afterthought

Per a few of the posts I've made lately, I'd like to mention that I'm getting calls again, this time from Las Vegas from alleged 'publishers' who want to help me with my book. I have the message saved on my phone, along with the phone number. I thought the timing was cute, and it's disconcerting as I am not only unlisted, but especially as they tied my pen name to my phone number when the last publishing solicitor in California used my real name. Before that, other publishing solicitors called trying to interrogate me.

Real publishers don't solicit. I am already contracted, so I had already called my own publisher and asked them about this. They sounded pretty shocked this was happening and assured me they don't give out client info.

The calls I'm getting might actually be legit, but it has the feel of someone working very hard tracking me down and letting me know they know where I am. I could be crazy, but my psychologist keeps insisting I'm not. It's funny they keep trying to help me sell my book, instead of other spammy things. They're trying very very hard to help me sell a book... The very first one who called let me know that if I handed over all my blog material they could put together the book *for* me. I'm a nobody, what in the world makes them think I have material worth any kind of money to them? They haven't even seen what is going into the actual book, and I'm sure not discussing it over the phone with a solicitor.



I've said before and I'll say again- If I ever disappear off the webs, it won't be because I left on purpose. I made a promise to stay public. I have my own story, and I'm already contracted. I'm not part of the entertainment industry except as a fan and an unpaid reviewer. The personal secrets I'm dealing with uncovering for my book are much more pervasive to all of us as a developing culture, but very disturbingly turning up in entertainment. Much to my surprise, eggs have started cracking throughout that industry unbidden by me, and I'm knocked over by how similar those stories are to my own.

If none of this is real, all I have to do is ask- Why the obsession, then? Because I'm not the one making up the obsession the entertainment industry has with certain themes and retelling the same stories over and over in varieties of ways, and I'm most certainly not alone noticing this.





I am The Elephant's Child, and I ask ever so many questions.

Je veux ton amour et je veux ta revanche

Lovingly running my hands lightly over lappy's keyboard. Wondering how quickly I'll adapt to the new one. I'll probably pick it up next week. Wonder if I'll miss how hot lappy gets. It feels really good to my hands. I overworked them today carrying heavy stuff and doing way more things for several hours.

Wil Wheaton wrote this post yesterday. I really hope he makes it. I haven't been able to run very far properly for ages, but it's one of my goals to be able to run again, even just a little bit. (It would be awesome to roller skate again, too.) Before my wreck I could run a couple miles easy peasy just for the fun of it, pushing cattle through fields and stuff. I grew up doing parkour without ever knowing what it was. That's just what you do when you're on several hundred acres and wanna reach the other side.

Bunny is my parkour now. I nearly took out a knee one day just trying to stand back up after I'd been playing on the floor with her. I don't recall any of my grandparents or aunts and uncles ever getting down onto the floor with us when they were my age. Adults just didn't do that. Now I know why. It has nothing to do with nice clothes or acting like a grown up and everything to do with a nearly complete loss of elasticity in tiny little muscle bands that can no longer pull a knee back into track after it's been maliciously yanked during an unexpected movement, especially while being an extra 28 pounds off kilter keeping another squirmy body from catapulting into disaster.

Wil Wheaton is about the same age as my youngest sister. She is already more arthritic than I am, but still more active because she's a bit younger. I know she's in a lot of pain, and will probably wind up much worse than me by the time she's my age. I feel bad for her when I think of that, so I try not to. The important thing is living in the now and being all we can be for each other while we still can. All the same, it's neat to have someone to root for doing stuff we wish we could do, too. I really wanna see Wil do a zombie run, because that would be awesome.

And me. I wanna be as spunky as Granny in the Beverly Hillbillies when I get that old. I'm working on it.

This is hours later. @bonenado had me on chat with Verizon for a good 30 minutes because stuffs. Near the end they asked if there was anything else, and he said Yeah, I want to unsync cloud off my desktop because it keeps storing everything and I'd rather have it sync off my phone, and then he showed me this on his phone right as I was getting a drink, and I nearly spewed water all over lappy's keyboard. This weird accident of technology accurately memes our entire marriage.

We're getting Bunny before sunrise tomorrow. I'm planning on being MIA from the medias. I've noticed I'm getting loads more work done nipping that compulsion. I like that. Also, all y'alls are starting to yap about the new Star Wars movie, which I really don't mind, but I'm Sherlocked this week and that's pretty much all I care about.

"All righty!", as the Verizon agent kept typing. Will I ever cease this heavily layered subtext about my real life RP OTP? I keep talking about writing...

#Shezzaday 6- highlights from #BlackFriday

Because being left alone to our own devices is a very rare thing around here.

I'M GETTING THE HANG OF THIS
click to see I suggested @bonenado download a kid screen lock app like mine, but did he look for the happy alligator? NO. He downloaded something different without checking it out first and promptly got stuck inside his new locked screen for over 20 minutes. We couldn't tell if the writing was Chinese or what, but finally got a popup that asked if he'd like to be kind and share the app, at which point we kinda picked up it's probably someone's homemade app, and if he gets charged for it I'm going to lightly mock all over again. I say lightly... By the way, my Samsung Galaxy S6 trumps his Turbo for navigation options when you get stuck in a locked screen app in another language. Don't know this from experience, just couldn't believe how much more difficult his phone was to work with than mine. This is probably what he's like at parties click for gif
You have 29 days left from right now to stream the official rerun via BBC. Just click this snip. GO! Couple pieces of pie sitting around and ice cream in the freezer and @bonenado and I fought over the broccoli and cheese, because it was THAT GOOD. Yes, we fought over a leftover vegetable dish. I claimed and then found out later mr sneaky pants got into it behind my back.
Yes, #BennyDepp. It was awesome. There's no telling how long this vid will manage to stay up, others were actually being shut down again within the same hour of upload. That's right, you're looking at a #BennyDepp sammy right now. CLICK IT. :edit: I am now replacing it with the official Graham Norton vid.
Yes, I went there. What gets thrown into the Pond, stays in the Pond. No, it won't click. If you don't know what the Pond of Death is by now, your loss. Aspienado wants to live there. Pinky says no. If anyone has a problem with that, well... I keep walking. No one hasta tag along to keep up, just stop jumping in my way like a pet for me to trip over. All my actual real pets learned real fast not to do that because I step on them. On purpose. Except for my chickens. I will totally stop for chickens and spend half my day hanging out, but that's beside the point. Anyway, I'm not fond of setting fires, and this is a really bad time of year to do it, so it's more like I'm trying to decide whether to smoke or pickle my tongue before I thinly slice it into a savory bechamel and pour it over some kind of fancy curly pasta with a grate of aged gouda. I may hafta cave and super stream my hootsuite. I dunno. I wanna keep things simple, and maybe the simplest thing right now is put the phone down and stay off social media for awhile, but I'm trying really hard not to disappear like I did last year.
People keep telling me I'm nice. I'm not nice, I'm kind. Big difference. The reason I am kind is because I don't know if someone talking to me (or trying to talk to me) might be dealing with a giant hole in their life after someone died, or if they're in shock after finding out they have cancer, or maybe lost a child or has a child in a hospital. I hid all my real stuff for years. No one ever knew, and I was treated pretty badly on the internet sometimes just because someone else was having a dumb day and dumped on me. I don't believe in dumping on people. The most famous incident, if you can call it that, was MegaCon. No one ever knew how sick I was that weekend, and that over the next couple of years I really did think I might die, and I disappeared off the internet. People in the older fandoms never saw me cry over a child being lost in my family, never saw me cry why me to the heavens when I was too sick to dress myself for several months, never knew the anguish I was in watching my mom fail in super slo-mo. During all this, I built fansites, and I know from this level of dedication that most of the beautiful and wonderful things on the internet come from people dealing with anguish. We write, we create, we design, we build, we entertain because we need something to hang onto, something to help us live through unimaginable pain. Because of this, I am kind. That does not mean I am a rug to walk on, a stuffed toy to bounce on, a kindred spirit to be pals with. Yes, I do have friends. They know me. Some of them have been getting to know me for several years, some of the deeper lurkers have known me for a decade or two. If you wanna be my friend, too, get in step. Learn where your place is with me, because it's not front and center in front of my face. I run with a solid pack, I love them very dearly, and I will love you dearly too if you take a little time. p.s. if you dig conspiracy theories, here you go, in case you're bored or something.

Me and facebook/twitter irl. This is me not disappearing after Thanksgiving, yo.

he had me at #allisall

Countdown to Turkey Day has already changed again. This has been the changiest month ever. I. need. staff.

click to see many more asshole cats

The whole next week is blanked out, huzzah! I'm on vaca! 

Ok, granted, it's like a working vaca without pressing pressure to drive away from my house to anywhere else. Will I finally get my floors done? 

I got kinda mixed up yesterday but I DID get both my lists done, yay! I am all over Christmas, baby. For the first time in, like, YEARS. Still not sure how long this will last and I'll suddenly morph into a brainless onlooker, so I'm keeping it cool, playing it slow, pretending I'm not all excited so I won't spook the brainster into hiding. Keeping the ol' chemicals balanced. Just sitting here sipping my coffee. What, *Christmas*? Nah, that was just a fleeting wisp of spontaneous thought, go back to humming along in your own little brain world. No big plans ~*here*~.

click for more cute coffee emergencies

I came home with 4 pounds of apples yesterday. All the fruits and veg coming in look so fancy and perfect now because holidays, so it's hard not to stockpile stuff that expires faster than we can use it. Maybe a pie will magically show up today. Got a weekend coming up, never know, might have visitors.

OH. New phone probs. I discovered this wonderful 'do not disturb' option, right? Well, I didn't realize that on this new phone, my voicemail is an app and that I hafta give that app priority and allow it to disturb me. I thought allowing calls took care of that, apparently not. When my screen goes to sleep and locks, some of those calls aren't getting through at all, and a couple of people have been trying to reach me for a solid week. I'd laugh except this is a big part of my month's scheduling flipping upside down and inside out. So I'm digging around, finding at least 3 different places where I hafta manually adjust settings just to let my voicemail alerts come through, wondering what overzealous coding freak has against incoming phone calls. I mean, I so rarely even get phone calls, it's no big deal, I just turn my sounds off and never hear them, the whole reason I have 'do not disturb' on is because NOTHING silences incoming notifications buzzing nonstop. So this weekend @bonenado and I are going to practice leaving each other voicemails.... what?

My brain just told me that's too much work to think about this early and kicked me right off the subject. It said find something more cheerful to talk about or it'll send me back to bed in an overload funk. No, no chocolate for breakfast. Oh, it's going to be like this today, is it? Demanding overlord brain vs spaz chillax brain. Brain halves, just ignore them. Think *breakfast*.

One bite of yogurt, we're all friends again. I need something silly.


And now some movie trailers.


This next one is inspiring some outstanding gifs. This one clicks back to the person I first saw it from, you can see it in action there.

Benedict officially began his reign over the #allisall hashtag two days ago, click here to see the very first picture tweet. Technically, the very first reference tweet belongs to this person, click that to see the convo. And technically technically, Ben was already taking over before people started hashtagging it, as you can see in this convo on how to break the internet.


Trewth.

I've come a long way since May 1st. I've never been so happily drowning in a fandom like I have this one.

Ok, 6:30, need to make a plan. I'm still a little exhausted from yesterday, but I slept great, thanks to another sub in PT who wasn't ASTYM certified and instead gave me the best massage I've ever had in my life. Hit my neck and shoulders really super hard, and it hurt like heck, but I s-l-e-p-t.

No plans are forthcoming. My brain is mocking me, pretending to not notice it's meeting time. Ok, let's prioritize then. The most important thing I can get done today is... oh, cute, my brain nonchalantly threw "The floors" back in my face. Ok, priority today is THE FLOORS. If I get nothing else done today, I want the floors to get done. All my will shall be bent toward this endeavor.

I call that a successful meeting for a Friday on the first day of vaca (vacancy, lol), and let's all get out there and have a great day. Cue inspirational jam. GET TO WORK! >=l FOCUS!!!

Aaaaand I immediately get lost in Sherlock Mean Girls smashes. I may have to embrace that this could be a nonproductive day. I'm clearly losing the battle here. Let's try this again. FOCUS!!!

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.

I want you to be my luv toy (HAPPY MONDAY, GUYS)

@bonenado is mildly fussing this morning about his backup floating around in a carbonite cloud that doesn't recognize him having an account since the phone switch. I've never trusted any phone company's backup reassurances to the cloud. Phone accounts are still way too solvent for that kind of eternal storage.

It's like the memory catacombs in Super Nova- who's going to ever go through all that? Humans could go extinct from a nuclear winter and as long as there is some kind of power getting to servers, all our memories will float in a vague cloud no one else knows how to access. We are in the packrat stage of our evolution. We think everything we think is precious and must be hung onto for posterity.

Meanwhile, getting warm fuzzies seeing someone bouncing around from a Lexx forum to my Lexx blog on a work computer, because it's only one state over from me and I so rarely see Lexx fan activity in the heartland. It's usually coastal, Canada, Euro, and a big nod to anything and everything remotely associated with Russia because over here we're terrible and lump all your political carnage and abusery together. I know some of you are caught in some very real situations. Ditto on the 'anything and everything remotely associated with' for Asia and Arabs, too, and a final nod to South America, I know you guys are still invisible to most North Americans while you take over food production and tech development for the entire planet. I think we're afraid of you guys because cartels run your soccer leagues and shoot players who don't score and half of you run around without pants on doing crazy sex things. I'm sure it's just a misunderstanding on our part.

Anyway, yeah, Lexx in the heartland. I'm not alone.

I did a little brush up research yesterday on fibro flare. My biggest challenge in PT is learning to hold back. I clearly overwork, nothing like having to be trained to go slow and easy. I worked like a dog through my entire childhood because that's what Mennonites DO, and it's just really hard for me to slow down when I feel good enough to GO. So I'm having a great year, I get back in PT, I push the upper core and then lock into position in a dentist chair for a checkup, push more upper core next morning, and blow up into super defcon all weekend, omg. I was doing deep tissue massage until I bruised myself, unconsciously stretching almost nonstop trying to get away from the pain spiking up from my shoulder blade through all the nerves around my skull, heat felt great but didn't do a thing, and finally my right shoulder and neck froze into a solid mass of hard rock. When it got to the point where I couldn't even move my eyes without spiky pain, I finally caved and reviewed the dealing with flare stuff, and the word REST got into my head, and I was like Oh, yeah... Funny how I miss that sometimes. You'd think it would be counter intuitive to hold still during a fibro flare, but it worked.

A few years ago I did this and a doctor I saw was absolutely convinced I had sprained my neck. If you've sprained an ankle, imagine that in your neck and shoulder. So me and Romo both go down on the same weekend, and I'm basically doing the same thing he is- holding still. Don't move the arm. Keep my elbow tucked down at my side. No lifting, no reaching, no holding anything. REST. And that is actually working. My pain level is way down this morning. I think I'm going to cut out upper core the rest of the week, just stick to lower core and my walking schedule. Poor Romo fans, huh? HAHAHAHAHAHA Suck it, guys. Of course, I can't mock too quickly, I'm losing big time to @bonenado this week after losing by only one point to Mandie last week. Cameron and his groin again :roll eyes:, and I really doubt Ivory will pull 30 points for me tonight.

All this techno mumbo jumbo, most of you reading this probably hate football, don't even know what Lexx is, or care about stats for either one. One of you in the back is waving and cupping hands around mouth trying to yell "And we're sick of Sherlock too" and I'm going WHAT I CAN'T HEAR YOU.

It's Monday, I need some awesome. You guys have a good day while I go bounce around with coffee in me.

thatch roofed cottages

Everyone survive ok?

No? Don't despair, we get to assess our faults now, decide whether to resolute stuff, and then swing chaotically through the whole thing all over again, yay!

I need to start my end of year assessing, and the first thing I'm noting is that my phone is so old now (zoomed right past the plan expiration and into no man's land) that playing musical apps isn't working any more. I duked it out with facebook long ago trying to control my email, sent G+ packing even further back when it grabbed the controls thinking it was the user itself (good one, google), and lately had to give up toggling twitter and pinterest reinstalls, just in the nick of time as I got all the pix loaded over. I'm down to 19 now. Since I've been over 1000 several times, that's a feat of strength I'll dare to brag about for years to come, using my raw will power and manual overrides to sort and categorize instead of sending mass dumps to the cloud, like @bonenado does. I did use a card once, that was a joke.

Anyhoo, after wiping histories and caches galore *again* and several more re-uninstalls (I still dare not use force stops), all that is left is loading about 50 more vids to youtube, and I can sort them into the proper pinterest folders from there on the laptop. Most of this is family stuff, private folders, but just never got done while I had twitter on my phone.

And now that I'm at this final stage, I can't seem to get twitter back onto my phone. Yes, I've tried everything. I'm really good at my phone. I've always found a way. Until now. No matter what I do, there is 'insufficient storage'.

I think my only hope now is to erase phone storage itself and go back to factory default, but I have the sinking feeling that none of the data in my phone will be really gone then. I think when we exchange our phones back in, the company uses them as their property, so 'temp' files, like what I could clear off my laptop hard drive, still exist in my phone in a quiet place I can't get to. Analytics is huge now. User data is $$.  I think they pass this off as needing a new device and a new plan, and they collect what 'doesn't work' any more but is still very usable to them, even though they're so outdated that they're truly useless.

Long story short, if I want twitter on my phone again, I guess I must concede to being forced to upgrade. SO. Until we upgrade, which might still be awhile because we're stingy old people who wring every penny we can out of tech far beyond what it's reasonably capable of, I won't be tweeting every little thing in my life for awhile. Guess I'll have to burninate some peasants to blow off my steam.