Friday, May 30, 2008

Moving up on Google

I just did a Google search on Peter Woodward, and to my surprise the Peter Woodward Photo Collective (of which I am co-admin) came up on the first page of hits.

At 13th from the top we came in after PeterWoodward.com (as it should be), IMDB.com, Wikipedia, some hits for unrelated people by the same name, a YouTube link, some bios on various film sites, and an article in The Galactic Inquisitor Online asking whether or not Peter Woodward can sing.

So, we're in good company.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

blah

The cable guy came today to fix our internet tubes. We've had next to zero connectivity for the last several days. I've been flattened by a thundering herd of fatigue, so I'd've been mostly offline anyway. So the timing could've been worse.

The Mister was able to be home early when the cable guy arrived, which was good because my Honey speaks "cable". My own geek streak doesn't run toward hardware. Anyway, it turns out there were bad splitters out on the main hookup, and another indoors. I'm not sure about these "splitter" things, but it sounds to me like we must've had some kind of infestation of horrible cable-chewing mynocks. I guess cable guys carry mynock traps because it's all fixed now.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

More Questions

Got my last set of blood tests back. My estradiol level is high... if I'm actually a man and we've just failed to notice that before now. Otherwise it's wayyy low. I'm right on the mark estrogen-wise for a post-menopausal woman. But apparently the previous test ruled out menopause.

If I'm doing the math correctly then: ((very low FSH) + (very low estradiol)) = WTF.

So, more tests yet in my future. Thyroid tests next? I'd very much like to get that WTF changed to an OIC* in the near future.



*"Oh. I see."

Saturday, May 24, 2008

The World of Wifecraft



I laughed so hard I cried when I watched this. Language is mildly NSFW, but the concept is absofrickenlutely brilliant. Might not be funny if you don't know anything at all about World of Warcraft. But if you know who Leeroy Jenkins is, there's a bonus in there for you.

Him: That's easy for you to say, you're level 70!
Her: Goddamn right I am, you newb.

Friday, May 23, 2008

Mixed Messages

My Honey, sitting in the dining room, says (via headset) to his party in World of Warcraft, "Did my silence work on her?" He's playing his troll shadow priest, Zwierdo.

Me to the empty living room, "Well it didn't work on me."

No answer.

I chuckle. "Wait, maybe it did work on me." To the three bathing cats in the room with me, "Can you guys hear me?" They don't even twitch an ear in my direction.

I chuckle at my own joke. I'm easily amused tonight.

My Mister hears my second chuckle, and says, "What? Sorry, Honey. Can't hear you. Boss fight."

I laugh harder.

He says, more frantically, "Boss fight. Can't hear you." I imagine the sounds of the spells and chattering of his guildmates coordinating the fight in his headset, and understand the level of fucos it takes to be a priest in a boss fight in Karazhan.

Me, loudly. "No worries. Just laughing.

"What?"

Louder still, "Just laughing. Tell you later."

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Wombat Says...

The Wombat says, if you ignore his message you are doomed. Repeat, doomed. So get it in gear.

I checked out his message. For a nocturnal marsupial, IMHO, he's got a really good grasp of the situation.

More tests again


More tests again
Originally uploaded by Pockafwye
The tests on Monday were inconclusive so I had to go back in on Tuesday. It's just down the hall from my physical therapy appointments, so while it meant more time in waiting rooms and leaving work extra early, at least there wasn't a lot of extra running around. As for the waiting rooms, I've long since learned to carry a book in my purse.

Good thing for me that the phlebotomists at the hospital are so ace at their job. Blood draws twice in two days, and hardly a mark on my arms.

I've been told by a number of nurses over the years that my veins roll around a lot. And judging by the number of times some of them have had to stab me to get what they were after and the bruises they've left, I'm inclined to believe them. But the professional vampires in the lab never, ever have trouble with my veins.

Monday, May 19, 2008

1 Year 5 months and change

Went in for my quarterly post-cancer checkup today, which included a blood test this time. My doctor is checking to see what's up with my hormones before we decide for sure what to do about my hot flashes. Which have really been less "flashes" and more "stuck under a heat lamp" 20 hours out of the day.

Today was one of those all medical stuff most of the day kind of days. Physical Therapy for the lymphedema, oncology tests, blood tests, waiting rooms, driving to and fro and parking.

The news has been promising, my tests have been coming back clean since the surgery, and the leg is responding to the therapy quite well. May be able to switch from mummy wrappings to a regular compression stocking soon.

What I miss most, lately, with all the doctor/PT appointments, puffy foot things and being awake at 3 AM unable to sleep because I'm so hot is having a normal sleep/wake/work schedule.

That said, I've spoken to a couple of other women who had hysterectomies because of cancer, who also didn't have to do radiation or chemo, and who said it still took a full 2 years for them to really get back to "normal". Many others bounce right back much more quickly, but it isn't as frustrating knowing that it's not just me who deals with all this stuff.

I can't complain too much. The cancer has stayed gone, I'm still making progress, and I've been able to become mobile again since we got those nasty muscle spasms under control. All things considered, I have a lot to be very grateful for.

Friday, May 16, 2008

Sounds of Spring

Usually, if we so much as reach for the horrible vacuum monster, 3 of the 4 cats scatter like a cat-banishing-bomb just went off. Catrina, the oldest (who doesn't seem to believe she's also cat) isn't much bothered by it, but Zabartik usually won't go near the thing.

So imagine my surprise when I found Zabartik taking his nap next to the vacuum cleaner this afternoon.

* * *

It's evening, and my Mister and I have just gotten home from dinner out and a trip to the pet store to stock up on pet food, litter, etc. Now he's beta testing a new MMORPG, Requiem: Bloodymare. Judging by the time it took to patch, and the amount of lag he's running into, a LOT of other people are all beta testing it right now, too.

There's a small but fast moving rainstorm passing through, and I've got the sliding glass door open. The smell of the rain is filling the living room and there's a chorus of frog song drifting in on the breeze. A welcome change after the quiet of winter. Earlier in the year that quiet was broken mostly by Canada geese honking a few blocks away, traffic on the highway a bit farther up the road, and the occasional train horn in the distance. And since it was so cold outside, most of those sounds were muffled or blocked entirely by our double-paned windows. If we were outside, it was often so quiet that when it snowed you could hear the hiss of the flakes as they hit the snow that had already accumulated on the ground.

Now the air is alive with sound. The kind of high, vibrating frog songs we get around here are among my favorite ambient noises. Mix them in with the song birds doing their evening things, the raindrops on the deck, and the rustle of the wind in the newly sprouted leaves and you have a heavenly feast for my ears.

Soon it will get hot and muggy, and we'll have the windows closed again while we run the AC. I'll still be able to go outside to enjoy the frog chorus, but it won't be something I get to enjoy indoors as well. So I'm soaking up the sounds of spring while I can.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Spring Weekend

We had lunch at Khan's Mongolian Barbecue in Richfield today, and then I spent some time out on the deck reading in the hammock. There are leaves on some of the trees, the birds are singing, and at 57° F it was wonderful in the sunshine.

Now we're watching some DVDs of the old TV show, Robotech: The Macross Saga. I'd forgotten how much I can't stand Minmay. I find myself rooting for the Zentradi, hoping Commander Breetai will put her out of my misery. Forgive me, fellow micronians.

I've also managed to complete my first successful swatch of single crochet. I experimented until I found a way to hold the yarn and crochet hook that gave me enough control of both to make it work. I wasn't having any luck with the hand positions I saw in the book I'm using or on the web. I don't know if it's because my left hand is just that dumb, or if I'm so used to knitting English style (throwing) that crochet feels backwards, but I just wasn't getting the hang of the proper hand positions. What I came up with is probably slower than normal, just as English knitting is slower than the continental style, but it seems to be working. Maybe once I get the basics of the stitches themselves down I'll focus on trying to hold the needles hook more correctly.

Friday, May 9, 2008

socializing on the intertubes

For someone who was painfully shy for most of her life, I've got a bigger presence on the intertubes than I ever expected to.

I had a book review website back in the late 1990's, but I kept it almost completely on topic. It had a lot of views, relatively speaking (50,000+ wasn't too bad back then), and it helped me meet some authors I've always admired, helped me find some books I'd've probably not discovered otherwise, and was generally a lot of fun. Then life got busy and sometimes chaotic, and I let the site go dormant. And finally pulled it down all together.

Now, 11 years after that book review site was in its heyday, I've got this blog here and my photostream over at flickr. They're really for two different things entirely, so having both makes sense to me. I have varying layers of privacy filters over at flickr, though most of my photos are public. Here, obviously, the blog doesn't require an account or special permissions to view it.

I twittered for a brief time, because the concept is an interesting one, but I only know one or two people on twitter, and they don't post much, so it seemed a bit silly to be twittering into a void.

I've got some friends over at Live Journal and MySpace. People I know from way back when, mostly. I created an account on MySpace so I could get added as a friend to my friend's pages, since they're generally private. And I do like that bands and such have info there that's easy to find. For instance, that's how I found out about the Peter Murphy show coming up in Minneapolis next month. So I personalized my page a bit and I peek over there now and then to see what's up.

I couldn't post comments for my friends at Live Journal using my OpenID because the one I use is several versions newer than Live Journal can handle. Didn't see any reason to make journal posts of my own to LJ, though. But there's one feature I've discovered that I do like about Live Journal that makes it worth posting over there every now and then. Ok... two features.

I like that I can mark individual posts as viewable by friends only. And I like that there's a friends view that lets me see recent posts by all (all 3 a.t.m.) of my friends in one spot. And the interface, while somewhat outdated, is infinitely preferable to the chaos of MySpace. Hmm... that's 3. Whatever.

So I've changed my mind about not posting to LJ. I'm going to, every so often, be making posts over there that are just for my LJ friends' viewing.

If you're a friend of mine -- as in, I know you well enough to email you privately on a semi-regular basis, or we actually know each other outside of cyberspace -- and you have a LJ account, let me know and I'll add you to my friends. For that matter, I run my instant messenger when I'm not working, or playing World of Warcraft, assuming I remember to turn the thing on. The same set of people are invited to shoot me an email for that contact info.

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Gozzles!

It really, really is spring now! I've seen my first batch of goslings for the year. I drove around the block a second time after spotting them so I could stop the car and take a picture.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

ficlets

Discovered ficlets.com through Wil Wheaton's blog, WWdN:In Exile. Wil posted a link to the ficlet titled A Loaded Gun in the Mailbox, and posted a prequel of his own.

The idea of very, very short bits of stories all written under Creative Commons licensing, all building off of one another as prequels, sequels, or original bits to inspire new stories is just fascinating to me. The ficlets all have to be between 64 and 1024 characters long (not words, but characters) which means you have to be able to do a lot with not many words.

Fiction is not my forte. So I doubt I'll join and post myself. But I know I'll be browsing through there during free moments to see what magic others are weaving out of the flowing river of ideas.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Not Aligned Like That

I've always kind of guessed what my Alignment (using the AD&D system) would be. And now I have proof. I took the Online Alignment Test.

I'm Neutral Good. For those of you not familiar with these alignment classifications, here's wikipedia's article on them.

To be honest, there were a couple of questions I seriously waffled on, because the answer was subject to change given the circumstances. So I took it the first time using my strongest convictions about those questions. And then a second time, using my alternate answers on those couple of questions. The second time, with my under-certain-circumstances answers in place, I came out Chaotic Good. So I'm going to assume I can claim Neutral Good alignment with some Chaotic Good tendencies.

Sunday, May 4, 2008

U.S. RDA of Iron Man

Just got back from the theater where I met my U.S. Recommended Dietary Allowance of Iron Man.

I have too many hobbies. One of the things I've always thought was cool, but never had much room in my free time and/or budget for was comic books. So I'm not hip to the Iron Man scene like a proper comic book geek would be.

That said, even without a proper foundation in Tony Stark History 101, the movie Iron Man was awesome. The special effects, while critical to the movie, didn't overwhelm the rest of the film, which had plenty of substance, humor, tension, plot (!) and good acting to carry itself respectably as more than a special effects flick. The script didn't pander to the lowest common denominator in the audience, either, IMHO, which was a bonus. I got the feeling that the creators of the Iron Man movie gave us more credit for functioning brain cells than most summer films tend to do. Not that it was highbrow. They just didn't dumb things down and drive plot points in with a piledriver when an artificially intelligent sledgehammer sized fist would do.

The humor appealed to both my funny bone, and my Mister's, which isn't a given. And it had the rest of the theater laughing at all the appropriate moments, too, which also isn't always a given.

I agree with some critics I've read who've said that the score was uninspiring. My Mister disagreed on that point. He did take it well, however, when I said I thought Iron Man was a better film than Transformers, which for the record, I also enjoyed. Maybe it's because Iron Man was more of a "grown up" film -- all things being relative. I can't help but make the comparison, though, because of the nature of the special effects.

I did find a few of the product placements in Iron Man a bit on the obvious side, which is just a bit distracting for me. Only because my brain starts involuntarily playing "spot the product placement" as soon as one leaps off the screen at me, and I can't stop noticing them after that. But promotion of consumer goods is a part of the whole entertainment package now, even more than ever. And if they were too subtle, they wouldn't work as product placements. So I don't have any illusions that they're going to go away any time soon.

No spoilers here. Just stay put for the whole rolling of the credits.

Oh, and one more thing. Some folks have noticed this already, I guess, but apparently I wasn't paying attention. Has Robert Downey Jr. always been dead sexy? Or is that the Tony Stark mystique?

Friday, May 2, 2008

I'd Cozy That


Stethoscope Cozy
Originally uploaded by keribeth
We knitters will cozy anything that sits still long enough to measure it. Don't believe me?

Go to flickr and do the following search: knitting cozy

I got 4,500+ results including:

  • a Volkswagen car cozy (I kid you not)
  • beer cozies
  • stethoscope cozy (seen here in keribeth's photo)
  • bicycle cozies
  • cell phone cozies
  • coffee cup cozies by the dozens
  • pendrive cozy in a south park theme
  • sunglasses cozies
  • sign pole cozies
  • telephone pole cozy
  • toilet paper cozies
  • ipod cozies aplenty
  • camera cozies
  • Nike plus transmitter/sensor cozies
  • egg cozies
  • someone working on a missile cozy
  • soap cozy
  • water bottle cozies
  • of course, tea cozies
  • fruit cozies
  • cozies for crutches
  • tree cozies
  • pint sized ice cream cozies
  • wine bottle cozies
  • a pink tank cozy (seriously as in a full sized WWI military tank)
  • knitting needle cozies
  • fork cozy
  • cozy for a toy dinosaur (stops being a sweater when nearly the whole toy is covered, I think)
  • cozies for adult toys
  • motorcycle cozy
And I didn't even surf through all of them, so I'm sure I missed some highlights. This list also doesn't take into account people who don't tag or caption their work, so their photos don't show up in searches. Or people who call them sweaters or covers (i.e. tree sweaters, steering wheel cover, etc.) or who tag them in a language other than English.

I also did a quick search for "crochet" and "cozy", and came up with roughly a quarter as many results. Some are duplicates from the knitting search, and a higher percentage of them than the knitting search were for people using "cozy" as an adjective (as in "crocheting by a cozy fire") instead of a noun or verb. But there are still a lot of crochet cozied items.

The crocheted chandelier cozy certainly needs to be mentioned.

So I say to my Mister, "See. It isn't just me. Knitters are just like that."

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Sock Wars III

Just learned about Sock Wars from a coworker. Maybe next year my sock knitting skillz will be l33t enough to participate. Right now, not so much. For the meantime, I can't help but appreciate the brave competitors who are taking on the challenge of...

... the original and bloodiest death-by-knitting tournament.

Masks and dreams

I had a dream last night about ordering a masked figure out of a house in a battle of wills. He'd entered through a window on the second story of the house in the middle of the night, and was either a ghost, or a person trying to make us (there was another person there) believe he was a ghost. He tried to convince us to follow him deeper into the house, with apparently ominous intent. No physical contact was made in the confrontation. Instead, there was a lot of staring each other down, and repeating our demands to one another forcefully until he backed down and left the way he came.

It was another dream in which I could see the eyes of someone in the dream. Though in this case the rest of his face was obscured by a helmet-like, black and red mask. But the details were very clear.

The other person in the dream was someone I haven't seen or spoken to in maybe 15 years. An old friend from high school. He had a face, too, oddly enough. I am pretty sure I know how he ended up cast for this dream.

My Mister and I watched several episodes of Unbeatable Banzuke last night on the DVR, and were particularly impressed by the Super Rider competition. The competitors ride their mountain bikes through an incredibly difficult obstacle course without touching the ground with their feet. My friend did quite a bit of trick riding in high school, so I'm sure he was hovering around in the back of my brain when I went to sleep.