temperature

97.8 F last night;
98.2 this morning.

In high school, my normal temperature was 97.6 F. Votania says to expect that I'll be running a little hotter than normal as I progress.

Any resistor heats up a little depending on how much power flows through it.

Frustration

Votania has a boyfriend who lives way the hell out in BFE. We have no car; for the past month or so his car's been broken. The schedule is that he visits approximately every other weekend, when things work out with his ex and his mother.

He was finally going to visit this weekend, today, because Uncle Alan went out there and fixed the damn car with him (big heavy parts; Votania forbade her boyfriend to install them by himself for fear they should fall on him and squish him, because he hasn't got the proper equipment to do it safely by himself).

Today it turns out that her boyfriend's mother, Mrs. Montague, has some stuff for him to do around the house, and even though he's somewhere between the ages of 24 and 26 with a daughter, he's still subject to the whims of Mommy until he gets himself the hell out of the way. There are, of course, reasons why he can't do this now; until he can, he's just going to wait and hold on and put up with everything Mommy bitches and orders him around. The guy's got the patience of a saint, except that Votania gets to listen to him bitch about all the drama that his mom and his ex go through. He's got to make up some bullshit excuse every time he visits Votania, and it's got to be watertight.

It doesn't help Votania's attitude that Adam visits me at least once a week, if not more. She's not going to be happy today.

Darkside

I'm trying to train myself not to react when I see his name or hear from him or see him or hear someone talk about him.

He showed up in the message boards at the Fanboy Otaku Gamer's Club this morning, before I was awake yet. When I saw his name, my heart leaped, and a giddy grin came to my face.

I smacked myself in the cheek, hard.

If it hurts enough to think that way about him, maybe I'll stop.

It's got to stop. It's gone far enough. It's messed with my life for a year now. Darkside doesn't know me. All he's known is the giddy mask I put on around him. He's known me only when I've been high on hormones, perpetually, for a year now. When the face that's closest to me shows up, he doesn't recognize it for what it is; he thinks it's depression and dangerous, when the fact is, the smiling face is the dangerous one.

But I've been happy this year. I've never been happy before.

And why, woman, would you want to be happy because of something completely false? Why do you wish to build your world upon a lie?

But Darkside and I are good friends. I don't care if he loves me or not. All I need is his friendship, and I'll be happy. See? I'm happy!

What happens, my dear, when Darkside falls in love again? When he falls in love with some woman you do not know, do not trust? It was bad enough when he fell for Votania, and you and Votania are sisters by everything but blood, transcending blood, and you still were crushed for two weeks or more. What happens when he trains his attention on some other woman, and has no time to smile at you in the mornings, to talk endlessly about DragonBall Z, to exchange the sorts of silly things you two love to do?

He wouldn't love someone I'd hate.

Supposing she didn't know you, didn't like you especially? You've seen it happen before -- when the woman hates the man's friends, especially the man's female friends who have non-platonic feelings for him, eventually the man gives up those friends.

Darkside's friends mean more to him than any girl who would hate them.

So did Shawn's. Look at Shawn.

Now, I say, that's taking it a bit too far. Darkside isn't Shawn. He'd never pull the crap that Shawn pulled on me.

I'm glad you're so sure about that.

The Love List

Adam
Darkside
Dave-in-Germany

The List (explained)

That is a list of the people I love, in rough order of general attention to and intensity. This would be romantic-type love and sexual love, rather than other types of love, because I've got a lot more people I love, if that's the way I'm listing things.

Every now and then, I list out the people I love, romantically, in order of precedence. It changes, of course, who's loved how much and who comes first. Sometimes there are equals. Sometimes there aren't. If I'd made that list a week ago, it would have read:

Darkside
Adam
Dave-in-Germany

...but since Darkside said "No", he just got bumped an order of precedence lower. The list more rightly reads

Adam Darkside
Dave-in-Germany

because Adam and Darkside are now approximately of equal importance.

I go back over the lists from time to time, seeing how it's all changed.

Every now and then I make up a list of what I wear, too, and a personality evaluation, just to keep tabs on who I am and what I'm like.

Sesame Street Tarot (again)

Votania was spending time doing divinations for herself between phases of an extended working, using the Sesame Street deck.

She drew the cards "In", "Danger", and "Walk".

When she got up after finishing the working, she tripped over some of Nephew's toys, and fell over and got a giant bump on her butt.

The offending toy is now residing in the storage shed. We'll be going through his toys again to get them down to a number that he can effectively play with, and either store or give away the rest. He had enough room in the old house. Not so here.

I love the Sesame Street deck.

the whole ball of wax

We're being witchy today, very much so. Doesn't look like Adam will be coming over.

We keep a very large jar that used to hold pickles, and in it we dump all the scraps of wax that are left over from our candles, and the candle-ends, and all that other good stuff. Today we're melting it all down. It looks to be turning out a lovely lavender.

...

Well, there's a certain point at which you stop dipping the candles, or else wait for them to cool majorly, or else the whole column of hot wax will slide right off back into the vessel that you are dipping from, and all your hard work will come to not very much.

I've now got a rather lovely small cone-shaped candle, one of the rather more standard dipped variety, and another one cooling in a plastic movie theatre cup that promises to be a pillar when it's done.

We'll see how my attempts at wick-braiding come out.

Wickin'

Candles. I have been officially dubbed the family wick-maker; I can braid wick out of some of the string we've got lying around here, and it seems to work just all fine and dandy.

Waste not, want not. In case of accident, donate my remaining body parts.

Low Explosives

For whatever reason, Microshit's Internet Exploder works on my happy machine again. Netscape was behaving badly, so I decided to see how Microsith was doing again. It works!

As far as I'm concerned, computers are still black magic. I'm learning it, though, and I'm not quite as clueless as I was.

Temperature

Wow.

98.1 F this evening. It always either amazes me or alarms me to see a temperature of over 97.9; either I'm raising my metabolism or I'm running a fever.

I hope it's my metabolism.

woo.

worked out. maybe half an hour. a little shaky now, but massive water is making that better. dumbass did not bring water bottle to weight room. dumbass. 98.1 F.

Feeling good

After my workout, I took a bath. Before that, though, I wandered around the house and managed to plug in not only the speakers that Votania loaned me when her sound card blew (they're Altec Lansing, and I like them) but the $3.99 speakers I got at the Temple that Consumer Electronics Built (Fry's Electronics in Phoenix, for the non-locals) but also found an adapter for my teeny television, so now I will not burn up the batteries when trying to see something on TV. My teeny television is the only one in the house that actually gets decent reception. The other television that could actually pick up signals that are not the VCR is now dead; Votania's been suffering from television deprivation.

This ought to work fairly well. I'm quite hopeful for it.

This is great. I have my wave volume turned down to 3%, and the knobs on the speakers at less than half strength, and it's equal to the volume I typically listen to music at anyway, when it's just me late at night.

I do have to turn it up to 5% for "The Sound of Silence", though.

Role Model

I think Votania slightly underestimates the effect she's got on Nephew. She knows she's his mother and all, but I don't think she realizes quite the extent of his modeling behavior.

Today at lunch I watched Votania drop a potato chip, pick it up, blow it off (dropping stuff on the floor is not a great health problem, except the occasional cat hair in the back of the throat) and eat it.

Later on in this same meal, Nephew dropped a peanut. Much to my amusement, he mimicked Mommy's exact actions, down to looking in her direction to see if she was looking.

This wouldn't be so bad if it were only she that he was copying from. He's in day care now, so Mommy can work, and ever since he started going there, he's been coming home with bad behavior. Apparently parents in this neighborhood don't enforce any decent standards of behavior with their children.

Since the kid is a rational being now, I'm going to start trying to track down the roots of the disturbing behaviors with him, and then explain to him exactly why those people he is modeling from are shitty role models.

Using, of course, different language.

Lately, Nephew's been such a mimic. Now is the time for us to be on our best behavior, and hope he picks it up...