karawynn

My personal writing will appear on karawynn.net for the foreseeable future. Also, for a while at least, it should be more frequent. :)

"You hang onto your pain like it means something, like it's worth something. Well, let me tell you -- it's not worth shit. Let it go. Infinite possibilities and all you can do is whine."

"Well, what am I supposed to do?"

"What do you think? You can do anything you want, you lucky bastard -- you're alive! What's a little pain compared to that?"


It's been a rough few months. Much pain, both physical and not. Watched the last episode of Six Feet Under, Season 4, tonight. Took it to heart ... at least for the moment. We'll see how I feel tomorrow.


"It can't be that simple."

"What if it is?"

...

For a partial update on our current status, see http://www.pocketmint.net/.

This is beautifully written, and achingly true: Keith Olbermann on gay marriage.

I know posting the link here is like preaching to the choir, but perhaps some of you have friends or family members who do not support gay marriage rights. This might be a good thing to send them.

"The world is barren enough. It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us — all of us — to go forward ... With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against each other for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?"

My userpic has swapped to something I've never seen before. My black-and-white webcam photo has been replaced with something I don't even understand, much less recognize. /jawdrop

LJ account hack or database snafu?

This amused me for a good ten minutes.

Palin as President

Yanked from littleowl , a politics quiz:


You are a

Social Liberal
(80% permissive)

and an...

Economic Liberal
(15% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Socialist


You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness.

After a rough couple of weeks, I finally am having an almost cheerful day. I attribute this largely to the very pleasant dinner we had with Maggy and Patrick last night. Home-cooked Indian good, conversation even better.

This weekend we host a kizlj! For four whole days. I am taking the two weekdays off work because the weekend just isn't enough Stacytime. In addition to the requisite Mashiko trip, she has mentioned a desire to cook with me, yay.

Next weekend was supposed to be travel with urlgirl but was postponed to give her a little breathing room in her schedule. We've invited a couple of game-friends over for dinner but don't have firm acceptance yet. If they can't come it will prolly be just Jak and me.

Last weekend of the month we are cooking dinner for Wolfe and Christa. Jak can be coaxed to participate in the cooking if it involves our outdoor grill and ahi, so that's our centerpiece.

In the dinner invite queue, waiting on their schedules: Maggy & Patrick, tbclone.

It's nice to be able to invite people over again! Yay for remodelling progress.

"I've gotten rid of all the goddamn grids."

That's Daniel Nocera, chemistry professor at MIT. For some reason, that one quote makes me want to give him a big hug.

Every once in a long while — sometimes not for years at a time — I read about something and the skiffy-writer part of my brain goes "YES! YES! THAT IS THE FUTURE."

A little over a decade ago I read about "electronic ink" and had that tingly feeling, and I've been waiting for that technology to come of age ever since. Finally, this year, we get the Kindle.

I'm having that skiffy tingle now. So maybe this is premature, but ... in a decade or so, this could be our ticket out of fossil fuel hell.

Best explanations I've found are at Wired and Forbes. (Forbes? huh.)

Now that I'm more visibly writing online again, I'm starting to get the 'So, about that whole writing career thing?' question with more frequency. To save myself having to explain it individually, I present ( the complete official answer: )

So there you go. Yes, I'll probably write at least one shortish novel someday, but breath-holding is not advised. Meanwhile, I will continue to experiment with other projects, some of which will be writing-based.

I'm forcing myself to break the inadvertent lj silence.

There's a momentum thing at work here; the longer it's been since I've posted, the more I feel like I have to make some all-encompassing update, and it quickly becomes just Too Much. So I'm consciously saying Screw That, and writing something quick and haphazard, dammit.

I've been quiet in part because a lot of my recent writing energy has gone toward Pocketmint. And in part, I am embarrassed to admit, because I resumed playing WoW.

I periodically go cold-turkey on the gaming for months at a time, and my overall life always shows measurable improvement when I do. I get more done. But eventually I start talking about it with people, and I get sucked back in, and ... my Real Life productivity suffers.

I'm working on that. Today I am *not* going to log on until I've finished my current Pocketmint post.

In other news: it's been a rough week. My insomnia has returned, coincident with a bunch of early morning appointments. This has resulted in horrible headaches and intermittent nausea. I also had a rare spate of panic attacks yesterday, for no particular reason. This happens to me maybe two to four times a year, usually just for one day, and every time I kick myself for not having asked for an anti-anxiety prescription ... but I never think about it when I'm at the doctor, because it may have been months since my last attack. I'm due for the annual physical now, so I have *got* to remember this time.

I consider Rotten Tomatoes to be a pretty decent indicator of a movie's worth — the wisdom of crowds and all — but I believe they got it way wrong with Hancock's paltry 37%.

Hancock is a good movie. Not perfect, but good. Definitely worth seeing.

We’ve been back in our house for a week, but I’m slow on the photographic record — so slow that I missed the window between finished floor and furniture delivery. So the floor photos also star our new dining table, chairs, and sideboard.

We did opt to extend the oak floors, and I’m ecstatic that it worked out, although as with everything in this house, we ran into unforeseen problems that increased the cost. The final result is beautiful, though, especially since refinishing the old oak changed it from a dark walnut to a rich gold, further lightening the space.

Along the way we also ripped out the stairwell ‘fence’; Jak and I were in complete accord about the hideousness of that particular feature, which was cobbled together out of mismatched pieces of ... er, I don’t even know the word for it, but the part of the door-facing that the latch and hinges are attached to. I want to replace it with some wide-spaced posts that don't block the light from the sliding door.

In addition to a stair railing, we still need the walls smoothed and painted, plus a bunch of trim work. I’m still trying to decide on colors; I want something lighter than the pumpkin-mustard and chocolate-brown we inherited, but still vibrant and not washed-out. We also have a list of furniture to acquire, as finances allow: two or three tables, a chair, a lamp, a coat rack, and two bookshelves.

But despite the mismatched walls, we do now have the basics for inviting people over: space and dinner seating. No toddlers, though, until we get a new banister ...

More photos and notes are available on Flickr.

To briefly recap where I've been since last post:

First there was the solo trip to Nashville, which was entertaining and informative on several levels. I didn't think about this in advance, but this was the first time I'd been out on my own in seven years. Turns out the trip was much easier than I expected, and reintegrating with my normal life was harder.

Then there were a hectic few days at home and work, followed by another week in a motel, much less comfortably, while further house renovations commenced. (I'll have photos in a day or two.)

Turns out Sammy? Doesn't travel well. Dog was brilliant, not a bit of trouble. Cat was desperate to get OUT OUT OUT of this strange small room, and let us hear about it at top volume. Almost non-stop the first night, and then at regular intervals for the six days thereafter. Sleep? Not so much.

Never. Again. Next time, cat gets a cage in a kennel.

Also, about three weeks ago I decided to start a new project, so most of my non-sleeping, non-working hours lately have gone into that. I brought it online tonight, beating my arbitrary self-imposed deadline by a week. That's what obsession will do for you.

Now I have to go do laundry.

ursulav speaks for me. The only difference is that I started out with a slight preference for Clinton, which eventually inverted to be a slight preference for Obama.

But ye gods and little fishes, I am so tired of hearing about this. I am an NPR junkie and I’ve been turning the radio off on my commutes, because the DTs are preferable to more Clinton/Obama primary analysis. CAN WE MOVE ON ALREADY PLEASE?

Following urlgirl’s lead:

( Absolutely. )

For the same reasons, I’m sure, that my enneagram leads with One.

As I recently noted over at nayad’s place, I have a long list of repeating nightmares. One common recurring theme is ‘bits of me that break’ — most commonly teeth breaking or falling out, hair being cut or falling out, or contacts shattering either in my hand or in my eye.

I guess my contacts are not technically a piece of me, but they might as well be; I’m certainly as dependent upon them as any usual body part. I’ve had contacts for over thirty years now — much longer than I’ve had, say, breasts — having acquired them at the tender young age of seven, because my eyes were just That Bad.

In this age of disposable soft lenses and lasik surgery I am suited for neither; I’ve still got the old-style ‘hard’ or ‘rigid’ lenses valiantly trying to hold some shape to my poor eyeballs. Rigid lenses are both breakable and expensive, a happy combination.

I wasn’t very good at taking care of my contacts at seven (or eight, or nine), something which frustrated and angered my parents no end at the time, but to which I now say, WELL DUH. Your average seven-year-old is NOT EQUIPPED to handle very tiny fragile pieces of plastic several times a day without a certain amount of attrition.

I lost quite a few contact lenses as a kid but only ever broke one once. I was around eight or nine and apparently managed to snap it inside the case; when I next went to put it in I was confronted with spiky shards-of-contact, and a sick ‘Oh god I am so dead’ feeling.

This no doubt informed my nightmares for the next three decades. Often my sleeping brain elaborated upon the concept with charming scenarios that involved sticking a contact into my eyeball without noticing its brokenness, followed by all sorts of gelatinous slicing and inability to remove the offending object. But other times the dreams involved a simple, straightforward snap followed by the horrifying realization that a) that was going to cost a whole lot of money and b) I was screwed for actual sight.

So on Monday, when I got up from a nap (ah, holidays) and opened my case and picked up HALF A CONTACT my first three thoughts were, “Oh shit,” “Oh wait, this must be another one of those dreams,” and “No way, am I actually awake??”.

My second three thoughts were “Fuck me,” “Fuck me,” and “Fuck me.”

Anyway, that was Monday afternoon. Tuesday morning at 9:00:23a I was on the phone to my optometrist’s office; they rush-ordered a replacement lens for me, which I got shortly after lunchtime Wednesday. I appreciate their promptness, because it was pretty much like being without a hand. Yeah sure, you’ve still got one, but you don’t realize exactly how much you need that second one until it's gone.

coopted from tommx:

What American accent do you have?

Neutral. Not Northern, Southern, or Western, just American. Your national American identity is more important to you than your local identity, because you don’t really have a local identity to begin with.



Also interesting is the map, which you can add to once you’ve taken the quiz.

We are back from Mexico. Third day actually, but I’ve been catching up hither and yon, and while urlgirl can attest that I have been incomparably voluble in person, I’m not sorted enough yet to say much in writing.

I have begun to upload select photos to Flickr, specifically ones where I was trying for artistry rather than mere snapshot documentation. Those of you with some photographic know-how are encouraged to leave suggestions and comments.

Some of the ‘we were here’ photos will be along later.

( Lengthy yet incomplete thoughts sparked by other people’s touching of breasts. )