Notorious

Evidently the apartment complex knows that it's no secret that we're witches here. Adam was out last night talking to a guy from one floor up and a few units over, seeing what all the fracas was about. I have yet to learn why there was any sort of fracas at all, but this guy had a few difficulties of the nature that we usually deal in.

He'd been thinking about talking to us about it, but hadn't quite worked up the nerve.

Adam, though, is far more approachable than either of us scary witches, and he and this guy had a chat.

Evidently, good witches working to undo all the evil, small though the efforts may be, it cuts through the evil better than a one-megawatt laser...

Giggles from the shower

More than half the fun that Adam and I have in the shower isn't sexual. Well, there's certainly a sexual element to it, as there is to anything involving two people of mutually attracting genders, naked, but that's not usually the primary source of fun.

We giggle in there. We talk about things that Darkside and I might talk about at breakfast. We splash water at each other. We act silly and juvenile and altogether too young for our age. We crack bad puns, smack each other's asses, indulge in crude physical humor with toothpaste, facial wash, and other shower items...

It's great fun. Everyone should have someone to play with like that...

dreams

All sorts of unusual dreams. Votania was in one, but not as her usual self. I don't think I have visited that particular dream universe before. She talked a lot about Red Sandlewood moving in an early bit of the dream. Odd.

Cast of Characters

Household: Residents of the apartment, known as the Temple.

Azure, Azz, Joan, Joanie, 'Ni: me.

votania, aka destruction130, previously known as Sis: my roommate, a soulsister I met November 2000; we've known each other forever. We have no known biological relationship.

Nephew, Little Angel: Sis's preschool-aged son.

Adam, aka Peace: My current fling. A very nice guy. Another morning student at DeVry. Votania's and my roommate as of mid-December 2001. Tall clean-cut redhead with a big grin and a wacked sense of humor.

Shamash, aka Rocket Cat, Mosh-Pit, Teething Squirrel, Pinball Cat, Schizo, Fuzzball, Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner (depends on time of day) Altar Cloth, Sunshine, Little Ray of Sunshine, Target, Familiar: The local cat. Currently a full tom, this is about to change. He adopted us in late June 2001, about a month old, a scrawny crying kitten who found Votania and told her to take him home, he was hungry. Right Now. Black & grey stripy with a short, bent-at-the-end tail. Will probably never lose his kitten-peep.

Fire Blossom: The siamese fighting fish (betta). Red. Male. Very quiet. Doesn't socialize much.

Death: One fucking evil athame. Belongs with (but not to) Votania. Only comes out when it needs to feed, or for ritual.

marxdarx: Not actually a resident of the Temple, he is a stray who hangs out a lot and plays with Shamash.

Cast of Characters, continued...

The Computers:


ENKI: votania's personal machine, generic PC assembled by a now-defunct mom & pop computer shop that failed to provide the correct sound/monitor drivers for reinstallation. Less powerful than the name implies. Has gone back to being personal machine from his brief stint as internet server after Tigereye went down. He's bitchy about sharing an internet connection with the rest of the LAN, and freezes three to four times a week. He's had several complete reinstalls of his operating system.

Tigereye: my beloved laptop, a May 2000 Dell Latitude. Currently down: broken transformer = sans electricity.

Digital: Adam's laptop. Multiple operating systems. Many, many, many virii.

mmx233: A quiet & well-behaved system running Windows 2000, with few apparent distinguishing features except that it has no apparent distinguishing features, no USB port, and is the computer that Nephew likes to play games on.

iqman: The server. Nice, speedy, talks to the DSL, has CD burner, has hotsynch cradle for the palmtops installed. Brand new. Behaves very badly with unexpected power-offs, both the power-failure kind and the pissed-off user turning off after complete crash kind. Has had the motherboard replaced thanks to this habit.

You Dumbass: Not the official name of marxdarx's computer, but it might as well be, because that's what it always gets called.

Ishtar: Votania's palmtop, a Handspring Visor Neo. Has been successfully resurrected from crash programs.

Inanna: my palmtop, a Neo identical to Votania's. Had been contemplating naming her Trinity, but I suppose that'll be for the next one.

Computer in my room: very small hard drive. Runs out of room thanks to stored internet files on a weekly basis.

Adam has several other machines in various states of operational, most of them without personality.

Working...

Last night, made some new stuff for myself. Yummy user picture, whee! This one's going to be my primary picture for posting in my novel, I think, because my usual userpic is distracting, and I want the novel to flow.

Odd format, LJ novelizing. Odd.

Any feedback on the pic? It's rough, but it'll work for now...

More Cast of Characters

Good Friends:


Darkside, aka War: my very best friend, a 7th tri CIS guy at DeVry. No true friend will betray you, but Darkside has never allowed me to betray myself. He, above all others, may be trusted with my heart, should he accept it. Looks eerily like my mother when viewed from the rear if his hair's in its most flattering style.

Neighbor, AKA the Oak Prince: A guy who until about the beginning of September lived in our apartment complex, but moved down the street some a bit closer to school, who went to UAF at the same time I did. Dated teenagewitch until the Long Distance Relationship thing did its thing. He works the DeVry help desk.

the Viking: Like a brother to Votania. Don't piss him off. Just...don't. I help him English class, he lets us bum rides off him now and then.

Echo: Votania's beloved.

Dave (Dave-in-Seattle, Dave-in-Baltimore, Dave-in-Philly, Microsoft Dave, Auj, pyrogenic): an old friend from CTY 1995

Dave (Dave-in-Ohio)/godai: an online friend, another of a large collection of Davids

Panic Montague: a friend of Sis's and mine

Dave (Dave-in-Germany): an old friend; a new flame; we are no longer attempting a long-distance relationship. He's Army.

Linux Dave: yet another Dave. Comes over to babble about computers occasionally.

Dawn, A*, Aurora: The friend of Darkside and Neighbor who is now a friend of mine. She and I conspire about my ongoing courtship of Darkside.

Various Livejournalers are also pretty damn good friends, but probably won't wind up listed here for a while until I form regular (my definition) patterns of talking-to.

Cast of Characters

Old Crew:


marxdarx: An old friend (1987) of Votania's who recently returned from the "people we used to know back when..." limbo and has started hanging out on the weekends, whenever he can make it here from BFE.

HSBF, Shawn: High School Best Friend, an interesting fellow with a knack for pyrotechnics. We've lost touch over the past couple years. He's got a daughter now, and a wife.

DC: an old friend from high school days back at home in Fairbanks. Very much like Sis. Expecting a daughter in June 2002.

Hawk: Votania's late beloved car, a Buick Skyhawk of uncertain age (pretty damn old). Went to the Summerlands in mid 2001.

BJ: My former fiance, 2 of 2. Used to be a fluffy-headed, over-religious and irritating high school buddy who I sometimes hung out with but more often wanted to smack some sense into. Is now most likely a drug dealer, and is on my blocked senders list.

the Lady E.: My former fiancee, 1 of 2. Still a good friend. Met her at CTY with pyrogenic.


next update

Cast of Characters

Assorted Families


Votania's Family: There is no love lost between Votania and her family. Some of them are cool, some of them are not.

Grandma: Votania's mother.

Grandpa: Votania's father, a really cool dude with excellent taste in music and computer entertainments.

That Woman: The other daughter of Sis's mother and father, the mother of Sis's neices. Nobody in my household likes her. She stole my Mortal Kombat CD, dammit!

Jewel: That Woman's oldest daughter, the brilliant one.

Jade: That Woman's middle daughter, the sweet one.

Krystal: That Woman's youngest daughter, the baby.

That Woman has a husband, a much put-upon guy who is very nice.

Great-Grandma: Grandma's mother.

Assorted aunts and uncles.

Mrs. Montague: an evil old hag.

Adam's Family:

His mom and dad

Pestilence: Adam's younger brother, a young man with the idea that guys should only date model material girls (regardless of their intelligence), who feels that he is his brother's keeper, and will attempt to thwart Adam's cunning plans to get some.

The Lunatic's Family

Mama: my mother. Quilter, potter, musician; biologist by college training.

FatherSir: my father. Retired programmer, ham (KL0YV), surrogate grandfather to a number of kids, violinist; does well at anything he turns his hand to.

Narcissa, Biosis: my one biological sister. Fiddler & poet & all-around joy.

River: Narcissa's fiance, also an ex-boyfriend of mine, and friend of mine from high school. Still a good friend.

Values: silence

It's odd. I wind up surrounded by people that hold some of the little value-tags that my parents did.

Case in point: moving with silence. My father started to teach me the basics of it when I was small. I was quite good, for a kid. As I grew up, I abandoned the search for the ability.

Votania values the ability to walk without making noise. I am re-learning it. Darkside values that ability as well.

It's the micro-values as well as the macro-values. Can't forget those, in personality theories.

Uh-oh.

Adam, if you read this, I think your attention is needed for the machine in my room.

IE has crashed at least twice today, possibly three times. I woke up this morning to a fuzz-screen (images stringy and overlapped, in quadruplicate) and came home to another. The first one required only ctrl+alt+del twice to reset: I do not know the cause; the second one required a manual whacking of the reset button, and the (barely legible) quad overlapped stringscreen implicated Explorer.exe. (Yes, dear, it *was* the reset button.) Now Internet Exploder is unhappy and crashing every now and then, one window at a time.

Who knows. I'm not a guru yet.

Error count

And check another one off for IE! Shut down another page. Internal error. Bleh.

Things I see: open gate

On my way to and from school and work, I walk past the back car gate of the fenced-in apartment complex right next to the school.

More than half the time, the gate's off its track, and is either rolling along happily on concrete, unusable by cars, or just standing wide open.

The first mistake they made in this gate is that they didn't install a human-gate, not with a punchcode; not with a lock; not with *anything* other than a car coming out from the inside (sensor open) or someone with an automatic gate opener (in car or on foot) from either side.

College kids standing there. Some vault the wall. Some wait around for cars to come in or out. Some carry the gate clicker. Some pull the gate off the track and slip in through the crack.

The trouble all started when a car crashed into the gate and fairly well bent and creamed it. First it was unusable by car, open on foot, then it was moved so it stood wide open. There was a sign saying that there was a reward for any information leading to the prosecution of those responsible for damaging the gate...

Before then, students were used to going around or waiting. Now, every other day, the gate is off its tracks, wearing a groove of rock dust on the pavement, grinding away tired and not quite in place.

Well, that's that.

Say a big farewell to Research International, everybody, because I am so out of there. I turned in my resignation today.

I was two minutes late today. My "occurrances" are reaching the danger point. So instead of having them fire me, I got three surveys on the youth antismoking study and then shook Gordon's hand, checked out, poked my nose in at the office and filled out all necessary exit paperwork, and that ... was that.

Omens

I did consult, before resigning. 4/5 for leaving; 2/5 for staying. I saw two ducks happily eating bread crumbs when I was walking home.

It was all so suddenly clear. I had fallen asleep in the middle of a survey, multiple times. I went to the restroom, played a hand of solitaire on my palm, went back to work with the concept of leaving in my head.

It enhanced my senses to laser clarity. I got that survey, and another one before I could hang up my phone and leave.

Library Monkey

DeVry's library is in need of a weekend shift person. I'm thinking this may be me. It doesn't pay particularly well per hour, but it may just be enough to allow me to also have a "real" afternoon type job to hone my resumé with. My afternoons are not particularly free given my current class schedule.

I may wind up back at Research International, but at least I'll have cleared out the cobwebs from that particular job.

I still have twenty hours of vacation remaining to me, so that'll be of excellent help in this upcoming terminal paycheck.

Quiz

Kid Ass Avenger
(Perverse Spoiled Functional Child)



It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a gigantic flying perv! Yes, it's the inner child Kid Ass Avenger (PSFC). Your inner child runs amuck in the inner streets of your inner Mardis Gras. He, in fact, is the queen of the parade, and by the end of the night, or any night of your life, is always smothered in the finest beads.

He is also a child genius, but uses his powers to bizarre and ambiguous ends. He may give you the power to save the universe from total destruction one day and the next day save you from dipping a french fry in ketchup. Who knows what adventures lie in your unconscious future?

Be wary, though. It's all part of his master plan to make *you* the super-villian.

Interesting, very interesting. Dreams of saving the world? Of being ... I don't know. I've got the mojo. I've got the brains. I risk winding up one egocentric bitch.

Non-interference directive

Adam out on date with V. tonight. Joanie no call.