12:27 PM 3/17/2011
Wearing: Green skirt with all the cord embellishments and the velvet stripes, black shirt, black sweater, green, orange, and black rubber bracelets, my star (very pointedly, without the other necklace I usually wear) and my snake ring. Also lipstick (magenta) and eyeshadow (green). HAPPY ALL SNAKES DAY. Someone on twitter mentioned that today is in fact a Thursday. I passed this advisory along to Amal, because apparently we are still fifteen. :D

Picked up packages from office. SO MANY PACKAGES. There were only two things in that whole Amazon order that were shipped together. Also, the package from nnaylime! Complete with photo of dog! :D

Went to farmers' market with aunt. Cabbage, cauliflower, onions, strawberries, limes. I'm thinking that it's a good day for sangria.

There was a stop after that, and I looked at luggage but today was not a good day for it, and got a laundry cart.

Unpacked, the packages proved to contain:

BPAL from nnaylime, with the aforementioned photo of dog. I shall squee with my aunt later, also.

The book from Amazon, one that someone had recommended.

Extract of violet, for the cunning energy drink scheme. Though I fear that this one is more for the herbal benefits of the violet and less for the taste. May have to order something else.

Liquid B-vitamin. Alas, it is cherry-flavored. We shall see if that upsets the balance.

Pure anhydrous caffeine powder. I tend to find out about the world by sticking my nose in things. It occurred to me, as I was bringing the bottle to my nose to see what it smelled like, that vigorously sniffing near white powdered stimulant was just an all-around bad plan. So I very carefully and delicately inhaled, careful to not create a breeze big enough to pick up much in the way of particulates. No particular smell of note. Tastes fucking nasty, though.

A little scale, on the recommendation of the bodybuilders who tend to buy caffeine and taurine and liquid B-vitamins, because getting the wrong amount of whatever you're measuring is just an all-around bad plan. The scale is small, adorable, and most worryingly, extremely -- one might say excessively -- portable. It looks as if it was designed by a reputable scientific electronics company who nonetheless were aware that this was probably going to be used by drug dealers as well as health nuts, and designed it with their needs in mind. It's really clever -- the box it came in is hard, stiff cardboard with embedded magnets, and a foam pad that holds the scale and its accessories in place. So you can just basically leave it in the box and use it. I find the extent to which the portability concept is taken to be vaguely disturbing, as I do the likely assumptions of Amazon's computer system after I visited it and bought it.

(Previous boxes had contained the Roomba filters, the taurine, and the set of itty-bitty measuring spoons that the bodybuilders had also recommended. They are wee, and perfect for dumping tiny but measured bits of white powder onto the scale. Oh god. I am going to have to tape a note inside the scale box with the weight/substance pairs that I have found best for energy drink composition, so that if someone ever does notice that I have a bitty scale with traces of white powder, they will come to the correct conclusion, not the obvious one.)


1:43 PM 3/17/2011
I mixed up a drink with all of the energy and flavor components that I was planning to use, and it tastes sort of like [metaphorical] ass. (Also, it looks like pee, and that is a worrying color in a bottle of liquid.) The taurine has been previously tested, and does not impart any noticeable flavor that my taste buds (semi-supertaster for the ick in cilantro) can discern. The caffeine is strong and bitter, but I think the ringer is the B-Complex. (Which is definitely the component responsible for the pee-like color.) So that's out next time. Failure is always an option!


9:52 PM 3/17/2011
I have figured out a hilarious costume for Halloween or some costume party or a convention. Today I was wearing green eyeshadow (not subtle) in honor of the holiday, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in the kitchen (not hard, the whole blamed closet door is mirrored) and observed that my eyes looked like something from a Boris Vallejo painting. I'd used lime green, bluegrass green, and as close to pumpkinfucker orange as the set of eyeshadow had (more of a bronze). I decided that should the opportunity present itself, I should dress up in some fantastic costume, and paint every inch of exposed skin in pearlescent eyeshadow of various supersaturated and slightly improbable colors, and attend the masquerade as a Boris Vallejo painting. amberfox found this just about as hilarious as I did.

Amber and I did not get to talk on the phone as much as we would have entirely liked, due to both of us keeping getting calls of the kind we could not ignore. In my case, it was $AGENCY-related (yay!). But other than that, I sliced strawberries and limes and chattered with Amber.


11:24 PM 3/17/2011
Discovered that my bag of potatoes had grown tentacles. I'm a touch on the exhausted side, so going out tonight to get more is not on the books. Tomorrow, though! I have the boiled-cabbage part of the colcannon-in-potentia boiled and sealed up awaiting the potatoes.

Also, there is strawberry-lime sangria steeping. I use a ridiculous ratio of fruit to wine, and I can only imagine the SIZE of the batch that would result if I used a whole $20 or $30 on it. (One $10 gallon of wine, the sort that comes in a carboy and leaves it stained when it sits after opening. A half-flat of strawberries is $10 this time of year. Four limes are $1 if you're paying for them, $0 plus transit if you know someone who has a tree and needs to do something with them. Sugar is cheap. Soda is cheap and you can use the inexpensive stuff.)

Tomorrow: shopping shenanigans scheduled.

Saturday: see seanan_mcguire's journal for details; hilarity is to ensue at Borderlands. I will be part of the adoring crowd of fans saying "Yay!" at all sorts of moments, both the appropriate and inappropriate. (Seanan has a book coming out in the fall? Yay! Seanan would like to unleash horrible bloody viral death upon the world? Yay! We are ... somewhat disturbing.)

ursamajor picked the following interests of mine to ask about:

poodle! stop humping!, yeeth, Cordelia Vorkosigan, duct tape sword guys, ectogenesis, egyptian fayoumi, Liquid Satan, Malkavian

She mentioned that most* of them sounded as if they were fantasy-related. In actual practice, the links are often tenuous at best.

( Read more... )

Curious about some of my other interests? Ask away! Want to have something to write about? Say the word, and I'll pick a handful of yours for you to post about.

Monkeys tazed & nasal jellybeans. Bounceback messages that need translation are no fun. Caffeine now likely a dietary requirement.

Lo, today is full of requests that are not fun. Solution: caffeine. I then plan to work some more when I get home. Two months is long. :(

I went to go watch M*A*S*H tonight and encountered a resistance. I'm bad about watching movies and things. I'll go out and see movies in the theatres. I'll buy DVDs. I'll watch movies with friends. I just don't sit down and watch a movie by myself.

Tonight I realized what this was.

Back in 1998, during my first (failed) attempt at college, I had a nasty little depressive episode. It was the sort where I was up all night because I couldn't sleep, and then asleep all day because I was up all night, sleeping for nearly twelve hours a day, feeling generally disoriented, and completely unable to recover myself from the nasty little emotional shock that had set it off.

I don't like to dwell on it. The past is always the past, but some of my past is an open book, and some is a closed book. That part of the past is not only closed, but locked as tightly as I can bear to keep it. There are some parts that were good, but the rest -- I describe it as "a black cloud" when I look back on the depressions. It's like walking through ice-fog in the dark, with no streetlamps to make it glow and provide illumination, just a darkness with occasional flashes of illumination. (I could probably have used this book then; I was certainly flailing about ever more wildly in my knowledge that I hurt enough to want to die but I didn't actually want to die die, just wanted the hurting to stop.)

I did have some emergency measures. When I knew I was on the edge of seriously falling apart, I had a temporary measure that would fix me up good as new and get me through the night unless something worse happened. I would take .75 liters of Jolt (I got it in the liter bottles from the little dorm store, and one time I wanted to know exactly how much it did take to get me out of the dangerous frame of mind) to artificially elevate my mood to the point where I could be made to laugh, and apply a comedy. Any comedy. It didn't matter which one, so long as it would make me laugh. Laughing would get me the rest of the way out of danger for the night, and I'd be decently all right. So I'd sit by myself in my room and watch a movie. Company would have been better, but bad company was more dangerous than no company at all.

150 mg of caffeine + 1 comedy = the ability to live until morning.

Needless to say, I don't ever want to go there again. And something small inside me still doesn't feel quite safe watching a movie by myself unless absolutely necessary to save what's left of sanity in order to save our life.

"My favorite humor columnist said it was dreadful" should not be a major selling point. But it is.

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/364.html -- bookmark.
http://www.trickster.org/kass/dream.html -- triofic, yum.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4879822.stm Zuma, you idiot.
http://community.livejournal.com/metaquotes/4925868.html cadhla encounters Coca-Cola Blak. No clear winner is determined. Except maybe her writing.

I've been having sleep issues lately. My sleep schedule is all screwed up, and I'm not sure how to put it right. I went to bed at 11:30-ish, and woke up at 2 unable to get back to sleep. I did wind up getting maybe another half-hour nap before the alarm clock went off. I'm lucky that I'm starting out feeling sharp and ready to hit the day, or else this would be a hellish ordeal.

Incidentally, I'm pulling a double shift today. I took the precaution of preparing myself 500+ mL of sweetened espresso with chocolate in a flask. (Well, more of a bottle than a proper flask, but it's the idea that counts. I wonder if any of the Junque Shoppes will sell a replica of Mad-Eye Moody's flask? That's some cool equipment there.)

The plan is to not hit the coffee unless and until I actually start feeling groggy, though I may violate that straight off because it's so tasty-smelling.

A list of odd or amusing band names or fictional band names
A blasphemous combination of dark hurricane humor and Magic: The Gathering cards. Warning: tasteless humor. Warning: reasonably equal-opportunity mockery.
Google fucked up; Google apologized; Google's going to fix the broken blog-search.
Caffeine content for a variety of sources. Also, the lethal dosage of many different forms of caffeine input.

Random complaint: the Skyehawke archives are having an utter bear of a time loading chapter-to-chapter; sometimes I have to open in new tab to force the next chapter to load.

Googlism: azurelunatic is: ...
azurelunatic is knocking out an average of 0.51 kittens per day over her lifetime.
azurelunatic is making some in the kitchen.
azurelunatic is that a soldering iron in your pocket?
azurelunatic is the appropriate link.
azurelunatic is happy.
azurelunatic is SQuishy.
azurelunatic is not a member of any public groups.
azurelunatic is offline.
azurelunatic is on the Cartman Cluster.
azurelunatic is the writer.
azurelunatic is a demented rainbow.
Joanie's is situated among tall pines on a hill overlooking town.
Joanie is faced with a dilemma.
Joanie is a cunning ham.
Joanie is doing very well.
Joanie is now back in Japan for more wrestling.
Joanie is the last of six.
Joanie is probably not entitled to a pension.
Joanie is always excited to hear from you!
Joanie is a teacher/librarian.
Joanie is coming to town!

Darkside is, evidently, allergic to girls. Also, the coolest, sooooooo cute, a camwhore, nice, updated monthly, a number of acronyms, already registered, and not a villain.

The hot tub was very relaxing. I sat in there for an hour reading. I think I really needed that.

Monitoring this morning. Laser Mom gave me a lift halfway to work. That was fun. If I followed the rules about never getting into a vehicle with a strange person, I would never be able to get into a vehicle with any of my friends, because we are all strange. Except for figment0. He is very, very strange.

Limiting an interaction with someone to face-to-face in public and commenting back and forth on a public LJ post somewhere -- those are actually two very similar ways of doing it. Both ways, it's in public, possibly with witnesses. Just, online witnesses, not meatspace ones.

It has already been a nutty morning. There were issues with things, where by "things" I mean "people", and by "issues" I mean "I want to whack them over the head with a Nerf bat."

I think break is going to require rather a lot of coffee.