I was Feeling Not Quite The Thing into the afternoon, and fell over for a nap sufficiently substantial that I had nearly no time to run the errands I'd planned to. I was going to meet up with Guide Dog Aunt for a movie this evening. (Wednesdays are no good: she has Boat that night. Boat is her granddog. Boat has enough German Shepherd to be a terror.)

I started having what may have been hot flashes over the weekend. Small ones. (Mumble) did the responsible-and-helpful thing (genuinely) and poked me to poke the doctor's office about it. I emailed. (They called me at fuck o'clock on Monday morning, left a voicemail saying I should call them, but just in case because I'd said that the phone was "hard" -- I'd said that the phone was the worst way for contact, in fact -- that they'd email too.) Their return email said that I should take my temperature twice a day, and if anything hit above 100F, to take my temperature an hour later, and call them immediately if it went over that.

FRIEND NURSE, I ASKED YOU ABOUT HOT FLASHES. THIS IS THE FEVER INFORMATION YOU HAVE GIVEN ME.

Also, since I haven't had a child living with me in ... ages, I did not in fact have a functional thermometer.

It turns out that iPods do not like playlists with All The Stuff on it. And that turning off podcast syncing will in fact empty the iPod of all podcasts. This means that re-syncing takes about an hour, if it's the old-style thing and you've got about 5-6 gigs of audio to get back on the thing.

So just as my aunt was finding a parking space, I rolled in with my new thermometer and some cold groceries to put away. We then zipped off to the library to find some movies of mutual interest.

On the way, I gave her the update on the Latest Information On My Social Life. This included a super awkward conversation about a delicate topic, lasting basically until we got through the library doors, and commencing again once we left. *facepalm* Family, gentlefolks. Honesty can be helpful. Honesty can also be utterly embarrassing.

I had not, in fact, seen Pride and Prejudice, though I have certainly read the book. Guide Dog Aunt thinks Matthew Macfadyen resembles a young Dylan Moran, and I can see the resemblance.

IRC on the iPad, and a keyboard in my pocket, kept me moderately chatty with the usual suspect(s) during quieter moments of the movie.

The house is in moderate chaos. The solar panels are on the roof; tomorrow's the day when all the electricity gets shut off in order to hook those in. (I registered a charger for some electric vehicle or other. I think Woodworking Uncle may have a new toy.) Guide Dog Aunt's kitchen is getting renovated hardcore. There are boxed-up appliances shoved in the parlor, and the two big chairs have been replaced by something a little less murderous on the back.

As I headed out, I saw a familiar black-and-white striped rump and tail disappearing under the porch. My aunt had thought that the underside of the house had been rendered sufficiently inaccessible to skunk-kind. Apparently not. And she's got Boat (the shepherd with no chill) tomorrow. Fortunately she's got about a gallon of skunk-wash on hand...

Next doctor's appointment is Tuesday morning, in Oakland. quartzpebble plans to meet me there, for backup.

Guide Dog Aunt threw a game night on Saturday. It took me a little longer to get ready than I'd hoped, but I did get over there. There was a Cards Against Humanity game in progress, and I was dealt in.

My aunt is all about the house rules that say that the purpose of the game is to have fun, so there were a few un-fun cards quietly put in with the used cards. Another common house rule is that if you don't know what it is (or don't admit to knowing what it is) you don't have to play it. Some people chose to ask things like "Who's Michael Bay? What's 'queefing'?" and many people were enlightened. "I didn't know there was a word for that!"

"What's Harry Potter erotica?"
"Well, when someone loves the Harry Potter books a lot, and writes little stories..."
"Oh! ... How do you know these things?"

One of the people who was new to the game was enticed in to play just one round, for the second go. By the second time we had got around the table, she was gleefully choosing a slightly weaker card, out of kindness to the current czar.

I won one hand by pairing "In this world there is nothing certain but death and ____" with "Soup that is too hot." Guide Dog Aunt agreed mightily.


It came time to cease partying, and everybody went home. I stuck around to help clean up all the fun, and with three people working at it, it was fairly quick. I caught up with my aunt, and then went home and went to bed.

A note on formatting: the pipe, '|', is used to denote multiple instances of the same person. The slash, '/', is used to denote pairings.


Family:

Immediate: I have mother/father, and sister. Mama and Dad live in Alaska (where I grew up); Tay-Tay has moved to Seattle, where she lives with her consort. She is younger. She plays violin in several bands. (She plays other instruments too.)

Guide Dog Aunt is local to me, a few minutes away by car, and is my aunt by way of being the youngest sister of Dad. She is a bit of a mother hen, tiny, hilarious, loves (and trains) dogs (her current dogs are the four-year-old "blue" (smoke-grey) Standard Poodle, Dazzle ("the poodle", or "Poodle! stop humping!"), and the 11-going-on-12-year-old Black (turning white around the edges) Lab, Deacon, who is not allowed to hump/be humped anymore because his joints are starting to go), tangoes, gardens, and is generally excellent. She is married with two boys, both now with their bachelor's degrees. The older one (and the 5th-youngest of all my cousins, also the family member closest to me in age aside from my sister) is my Infamous Cousin raranax, who is best known for The Chocolate Penis Saga, but also makes a habit of supplying me with every hilarious and needs-titanium-eyespork thing he can find on the internet.

( This is going to get long. )

12:12 AM 4/21/2010
Tonight during Glee, I traumatized IRC with a Luc Valvona song. :D :D :D :D
(Most of the Fishies know what I'm talking about here. Some of you may not. Heh. Heh.)

Perhaps it is a bit windy outside. I hear some banging. Earlier, there was hail. (Hail now makes me smile sweetly and look distant, due to the "DO YOUR WORST!!!" incident. Sweetie, if you yell that at the sky, I don't care if it's Arizona, your ass deserved that hail, darling.) (Insert linked memory of Voltaire-related shenanigans here.)

12:16 AM 4/21/2010
My head is a broken search engine. Tonight, Madonna's "Borderline" made me giggle inappropriately, because my head has associated "Borderline" with a song by a different band, and now the word itself has ... connotations. TURN AROUND AND TAKE MY HAND.

7:27 AM 4/21/2010
So last night I had a long and complicated dream involving god knows what-all. As I was waking up, we and everyone were at some kind of show, and there was some kind of danger, and people (again unspecified, but some were) were thinking about the best way to get the word out, and it turned out that the best way to get the word out was via the Mythbusters. Adam was there, and Jamie was there too, and Jamie had a secret Twitter account that no-one was supposed to know about.

See, we'd just apprehended this guy who had met Stacey at a sushi restaurant, took one look at her general beauty and her legs, and fell for her and (because he was also crazy) basically started stalking her, ( Read more... )

8:23 AM 4/21/2010
There was apparently another power outage ( Read more... )

12:25 AM 4/22/2010
I should mention the state of the current Dog Issues. Deacon (the black lab) is still somewhat creaky, but when properly medicated, he's mostly ok except for distance and stairs.

Dazzle (the poodle) was at the vet or somewhere ... the day before yesterday? ... and they noticed something in his mouth that might be nothing and might be some sort of cancer. They removed two things from his mouth. My aunt is quietly freaking out. And the poodle is resistant to being given pain pills, yet he needs them at this point.

Today's events included no walk, because it was amazingly windy (I love the wind, but my aunt does not), ( Read more... )

Even more meta is brewing in my head. You have been warned. :-P

Tomorrow: farmer's market.

Yay, my aunt came by with a care package this morning: white grape juice, applesauce, rice cakes, saltine crackers, and chicken broth.

I have been keeping stuff down this morning.


I am also testing something here; please to comment?
Edit: ha, so this "Allow Comments? Don't E-mail" noise? Not working like it should.

(from theferrett's What is the best cake you've ever had? post, expanded somewhat)

Mama made almost all our cakes, from scratch. I wasn't even particularly aware that they sold cake mixes until much later. For the longest time, the traditional birthday cake was golden layer cake with white buttercream frosting, and/or whipped cream, and strawberries, until I expressed a preference for chocolate. Then it became chocolate cake (from the recipe on the back of the Hershey's cocoa powder box) with chocolate buttercream frosting.

Mama's relationship with baking cakes was complex. They were always delicious, but sometimes they fell apart. There were superstitions about how to get a cake to come out right, including "It's just a home cake," said in the cake's presence before turning it out of the pan, as a home cake was almost always perfect, and a cake to take somewhere else often came out with craters. (One frosted them back together, put the nicest layer on top, and took it anyway.)

For one of the birthdays of my teenage years (this may have been 1996), Mama had the standard two-layer chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream icing. As a joke, she had frosted it with white buttercream chicken tracks and a Hershey's kiss, because we had chickens (the batch of four Egyptian Fayoumi, teenaged) in the bathroom at the time.

We had been out all day at Suzuki Institute, and came home to see that the entryway was *trashed*, with chicken droppings all over, and the chickens sitting innocently in their box in the bathroom, with the netting pushed to the side. Who, them?

The wreckage proved to be mostly confined to the square of light from the bathroom door and a bit up the stairs. The cake was untouched, and was now doubly hilarious.

Another excellent cake was the Enterprise. It was huge, and kind of weird-shaped, and lumpy, and blueish where it should have been grey, but it was nonetheless awesome. My virtual aunt made it, although for whose event I can't recall anymore.

Mama made the wedding cake for my virtual uncle and his (now ex) wife. It was some lovely golden cake with wild Alaskan cranberries in it, the sour kind that leave you spoiled for any domestic cranberries ever, with cream cheese frosting and little garnishes of fresh cranberries. I decided then and there that screw bakery cakes, I wanted this at my own wedding.

Then there was The Year of the Two Birthday Cakes (2005, in point of fact).

Grandma was going to the nursing home, so we were cleaning out the ancestral home. This was around the same time as my birthday, and my family decided that a late celebration was in order. I went out with Dawn for breakfast the day that the celebration was planned, and while we were out, I decided I might as well pick up a cake.

Now, Guide Dog Aunt is notorious about health food fads and general clean living, so I decided that I'd go for as healthy as possible a cake, and picked a gorgeous tart covered with fresh fruit (and glistening with sugar syrup, as it turned out). We returned, cake borne proudly, just as my aunt returned, proudly bearing a swanky bakery box.

We looked at each other, looked at our own parcels, and busted up laughing, then compared cakes. She'd got something that looked truly decadent, with a very smoothly frosted chocolate top with a chocolate fan garnish, and sides that had been browned in a checkerboard pattern. She'd been thinking of my tastes while I was thinking of hers.

We cut into both cakes that evening, and we had enough people that it was good we had as much cake as we did. My tart turned out to be filled with gooey and delicious custard, and her expensive fancy cake turned out to be dry and disappointing aside from the lovely chocolatey bits.

In the last 24 hours, I posted the following to Twitter:

• Monday, 0006: Heee: http://thefuckingweather.com/
• Monday, 1011: @irohawk I moved in December? It was kind of a big production at the time, and then I went all hermity.
• Monday, 1132: @cassieclare That takes the advanced touch-typing skills, and talent, and possibly a high tolerence for OMG CLAWS IN THE FACE. I'm impressed
• Monday, 1215: I can attest that chickens do not like to wear bonnets from my own experience too. http://tinyurl.com/b3pw5w
• Monday, 1630: I'm at Fort Funston - http://bkite.com/04Hj5
( read the other 15 )

Follow me on Twitter.

In the last 24 hours, I posted the following to Twitter:

• Tuesday, 0906: Words I just used to describe aunt's cleaning crew to IRC, and waking up thereto: "Very efficient. Lots of vacuum cleaners."
• Tuesday, 0909: @amyty I'm so glad California doesn't have those. Doesn't help you much though. :(
• Tuesday, 0914: @amyty If you liked that, try Charlie Chaplin with Attila: http://tinyurl.com/3v85gy
• Tuesday, 0938: Support greasemonkey gurus: I would love a script to select me my "Suggestions Queen" userpic in Suggestions, automatically.
• Tuesday, 0939: @thedivinegoat You just pinged out
( read the other 39 )

Follow me on Twitter.

So my aunt's been trying to teach this shelter dog, Spence, some manners. See, she has this internship thing going on, and part of the internship is to train a dog, and include a before and after video. Her first dog, the Snowball from Hell, was a great trainee dog and took well to the training. However, her video skillz were not up to muster (the tape ran out on the camera) and she had to re-do. Thus, Spence.

When she brought Spence home for the evening a few days ago, raranax promptly dubbed him Shpanky.

The existing dogs do not get on with him so well. He's much improved: he used to jump up on people, barge through doors, nip, leap on furniture, and a host of other obnoxious little behaviors. Now, he merely does up-skirt nosing, tries to hump the poodle (my uncle says that the poodle only lets Deacon hump him because Deacon licks his dick first, and there is some merit to this observation), nips occasionally, stands on his hind legs but doesn't put his paws on people, sometimes puts his feet up on things, and sometimes takes a while to sit before going through a door.

	(not) behaving Shpanky the shelter dog outside
	Bitey Shpanky. The poodle puts up with a lot.

Yesterday was a whole lot of not so much. My aunt and I were planning to go to http://www.calacademy.org/, but the parking situation looked dire enough that it seemed that everyone was there. (There was a great moment involving a bike-car and them passing another bike-car right in front of us; that got thumbs-up from us.) So we resolved to go another day. I was feeling mildly miserable due to not quite enough sleep, and the beginnings of a cold. We did stop in at the library, and I checked out some Thursday Next books, and proceeded to read them all afternoon.

Today may involve a raid on a 90% off sale, because my aunt needs pants and towels. Ph34r.