sweet dreams

digitalambience visited, helped with AIM and with attempting to get off the Norton firewall, calmed some of my snuggle-cravings, and spent the night. It's odd to see him curled up in my bed, now, and it's odd to share a bed with someone else now.

Mmm, breakfast.

...Cappucino seems to be the flavour of the day. I stuck the rest of mine in the blender with two scoops of icecream and some chocolate covered espresso beans. Votania saw what I had done, cheered, cheered me for having gotten icecream yesterday (not to mention the blender some months ago), and followed suit, without the extra beans.

Ours taste better than Starbucks. Nyah.

Decorative plates (from a comment)

I think the entire concept of useless decorative plates is idiotic. Got an advertisement in the snail for some plate with a hideously ugly dog (one of the squashed-face variety) in with some poppies. For the love of gods, why?

My mother is a potter, and makes absolutely lovely dishes, which some people buy to display and never use. Other people buy them and use them every day. They're microwave and dishwasher safe, and have survived being dropped on a wooden floor by a five-year-old. If you're going to have a plate for display, it had better be beautiful; if you're going to have a plate in general, it had better be useful. Things that are neither beautiful nor useful really don't have much of a place in my mindset.

Sleepovers are nice.

I think my bed can sleep three if two are cozy with each other. Last night, there were three people who don't officially live here sleeping over. marxdarx is only not official because we haven't put in the paperwork yet, so he still counts as unofficial, even though he's always here. digitalambience was curled up next to me, and evealone got the couch.

It'll be fun, when the Halloween party hits.

Some things just never change.

Ghhhaaaaaa! digitalambience, please! Bathroom. Belongs to female. Seat on toilet. Leave it how you found it. Please!

You know you're becoming an LJ geek when...

...you can remember, off the top of your head, the precise phrasing and then the numeric code of the filter to type in after /friends to activate your Not (page size) filter for those mornings when someone seems to have posted something especially wide... and then, when the page size doesn't decrease to something human, rather than going and applying the filter the normal way in case you got the number wrong, you remember that you've got to subtract said offender from the filter before it'll work...

...and then, when you do remove them from that group, and hit refresh, it works...

Things that Backfire

Last night, when digitalambience and I were lying around comfortably, he looked a little chilly, so I tossed something on top of him, something that turned out to be my rainbow-stripey nightgown. He commented that now he knew why I liked to wear that with nothing else on, because it feels nice on the skin.

Somehow, he wound up putting it on.

Somehow, he wound up with the bright idea of wandering out into the living room, wearing my rainbow-striped nightgown, and freaking out votania, marxdarx, and evealone. He reconsidered, and put something on beneath it, so that if they said that it didn't look like him, he could quickly strip out of it, and freak them out if they thought that he would not be wearing anything underneath.

Somehow, his plan backfired.

When he wandered out into the living room in his rainbow-striped glory, votania commented that this had been her grandma's nightgown. digitalambience screeched and raced back into my room, stripping off the nightgown as he ran.

It gets better.

As I lay next to him, doubled over with laughter, it became apparent that he had misheard votania, and thought that the nightgown had belonged to her grandfather. Evidently, learning that it had in fact belonged to her grandmother made it just that much worse. Wearing the nightgown of an odd, cross-dressing old man is less squickful than wearing the nightgown that used to belong to an old lady.

There was much laughter.

Cross-dressing seems to happen around me. I'm not entirely sure why.

Makeover Day

votania asked me to help her with her hair today, as it's at that completely awkward length that she can't do anything with. I put some gel and barrettes in it (and it looks killer), and then proceeded to do her makeup as well.

I used a dark forest green eyeshadow on the inner corners of her eyelids (got a little heavy there so I smoothed it out with the creme face makeup stuff) and the same color, more lightly, on the outer corners. In the middle, I highlighted her eyelids with white. She wanted glitter, so I put glitter on her eyelids with the eyeshadow, and then some on the upper part of her cheeks. Used a small amount of creme base to clear up her face, then chose a lipstick just a little darker than her lips, applied a small amount, and then lip gloss to make everything come together.

Evidently I'm doing her makeup from now on, when she wears it. She's had other people put makeup on her before. The chick who did it must have been applying it with a trowel, and as votania is one of those people who really doesn't need makeup to look good, and should only use makeup to emphasize what's already there, it made her look dead. Or undead, as the case was...

*.*

Post with comment feature disabled to test something

[edit: comment feature re-enabled to test something else]

[edit: comment feature re-disabled to continue the testing]

Tested

Right, that's what I thought. Even though there's no link there, if you're determined enough to subsitute the /talkread.bml?journal=foo&itemid=x with /talkpost.bml?journal=foo&itemid=x, it'll give you the "Sorry, user has disabled comments for this particular post" message.

[edit: if you enable comments, someone leaves a comment, then you disable the comments, the comment that was left will not be seen; however, if you enable comments again, later, the comment that was left will still be there.]

Household ponderings: inclusion, exclusion

When we were taking the pictures this morning on Red with Votania's happy webcam, Nephew was trying to get into all of the pictures, and being very hurt when he was told to get out of some of them.

He's got a fear of being left out of things, of being excluded. That's why he's making such a big fuss over things like that. It's one of those "Of course!" things that smacked me this morning. Mommy has a boyfriend, and Nephew's really never dealt with Mommy having a new boyfriend before, never one who was able to spend a significant portion of time here. Nephew's always been included in almost everything, except for some movies, and he kicks up an enormous fuss when he doesn't get to do stuff with us where we're laughing and having fun.

He didn't want to go down for a nap this afternoon. He was upset that votania and marxdarx were going out somewhere without him. I seem to be very good at talking to him these days, though, so I reminded him that the trips today are just like the pictures were this morning: there were some that were just Mommy and marxdarxtogether, and there were some that were everybody all together; and after they got back from this trip, we are all going to the store together, but since he is grouchy when he does not get his nap, just like I am grouchy when I do not get my nap, if he did not get his nap, he would not be able to go on the trip to the store all together.

He closed his eyes upon following my logic.

Filling in the enthymemes is a higher-level, grown-up sort of logic function. Kids are perfectly logical, but can't always follow grown-up enthymemes, the fill-in-the-blanks sections of the train of reasoning. Kids leave enthymemes of their own, ones that grown-ups can't always follow.

I can't tell you why I know that he's got a mortal terror of being left out, other than just the way he acts, which could also be attributed to general crankiness and the Kindergarten Rebellion, but I know it. My way of dealing with the same fear was to not ask to be included, so I couldn't be deliberately excluded, so if I wasn't invited I could think that it was just because they were forgetting to invite me, or thinking I wouldn't be allowed to come. His way is to need to participate in everything.

Suggested helping-out: some things that are just for Nephew and Mommy, with nobody else participating, with that feature about them pointed out specifically, so he gets the feeling of being on the inside of something that other people are excluded from, rather than always feeling like other people are doing things without him. Yes, he gets plenty of things that are just for him, but they'll need to be pointed out to him when they're happening, so he'll make the connection right then that he does get included in exclusive things, rather than vague "You get to do lots of stuff with just Mommy".

Tricky portions: balancing the "include everybody", the "other people doing things just for them" and the "just me and you and nobody else" things so he won't get too exclusive, especially at school.

bitchy...

When trying to do stuff with Enki and Tigereye this morning, I got frustrated enough to yell and cry. Only grouched a little, but that's a lot for me.

digitalambience stopped by and began attempting to geek with/at me. I nearly yelled at him. He kept going through stuff that really would be reasonable to think about, but I'm in no condition whatsoever to be thinking right now, and anyone who dares get in my wrong side is liable to get slapped. Or scratched. Or chewed up.

To top that off, I'm horny. Again. Dammit.

Working through...

...I'm under a lot of stress over Darkside graduating. I'm going to be going from spending around ten hours a week with him to an unknown, and likely lesser, amount of time with him. It's bad enough for me to be spending less time with a friend, but time with this friend is more than just fun-with-friend time.

I have come to the awareness that I am not entirely to be trusted as the administrator of my mind. On most things, I'm pretty good, but there are not often but regular things I do that go undetected, and if undetected, cause damage. Rather like Galeni going crazy: quietly, and with a lot of collateral damage.

Fortunately for me, Darkside can and will pick up on the subtle things I do when I muck with my own mind and do it wrong, and he will catch me and call me on it. I'm desperately afraid that without my spotter, without proper training in how to catch myself when I do that, that I may do some horrendous things to myself.

Now that I've realized that this is my fear, and that all I need to do is to be as sensitive to my own moods as he is to mine, I've calmed down considerably. I know what he does. It's not a big secret, it's just that he's got near-admin access to my mind, and knows where I've written the root password, though he doesn't touch that unless it's an emergency and he's assessed that I'm not in any shape to be doing anything, and even then, he won't do much beyond emergency repair. He guides me in how to do things rather than doing them for me, which I appreciate beyond telling...

I'm going to be OK. The sharp, bitchy mood has gone away; that's probably been what's on my mind so horribly much.

Whee!

Welcome to reichiere, a schoolmate! She runs, or helps run, the anime club that I never seem to make it to.

Geekery...

equating magical systems to games, and the underlying structure of the system, once stripped of the religious trappings, to the game engine...