Kids...

Well, Tommy and Angelica (Little Fayoumis's two playmates in the apartment complex) are moving to Yuma. Today was their last day here.

Sad to see him losing friends, but good gods, it's a relief to not worry about dealing with both of them at once again.

...It wouldn't be half as bad were it just Tommy by himself, because little boys will be little boys. But when you throw a 4 or 5 year old girl into the mix, it all goes pear-shaped.

Great lines from UF

"Whatever happened to 'love thy neighbor'?"
"He's no neighbor! He's at least eleven router hops from me!"

Ahh, blessed clear throat...

The problem isn't so much the stuffy nose or the coughing. I can deal with that. What I can't deal with is when ( TMI )

. That just makes everything suck that much more.

Happily, I am chilling with the happy peppermint tea. It is hot. That is good. Even water does not clear out the creeping crud, but hot liquids do.

Almost anything I can think about eating contributes to the creeping crud. This is why I braved going Out There to the Chinese place on the corner to get some orange chicken. That did not aggravate the creeping crud, and it was about time I ate something other than supper last night, chicken broth, and the random Halloween-sized pack of Shock Tarts. (Those, by the way, contribute massively to the creeping crud. As does caramel, and chocolate. Dammit.) I was beginning to get more wobbly than just what could be accounted for by the shortness of breath.

Dear cats...

You sux0r.

E-Mail to Sandstrom

Hi, Prof.

My absence Friday was probably notable. I seem to have caught the creeping crud that's been going around. I have had an utterly lousy four days, and look to be going for a fifth. I hope to be conscious by Wednesday.

--Joan

Earworm

http://weeble.fluent.ltd.uk/data/toons/badger.swf

ARGH!

Maniac: dancing

Darkside doesn't think he can dance.

He's proved to me otherwise, of course. One fine day, long ago, he and I were sparring in the courtyard, and we wound up locking hands and wrestling in step, moving smoothly together. He fits with me better than any other dance partner I've ever had.

I told him that I'd like to dance with him sometime, after the bout ended.

He told me that he didn't know how to dance, and anyway wasn't any good.

Bull.


All that says to me is that he's never tried the right kind of dancing with the right kind of partner before. I'd love to take a dance class with him, to show him the basic steps, to master a few funky moves. We've already got the chemistry that good dance partners have to have. We have the beat of each other's body. I'm not a half-bad dancer, with a good lead, especially one who will assume the control and leadership that's necessary, because, if I trust that my leader is leading, I will follow, and give over control of the dance without second-guessing.

Shawn was bad at that. Darkside could easily be so good. Shawn nearly danced me off the edge of the stage one time. Darkside... wouldn't. It all comes down to trust. There are some ways dancing doesn't lie. I'd like to dance with Darkside, to see what truths come out...

Unusual dreams...

Dreamed, in bits and patches...

Dreamed that I had dinner with Darkside and his parents. I was, naturally, well-behaved and quiet. After dinner, I suggested to Darkside that perhaps he and I watch a movie or something. He agreed without the least struggle. I was astonished; his parents were likewise impressed, and his mother noted that it usually took quite a bit of doing to pry him out of the house.

I was waiting in the car in the snow-covered parking lot; he'd had to run back inside to visit the restroom. The car began doing funky things, like move around; evidently there was some pedal on my side that I was stepping on. No damage was done, but we were too late to see the movie.

Odd.

I wonder how somebodies comes up with what lines are going to be used in any given post.

somebodies has friended a bajillion people with permanent accounts. Each post made by somebodies is a surreal cut-and-paste of links, sentences taken out of context from individual entries of the people who have somebodies friended back. The results are sometimes beautiful, and always bizarre.

One might think that the user skims their friends page and picks out good lines, but I note that one of the lines used in today's post is from my journal, and was way back at the end of August. So I'm wondering how they come up with the lines. Do they skim the friends page for good material, and save it somewhere, to use it when it fits in with the theme of the day? Perhaps.

It's really fascinating, how different the same words sound in context and out; it's also amazing how good I am at remembering what I've written, and recognizing my own writing style. I sometimes have to go back to put it in context, but I generally know when it's mine before I hover over the link and see my name.

Reply priority queue

I have an odd system of sorting my mail. ( And I go into tedious detail. )

The horror! ARGH!

Went to put stuff in dishwasher. ARGH! The horror!

I really need to give seminars on dishwasher packing, or something. One thing that is not wonderful is if plates are jammed in everywhichway, creating a space-wasting tangle, instead of in orderly rows, where you can put in more stuff and therefore save energy washing.

Seriously, the bottom rack of the dishwasher was full when I looked at it. I rearranged it, and it was only 1/3 full, and 2/3 empty. It looked like a practical joke on me, but I fear it wasn't...

New terminology! (Darkside-specific)

From now on, I'm probably not going to be referring to my thing with Darkside, whatever the hell it is, as 'unrequited love', because that suggests a lot more angst than there is.

Instead, it's 'asymmetrical love'.

It's balanced; we're very much friends, and we put proportionately equal amounts of effort into the friendship. (He, being who he is, doesn't devote a lot of time to friendships; I, being me, do devote a lot of time to friendships; I think it's safe to say that of his friendships, I'm one of the ones who gets the most attention.) It's wonderful. We both care very deeply about each other; it's just that I wist for a romantic relationship with him, and he does not, so much. It's balanced, because we're both okay with each other, but not symmetrical, because the absolute amounts of attention we put into the relationship are different, and the catagorizing of the relationship is different...

It works. Asymmetrical is the word I was looking for.

School...

Two kinds of 'not a good day' -- mine and his.

Mine: I wasn't up to going at all.

His: he sits and tries to work, and erases because it isn't absolutely perfect. Teacher threatened to remove the erasers from all his pencils; I asked him to try and pretend his eraser wasn't there tomorrow, and ask himself, "Was that a little mistake or a BIG MISTAKE?" and if it's a little one, move on, and only if it's a HUGE GIGANTIC MISTAKE erase. I also asked him if any letters were hard for him to write.

Evidently the "hair" letters were hard to write. So when we got home, he practiced writing some letters. He worked on writing the word "rig", actually. I stressed how all the letters are at least supposed to come up to the middle dotted line...

We'll see.

Dude?

Did anyone else's color schemes suddenly go wax0red? Mine's now all mint-green and pale purple, with white.

This is t3h sp00ky.

Friend matchups

zanna_voodoo and rubrchick might or might not get along.

It's odd, when you're reading something behind a cut-tag, and you think it's one person with a well-developed writing style, and find that it's in fact someone else who has developed a very similar style...

Holy gods on a smoking sesame-seed bun.

It shouldn't be considered counterfeit if there isn't any chance in motherfucking hell that a sane person would recognize it as legal currency.

Happy kid.

Little Fayoumis is set up out in the living room with the stereo on, his spinning ball of colored lights on, the strobe light on, the police light on, the mini spinning colored ball, and the disco ball on. He's got some white iridescent tinsel that hasn't been cut to separate it from the thing that holds it together that it came on that he's shaking around like he's on the cheerleading squad.

He's a Happy Little Fayoumis.

An aside: I really don't see what the issue is with het guys preferring to be on the cheerleading squad. As evealone put it, why would you want to hang out with the guys when you could be hanging out with the girls with no other guys around?

He just popped his head in asking if I wanted to dance. I'd love to, but that would sadly make my cold worse.

...Kids.

Of course, his attention span is strictly limited, so now he's packing up and putting away, having turned off all the lights. I showed him where the stereo power button is, so next time he'll be able to turn it off by himself.

Heck, I should sit down with him and the stereo remote and give him the grand tour.

One of those joyful evenings at home...

Note: when you see the glass container of espresso in the fridge, and shove it further back on the shelf when you know it's going to fall? That doesn't work. No matter how far back you think you got it, it's still going to leap out and shatter the next time someone opens the fridge.

So marxdarx has been cleaning up espresso and broken glass.

This disrupted the flow of the entire evening, of course. Little Fayoumis was startled to have his cheerful routine status queries snapped down; I suppose one of the alternate-phase-of-operations rules he should be learning is: when Marx is busy with something when something went wrong, don't say anything to him unless it's an emergency.

It seems that everybody's been worried about me. I don't really see why. But then, I realize that I've seen me like this at least [(20-4) * 3.5] = 56 times, as I'd get sick like this about three and a half times a year back home in Alaska (my active memories only go back until four or so, and I was there until 20). This is actually better than most of those. I was only completely down for four days, and I'll probably lose the cough within the week.

Contrast this with my "colds" in Alaska. I had, from the start of my school years: the back-to-school cold, the Thanksgiving cold, the Christmas cold, the Valentine's Day cold, the May Day or birthday cold, and likely the 4th of July cold as well. I counted myself lucky if I skipped one of those. I did, from time to time.

My colds started out with the sniffly nose. This was followed quickly by the actively snotty nose, and then it worked down into my throat and lungs. I would have a ghastly cough for the week and a half duration of the cold, and would continue with the cough and sniffly nose for what felt like a month after the cold proper was over.

Now, my coughs are not a delicate, ladylike little cough. These coughs have the full power of my 8+ years of singing experience, and all my theatre training, behind them. They are deep and alarming; they cause the casual observer or the unfamiliar to guess that I'm dying, or in immediate danger of expiring. I used to wake myself up coughing on a regular basis, when I was a kid.

When I was a kid, I also used to be up in the middle of the night crying because I couldn't breathe. I would cough, and cough, and cough, and I still had a clogged nose and a clogged throat. Mama would have to calm me down and get me to inhale steam with menthol crystals melted in the water before I could breathe, despite cough medicine and decongestant.


Since I've come to Arizona, I've had regular allergies, but nothing to compare to my regular colds in Alaska. In fact, by the time I was 16 or so, I knew what the first wish I'd make would be, had I three wishes: good health, without having to worry about maintaining it.

I didn't wake up crying because I couldn't breathe, this weekend. I woke up frustrated, from bad dehydrated dreams of evil pervasive snot, but I didn't wake up coughing and crying and sniffling and barely able to breathe. I haven't had to go to sleep propped up on pillows so I can breathe. Even at the worst of it, I didn't remember that I should probably be taking something to squash the symptoms so I wouldn't get more crud in my lungs, because it wasn't all that bad.

I'm not really treating this as a bad cold, despite its being one of the worst I've had since coming to Arizona, because it's nothing compared to how sick I used to be, virtually all the time.

So... no need to be worried.

Major suckage

votania's phone is on the blink, for whatever reason. Says to call Customer Service.

At least she'll be home within the hour.

Quizzy

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