Things the Roomba has eaten:

a corner of the black satin sheet that's getting retired because my nasty cracked heels have shredded it
a plastic cat spring
a different plastic cat spring
a short colored pencil
a catnip rat
the tassel on the corner of Escape Calico's cardboard scratchy-pad
a corner of the good cotton sheet, several times
a lot of long hair (both Alex and I are longhairs)
several pieces of paper
half a blueberry


Things the Roomba has mistaken for a cliff:

a corner of the black satin sheet it tried to eat
the black bath mat
to be strictly fair, the heating vent on the floor of the main bedroom is a cliff, but it's a safe one

The roombots were excellent. They also required a whole lot of prep to make sure that they didn't eat anything they weren't supposed to. Twitter threads, including some cat moments.

Belovedest took stock of the runner rugs in the kitchen and asked if we really needed them. Given the circumstances, we probably do not. They do help guard my sensitive little feet from any sharp debris, but the roombots will help keep any sharp debris from collecting long enough to be a danger to my sensitive little feet. So out they went, along with the other ones except the door mat. We ordered some anti-fatigue mats for stove and sink. They were on sale, and bumped the washable scrubby pad for the floor washing robot up to free shipping.

After the floor exercises (including cats vs. roombae), Belovedest and I went on to contemplate the pantry. The cans are sorted again, and the one can that was nearing its date was lunch for me. Jams and dressings have gone to shelves in the lower right hand cupboard.

Both the green glass beads and the package with the bike lasers arrived. I was not impressed with the bike laser packaging; they spilled out into the envelope with their stuff. Apparently the brand "Penesamig" battery has been around for a while. Hat tip to wohali. These batteries don't seem quiiiiiite that flimsy.

I have a pair of prescription swim goggles now. My eyes are close enough again that I figure my left eye can just cope with the same prescription as my right eye for the duration of however long I'm going to be in the water, when the world is such that I get to go swimming again.

Purple was online when I said hey, and we caught up for a bit. His washer's out of service. Mama's been trying her hand at mask sewing.

Pips (the sibling, not the cat) pitched game night, but when time rolled around nobody else seemed up for it. I banged my head against the slides a little more. It always seems like I have to entirely re-do the slides for the different groups, but in retrospect that's both accurate and expected. Group 1: a bunch of techies, making the pitch that you need moderation and this is why (and how). Group 2: a bunch of moderators, needing detail on this is how, and some wandering into the weeds. Group 3: a bunch of the people who will be both getting moderated and learning the soft skills in helping keep the entire show on the correct path. I've been altering days working and days mostly hiding in bed, in accordance with the prophecy.

Gnocchi and pea pods. Then, Labyrinth, as alexseanchai hadn't seen it yet.

The roombot is scheduled for 7am, since this is the time least likely to interfere with a sleep cycle starting, and also least likely to annoy an Escape Calico.

( Specifically disease related )


Today is supposed to be calzone day. The pizza dough is in the bread machine. We have meat sauce and ricotta that need using up. Nom!

Apparently when Notepad++ updates, it doesn't always retain the plugins. So I had to re-download the newly(?) renamed TextFX Characters. Happily the binding to F5 was still in place, so all I had to do was download the thing.

I may have some slightly more forcibly out of the gender closet with some of my women relatives. Peacock Aunt sent a "ladies, wtf do I do with 6 pounds of grits" email. My response was "(Not a lady but)" and a few suggestions. Followed by a discreet link to https://gender.wikia.org/wiki/Agender which hopefully my mother will take to heart.

Apropos of the coming Roomba, I have re-read https://tomatonation.com/stories-true-and-otherwise/viva-la-roombalucion/
It's a pair, a Roomba and a Braava. We have not yet decided on names. We have shipping information now, even though we don't yet know the intended delivery date.

The calzones are being assembled. It's a three-person process, I think. I got all greased up and divided the dough, and started stretching it. alexseanchai added toppings. Belovedest forked the edges together.

Apropos of Belovedest and me quoting lines from "The Terrible Secret of Space", I have submitted a provisional application to name the cleaning robots Pak and Chooie. (This might possibly be expanded to Pac-Man and Chewbacca, who knows.)

Calzones were delicious! Next time the salami goes on the bottom layer, to better contain and salt the cheese. Still delicious.

Came back from shopping, and R. Daneel was charged again. Set him to Roombulating. Had to run away from IRC for a few moments because he'd started chewing on someone else's charger cable, and was attempting to run away with it.

[00:19] azurelunatic OH GOD R DANEEL
[00:19] azurelunatic BRB
[00:19] cme ?
[00:21] azurelunatic it's like toddlers, in a way.
[00:21] azurelunatic you think you have made the area sufficiently safe, and then you set them loose, and you're keeping half an eye on them and chatting with your friends
[00:22] azurelunatic and suddenly it's R. DANEEL, STOP EATING THAT ELECTRICAL CORD THIS INSTANT
[00:22] azurelunatic YOU NAUGHTY ROOMBA
[00:23] cme oooooooooooooooh
[00:23] cme yes! I have had this roomba experience as well!

[00:24] azurelunatic: (and R. Daneel started eating electrical cords. :D )
[00:24] niqaeli: a cannibal, huh?
[00:24] niqaeli: *g*
[00:25] azurelunatic: I won't start fearing that until he noms a bluetooth headset or something
[00:26] niqaeli: heh
[00:26] niqaeli: that's fair
[00:27] azurelunatic: (because, I mean, it's not like he doesn't try to eat his OWN power cord.)
[00:27] niqaeli: heh.
[00:42] * azurelunatic has pinned him in my closet-hallway
[00:46] niqaeli: aw, no more freedom for roomba?
[00:47] azurelunatic: Less freedom, more deep vacuuming of the closet.
[00:47] niqaeli: ahhh
[00:48] azurelunatic: (I got a bathrobe. the bathrobe is black microplush. my apartment is carpeted in industrial beige.)
[01:11] azurelunatic: aww, he's herded all my shoes into a pile.



5:23 AM
An excerpt from The Book of Wholesome Hobbies That Denise Has Forbidden Her Volunteers From Taking Part In:

• Deleting every single comment that an ex-friend has left in your journal and marking it as spam. (It's the marking it as spam part that's forbidden. Delete to your heart's content.)
• Feeding the trolls.
• Hanging out with that guy who points AK-47s at you.
• Making a large number of completely outlandish suggestions in dw_suggestions for the sole purpose of making the person handling the moderation queue crack up.
• http://qdb.dreamwidth.net/dw/258

On Julian Assange ending sentences with two spaces after the period, me: "Of all the things one could judge him for, that sounds amazingly nitpicking/petty. I'm not above a good spelling flame, but that's sort of like telling George W. Bush his ears are big."

5:47 PM
suggestion: allow moderator to report-as-spam in a comm as well, given that they can do it from the moderation queue?

I learned about spontaneous pistachio combustion.

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.)

( Music, writing, LJ-meta, agoraphobia, apartment complexities. )

5:56 PM 3/2/2010
Reading fic, and that got me stopped on the fic and started reading up on the different types and applications of safewords.
( Safewords. )

( Housecleaning with a roomba. )