sapios

So I'm juggling all this stuff last couple weeks, like 8 days out from surgery was actually babysitting a 4 year old all by myself, so you know I'm pulling a pretty good fake with this. We've had this crazy holiday week supporting her mama pulling extra shifts as a sitter in ER, which is really what it's all about in lots of families having problems coping, and on top of everything out of the blue last night Scott asked when I'm going to get that Mantrid post done, because it's been two years.

😑 Right.

Tomorrow will be 13 days since surgery, and I am crazy bizzy. Bunny says that when she twirls, she gets bizzy. Granted, today was my first big ohHELLno guts waking up and realizing something is really amiss, and it was a fun watch me sprint day (and a really fun race fail), and those of you who've had gallbladder surgery probably know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm finally able to eat again, but for about 3 hours everything was all-stop and red alert low grade pulled me over and asked me if I knew how fast I was going, and I said Hold my apple juice and watch *this*.  Dishes done, laundry done, executive decisions made about remodeling my player shop, Walking Dead watched. #Crushinit. I'm just thrilled my stomach is allowing a handful of mozzarella cheese shred before I go to bed.

I wish we'd had the term sapiosexual about 20 years ago. I've tried to put a finger on why Scott and I work so well, and basically it's exactly that. Funny this got a reject on it 5 years ago and now it's everywhere. Clicks to source.

Six Signs That Prove You're Secretly A Sapiosexual That article is seriously one-sided but spot on. Scott wanted a 'college girl', well, he got one that won't shut up and he's still here. Early on I was intrigued how differently he uses his own brain, actually kind of brilliant about a few things once I got past the dyslexia (I'm merciless, but dang it, he's so cute saying and spelling stuff wrong).

And thanks to Ken Jeong retweeting during the live tweet, that one really took off.

~wild subject change~

Lemme 'splain. My dad was born in the wrong century and refuses to keep up with anything remotely techy, so he's kind of like a cross between an alchemist and a scientist about how the world works, and of course disaster looms because prophecy. He actually literally measures the yearly winter solstice with a pin in a wall that the sun setting through a window casts a moving shadow on, and he marks where the last of the light is with the date. And this year is a month ahead of last year. You know, because like orbit problems maybe. I immediately wondered if the land under his home must have settled or something, this entire area is karst with loads of sinkholes and you can see the big fields drooping away from one particular highway that I drove for years, and they were definitely not doing that when we first moved here. Anyway, naturally I can't help diving into the search bar and reading what I find back over the phone, since NASA obviously won't tell us the truth about what's really going on (you have know idea how thankful I am that he's not a flat earther), so in case you're curious yourself, the winter solstice doesn't necessarily fall on the exact same day every year, and the way it's measured isn't about where the sun falls on a spot on the wall.

December solstice 2017 is the 21st
"Why doesn’t the earliest sunset come on the shortest day? The December solstice marks the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and longest day in the Southern Hemisphere. But the earliest sunset – or earliest sunrise if you’re south of the equator – happens before the December solstice. Many people notice this, and ask about it... By the way, the latest sunrise doesn’t come on the solstice either. From mid-northern latitudes, the latest sunrise comes in early January."

It's a bit confusing because it's not about the light we see at what time, but about the length of the day that we have light. I don't know if my dad measures the sunrise as well, but he's adamant that the yearly solstice must be exactly like the year before.

10 Things About the December Solstice
"Most people count the whole day as the December Solstice. However, the Solstice is actually at a specific moment - when the Sun is exactly overhead the Tropic of Capricorn."

Probably lost a few wanderers during that, but basically it demos my sapio thing. A LOT of people love knowledge. They love it so much they'll spend lifetimes pursuing it. If you are one of those people and wanting to find a good match for a lifelong relationship, make sure that person is cool about the obsessions you love. If you're going to have to BE HOME at the exact same time and date every single year to make a mark on a wall, make sure they know that.

Oh thank goodness, I finally just yawned. OH, almost forgot. I dropped outa #latenightmovie last night because I was so fried, but at least I can now say Yes, I have seen the Star Wars Holiday Special. I made it up to the cartoon, at least. "The special is notorious for its extremely negative reception and has never been rebroadcast or officially released on home video."  Like one of the gang said, it was more like a Pink Floyd experience than anything.

K, I'm about to fall over now, thank goodness. I need sleep so bad.

it's all right

the description when you click is sad 😢

When this post elicited this response yesterday, I burst into tears because I knew someone actually heard me.

I've said before that sometimes my worst days are also my best days. This comment happened a few hours later.

There are days where family and friends don't know what to do with me, and I withdraw for all our sakes because my world is so black no one can handle me. Thank goodness for this distraction, which happened in the nick of time. Not sure if you can see it without a facebook account, although it is public.

I rarely reach a point where I'm listing possible names to grab on some kind of call or private messaging, but yesterday I was down to 3 names and ticking a list of what each person could probably handle on short notice without it actually killing a relationship and coming up empty handed. Having social media accounts on the internet was that little ledge I hung onto with one last claw.

Thank goodness time passes, but I wasn't released until I made it through the kind of long and detailed nightmare that spits a person out on Monday morning feeling really crabby. Thankfully, crabby is one of my salvation modes, and then there was coffee. And then I got busy and now I'm mostly ok.

#transparency My world doesn't feel ok. I'm pretty sure it's a virus and my nervous system is doing its best, but in my brain (nerve central) it feels like everything is so sad that I can barely make a plan, and I think I need to leave the house in 30 minutes for an appointment. I'm pretty sure my mood swings will be off the hook until this virus is over, and I very naturally fell into a writing rhythm dealing with it, like I have trained myself for years to do when I don't know what else to do.

On days like this, tears just stream down my face nonstop. Sometimes I don't even notice. I don't actually cry or weep, they just stream. When I think about it, I'm actually thankful because the nerve damage was bad enough for a couple of years not to be able to make tears at all in one eye. Tears are good.

I don't worry about what people think. No one asks, usually. I'm alone so much that there is no other outlet. People are busy and my stuff is overwhelming and transitory, and I know I can make it to another point in time where I feel better, because I have before.

All the same, I'm very tired, stuff looks and feels very hard, and I don't know if I can be good for people right now, so I'm winging it. I'm keeping it simple. I tell people around me to just tell me what to do and I do it. Tell me what time it has to be done, and I make sure it's done. I don't try to think beyond that. I trust that being told what to do and when it needs to be done by will be what I need to get through the day. Today I have several things to execute in a certain time order, and those are my stepping stones today.

This is the black side of autism spectrum egocentric narcissism in a spoonie body on a manic dip into a nonexistent abyss that feels really real. These are the moments where the word 'friends' doesn't save me, where my love for my family can barely shine a tiny light in a far off distance, and where I am the only one I can count on to save me.

God bless fans. This song has been saving me for so many years.


Time to run out our door.

dishing on my messy life

This is Thanksgiving Eve with a disability. It was originally the most beautiful swirled mocha cheesecake I'd ever made, a first time experiment with a gluten-free crust. I don't share that much, but this is the kind of nerve fail in my arms I'm fighting to hold at bay. I've been told that once I lose especially ulnar in my left arm, I won't be getting it back. I have destroyed my phone case dropping it so many times, despite taping it back together several times, but since my phone still brilliantly works, that is one helluva good phone case protecting my phone.

I remember sending you a story about a dream I had where I watched a life from beginning to end. Not knowing who it was, passing judgment on that life. Then finally being reconnected with my memories to find that I had judged myself. No matter how hard I tried to think up a reason of how this was unfair, I could not.

My cousin and I have very interesting convos, like no other person I've met. We've both had near death experiences, DTs from severe withdrawals, and close enough childhoods to be able to compare really deep personal meanings we've come away with.

This was the other half of that cheesecake. I've taken things out of the oven a million times, and I assumed this would go per usual, except this time my left hand couldn't make a grip at all in that position, and without warning (there was no pain), there she went, and my right hand was all that barely saved that 350 degree dish from burning me or careening across the kitchen.

I have always loved the debate over the existence of God, because it is unsolvable, even with logic. I was taught to debate from a very young age, and although it's taken me years to let go of using it as a cat and mouse toy on other people, I still love it inside my head. Sometimes I try every way I can to prove God cannot exist (for fun and games, I am not an atheist by birth, or even by nature, as I have found out), but physics keeps changing my footing. I used to be able to stop at If there is no life after death and this universe is all that there is and we are made of and from this universe and nothing else, then we should not be able to conceive or believe in anything or anyone else after life, yet so much of the world does.

I unfolded the saved bit and dug around taking a few bites, and it was pretty awesome cheesecake. I had marbled the lighter coffee swirls and darker chocolate swirls like art, and had used the only cream cheese I had to construct it. This was it. So yeah, I stood there at the stove and ate some after I walked off for 5 minutes on the pissy edge of tears. I'm not very good at self pity and why me, though, so it didn't take long to turn into a pig.

We are learning there is so much more to this universe that I have to keep tacking on provisional statements. For example, the Ancient Alien theories suggest that humans were part of a long galactic history of DNA experimentation, with growing evidence to support that. If aliens were posing as or mistaken as gods and could bring humans back to life via resuscitation, naturally this could be jumbled into a mistaken afterlife concoction. Like that. I allow for side jaunts into all kinds of logic that would still support my main supposition even though the side jaunts are questionably- questionable...

@bonenado was awesome and cleaned up the mess after it cooled. You can see I'm really hard on my oven, lots of broiling and spattering, but oh so yum. He got in there and spiffed it up while I stood off to the side sampling the other half of the mess. We were making crazy funny jokes and laughing our heads off. He always saves my days.

Anyway, over a long time I'm kinda sifting down to a couple of conclusions. There is no logic for the fail we feel over broken relationships at death after decades of not fixing them, and there is no logic for dreams like my cousin shared with me about the kind of life review judging we dread. Notice that both these things are very strictly subjective and usually unexpected. We question these things. We don't know why they happen, and we see nothing in this universe around us, even incorporating the latest physics, that allows or explains why we feel sad and guilty when everything else is stripped away and we are left standing alone before God, as it were. And it's not even that God is the vindictive one. We are the ones who recognize we f*d up. We are the ones who, at the very end of things when time has run out and despite all the other wishes and dreams and regrets we ever had, judge ourselves based on the deeds we did while we were here.

Nothing else.

This was Thanksgiving morning. Right hand this time, grip completely relaxed without warning after cracking the egg for scrambled eggs. I've worked very hard for years on learning to hold my hands differently, using both hands together, standing over areas so I'll stop dropping bottles full of tiny pills all over the floor, plus 4 years of physical therapy. This is life. I need assistance with so many things. When a handicap button to a heavy door doesn't work, I can't get into a building. It's that simple. I'm sharing this part of my life to help some of you understand the challenges holidays can be for people you know but don't really think about. Get up and help people do their dishes after they've cooked for you. If it's a drag for you to clean, imagine the drag it was for them creating the mess and then having to clean up after you. You know what love is, Charlie Brown?
14 Simple Ways Peanuts Taught Us What Love Is (click)

Here are the books.
Love is Walking Hand in Hand
   (1965 edition)
Happiness is a Warm Puppy
Peanuts Guide to Life

From The benevolent God of the funny papers

Throughout his life, Schulz constructed himself as the put-upon target of others' ridicule or indifference, from schoolyard bullying to the plaint, repeated well into old age, that no one loved him. Michaelis identifies the artist's "lifetime inclination to conceal hurt and the harsher emotions that follow on it, the better to brood upon them"; but as he also shows, that hurt was often illusory, the betrayal a figment: no one else recalls the bullying, and Schulz was indeed loved deeply and well by many. Yet, perhaps due to the premature loss of his mother, he nursed forever the symbolic wound of emotional and social rejection. "Arrested, bitter," Michaelis writes, "he spent a startling amount of time over nearly 60 years polishing a cameo of boyish helplessness and frustration." It's a puzzle worth puzzling over: the stunted boy's resentment of a cold, motherless world takes perfect creative form in the hopeful, searching Charlie Brown.

Getting ready for holidays in Mirkwood.

My biggest fail is an auto anger response that flares up over way too many triggers, clear back to childhood. The resulting fallout from that is sadness and depression. I'm trying very hard to change that response. Life is way too short and we have way too much to lose for me to hang onto being petty and hurt. Since so much of this response is both genetic and trained into me from birth (and I would argue might even be the survival tactic that helped me make it this far), it's hard retraining my brain to let go of it. Feeling sorry for myself or being angry about something I have no control over isn't useful. It's actually even wasteful of resources and drains me.

I wish these could stay up all year.

I think the important thing is, now that I recognize I can attempt to control some of this emotional chaos within me, that I apply it before it's too late and I regret later that I didn't try. At the end I want to be able to say I'm glad I was here, I loved my people, and I think I did ok, even if it's illogical and there really is no God or life after death. That doesn't change that I want there to be, and that I want to go on learning and doing and being in a variety of new ways. I definitely don't want to spend my deathbed moments feeling sad or disappointed in myself because I dismissed the important stuff while I had the chance.

I can't go out on sappy. Here you go.

organization is the key

I heard that phrase I don't know how many times from a boss on one of my jobs. "Organization is the key." I love organizing. My house doesn't know it, but I really do.

click for more awesome SW memes

My lists flew out the window through October. I feel woefully unorganized, despite October being a very successful #allthethings month. I'm coming into November with most of the running out my door behind me for awhile, thank goodness, so maybe I can get my head back on lists and showing my house that I love organizing.

Had a fantastically perfect day yesterday. Everything fell into place like magic the entire day.  Was thinking driving in that I need to check and see if anyone cancelled with my psychologist, bing, my phone rang about a cancellation and I could get in that day after my other appointments around town. *Perfect*. My brain was jello but everything fell into place without me missing anything- post office, Walgreens, library, Good Will drop off, bank. Got my flu shot, doesn't even hurt. Some years I get a little fever and my arm hurts like crap, this year, nada. Assessed back into physical therapy after that, scheduling once a week up through the end of the year magically fell on the same day and time every single week. Stayed on track with my lunchbox and noon meds, started reading my library book. Psychologist, thank goodness. I feel soooooooooooooo much better now. I'll be touching base again in 2 weeks, then in 3 weeks, so I'm covered through holidays. I've been alienating people again since another big breakthrough last week, and I can't talk about it with anyone except psychologist, Scott, and Kai (Kai saved me that day, super thank goodness on that). So my next objective is to look at me alienating people again and figure out how I'm going to handle holidays being a Sith Lord.

To people dealing with other people having meltdowns through holidays- I am sincerely sorry I suck. Please hear that coming from other people who've not yet reached the point where they can say that. I know a lot of people put up with me, I know I make things difficult and awkward, and I know I utterly fail sometimes when other people need my support. I know you know I'm a mess and I wish I wasn't and I feel really bad that it gets in the way, because I really do love people. Please hear this from the people you love when they can't say it through this holiday season. What comes after meltdown that a lot of people don't see is a deep self loathing and #epicfail feels, and then the awkwardness, and that is why we don't know how to talk to people sometimes about real stuff. You know, like we see on TV.

Anyway, making huge headway with my emotional processing again, and yes, it will upset people, so I'm working on how to write it without upsetting people. I'm writing to heal, not to be mean.

In the meantime, today is all about pot roast in the crockpot, constructing apple pie, organizing a work list for little writing projects through holidays, organizing another work list for my house, reading my library book, and minecraft. My head is still weird from unremmitting sensation overload and continued aspie shutdown mode, so just staying busy and distracted is top priority, keep emotions low key, do the usual stuff taking care of myself with good nutrition and hydration, quality rest and a little exercise, and staying focused on being in the moment. I'm doing great, it just doesn't feel like it. It's hard to tell in a wonky nervous system that everything is on point.

Ug, already tired of myself. Let's look for something fun.

heart of pinkness

The dichotomy of the love-hate war I feel every day of my life is much easier to see in detail before, during, and after anesthesia. While I insist that I'm naturally predisposed to a certain amount of terribly unempathetic judgmentalism layered in childhood as software programming over hardware autism spectrum, all it takes is just enough sedation to knock aside a mountain of pain to reveal I'm a tenderhearted soul with a deep need to let people know they're awesome and I love them.

Ever wonder what you say under anesthesia during procedures and tests? Because you can still respond to questions, and I'm one of those people who never shuts up and then remembers some of the stuff I'm technically not supposed to be able to remember later. I make really stupid jokes and laugh and talk to everyone around me like we're best friends, like a schloppy drunk who loves the world.

Ha, you didn't know that was a word, did you?

And then it all slowly creeps back over several hours (I'm one of the slow ones, nearly 2 days for me before it completely wears off) and the mean comes back because things get hard again. The hardest part was the few hours just before pre-anesthesia- no sleep or pain medication and almost no food for almost 48 hours, and no coffee that morning. To say I bit @bonenado's head off, chewed it up, and then spit it out doesn't even touch how awful I was. To say I'm grateful he doesn't crab back and dump my butt in a ditch on a highway is understated.

I'm deeply attracted to the layers of mirroring throughout the Sherlock series, both physically and psychologically, so I think it's cool someone else picked up on some of that.

Galaxie Gurl, fan of the fans

the metaphorical cornerstone of what will soon be Yablo's Evil Lair

My brain was so flatlined last night that I didn't even think about putting coffee grounds in. This morning I got a pot of hot water. I went back to bed while Scott made real coffee.

Sometimes I wake up and think things like "I haven't had french toast in five years." A couple of you just ran off to make french toast. I could feel smug about those 6 pounds staying off, but I'm afraid I'll jinx myself.

Quoting myself from I Try To Excercise My Demons, But They’ve Gotten Out Of Shape. -survey.

Have you ever made a mistake just so you could feel miserable?

Recrimination is not my strong point. I suck at baiting myself psychologically. People who feed off their own emotions like a drug mystify me. I’m terribly Vulcan in that regard.

Actually scrolled through an article about why Adam Sandler sucks before I could make myself get up again this morning, and that's after the real coffee was ready. They're right, I hadn't even heard of the other movies he made last couple of years. He's got his own little rat pack going. That's cute, isn't it, a Hollywood rat pack. I still liked Pixels, though. Someone needed to do that.

srsly, how stupid is this? I can't stop laughing

I know, you just caught that, too, right? I couldn't get out of bed this morning. That's about the rarest thing that ever happens to me.

I have been a very mixed up person on Minecraft. I have a Mojang account, a Minecraft account, a MoCreatures account, a MoCreatures wiki account, and then there are realms and multiplayer and singleplayer and two different IDs I toggle between. Somewhere in all that, several weeks ago when the new 1.9 came out, it was buggy and I reset back to 1.8.9 and lost being able to get back into Kai's realm, so yesterday, during the lowest IQ day I've had in possibly a couple of years, I accidentally fumbled around and got that all back in order and got back into the original Rivyndell. I didn't get any snips or vids, but I went through the portal behind my temple and was just wowed, and the whole time I was thinking I have a friend who does this cool stuff. I was missing so much all these years. I have so much to catch up on and catch up to.

Most of my life has been about winding up with the wrong people in the wrong places doing the wrong things. I see other people doing what they love with people they love and feel mystified by how that happens. Kai said it best- You just have to meet the right people. It's easy to get sucked in by an emotional vampire. And then I nailed why it keeps happening- I was raised to feel guilty and serve others, perfect pairing. Disentangling and disengaging are as hard as addictions to deal with, live with, and continue with. The whole behavior modification thing has gone multidimensional with internet connections now. Our social mapping extends so far into virtual space now that real space takes a back seat.

We both circumvented the Pit of Despair in different directions and met back around on the far side.



Fans continue to blow me away with the depths of their souls, but the ones who create aren't usually the ones who connect. I get more out of FANS than I do out of the industry itself.

Imagine if we'd had internet back in the beginning... This is pretty much how I came away from The Force Awakens.



It's gotta be about more than watching other people create TV shows and movies. We're here to create ourselves, not to be molded by someone else's ideas of sales gimmicks.

me trouver en vous

I've reached the zombie stage on zyrtec, so I skipped a dose, and I don't know if zyrtec and the wee bit of xanax I'm allowed massively potentiate each other or what, but this was a really complicated dream.

The walking dead was about an alien invasion instead of zombies. People were disappearing and no one knew why. Rick's gang had been able to stay ahead of getting caught, but they'd found other people, kind of like Alexandria but this was more like a residential apartment and duplex section of a big city. Carol was helping a group completely lead shield the inside of one of the buildings and for all intents and purposes wasn't around any more, everyone thought she'd been taken. Rick disappeared but no one knew if he'd been captured or escaped. The aliens didn't look human, sort of looked like some kind of weird cruel dogs with way less hair and more bipedal. They had reached our group, caught us rabbit in the net style, and started interrogating us.

They wanted to know about some underground leader in another country, as if we had a clue, and I was all like Hey, let's play along, lead them on, so I said yeah, that's my dad, so they took blood work to see if they could divine the future from my genetic past. It was weird, like they were into their own weird mysticism and didn't quite understand how biology works. Beyond that was regular mundane in and out ducking and hiding and convo stuff about steering clear or surviving or whatever.

Back to minecraft. I apparently really ticked off an ent yesterday in Mo'Creatures. I was gardening away, when suddenly I was picked up and flung around over and over, and I never could see who was doing it and had no defense. If I'd had my wits I'd have F5'd real quick so I could POV behind me and I might've gotten awesome video if I had done that. I bet no one in the world has video of being thrown around by an ent. Anyway, of course I died, slammed into the ground from a about 4 stories up, but none the worse for wear. Didn't lose any of my stuff like I do with other mobs. Oh, here you go, ran video after the fact in case it happened again and never did, this is the guy that got me.

And then I forgot to switch out of forge going into singleplayer (I seem to have found a chicken world) and the MoC pack crossover wiped all my mobs from the seed world I was in. Everything in my chests was gone, and my door was missing, but nothing else was touched, and my only clue was a lone ant crawling around my patio.

And then Kai found the island with the legendary giant mushrooms. That was pretty cool.

And oh yeah, this went a little crazy. I was barely even on twitter yesterday, come back later and wo. Here I was facepalming over not having written 'switch' instead of 'button' and suddenly it just takes off. You see why my first book isn't published yet... I'm not sure I could take my own cringing if I ran into a typo after the fact, and I've seen readers hash other very famous authors over the typos that come out of ghost writing and cheap print jobs. Mashing two phrases together into an awkward tweet and watching it go semi-viral nearly undid me yesterday.

@bonenado brought home The Force Awakens to watch today, help take his mind off a partial fast for a test tomorrow. I have done everything in my power (sort of) to ignore what I see on the social medias, but I already know so much that I'm feeling kind of blase about it. I love fans, and I love twitter, but I guess the mass hysteria over this one didn't settle well. I'm sure I'll come around once I've actually seen it. The snip clicks to IMDB.

Monday and Tuesday will be a little demanding, no idea if I'll be on anywhere or not, likely not for greater portions of either day.

This was uploaded 3 days ago, so even though I'm way behind the viewing audience, I'm still sort of cutting edge.



But seriously, need a jam.

get me some feliz, stat!

OH, I need some Christmas cheer.


One of my nieces went last night, friend of theirs is 501st. I saw this going around, had to nab it for her, just had a kid last month and named it Rogue, so next year he'll be one. Get it? Beat that, guys.

Can you blame the guy? Yeah, after what happened to Vulcan... No one is sacred any more. But some of you have seen the movie now, hoping the disturbance I felt in the Force yesterday wasn't y'all freaking out about anything really bad.

I woke up thinking I need to pull out the big guns today, wound up in NSFW Lady Gaga Land (I forgot about the really early Christmas stuff), then the angsty SW stuff, and I'm pretty much descending into holiday hell. I'll just leave it here and keep getting ready for Houston to asplode Christmas 4 days early at my house. I don't think anything tops John Crichton and Scorpius Claus today. I'm sure my Sploit would approve.

waiting for Scott to get home last night

Waiting for Scott to get home last night.

Was hoping to find a Walking Dead vid set to Jingle Bell Rock and wound up wandering through the most random chaos ever. I. Love. Fans.


That little motorcycle is so cute!


Shippers worldwide are agonizing over this, and here it is a casual convo.


Would anyone ever have dreamed looking filthy and sporting a Moses beard would make this man one of the hottest guys on the planet?


K, I needed this one.



But alas, no one has yet made a TWD style Jingle Bell Rock. And could someone please set Mannheim Steamroller's Christmas music to fractal zooms?



Today.

I truly appreciate other serious bloggers supporting me supporting Lexx, you know? Paula is a super stats nerd, like me, and I've got her blog pinned on pinterest. One of my fave write ups she's done is Why Stories Matter: My Introduction to NerdCon. She's very thorough and down to earth and easy on the eyeballs.

Accidentally synced with the world by mailing cookies out to my dad on #NationalCookieDay yesterday. From FB- "I modified the Peppernut recipe, and after they come off the pan you dip the fronts in powdered sugar to look like snow. Cream 2 eggs, 1 c butter, & 1 c sugar. Stir in 1/2 c white syrup & 1/2 c sorghum or molasses. Stir in 1 t cinnamon, 1/4 t cloves, 1/2 t nutmeg, 1/4 t allspice, & 1 T cardamom. Stir in 4 T (one bottle) anise oil & 1 t soda dissolved in 1/3 c water. Add 6 c flour, 2 cups at a time. Pile into cookie press, bake 350 to desired texture (soft or crunchy). Flavor ripens over time." Of course, nowadays I use gluten-free flours. I've discovered you really don't need xanthan gum in cookie doughs, so I cut the ratio to 3 parts plain King Arthur and 1 part Domata, and for this recipe it was still too sticky so I added another 3/4 cup of KA flour so it would go through the cookie press. Xanthan gum is horrible for doing just that, turning cookie dough into gum.

I think the Stormtroopers putting up the Christmas tree wins facebook. Click this snip to get there and then click through the sequence after you get there.

Ah, someone has set it to music, how cool.


I'm just going to leave this here. Have a great weekend, guys.

the purple blur

(Monday)

This long day/week/weekend/month slinging me around like a carnival ride thing needs to stop and let me off for a bit.

I was going to put a Calvin and Hobbes strip here but I'm lazy, so here you go, peruse the official Calvin and Hobbes dotcom or visit GoComics to see the daily strip and comment.

As per my usual flinging off into tangents, I remember when Bill Watterson got pretty miffed and just stopped, and the world missed him very much. I didn't know he's back. This from last spring-
Bill Watterson talks: This is why you must read the new ‘Exploring Calvin and Hobbes’ book
"For years, the cartoonist didn’t make public comments. Now, in a single wide-ranging and revealing and illuminating and engrossing and self-deprecating and poignant and, of course, deeply funny interview, Watterson has proved more generous than we perhaps could have ever hoped for."

So I'm very excited now instead of dragging into a junk dump, yay! In celebration, I shall share fan renditions of C&H/Sherlock smashups. You can click and peruse at your leisure.

I have no idea what the crap Leo is doing in there. This next isn't creepy at all unless you've never seen Dr. Evil's enthusiam for Leonardo DiCaprio.


Ok, that's doing things for me, let's just go there.


Yeah, that saved me. I desperately need to take a little nap or something, I'll just work on this later.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered my new phone had dialed Switzerland the first day I owned it. Somehow. Not. a. clue. But it's right there in my history, the second number called, so now I can truthfully reminisce in a suave and casual manner about that time I called someone in Switzerland.

(Tuesday)

~the next day~


Here we go, bolted wide awake at midnight freaking out that I'd forgotten to make the cranberry sauce. Was wondering when the time distortion would hit because this month's been a mess. Thank goodness I got back to sleep, but truly relieved to pop back awake at 4 a.m. because my head was ridiculously busy all night.

from my old
Xanga mini
collection
(I'm a packrat)

So now I'm on coffee break. Looking around at my house. Thinking about the holiday zooming up just around the corner. Wishing I could pull some of the busy in my dreams out into real life. Wait, maybe not. I can't decide. I just know I was way more on top of stuff there than here. Oh, @bonenado told me his dream just before he bolted out the door to work. He had bought a house and discovered the basement had several old mattresses strewn around and thick dust everywhere, and he was freaking out wondering "How am I going to get rid of these mattresses? Jan's gonna kill me when she sees how filthy this basement is, I didn't even look at it before I bought it, she won't even come in the house till I clean it up." And it went on like that, the garage was filthy (we've wanted to build a garage for 23 years...), but he thought he could get that cleaned up too, and his whole dream was this rushed last minute buyer's remorse purchase full of MOAR WERK. I think it's safe to say we live under stress. We have no clue (been almost two years now) when his boss is going to close and sell the company. His stress dreams make mine look pretty tame.

Ah, thunder... I may be off and on this thing all day.

Back to me. I have some serious brain sorting to do. It doesn't help at all finally getting it all right and straight and someone jumping into my PT scheduling and changing an appointment on me. I walked in yesterday- "I'm probably pretty early." "Nope, it was an hour and half ago." "No, it wasn't." "Yes, it was." Pulling out my planner- "See, I wrote this down from the website" (we can look up our accounts). It actually sorted back out just fine. My regular person's schedule has been dispersed and delegated across other therapists while she recovers from something, and this time someone forgot to call me OR update the scheduling in ALL THE PLACES, so in one place it was 9:30, in another it was 10:15. But I'm super savvy nowadays, asked if I could grab the next open spot and call this a reschedule instead of a missed appointment, because that really screws with medicare, and voila, I got another person at 11:45. So I took the opportunity to go use a couple coupons at Hallmark.

That's right, Daryl Dixon and Barney Fife. o_O I'm sure they'll get along just fine on the same tree...

So anyway, I've been rescheduling #allthethings several times this whole month already, and then that happened, so I feel terribly thrown off. My only hope is to get on some brain sync maneuvers before I hafta run back in for a psyche guy appointment tomorrow, and that means wading through the jumbly stuff making sure bills are actually paid correctly, my planner and calendar are synced up, my pre-Turkey Day lists are up to the minute and not scattered like my head, etc. I'm really surprised Mantrid hasn't shown up in my dreams, as stressed as I feel, since I dropped right out of finishing that Mantrid character post. Lotta fans share their Lexx dreams, but all these years, all my dreams, I can only remember one Lexx dream that I've ever had, a long time ago, before everything. Looking back, it actually looks kind of prophetic. At the time I had no clue what it meant, but I do now. Oh, you wanna know what the Lexx dream was. Ok, but only the most hardcore fandom historians will be able to see it for what it is. Hang on, this needs coolness.

THE LEXX DREAM
I copied the code from my last #Shezzaday post, so the table is still mangled. I'm going to keep this work jam here, it's totally my head right now. Everyone's doing stuff like Wholock and Johnlock and Starlock, can you imagine a #SherLexx smash? I grabbed that hashtag last spring. Ok, back to the dream. I might throw how I interpret the dream around in there, that's the italics. Have fun.
I was walking down a street and noticed a blue house on my right was having a huge yard sale. I'm not a yard sale fan, but I turned into it and meandered around the yard looking at stuff. 2004 was the first time I ever deliberately went looking for fansites after a show was over. I couldn't let Lexx go. I noticed some of the people were going into and coming out of the house, and the door was open. Maybe the sale was going on in there, too, so I followed a couple of people I didn't know into the house and sauntered around looking at the cool stuff all over the walls and furniture. I'd been in forums before, even admined, but this was the first fandom I ever dabbled in that consistently kept showing up in my own blogging, and it all started out of a fear that fansites were disappearing off the internet after the show ended, so I spent quality time going a little deeper into the fandom. There was an odd hallway on the left that ramped down to a sort of walkout basement, and down there was darker and way cooler. I almost didn't go down, but Kai and Xev walking down the ramp into the darker part caught my eye, so I followed behind them. Obvious turning point, and a few people will know who I mean by Kai and Xev. We eventually wound up going out the basement door onto a different part of lawn, away from the other people milling around, and then we split up and went on our ways. Seriously, I dreamed all this before it happened. There's nothing more to it than that, just a symbolic look at the path I'd be going on. I have lots of dreams like that all the time, and afterward I always go Ohhh when I look back and see that stuff really happened like that. Yes, I left out a few details, but you don't need them. Yeah, a couple of you get what the basement is. There were a lot of tables down there, full of cool stuff. Rats, I forgot checking in compose will screw my table now. Well, I'll go do my other stuffs and then come back and fix it last. -- Ok, *bump it*, I just copied the entire html so I can repaste it back after I'm done with my other stuff.

And it's all good. I've made my peace, I'm here to WORK, and I'm Lexxcited about the future. Whatever happens, I'm on my board surfing.


Allow me to sort through a few weekend pix while I do my office work. Our most recent home invasion featured a hungry Saints fan.

===BREAKING=== THIS JUST IN

I was tweeting about this ad during last night's #Gotham watch.


There you go, live blogging. I've had State Farm since my very first car, and I have this thing for the Flying Elvi, so there you go. Not paid to link ANY of that. And no, I have no idea if that was an actual Flying Elvis that parachuted in on the commercial. You can see the commercial metrics here.

click for super cool

Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, loading Bunny pix in between chores. You didn't see me start laundry and get the TWD live tweet done and put a meatloaf in the oven all through this.

Well, we can't have a Saints fan in the house, so Papa pulled out her special Vikings shirt, and right now it's as big as a dress on her, so she ran around in that. She did insist, though, on keeping her Saints bow on her head for awhile. That kid is like a super blur most of the time, and it's like trying to get a picture of a chicken, just almost impossible, and I gave up.

 

And there are stickers all over the walls and furniture, and chaos reigned. I finally caught a decent shot a couple of hours later.

By the time she left I was super jealous of this.

And you didn't see curtains get hung back up and sheets put back on the bed and potatoes put into a pot.

It rained all day long. I got a Timehop notice yesterday that we had snow last year. If today's rain had been snow it would be piled up pretty good by now. My front yard is a swamp, and Twink said their parking lot fills up like a pond. If we were to get a sudden freeze tonight on top of all this soaking into the plants, we'd get frost flowers (that's a cool link, lotsa pix) and some of the tree trunks would 'explode'. From Exploding tree on wikipedia- To the Sioux of The Dakotas and the Cree, the first new moon of the new year is known, in various dialects, as the "Moon of the Cold-Exploding Trees".

~more time passing~

It's been over 12 hours since @bonenado left for work. Every day is like this. He commutes and sometimes has to drop off or pick up something, so ten hour days get pretty stretched out. I shall pass the time with stuff like this. Laterz.

Utto nye usabia atoonyoba?

I am Jawa, hear me prattle meaningless syllables. The translation for the title of this post is "Want to buy a used droid?"

@bonenado is the best boyfriend ever and my favorite boyfriend of all time. Yes, he got me a new phone. I'll help pay on it, but he up front 18-month'd it, plan and everything, so I'm carrying around a mobile office again worth more than all the jewelry I ever wore put together. Well, it's hard to tell because I got such good deals during red tag Kohl's employee super discount sales. But pretty sure because I'm not a bling and bauble kind of person. Here is a gold Samsung Galaxy S6 with a "Brilliance" case. (If you really want that case you can pay much less on amazon or even less on ebay.)

Tried to get it on Scott's Turbo w/o the flash
but he hasn't figured his phone out yet
Basically looks like asphalt or tiny chat
or 'spirkles' that Eskarina Smith could tell
weren't real gemstones in 'Equal Rites'
(I like rocks...)

This does NOT mean I'm gonna start DMing &PMing the world again. Smart phones apparently severely aggravate not only carpal tunnel but cubital tunnel as well. I can currently barely keyboard, much less hold my new phone for any length of time.

As you can imagine, my weekend turned into a controlled crash while the laundry and dishes piled up, so this week is about excavating my way out of the rubble and devastation. Since we're still in the middle of the nerve entrapment approach in physical therapy, I'm kind of floating around feeling useless while my arms REST. This feels exactly like the Bell's Palsy felt years ago the first week, when my face felt 'tired' because the 7th cranial nerve had switched off. My arms feel very 'tired'. My muscle tone is awesome, but I have definite nerve weakness, and nerves take longer to heal than any other kind of tissue. Freeing up nerve pressure is like when little kids pinch your fingertip real hard for about 30 seconds and then let go, there's a rebound wham that feels like your fingertip will explode as the pressure comes back off the nerve. Went through that with my arms last week, and there's really nothing you can do but wait it out. My arms and hands are the most overworked parts of my body, and they are pretty sure vacation is hell and want the nerve pressure back on so they can't feel all this crap. I keep telling them that's how my mother wound up with useless and curled up arms as nerve damage eventually led to muscle waste, but they're being ridiculous and demanding 50 hours of work today. I poured coffee on them and said Ok, go to it.

I have a very busy day/week/rest of the month (as, I'm sure, do we all), so I'm trying to pace myself. Even so, I think we're nearly set for Turkey Day, and I'm hoping we have a tree up and cards out by the end of the month. I'm still not sure how I'm doing this, but yay! Just using the KISS method and not worrying about anything. I'm going to take the new phone slow, which will be easy since I'm so used to not having apps at my fingertips, and definitely won't go crazy all over them like I did with the last phone.

By the way, it was hilarious watching the Samsung rep at Best Buy try to import my contact list. He couldn't. He tried everything. Remember when I said I thought my HTC Sense conflicted with facebook updates that stepped out beyond the factory default settings and froze stuff up so bad that I had to start dumping apps? I got down to stone age twitter (HTC) with no perks and stone age youtube that could only pull in vids uploaded before a certain date, and I've been used to that for so long that I'll probably keep living like that for awhile. Anyway, my point- I wrestled my phone so hard that I was able to keep squeezing last gasps out of it, routinely getting "You have 13MB of space left" warnings, and once I think it even got down to 8. So this guy is trying to do everything I did with app wizards, app wipes, app dumps, until there was absolutely nothing left to do and clearly there was actually some room to breathe, but I had that phone packed so tight reorganizing my space on it that the new phone couldn't communicate enough to send a command over for the old phone to relinquish a contacts list. My old phone was that close to utter fail, and I was still using it. Kinda like being in a nearly dead space station orbiting a planet and hoping rescue shows up before the orbit degrades into epic crash. So, yes, I'm manually inputting contacts by carpal tunnel hand, slowly, like once in awhile I stick another one in.

But hey, NEW PHONE.


:edit: ~later~ I know, right? You guys couldn't believe I didn't put this vid in. Here you go.

Force choking hazard

There's a thing going around facebook again about being wary in areas with big shopping and big parking lots.

One of the comments I got when I shared it was how scary it was reading about sex rings also using young children to make contact with other young children in stores and get them to follow away from parents out of sight. I've actually witnessed this happening in a park on a pretty summer day. A couple of teenage girls followed a toddler around until a tired mom desperately needing to sit and talk with friends felt comfortable enough with it to let them get further and further away, assuming the girls were part of another family in the park. I followed the girls following the toddler at a little distance watching because I could tell the toddler wasn't actually being watched over so much as slowly herded away, like a little cow or sheep. As the child and teens neared the edge of the parking lot and rows of cars, I closed the gap until I was nearly right behind the girls. One of them gave a final look back and was so surprised to see me right behind watching her that she abruptly took off running, and the other girl immediately followed without even looking back, abandoning the toddler, which by now was close enough to touch a car bumper. I got around that kiddo and got it turned around the same way the girls had done, by getting in its way until it naturally turned around and started toddling back toward mommy, and I just followed it back until mommy saw it and picked it up. She smiled at me but never once questioned that a completely different person was following her child now, and the girls were gone.

People who are unaware of how all this works really don't have a clue how surrounded they are all the time, how entrenched our ways of life are in an invisible underground going on all around us. My best friend was abducted from a mall parking lot during college and later found in a room full of other dead girls her age, along with filming equipment. I won't go into details here. I personally know another person whose high school senior age daughter was abducted from a friend's house during a sleepover, and 3 people who went missing from that incident have never been found or heard from again. I live in a puppy mill area that gets far more attention than the amount of people that go missing around here.

I'm not going to say more about it right now, except that once something like this happens within a circle of people you know in real life, your life will change and never be the same again. A person of any age going missing is worse than death, because there is no closure, just a crater sized hole in your lives with no answers.

When I see people applaud pictures of other people rescuing kitties and ducks off a highway, or risking their lives to save a dog, I know the same people applauding those pictures are probably oblivious to very real people they've passed in public who are trained specialists in entrapment, rape torture, reconditioning, and trafficking. Once the worst happens in your own life and your eyes open up, you see it everywhere. It's kind of like working in a big store and not being able to touch someone you know just pulled tags off 10 bras and piled them on under a big sweatshirt. Only security can legally detain, and if it's their day off, there's nothing in the world you can do to stop $500 worth of merch walking out the door. What's worse is when a parent sends a small child in a parka out a door ahead of them when they see you approaching with tags. That's outrageous, you say. Yes, and so is the thought of your own child being trained to lead other children into high dollar porn trafficking.

It's hard to wrap our minds around this kind of stuff until we meet people who've been there. I've been there, right up to the edge of it. I personally know people who made it out. I've also lost someone I loved.

I know we're easily calloused by stuff making the rounds on facebook. At first we sit up, but later it's like flipping through a magazine- seen it, seen it, shared it 3 months ago, seen it, can't believe that one's still going, scrollscrollscroll. And I honestly don't like filling up my own timelines with emotionally angsty stuff, because I've already been through so much angst in my life that I desperately crave distraction. But once in awhile, I need to stop and say something.

It's real. It's all horribly real. You go to school and work with people who've seen it, or been part of it. You walk by people every day who know what it all is. While you blow off a creepy person who might actually save your life because they've been there, you think another well dressed smiling person can be trusted because they are polite and have no clue that they do this for a living and their acting skills could win emmys.

People are always surprised when someone erupts and shoots up a store or a school or something. That person was so nice, we didn't have a clue. Well, there you go, none of us have a clue. We watch TV and fuss about life throwing us curve balls, and we're so wrapped up in the 'feed' of commercialism and taking sides about the news that we completely miss what's going on around us, and worse, we don't want to get involved.

I can't tell you how powerful a good stare down is when you see something suspicious. Sometimes that's all it takes to break off a covert intention, and suddenly people turn and walk away. It's instinct to look away. Wanna be a superhero? Don't look away. Lock your stare on and make someone nervous. You just might save a life and a whole family from a horrific sadness. If you feel especially brave and have a little extra time, follow that oddness around a store and see if it starts to happen again, and casually get in the way. Once they catch on someone might know what's up, they abruptly leave the store. I've seen people suddenly just walk out the doors without a single purchase after lurking and loitering behind kids pretending like they're shopping for half an hour. Ever see an abandoned partly filled cart sitting around? Might be a marker that someone scored and made it out the door with a kid. That'll creep you out now next time you see an abandoned cart just sitting in an aisle.

Use the Force, guys. Lock eyes with evil and get that Force choke on.

#TBT why I stopped writing fanfic...

...because some people really do want to know.

Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was contacted in a forum by a nurse in another state seeking a fellow writer to have a little fun smashing Star Wars and Star Trek together. Since this was back in the Dark Ages when smashing fandoms was still considered heresy, I shouted Hooray! and gleefully jumped into emailing back and forth.

It. Was. Awesome. I love writing words. I love Star Trek and Star Wars. I had often imagined what could happen if the streams were crossed. I floated happily along through initial construction, setting up several plot lines and testing out character interactions, like Q bugging the Emperor, when I realized I was playing ball kind of alone on one side of the court while Riker was making out with Leia on the other side. It was dramatic and romantic and completely left out plot devices of any kind, even bad ones.

That was my first experience meeting Mary Sue. I had no idea what to make of it. I thought we were writing a cool story, but turns out I was a tool for someone else's fantasy role play. It felt weird, like asking a stranger to watch and maybe even join in. I was at a loss.

Nowadays, fans skip the whole writing thing and do this cool stuff.

Next up was Sliders. I had a really good time with that one. I discovered I could write quick comedies in very few pages, and I had a ball cracking myself up over the time all the parallel Sliders wound up randomly sliding onto the same Earth in someone's shower at the same time and stepping out sopping wet having to figure out whose people were whose, and the Colins were a riot. You'd have to be there. Sadly, no one else in the fandom was interested because none of them were having sex with each other. Still, it's awesome running into Sliders fans here and there nowadays. Click pic for awesome.

A year or so went by, I was rockin out in the Xena fandom and had figured out that's basically how fandoms party, so I became a ringleader and took a rowdy Joxer bunch with me over to a crazy list feed before we all got thrown out of an actual fan club. It was a lot of work, but I loved it, and pretty much played it like a Vulcan surfing a wave in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses. Yeah, I invented party Spock and didn't even know it, way back in the 90s. That is who Yablo was.

Yablo was trubba, but my gang was even more awesome trubba, and I didn't care. Until I was asked to read and comment on some fanfic. I'd already written a couple of 3-page comedies to be included in a fan book to Ted Raimi (never found out if they made it), one in particular that I thought was a genius mashup on Joxer accidentally becoming a Darkwing Duck figure, so I thought Ok, sure, let's see what other people have got.

I didn't expect a submission in a big yellow envelope in my mailbox, and I didn't expect it to be on par with erotica. I'm sure there was love in there somewhere, but since I was unfamiliar with the lingo, I simply fell over cracking up, and from there it became a comedy to me. So when I reviewed it, I had no idea that I hurt feelings quite badly.

Can you imagine if we'd had youtube back then? I'd have been in heaven.


From the frying pan into the fire, they say. My fourth experience with Mary Sue was an entire world fandom eating itself over a dead guy and a love slave, with the show itself instigating the never ending frivolities, and suddenly it all clicked. Marketing. I understand.

No I don't understand, apparently. Stepping back from Mary Sues means we can't be friends, whaaaaa. I have my own tastes and agendas, but being swamped on all sides with singular focus on internet orgies of every conceivable kind had me finally standing up brushing it off in private to a few people. Aaaaand, that didn't go down very well because that was back in the days before I knew I was an asexual person with Aspergers and before you know it, I became a worthless trading card left in the bottom of a drawer. Well, that's a quickie rendition of months of oncoming sadness, but you get the point.


I. Write. Stuff. I can take any writing prompt and turn it into several thousand words of honest to goodness story in minutes. I don't need sex to sell it, I don't need to be a character to feel it, and I certainly don't need validation to keep writing.

I see the fights going on through the years over someone stole my idea thing, and the copyright wars over stuff that's barely even legal to begin with, and I just stopped sharing what's in my head. Until Pinky started publicly blurbing at syfydesigns, which has over 26,700 views now, thank you very much. And then Pinky started publicly blogging on a real blog. And I'm sitting here looking at the view count wondering how in the world that happened.

I love fans. I've always said that. Fans are my coffee in the morning. Fans are my catharsis through rough days. Fans are there in the horrible dark nights when I'm scared and alone. The internet is full to bursting with fans being awesome.

But I'm sorry, I just can't have sex with you guys. I know, I'm weird...

But mostly, I'm busy. It's called a contract. And this blogging stuff is called warm up, you know, like athletes do before big games.

As I write, I am realizing my real life trumps all the fanfic I could have ever written. Maybe one of the reasons I don't Mary Sue fanfic is because I don't have to imagine it. One of the reasons I don't read it is because I've seen it all around me. The vamps. The violence. The slaves. The dead.

I have kept so many secrets. I have been so many scary places.