the · soul · afraid · of · dying

Jeph Jacques apparently knew me in college, or stalked me, or something? Or else I am a more common weed than I thought.

/sad schneptune face

The house is on record. We have closed. The Deutsch and I are homeowners.

/HAPPY SCHNEPTUNE FACE

Two things:

http://artbloom.net/der-shing-helmer/

I still draw like the ones on the left, but there is hope. This expresses the "no, I'm not some kind of super genius, just someone who kept drawing, and you can too" thing so much better than I've managed over the years.

and, I have a cavity. A CAVITY.

It's kind of exciting, actually. Novel. I've never had one before. All my life I have gone into the dentist's office and heard things like "perfect" and "there's no justice", but today, in addition to that, I also heard "undermined" and "drill". I hadn't been near the profession for six years. Guess it serves me right.

The roofers started today! Probably the Deutsch and I are going to buzz the house after work and see how they are doing. Our neighbors are going to be thoroughly tired of us before we even move in.

I always want curry on my birthday. Something about the cold weather and the colors of turning leaves.

What do you like on your birthday? Something recurrent, or just whatever you're craving at the moment?

GO SEE THE ART

HE DID A "TWO HEARTS" BAG

HE FIXED ROMEO & JULIET

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH

I think this house-buying process may finally have broken me. (We signed disclosures this morning)

Nevertheless, if he ever does Sirius & Malta I may have to seek this man out and marry him by force. Even if he's already married like I am. We could all live in Utah or something and fill our lives with art.

Yeah?

Today I will be given the keys...and we haven't even officially pended yet.

(To let in the pest inspection guy on Sunday, while the selling realtor's having an open house and Bossman is out of town. But still. EHEHEHEHE)

I lay awake last night staring at the ceiling.

That's a lot of money every month.

We could do our own laundry. At HOME. Whenever we like.

It needs a new oven.

I wonder if that nice little greenhouse-thing in the kitchen window actually leaks.

There's an oak floor under the carpet in the living room.

What if the pest guy finds a lot of damage?

We could paint the rooms...any color. I could paint things on the walls and they'd stay.

That's a lot of money every month.

We need to pack.

Pay the PG&E bill tomorrow...make sure it's up to date.

What if something breaks? We'll have to fix it.

Where are those poems by Ogden Nash...?

Nothing unusual, no doubt. But new. Frightening and exciting.

A beautiful girl just walked in to pay her rent, bringing autumn with her. It had been lingering in the corners of my perception all day...ever since my delicate hothouse blossom of a husband woke up this morning and scrambled to turn the heater on and stand shivering before it...but it clung to her tall slender frame, the luxurious fall of brown curls down her back; it swirled in her brown skirts and gray sweater-coat; it shone from her freckled skin and the crispness of her blue eyes. Now it hangs in the air: a cool, crackling dryness with a promise of spicy cold. It's here at last.

The sellers are being...unreasonable. In several ways. Clearly, they aren't desperate to sell, and yet, from some hints we've gleaned about their situation, they may be trying to milk this deal for every last penny with more than usual fervor. Bossman says our terms are too far from theirs to do any negotiating at this point, and we're at a dead end.

Externally, I am trying to dismiss it and move on, shrugging off all the excitement, hope, and plans.

Internally I am indulging in a full-on Veruca Salt tantrum complete with screaming and throwing things and jumping up and down.

Looks like we won't be getting that fat tax credit after all.

Feh.

WHY did I not post this before? Excuse me while I give myself a good kicking.

Do you enjoy anything Peter Beagle has ever written? If you've met me, you may, because I've been recommending him to anyone who would listen for years (thank you, Know Knew Books, for being my soapbox for a bit). Right now he's working on a Project, the 52/50 Project. This is him producing a new song lyric or poem every week for a year, to celebrate being in the business 50 years. This is wonderful. This helps him pay his bills. This costs $25 for the entire year (and if you subscribe late, you get back-issues). This is ridiculously cheap to share in the creative process, the thoughts, the history, the beautiful way this man puts words together. It's small, personal, interactive. You can even make subject suggestions he might use in a future piece. I cannot say enough good things about it.

So go and read about the Project, and get in on this, because the getting, it is good.

We were at the Farm Store last Sunday, minding our own business, and I turned around and saw him in the cage, and before we knew it we were on our way home with a borrowed carrier in the back seat.

He is five months old, long and lithe as a mink, with round eyes the color of a ripening pumpkin. His fur is fine and silky, all black except for a few white hairs on his tail and belly; the area between his eyes and ears is so sparse that it looks bare from the right angle. His little head is round and hard as a marble, pushing up into the palm of the hand, and his purr is loud because there isn't much cat between it and the world. His big ears swivel like satellite dishes, set with waving wisps. His expressive tail arches up over his back when he stretches and arches in challenge when he skitters sideways, trying to get the other cats to play. (The other cats are not amused.) He has a long aquiline nose with one little extra whiskerlet on each side, poking out at an angle like tiny antennae. He is brave and tireless and clumsy-deft in the manner of kittens, so careful with his claws that I thought at first he'd been declawed. Right now he's extremely bored because Felix and Simon think he is just a new and larger breed of flea, and the Deutsch can't get up for very long at a stretch to play with him. (He's doing great recovering from hernia surgery but he's not yet up to standing around waving a string for long.) At lunch Felix perched on top of a thigh-height bookcase looking disgusted while Angus scrummed around the bottom, tumbling end over end and trying to look fierce. I introduced him to Christmas string this weekend and he thinks it's the best thing ever.

I'd forgotten how energetic kittens are. He's tiring me out with all the zooming around and the mewing and the constant demand for attention. He's lovely...I'm so glad we found him.

So we've been enduring the bitchy leadership of one sucky druid on raids for months. MONTHS. This guy can do one thing, and only one thing, well: show up and order people around. He doesn't necessarily know the fights, he's not particularly open to alternate strats or suggestions, he won't delegate responsibility, he plays favorites, and he has absolutely no talent for boosting morale or keeping the pissy disappointment out of his voice when we wipe. We put up with him because he SHOWS UP and does it unfailingly. That much I will give props for. Big, burly props. I know raid leadership is hard. But that doesn't mean get all snide when we don't dance well enough to the tune, you know?

Last night he left the guild in the wake of some of our better raiders who had had enough of him and our lack of progression, taking a couple other good raiders with him. I'm sad about that, because when someone leaves the guild like that, without giving much of a reason, they're kind of dead to me. I'm not going to harass them, or even /ignore them, just kind of...act like they're not there.

Now he's going to join another guild, where he has no rank or power, and he's going to be put in his God damned place. So ha ha ha, and FUCK YOU MERLE.

That is all.

So we did VoA on Wednesday night, followed by ToC25. I was the only hunter; my more sagittipotent comrades were all absent. So I tried to remember to mark and misdirect and do the best dps I could, because I needed to represent, right? even though I am teh BM failhunter and rarely break 3k. We downed Koralon, which was exciting, and I got pants and gloves (because it was me or the shard pile), which was also exciting.

And somehow, over the course of the night, I averaged just over 4k damage and spiked to 6k on a couple of fights.

BKAWK??

The core raiders were all having a good hard doubletake over that too, one of them told me when I asked if he'd had a meter up. The parse got screwed up somehow and only showed Emalon, which is tragic because now I can't figure out exactly what I was doing right. I have a feeling that maybe it was just all the standing still, which favors hunters. Elec and his Sniper Training would probably have done, like, 7k. But I would really like to know for sure so I can do it again.

If I understood the tag system, this would get tagged WoW. But I don't.

Okay, I'm excited. And not excited.

Goblins taking sides? Okay...I guess. Even though every goblin presently in the game is neutral. If we had neutral trolls as well this would make more sense.

Worgen players? Ummm. We'll see about those. At least they don't look as goofy as the goblins.

Gnome healers? HELLS YES. I was once part of an alt guild composed entirely of gnomes. It fell apart after our sixth try on Deadmines because we had no healers.

Human hunters? Psh. (turns up snobby nelf nose)

Troll druids? I assume this is because they're making the class available to worgen. It makes sense.

Tauren paladins? Like the blood elves weren't bad enough? Head for the God damned hills. Though I have to admit, this is a no-brainer race/class combination. Plus the armor will look amazing on them.

Ravaging the landscape? Ack! (A prettier Desolace would, however, be very welcome.)

Flying mounts in Azeroth? Oh my God. I had better get all my alts through the Lakeshire stage right quick, because there are going to be two or three undead rogues hovering over that place on day one of this expansion and for months thereafter, just waiting for a chance to scream DEATH FROM ABOVE! in Orcish. (And, to be fair, there are going to be all kinds of Alliance screaming the same thing in Common. I've just never been on that side of things.)

Archaeology looks neat. It'll be nice to have all the usual expansion things like new gear and more levels and so on. The guild leveling system will be interesting. But nothing shook me quite as much as the sight of Auberdine lying broken.

Time to go take some screenshots...

On Friday night we were driving home from a friend's. It was about one o'clock. I rounded the slight bend on I Street and there was a cat lying in the road, its eyes shining green at my headlights. It took a moment to realize it was dead. I always hate seeing cats hit on the road, but this one struck me particularly because of the illusion of life. "Do you want to go back? Let's go back," said my husband.

So we did. And he walked out into the middle of the road with a flattened cardboard box. Next to the wide-open eyes lay a collar. He picked it up after sliding the box gently under the furry white body. The tag read "BUDDY", and there was a phone number, so he called. Soon a big truck sped to the curb opposite us and a burly man in a wifebeater took Buddy's body gently from us, unable to speak.

We drove home, hoping he didn't think we'd hit his cat. It couldn't have happened long before we had arrived on the scene; the body had been warm. At a quarter to two, as we sat watching TV, not yet able to sleep, the man called and thanked us for returning Buddy to him.

So there was something good anyway. Man, I hope this never happens to us, but if it does, that someone cares enough to stop and let us know.

As someone who desperately wants a house, where she can paint or knock out walls or have pets of her choosing or plant things in the garden and basically call it her own little corner of the earth, Dutch, I have to say, you're fucking killing me over here.

Last night I finished up Eastern Kingdoms Loremaster by running Lowbers by myself. I pulled up a map on WoWWiki and noodled around, picking up stacks of runecloth off the mobs I needed to kill and avoiding the rest. I had never been into that wing of the instance before, and it was weird and wonderful to skim through the twisting halls and levels alone, finishing gray quests I never thought I would have a chance to do, with a sense of luxurious leisure at the idea that this was my instance and I could take my time, melee mobs, loot anything I cared to. (I followed Casidy's fine draenei ass through Ubers a few days ago and although he was very patient with me, he was also amused that I picked up everything.)

45 quests to go in Kalimdor (the Ahn'Qiraj chain should take care of a lot of that), sixteen in Icecrown, most of which are unfortunately 5-man, and I'll have my Loremaster's Colors.

And then what?

If goth looked like this all the time, I would have been (desperately, gracelessly) trying to be one for YEARS.

One

Cut some holes in a box

Two

Put your cat in that box

Three

Take the box to the vet

And that's the way you do it...

Felix is mysteriously ill. I have too much to do today to sit around fretting. It is probably something minor. Please, let it be something minor. We will know soon.

Today my new glasses arrived, the first in five years. The Deutsch picked them up and brought them to me at work. I walked outside to try both pairs (regular and shades), gaping at the street and chattering at him.

I'm glad you have good vision and all. But I wish you could see, I wish you could know what it's like. I have to look at the trees, look, across the street, see that one against the building? I can count the leaves. You just. You just don't know. I wish you could see this.

Everything is so crisp. It's surreal.

(Glitch prevented this being posted yesterday).

Same feeling as the morning I woke up and saw a photo of the towers burning on MSN. Same feeling as the evening my roommate told me Princess Diana was dead. A little mental stumble, a world that isn't the same as it was yesterday or for many years before--slight and silly, but true.

I choose to remember the charming rogue of Thriller, not the freaky recluse.

Friday: I can't believe it, tasteless jokes involving Michael AND Farrah are already circulating. Don't people have anything better to do?

Three years today...

Not a word from anyone, though I was sure to pointedly comment on Friday...

It'll do for now, it pays the bills, &c &c &c...

Woo.