bironic

Hi, friends. Thanks for voting in the poll! Indecisiveness combined with a general suspicion that everything I say and write these days is stupid banal can lead to extra-long periods of not posting.

I have been all right. Going to the gym 4+ days a week is not my natural inclination, and I still hurt in many places, but it is clear the activity is keeping my mood afloat, helping me sleep better and, yes, building strength and stamina. I took tonight off to browse the local library book sale -- $2 for Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year vol. 1 and Whale Rider on DVD, yay -- and write a post.

My sister came to visit over Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day weekend. (Wow, it looks even worse to put those side by side than to use one alone. Wish we could just say Indigenous Peoples Day now, but it hasn't permeated the culture yet.) We went to a book event featuring chef Jacques Pépin, daughter Claudine and granddaughter Shorey. Having grown up watching Pépin, Julia Child and the Frugal Gourmet on PBS, it was a real treat -- especially since he came out twenty minutes early to do photo ops with anyone who wanted.

The discussion itself was quite funny. Claudine, the moderator, got teased by her dad, but she dished it right back. "Never work with family," she quipped at one point. They told stories about things like how PBS timed its filmings so if Claudine wasn't a fast enough learner at rolling out dough or whatever, Jacques would elbow her out of the way and do it himself. Whereas when he partnered with Julia Child, she just told the film crew, "We're going to make this dish and we'll tell you when we're done," meaning some poor editor had to trim 110 minutes down to 20-something. Nor did they work from recipes, so airings were delayed because the producers had to reverse engineer them.

We also went to the county fair in the rain, figuring the crowds would thin out. Incorrect! Nonetheless, we enjoyed many animals, vegetables and minerals crafts. A pair of goats tried to eat our plastic ponchos, and once again the rabbit and cavy tent drove me to look into how feasible it would be to get a couple of guinea pigs to cuddle at home. (Space, climate control and frequency of cage cleaning & feeding are the main concerns, i.e. I could not be away for more than about a day without arranging for care. And I don't know if I trust my ability to maintain the energy levels to do what's needed. This was easier growing up when we had four family members to share tasks.) LOOK AT ITS LITTLE TRIBBLE TUFTS.

Work has been work-y. We were urged to apply for some awards in our field, which took up most of the last three days. I've won a few in this job, so I'm a bit hopeful. Otherwise just trying to keep my head down and enjoy the aspects of this career that I enjoy while our office's overall stress rises and morale dips. Pretty sure [coworker] is about to quit.

Good news is we still get financial support for professional development. Next week I'm flying to San Francisco for a conference. If any of you have food recommendations in the Union Square/SoMa area, especially for breakfast and lunch, share away. I'm already set on returning to a couple of takeout places in Chinatown for tasty tasty dim sum. Still dreaming of the shrimp and leek dumplings from my first visit there a year and a half ago.

Writing feels onerous these days, even emails and comment replies, which is unsettling for someone who has considered herself a writer for 25 years. There has also been some of that periodic "What am I doing? What is this career? What are these hobbies?" mixed in.

I am thinking about small, non-intimidating items to post about.

1. You can take the girl out of school, but...

(Note: mentions [wanted] touch from a male authority figure)

Today I went to an awards ceremony honoring a professor I occasionally work with. When I said congratulations at the cocktail reception, he gave me a hug. This was unexpected but quite welcome, as I have a tiny work crush on him. It was a highlight of the day. It also got me thinking again about student/teacher dynamics and how I haven't yet grown out of wanting to please teachers and professors and be among their favorites. Not that I am a favorite of this particular guy, but it evoked the same rush of pleasure.

Plus, it once again highlighted how I need pleasant touch from fellow humans more often. (To be distinguished from things like the press of strangers' elbows and knees on the bus, which are to be avoided whenever possible.) Continuing on the office theme, one of my editors, a woman I like a lot, put her hand on my shoulder the other week for several seconds while maneuvering around some chairs, and it felt so nice. The last time I recall something similar was a couple of years ago, and I think it was actually the same professor as today. Sometimes when hugs from friends and visits from cuddle-able houseguests don't quite fill the quota, I think about getting a pet. There's a reason I wrote John Sheppard like that in Forty Years and Eight Pounds.

2. Nerds tour Cambridge

Some of you might remember my Finnish friend A. from when we both lived in DC, who now lives in Germany? On Friday her husband V. emailed to say he and two of his students were going to be in Boston the next day on their way to a meeting, and we ended up spending all of Saturday together. Being a bunch of fellow nerds, they wanted to see the Harvard and MIT campuses, so I showed them what I could between bouts of drizzle. The students -- one Spanish and one Italian -- delighted in the diner-style Veggie Galaxy, complete with milkshakes and plain red ketchup bottles. We talked politics and science and idioms and culture and personal stories, gazed at the beautiful old houses on brick-lined streets, paused at coffee shops and riverside benches and the Kendall rooftop garden, and to top off the evening, V. traumatized his students by holding up a pair of women's shorts and shaking his hips at the Gap. (We went to the mall. Apparently jeans are five times cheaper here.)

Anyway, it was a lot of fun, even though it made me miss A. and V. more keenly.

Two things make a post. Let's pretend this didn't take an hour. One day soon maybe we can talk about Wonder Woman and Doctor Who (speaking of student/teacher tropes) and American Gods and fannish projects and the announcement that Vividcon is ending, and and and.

Doing

Working a lot at work. Consequently, doing not a lot at home. My proposed promotion is still moving forward, although not approved yet. But I'm sad about feeling vaguely unwell so often. (No advice needed; docs have been consulted.) On the tail end of one of these periodic weeks of poor sleep, I had a gross dream about a manager in the office and had trouble looking at him yesterday. Then today my laptop died! Only I looked up the "symptoms" on my phone and fixed it via a method that indicated it was only an issue of built-up static charge, whew. We had an Arctic front sweep through last night; the same dry air made my lip split when I went to the library this afternoon.

Last weekend featured Boston fan brunch, always good, followed by fangirl movie night at thedeadparrot's, in this case Dune, for which serenadestrong made a spectacular sand worm spice bread. On the downside, a friend moved away to NYC, and the whole weekend felt vaguely unreal because my ear was plugged for uninteresting reasons, so until these drops from CVS cleared it up I was half deaf and felt slightly feverish, maybe because I associate plugged-up ears with being sick.

...This is the kind of post people used to make fun of when they talked about the banality of blogging. I will stop complaining.


Vidding

No, wait, I will complain about one more thing, because it is upsetting me: Last Saturday YouTube blocked the Ancillary Justice trailer in the U.S. and Canada because of the DhakaBrakha audio snippets (although it's still up on Vimeo), and then last night Vimeo took down Starships! because of the Nicki Minaj song (although it's still up on YouTube) -- no warning, just down, with an email explanation of the copyright claim.

Things I have done:
- Emailed the OTW's legal team to see if they have experience helping vidders contest copyright claims for music rather than video clips
- Emailed the Vimeo support team to gripe about the sudden takedown and to request screen shots of the comments and last known view counts
- Asked vidding friends on Twitter for advice
- Added the YouTube link for Starships! to the biggest Tumblr post that's been circulating, although who knows if people will see it
- Begun preparing points to make in the appeals

I believe the book trailer has a better shot of being reinstated because it only uses a small portion of the full song and isn't competing with the original. Starships! I'm not super hopeful about, in the same way I haven't been hopeful about previous copyright matches for vids that got denied upon initial upload, and that sucks, because vids are clearly transformative works and I wish I could articulate how video clips transform the audio (rather than vice versa), or form a gestalt with it that the song wouldn't have done alone.

Meanwhile, I requested a song for Club Vivid and it got approved, although I'm not sure I can make it in time because of the scope of one of my Fandom Trumps Hate auction vids, which I am going to post about soon because I could use your help.


Reading

Those SF/F compendia. Also Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor. I liked Binti a lot and was pleased to learn of the sequel, which was also good, except for how it's a CLIFFHANGER, sigh.

Next up, The Dream-quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson, because the Nebula nominees were announced and some of the novellas looked interesting.


Watching

This week I got to see a performance of Tennessee Williams' Night of the Iguana featuring Amanda Plummer and James Earl Jones! More on that later, I think. We do not often get New York-caliber dramas in Boston, so that was a treat.

Also a bunch of random movies that I will not list exhaustively but that included 13th, just as powerful as advertised; some movies my sister and I used to watch all the time as kids but that I hadn't seen since then (Annie [1982] and The Neverending Story); Cloud Atlas, which was terrible in different ways from the book (the racebending makeup was creepy and wrongsighted); and Child 44, an action film that was utterly unremarkable except for its cast: Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Charles Dance, Noomi Rapace, Vincent Cassel and Fares Fares. It took place in Stalin-era Moscow and Volsk so of course they cast Brits, a Frenchman, a Swede and a Lebanese Swede and made them speak in "Russian" accents.

Want to see Get Out and Logan. My sister will be visiting next weekend and we plan to take care of at least one of those.


Listening

Stephen Thompson at NPR released this year's Austin 100, a batch of songs by artists he recommends ahead of SXSW. I usually find a handful of vid songs in these -- among the 2016 recs I found this year's Club Vivid song, the song I used for the Chris Hadfield vid, and the song I'm going to use for the Mary Sue vampire vid -- and am looking forward to this new collection.


Writing

Posts and emails, mostly. Did I mention that over Presidents' weekend I added some pages to some very old Mary Sue fics? It felt good to get words out and to extend those stories a little, even with the inevitable self-criticism over things like "Why did it take you all day to write two pages?" and "Why are you still thinking about teenage fantasies?"


Off to disgruntledowl's for dinner/movie. I made brownies. Before that, I made some mashed cauliflower. The apartment smells very confused.

Hope you are having good weekends.

I don't even know what to say. You all see what's happening too.

How I've coped this week:

Reading, Watching, Sharing, Doing
I've been taking in as much news as I can handle, which varies by the evening. Since it's all too easy for me to think about things and stop there, I've also made efforts to transform that intake and mental processing into actions. Things like setting up monthly rather than annual charity donations, signing the subset of petitions that have a shot at going anywhere, and building a spreadsheet of local, state and federal representative contact information plus specific issues to thank them for supporting or urge them to oppose. I haven't psyched myself up yet to, uh, actually make the phone calls, but I'm working on it. Still unsure which outreach efforts are most effective when I live in a Democratic state with kickass reps who are already writing joint statements and introducing bills to prevent or reverse the most atrocious developments.

Working
Nobody at our office got anything done the day after the election, but by the next day I was ready to bury myself in work. My monthly productivity is now on track to be one and a half to two times normal.

Vidding
thedeadparrot, stultiloquentia and disgruntledowl came over at various times last weekend for communal laptopping and to talk or not-talk about our government-to-be. I made a festivids treat draft in 24 hours and picked at a few others. Current plan: four Festivids and one Christmas vid. Ha. Ha ha ha.

Cooking
Vidding only worked as a distraction through Saturday. Sunday I tried to sit in the computer desk chair but kept drifting into the kitchen to start some other cooking or baking project. By the end of the day, there was curried pumpkin-apple soup, pumpkin bread, an onion and feta frittata, baked sweet potatoes, roasted vegetable lasagna and lemon-basil haddock with spaghetti squash. It's kept me in leftovers for the entire week, plus extras in the freezer, and one loaf of the pumpkin bread fed my coworkers.

Reading
Not much fiction. Finished the Young Miles compendium -- enjoyed the Dendarii parts, gradually lost patience with the rest -- and am wrapping up Vampire Romance 2. Starting to do proper research into the paranormal erotica short story market. I did go to book club last Thursday despite only having read a few chapters of the book months ago (The Goblin Emperor), and was glad to have done so, for the company.

Writing
Picked up a high school- into college-era (!) orig fic last night and added 1,200 words in 60 or 90 minutes, which, if you've been keeping track, is a lot for me these last few years. Want to try some more tonight and over the weekend. There is a sequence of scenes I daydreamed about back in the day that for some reason resurfaced, matured with time, a couple of nights ago, and I'm trying to get them down on the page. A sort of recovery story, years after the hurt I put the hero and heroine through: probably another form of self-comfort this month to go with the blankets and hoodies and warm drinks and toast.

Watching
Not much besides current events. thedeadparrot and I did go to see Arrival last Friday and it was great; haven't enjoyed a new SF movie that much since Interstellar. Oh, and Westworld. I'm still ambivalent about it but there's more to enjoy than it seemed at the beginning. This week's episode had one particularly delightful scenario and one great twist. Still, laughably Dark and frustratingly male-POV even when it's focusing on Strong Female Characters.

Dreaming
Starting last Tuesday, I went from having never dreamt about politics or politicians in my life to dreaming about them almost every night. Am ready for this phase to pass.

And so another week comes to a close. How are you all holding up?

Music: NPR/Stephen Thompson's Austin 100 lasted most of the drive to/from New York this weekend. It provided a dozen new-to-me songs I'm calling keepers, including four that sparked vid ideas. Two of the vids I'd definitely like to make at some point. One of those would be perfect for Club Vivid -- next year, that is -- once I figure out what fandom(s) slot(s) into the structure it presents.

Books: That thing where I said I was re-reading The Dispossessed because I'd made it almost to the end last time but petered out? I'm a little more than halfway through now and have no memory of anything beyond the middle of chapter two. It's a perfectly fine story of character, comparative politics and cross-cultural communication barriers. I'm beginning to suspect I didn't read much of it at all and have been confusing it with Stranger in a Strange Land, which I similarly didn't finish years ago.

Brain: Day four of four days off, and I'm feeling better than last week, although still not great. Took care of a lot of to-do's yesterday. Could use more days. Unfortunately, this is another week of Many Things To Do At Work + several evening engagements. Also feeling all a-roil regarding my career path after -- well, a lot of things, but most recently a grad school alumni party at our professor's house last night, at which many people shared the impressive things they are doing. I will continue to plug away at my tasks and do my PT exercises and see what happens.

Food: Taking care of myself by making sure meals are prepared for the week. Tried a couple of new recipes today that came out well. If you are interested: chicken and white bean chili (subbed a can of chicken near the end for raw breasts, and milk & yogurt for half-and-half & sour cream) for lunches; the simplest, silkiest cauliflower soup for afternoon snacks; and quick sautéed mushrooms with garlic, parsley and a mix of butter and olive oil to bring to a friend's tonight.

Now to figure out how to spend the 2 1/2 hours until the get-together.

Odd day.

Dozed after waking to footsteps upstairs, and had a dream about ( cut for Holocaust-like imagery. )

Jeez, it sounds horrific to write it up like that. At the time, it was just a thing that was happening. One girl hid in a room that was my childhood bedroom by lifting herself onto the top shelf of the closet by the lintel like a pull-up, realized that she could be easily seen, and hastily shoved a folded blanket between her body and the top of the door. I was the girl. Vin Diesel found her/me and said, reasonably enough for a prison guard, something about how the punishment would be eight somethings but he'd go halvsies with her and only do four if she'd just give in. She/I said, calmly, Okay. He seemed taken aback. That was that.

*shrug*

Today marked the end of my three-month probation period at work. I had a good review and was not fired. (I was not worried since my performance has been fine and people like me, but still. Not being on probation is a relief in the current financial climate. If anyone in the office had had to be cut to save money, it would have been me.) (Not to say that fear isn't still there; it's just harder to let someone go after they're off probation.)

.

Good, easy soup recipe, adapted from my new everything-chicken cookbook: Dice and sauté two small onions. When soft and beginning to brown, add a quart of chicken or vegetable broth. Grate a couple of zucchini or summer squash; add to the pot and boil for ~15 minutes. You can also add small pasta at the time you add the vegetables. At the end, drizzle in two eggs or egg whites and lemon juice to taste. Mm. Looks like it makes three bowls' worth.

.

Let's answer some vidding questions from alizarin_nyc: "What do you use for media when starting a vid? Do you rip DVDs, convert .avi files or what? What editing software do you use and why? What is the next thing you want to learn/try in writing or vidding?"

( I tend to rip DVDs )

( I use Adobe Premiere )

( I want to learn to do a thing with John Sheppard's face )

( But also how to better create clip pacing that is less a slave to the music )

...I don't know if I articulated that well at all.

4) That's a good question about what I might want to learn next in writing. Will have to get back to you on that. As compared to video editing, fiction writing is a thing that comes so unconsciously to me -- not always easily, just instinctively rather than as a series of technical steps -- that it's hard for me to approach and understand it as a craft. (I used to think that was something to brag about, but the more I press up against the boundaries of what doesn't come naturally to me and what I haven't been educated about, and the more I look back on many of the fics I've written and listen to others who do understand the technical elements of putting together effective stories and characters, like the more I appreciate that relying on instinct alone can also be a limitation.)

Life takes a turn for the exciting, on both RL and fannish fronts.

RL news - Moving to Boston!

You guys, I applied for what is basically the 9-to-5 of my dreams, and (several interviews and tests and negotiations later) they gave it to me. Then I went up to apartment hunt in the best/worst real estate season of the year there. I was so stressed out I got off the plane shaking, yet somehow I was incredibly lucky and landed my first choice. I am thrilled, even though it, like everything else in the city, is $.

Which means in less than a month I will be living in a beautiful 1 BR instead of a studio, giving the work I have been wanting to do for years a try, at a Prestigious University that I didn't expect to have a chance to be affiliated with.

Is this my life? I'm not sure this is my life. Something is bound to go wrong. Right?

(The downsides: becoming yet another person leaving my office, leaving some coworkers I like and sticking them with a lot of work; and, more important, leaving friends behind. deelaundry, cincodemaygirl, alpheratz, ellen_fremedon, recrudescence and v_greyson whom I've hardly been able to see, etc. etc., and of course synn, although we have already weathered three or four interstate separations. :( :( :(

It will be nice, though, in exchange, to see more of the Boston-area fanpeople - Ny and parrot and thirdmouse and kass, maybe get in touch with bathsweaver if she's still there, whom I barely got to know before I moved away last time - plus some grad school classmates who stuck around and also my college friend S., the fellow Trekkie I've mentioned here a few times over the years.

Whom else do I know or should I meet up there??)


Fannish news - Starships remix is live!

I have been remiss in not pointing you to jetpack_monkey's remix of Starships, along with a source list and a side-by-side comparison that will knock your astrosocks off. He used all black and white footage, all pre-moon landing air dates, aglow with hope and joy and silliness and the sort of string-and-matchsticks special effects that hold a special place in so many of our hearts.

As if the effort he put into securing and cleaning up the footage over the better part of a year weren't enough -- seriously, be sure to read the vid notes -- he scoured it all thoroughly enough and worked the speeds well enough to achieve pretty much a shot for shot homage to Starships. Cigarette smoking, salutes, bubble helmets, launches and crashes, little flying pellets, you name it. Chess for poker. Astro Boy for WALL-E, holding up the sky. The Lost in Space robot for Data the android, embodying the way technology and the sources themselves have evolved over the decades. A flying submarine for the flying Winnebago, because ridiculousness endures though it may change shapes. Billy Mumy for Nog, the boy wonders. And the TARDIS, stretching across eras. So many brilliant choices. So many I have yet to fully appreciate because I don't know all the source material.

It's an absolute thrill to see jetpack_monkey's vid come to fruition and receive the accolades he and it deserve. It's a humbling tribute to what I rushed to put together last year, and it absolutely stands on its own as a love letter to the sci fi shows and movies of yore.

What are you waiting for? Go watch it. (Or, you know, go watch it again.)

(I've been able to watch some other Vividcon vids and need to do a recs list. One of these days, in between packing boxes and getting paperwork settled.)

Hm. I said I was going to stop writing summary posts like this. Another time, I guess.

This week in a nutshell:

Furniture. Up to NY on Saturday—saw my sister for half a day between a gig and the next leg of the tour, rescued her from a flat tire when she had no money and a dying cell phone, played a rousing game of "where the hell are the table legs?" in a house full of stuff from my dad's moving-in girlfriend, and ate sushi—back from NY on Sunday, and now I can has furniture. Well, the table/chairs, an area rug, a small bookshelf, a little papasan chair, and a metal cart left over from college, anyway, but at least now most of my things aren't on the floor.

Oven. Adventures in broken-down apartment features this week included the smoke that came steaming out of the oven when I tried to use it for the first time. Long story short, it took one day for maintenance to identify the problem, another for them to come back and fix the problem instead of just telling me about it, and another for me to find out they had come, because they sent a note to the previous tenant's email instead of leaving the piece of paper on the door like they'd always done. Aie. I had, naturally, just bought a chicken to roast; the poor thing ended up in the fridge for a day, cooked for ten minutes on day two, put back in the fridge for a day, frozen for another day, and it's now defrosting so I can cook it tomorrow. If I die of salmonella or something when I finally eat it, please all of you play nicely as you divvy up my things.

Hair. Attend: I am making a pact not to use elastics anymore (except at the gym, where I have been trying to go most evenings right after work). Gone with the ponytail of yesteryear, I cry! Thanks in part to a book about curly hair recommended by hannahrorlove and wisdom accumulated five or so years ago the last time I got a good haircut, I am trying to care for my hair with conditioner and gel so it can do its thing without frizz, and plan to use some freelance money to get a good-quality cut at a real salon in a few weeks when a spot opens up.

Alcohol. For the first time in all the years I've been over the legal drinking age, I bought a bottle of alcohol for myself. Two, actually: amaretto and sweet-and-sour mix. I plan to use it as a wise professor once advised me, to lower inhibitions so I can actually write without the impending deadlines of Kink Bingo. Okay, his advice didn't mention Bingo, but the rest is true.

Plants. A coworker who gardens potted two small plants for me, a spider and a philodendron, and they make a disproportionate difference in this place than their size would suggest. The spider plant is in a pretty earthenware pot that's glazed deep blue-green with brown streaks in the light. She said it reminded her of my eyes. Aww.

Job. I have absolutely sucked at work this past couple of weeks. Just sitting there all day getting nothing done. I have to get my act together and make up my mind about which of the two offers I have I'm going to take, because while neither is ideal, I can't keep stringing people along and agonizing so much that I'm totally unproductive. On the bright side, just got a raise and will have health insurance in November. On the dimmer side, that means a two-month lapse in coverage; need to find a stopgap plan, because there are prescriptions to fill and possible illnesses and accidents to be prepared for.

DVDs. After following up with Amazon, the postal service, and the place I used to live, a refund was attained, a new order placed, and SGA S5 finally arrived here on Thursday. Hopefully that'll kick-start the vid-that-was-in-progress about how Pegasus people are angry.

Fanpeople. Thanks to kassrachel, I was put in touch with a local cluster of fans who gather weeklyish to watch sci fi down the street from me. I met many of them for the first time last night and it was wonderful. We watched the Vividcon premieres along with a few others, had tasty food, and chatted about the usual hit-and-miss collection of fan topics -- vidding, knitting, cats, various Star Treks, works in progress, textual analysis, slash, Canadians, mpreg. Okay, the last was my fault for having brought up, as we were leaving, the fact that I was glad we hadn't talked about it, after barely_bean scarred me for life the first time I hung out with the NYC brunch crew.

Good vids included greensilver's American Tune, a tribute to The West Wing set to Simon & Garfunkel that moved me even though I barely know the show, and another viewing of Seah and Margie's spectacularly unsettling Dr. Who vid No Handlebars (again, need not know the source material), and Learning to Crawl by jarrow (BSG, ditto). A couple of nice vids introduced me to lovely songs, including Greg Laswell's It Comes and Goes in Waves (vid) and Jars of Clay's Boy on a String (unlinked vid of the same name was by traykor).

Okay. Off to see the wizard Laundrys for the first time in a while, and then… long weekend!

Happy news, for some of us:

1. Remix signups are open. Each year I fear what I'll be assigned, but I'm three for three now, so that must mean something, right?

2. Getcher automatically generated Kink Bingo cards here. I am excited, although who knows whether I'll be able to follow through with a whole bingo. My card contains tentacles again (!), and medical play (I have a House WIP I want to finish for this), and consent play (a secret favorite of mine; and I've been wanting to do a story where it is clear from the beginning that the participants are playing, with mutual consent and enjoyment; none of that 'surprise, it wasn't a real attack!' stuff), and other goodies. It would be great if I could find a way to write in some fandoms I haven't shared online before, like DS9 or BtVS or the Vampire Chronicles.

2a. I feel like I've posted mostly gen and vanilla or ordinary kink (i.e. bondage) slash here, but I thought about it while glancing at people's Bingo cards and realized I've done some weird edited 2011, for and with sensitivity: a surprising variety of stuff, often unintentionally: bestiality, double penetration, aphrodisiacs, bizarre object insertion, facial/bukkake, biting/vampires, scars; and, in stories offline, suspension, consent play, student/teacher, god/mortal, celebrity/fan, alien/human, guard/prisoner, virginity, electrodes, bloodplay, gang bang, and humiliation. Huh.

3. Now is the time to leave House/SGA crossover prompts for the upcoming Porn Battle. That semiannual 'fest has been great for not only generating lots of PWPs in many fandoms but also stimulating me (heh) to produce a few new ficlets of my own, often after a dry spell (heh heh). Hopefully this round will be no exception, even with my daytime hours out of commission.

.

On the walk home before from the bus stop, the clouds over half the sky looked lumpy underneath, like bubble wrap with the big bubbles. But nothing's come of it. We must have only caught the tip of the system. Too bad, because it was horribly sweltery today, and D.C. gets great thunderstorms.

Second day of work today; first full day. Place and people seem nice. There's enough work to keep me busy, and they're encouraging me to take on what I find interesting. The hours are also flexible, and it's seven hours a day (eight if I want a full hour for lunch, which most of the time I won't), not nine. What a change from my last company. Not having LJ/email access is going to be a good thing, too; I'm focused, not tempted to stall with easier, more comfortable, irrelevant stuff, and there's a neat little collection of posts and messages to read when I get home. (Though I did smile to myself when the two-hour security training I completed this morning warned multiple times against accessing or transmitting sexually explicit materials.)

I melted part of a spatula-turner-thing yesterday. Note to self: Gas stoves burn hotter than electric, and scraping stainless steel pans with nylon utensils is not recommended. It was my—subleaser's?—spatula, too, so I'm going to have to replace it with the same model before I move out.

.

It is very weird, and wonderful, to see one's sister appear in a YouTube video a stranger took from the audience of a David Cook show. It's a funny clip, actually. A cake is thrown. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZj5Qsme48

Now that I've done it, I can say outside of friends-lock that I gave my two weeks' notice at work today, and my boss, a.k.a. the company president, did not in fact get angry and ask me to leave right away (which is not an uncommon occurrence 'round these parts), but instead gave me several genuine, wide smiles, a hug, a clap on the shoulder, a fond pat on the cheek, well wishes and congratulations, and a partially serious request that I give him a call when I get out of school. And then proceeded to announce the news around the office like a proud parent.

Huh.

My manager—well, ex-manager, but even four months after my promotion she still hasn't admitted that I don't work for her anymore—actually took it the hardest. Aside from losing the most senior member in her department and the only experienced writer in the company, she said she's going to miss having someone around who's on the same wavelength, sharing knowing glances whenever someone says or does something crazier than usual.

So yes, for those I haven't told, I am going back to school next month. I haven't decided exactly how much I want to reveal about what and where, but I'll be moving to the Boston area for a year, and afterwards you may call me Master. Two more weeks of work, two and a half weeks-ish to prepare, and then moving day. Whew.

It's funny; after four years at this place, fantasizing of quitting out of spite or exasperation, finally resigning has been something of an anticlimax. I even imagined what my post about it would look like, all capitals and exclamation marks. And yet here we are, not very emotionally moved: on good terms with everyone there, and writing plainly like any other day here. It probably has to do with the fact that I knew I'd be leaving months ago, so I've already been enjoying all the stress relief that comes with having an end date in one's head. Also to do with the fact that waiting at the end of these last two weeks is not a relaxing vacation or exciting new job but 12 months of hard work. Twelve months that I'm looking forward to, yes, but still.

For some reason it didn't occur to me that some people in the office might be sad that I'm leaving and want to do things like take me out to lunch. Those sorts of comments today were nice. A bunch of us will probably hang out that last Friday at a local pub, too, the usual event for developers who leave.

Oh, and the semi-final turnover numbers since I started mid-2004? Ninety-five people hired, and 65 left/fired. Average total employed at any given time, 40.

.

In other news, ( photos of the carnival and moon from last week: )