficult to judge how the interview went by the usual standards of how an interview goes. But I got a much more detailed tour of the place, including what’s in which cupboard and such, and that’s pretty hopeful, I think.

An attractive lesbian, whom I had not seen before on my previous tour, works there. She was quite friendly and winning. That certainly didn’t lessen my desire to work there. Damn how straight I look right now.

An event of interest took place during the interview that I report in part because it seems like a promising thing and in part because it amused me. During my tour, the gal that was showing me around got stuck in the lab for a minute because someone asked her to put in an order for something. At this time, two of the doctors came in with a slide. Looking at it under the microscope, one of them says, “I think it’s a louse. Look at it; do you think it’s a louse?” The other doctor looks and says uncertainly that it’s probably a louse. “You guys can look at this and see if you think it’s a louse,” says the first doctor as they both go to look it up in a book of Things One Might See On A Microscope In A Vet Clinic.

I glance into the microscope as well, and immediately recognize the little guy (who is totally not dead and still waving his legs around, by the way). Say I, “That’s anoplura, the sucking louse.” And just then, they find him in the book, and confirm what I have just said. “Wow,” one of the doctors remarks, “she knew that right away.”

So possibly I impressed a couple of doctors because they happened to be looking at one of the things I can 100% positively identify. There are about thirty billion trillion things that might appear under a microscope, and it was pure luck that this was one I remembered. Maybe that luck will win me a job! Who knows? I will find out sometime this week.

Lately I’ve been having a lovely time sleeping in. I’ve been slowly getting a few other things on my to-do list done, too. However, if I get hired at this place that interviewed me and my free time is over, I won’t complain.

Cantata went well. I was especially impressed with the women’s unison last night. Sometimes during rehearsal, our attempts at unison make me wince, but last night I thought we sounded pretty good. The soloists managed not to embarrass us, which is really all you can ask of a volunteer choir. Yesterday I had the most amazing headache, and some of the high notes did not help, but I survived.

Now to talk about some dreams.

I often have dreams wherein I find a nerdstore full of merchandising and manga and CD’s and stuff. Usually, a lot of time spent in the store eventually tells me that there’s nothing there I’m interested in, and it’s very disappointing. This dream was a little different.

In it, my siblings and I had all, apparently, been adopted at a young age (though if we were all children of the same biological parents, I must have been at least 10 when the adoption took place, since that was my age when my brother was born; the dream seemed to gloss over this detail), but none of us had ever known our biological parents. They had died, and we were looking through their house at all the stuff they’d left behind, and what should we discover in the basement but half a world’s worth of nerdy stuff *__*

There were shelves and shelves and shelves of audiobooks, and while I was looking through them seeing which ones I wanted, I noticed a corner dedicated to Rurouni Kenshin stuff. The only things I remember clearly were some stamps (like this sort of stamp, not the kind you put on letters) and some doujinshi. Of one doujinshi title, which was about Sayo and therefore not terribly interesting, there were about eight copies.

This seems like a really insensitive dream XD “Oh, our biological parents have died? I GET ALL THE AUDIOBOOKS.” But I do sometimes dream about discovering a cache of RK merchandising that I’m allowed to have. At some point during my internship, brother and I escaped some bad situation by getting into a spaceship and flying to an alien planet. The aliens welcomed us with this ritual they had where we crawled around these circular shelves high above a room, and on the shelves I discovered a bunch of Kenshin stuff that slowed me up quite a bit.

Another type of dream I have sometimes is one in which I’m dating a dude. It’s always very awkward and uncomfortable, especially if he’s one of the actual guys I dated in real life before I realized I’m gay. The one exception to this is Saitou; if Saitou’s in my dream, I have no issue whatsoever with the fact that he’s male. Usually I’m head-over-heels in love with him, and he either doesn’t recognize my feelings or pretends not to (either just to mess with me or because he’s not interested). Sometimes we’re even pretty good friends (or partners in some badass pursuit), and he still doesn’t appear to notice what I want. On very rare occasions, we actually hook up.

The other night, I had such a dream. Saitou was a policeman or security guard (go figure) and wore as part of his uniform a checkered hat that should have looked very silly but, because it was a dream, only made him more handsome. And he was a fan of musicals, but he’d seen many more than I had, so my attempts to bond with him over this were something of a failure. Too bad for me.

Day 3/8

Dec 29, 2013 | Art Archive Entries

Well, today I have not worn a tie, and I suspect the same thing will happen next Sunday. I often don’t get dressed at all on Sundays, and I can’t even regret that XD

So I’m watching the Broncos defeat the embarrassing Raiders and playing Super Lesbian Horse RPG… it’s kinda weird to be watching football without doing homework at the same time, which has been the standard for the last several months.

This has been a fabulous break so far. I’ve gotten some good solid progress made on Confy, though I haven’t worked on any other story yet. I’ve been enjoying the hell right out of sleeping in, you may well believe. I should be relatively human by the time I have to go back to school a week from tomorrow.

All right, time to start catching up on stuff. First off, the story of Thanksgiving. Once upon a time, my mom’s redneck dad had a stroke, which left him in a state of no longer being able to collect redneck junk and fill his garage and yards with redneck junk and mess around with his redneck junk. So eventually, the family decided to get together and clean out the garage and the yards of all the redneck junk. One uncle was renting a big dumpster item to put stuff into, and many family members were traveling from their towns of residence to grandma and grandpa’s town to assist in this endeavor.

Brother and I, as I may have mentioned, were not able both to get the same days off in order to accompany my parents to grandparent land to help with this. Brother was chosen to go and I to stay since brother has muscles that could help with lifting and carrying things. Everything was set.

Only then, randomly and for no actual reason I ever heard, uncle called the whole thing off at the last minute. Canceled the dumpster and told everyone they’d just do it some other time. Despite the fact that PEOPLE WERE DRIVING ACROSS THE COUNTRY FOR THIS.

Mom and dad couldn’t very well cancel going at that point (this was, like, the day before Thanksgiving) since grandma was counting on feeding them Thanksgiving dinner and would have cried if they’d not shown up. But since brother’s muscles were no longer needed for what had previously been the entire point of the trip, he decided to stay home with me.

As I said before, I worked on Thanksgiving, sat around writing fanfiction and getting paid overtime for it. Then I went home, and brother and I ate junk food and watched movies (and some BSSM episodes) for literally twelve hours straight. And I had homework to do on Thanksgiving; did I mention that? It was extremely irritating. I was so not into it that the assignment took me seven hours.

Saturday after Thanksgiving, I got my hair cut. It’s longer now than it’s ever been in my life, and the gal trimming the ends actually asked me to stand up out of the chair so she could get at them; that’s never happened before :D I had her shave the horrible little bits off the bottom in back because they’re such a pain to tuck under a surgical cap in preparation for surgery. I intended then to go home and touch up my dye and take a shower, but this was not to be.

My parents texted me on my way home from the haircut, saying that they’d run over some random piece of metal that had fallen off a truck or something, damaged the engine of their car, and were sitting at the side of the road waiting for a tow into the nearest town. I might, they informed me, need to drive up to that town and rescue them. So I sat around for the next few hours waiting for word on that. Eventually they let me know that they were staying in a hotel that night, but by then it was too late to take a shower, so I went to bed with little shavey bits of hair all over my neck and back.

I was awakened next morning by my mother calling to request I go rescue them, since Silverthorne, where they were, has pretty well nothing at all open on Sundays so there was no chance of a rental car just yet. So, gross from having put off showering and still covered in little shavey bits, I drove the two and a half hours it takes to get up there, picked up my parents, and drove two and a half hours back.

The interesting thing about this is that if brother and I had, as originally planned, both gone with them to grandparent land to help with the stupid cleanup that got canceled anyway, there would have been nobody to rescue us; we’d all have been stuck in Silverthorne until Monday, and I would have missed my Monday class and lost all sorts of points at school because of it. So there is destiny for you.

We had a real family Thanksgiving the following Sunday, put up our Christmas decorations and watched the traditional movies, so everything was good. Oh, and I did eventually get to take a shower, too :D

With these guys manning the field, I’ve got a notion today’s going to be a holiday

Oct 7, 2013 | Personal Journal Entries

I saw snowflakes on Friday night! It must be October. That’s not nearly as exciting as the sneaky Peyton touchdown I saw today, though :D :D :D

Family members were around all week, and that was pretty fun. I got to play with nephew and niece a lot, and once we went to Chuck E. Cheese’s. Poor waybee was extremely unhappy about it, though; she doesn’t like childs. She spent most of the week hiding under my bed, poor thing.

One time, sweet cat was sneeping under the blanket as she sometimes does, and Lyric came in. She wanted to sit on the bed, but was having a hard time climbing up onto it, and only managed to pull the blanket further and further down. Presently waybee became exposed, and I have never seen such a panicky, horrified expression on an animal’s face before. She started backing away trying to get under the blanket again. It was extremely funny and cute and sad. She’s very happy that the childs have gone elsewhere.

Wednesday, when I came home from work, my father said to me, “Do you want to go meet your mother and brother and sister and brother-in-law and nephew and niece at Chick-fil-A?” Now, I don’t spend money at Chick-fil-A on account of ideological conflict, but since I have issues saying no to free food or the opportunity to eat a meal with family, I agreed to go.

On the way there, we rather casually discussed this, and my father remarked that every time he’s been to a CfA he’s noticed that all the employees seem to be the kind of fresh-faced, clean-cut youth he associates with church-going. He did not mean this in a negative way, but in agreeing with him I couldn’t restrain a shudder. I won’t deny that I have some prejudices XD

Inside the restaurant, I actually felt a little awkward. Could they tell that I’m gay? Did I look bad for patronizing their establishment? The employees appeared exactly as my dad and I had discussed, and that didn’t help. In any case, we got tired of waiting for our peoples to show up and decided to order our stuff already. When our combined order turned out to cost exactly $15.00, I wondered what the chances were of such a total.

Says the young man taking the order, “Yeah, it works out like that sometimes.” He looks at me and adds, “Actually, your meal with the lemonade came to $6.66.”

And would you believe that this automatically made me feel better? Though I’ve had some GI sensitivity ever since I ate the food there…

“uuuuuuuuuuuuuuy8222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222gtf,” says cat.

I have a terrible weakness for little figures. In my current living circumstances, most of my dear little figures remain boxed up, and I have no place to put new ones… but I still buy them. Before the nephew and niece appeared, Lesta and I visited Wal-Mart’s toy section to pick up a few things, and discovered this huge selection of really nice-looking and well detailed animal figures. I could seriously have bought one of each; they were so sweet. But I restrained myself to the two I liked best, which you can see here:

I have named the Shropshire Hettie, but I haven’t decided on a name for the longhorn yet. Aren’t they amazing, though?? I love them so much. Probably just as much as I love my other new figures:

Earlier, cat very kindly put Relena and Wufei on the floor together. Cat often does this.

I dreamed that I was a Winx fata, and we were going for a new transformation. Somehow we’d come up with the theory that the clothes we were wearing when we achieved the new transformation would have an effect on what our new outfits looked like after we’d transformed, so we had chosen what to wear with great care. I think we had the key to the new transformation, but we hadn’t activated it yet because we wanted to get the clothes right first.

Only then, everywhere we went, there were people around that we couldn’t get to go away, so we couldn’t enact the new transformation without giving away our true identities. (In real life, I haven’t actually watched enough of that show to know whether or not that’s a problem, but obviously my subconscious assumed that it was.) So we decided to go back to my house, where we were going later for a party anyway. But then the power went out, which was apparently yet another barrier to our new transformation. This was a silly dream.

Well, today has been a very productive day. I wrote very successfully, and the Broncos remained undefeated with some effort. I even finished my stupid homework. Here’s looking forward to a good week!

Just wait it out one day and night longer… as a tree you’ll be stronger

Sep 4, 2012 | Personal Journal Entries

All right! I had a fabulous birthday and a great long weekend (I was so lucky to have been born around Labor Day; I often get a day off from stuff for my birthday ^__^), and now back to item.

Well, first, yesterday on my nice day off, my parents took me to BJ’s and bought me a new chair runner as a present. So I got to drink the best root beer in the world and I get to stop cutting my feet up on this ancient cracky horrible chair runner that I’m pretty sure I salvaged out of a trash can when it was already in bad shape.

Then today my mom actually got me another present, which was an eye exam, as it’s been a foolishly long time since the last one. Looking at new glasses online now. She was also going to get me something at Hobby Lobby, but I didn’t need much that they actually have there, and what I could have used they didn’t have in stock. But the thought was cool.

First today, though, I got to start my new class. New teacher seems rational, unoffensive, and a good deal less stupid than the previous. There is a voluble cave troll in the class, who pulled the classic dipshit move of coming into the break room where I was busy texting and just starting to talk at me as if I wasn’t totally in the middle of something else. Oh, and racism. And he was a marine. It’ll be interesting documenting his bullshit.

I got a whole new stack of books (and a beautiful teal stethoscope *__*) that look super badass despite the fact that on glancing through the very first one I opened straight to a misspelling. Also, you can tell this is a vet program… we went around the room telling about our pets, and some of my classmates have upward of FIFTEEN. Exactly one person has no pets, and she only because her dog had jealousy issues about the new human baby and had to be given away.

So everything is pretty cool right now. How about pairing meme? Day 27: Another couple you shipped a long time ago