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Jun

story of a girl

By rei 0 Comments

Categories: my cats and school

So.

It’s been a while I suppose, since I have posted. I don’t mean the random bits of interweb that catch my eye and get tossed here for their dubious entertainment value…I know I’ve kept up with eye candy and oddities. But I am a bit behind on any actual personal updates.

So.

Um…school continues to be horribly tedious. The fact that I have two classes in which I’m doing basically the same thing (website design) on the same timeline makes the work less than entirely enthralling. The fact that the class in which I have to go beyond just DESIGNING websites is taught by a person who isn’t great at explaining complicated processes makes my work frustrating as well as tedious. And I share my other class with a guy so annoying that I refer to him in conversation with others as ‘Annoying Guy’.

We have suffered continual false promises regarding my tablet shipping. We understand that it isn’t Lenovo’s fault that the shipping schedule is behind…but what IS their fault is their abysmal customer service.

So no…none of this is new. What is new…?

We got a new cat toy for Robin, and both he AND Mercury adore the heck out of it. AND it has no plastic ribbon for him to eat! Yay!

(It should also be noted that when I Google-searched for ‘cat with toy’, when I got as far as ‘cat with t-’, Google’s top suggestion was ‘cat with two heads’. WTF?

My Contemporary Type teacher convinced me to enter some stuff in the annual student show. So I’m gonna do that, I suppose. I’m rather intimidated at the prospect, but on the other hand, I might as well at least throw my hand in.

I got contacts. Which sounds exciting, but I don’t think I got the prescription quite right, due to my need to over-achieve at all exams, including eye-exams. But, I’m supposed to wear them for increasingly longer periods each day to a) get my eyes used to them, and b) learn how to put them in/take them out/care for them. So I’m getting used to wearing and caring for them, and they do lend SOME vision correction…just not, I think, quite as much as I actually require. Which just means, when I go back to pick up my new glasses, I’ll get a new exam for the contacts and just hope that my glasses are okay. Because I don’t think they’ll give me new free lenses.

Oh, ans also, I learned that getting contacts is the quickest way to get over squeamishness regarding putting in eye drops. I always had to pretty much sneak up on myself to moisturize dry eyes…but within a day of having contacts, my eyes learned what a relief nice cool eye-moisturizer can be.

What else…um…in doing simple yard work and house work this past weekend, I managed to injure myself way more than one would have expected (don’t worry mom — just bumps and bruises!).

I saw Mogget, my catfish, today for the first time in, literally, months. Which is impressive, since he lives in a five-gallon tank. Also, Sam, the fantail goldfish that was so tiny when we got him, is HUGE now. I need to stop feeding him.

Aaaannndddd…I think that’s about it. Nothing new under the sun.

May

zombified

By rei 0 Comments

Categories: art, my cats, rants and school

I am trying to type around a purring cat. I swear they get all cute and cuddly so that you will feel bad about moving them.

I’m wondering what kind of quality of writing I’m going to be turning out here and guessing it might be…bad? I think that one all-nighter a week is kind of a limit for me…but last night I stayed up trying to finish various and sundry homework ’cause today was Mom’s day and Briggs and I were expected at family-function type stuff…and it’s a good thing I stayed up working, as I had to skip out on the family stuff anyway, due to immense piles of homework. I think I may be…closer to caught up at this point, however.

This quarter is not treating me well. Usually punctual me is kind of constantly scrambling this term — an unpleasant feeling.

I suppose my constant bitching about school lately must be getting pretty wearing by this point…playing catch-up in my classes really isn’t the only thing I’ve been doing lately, it’s just that I keep hopping on to blog right after massive stress sessions or homework sessions and it SEEMS like there is nothing else in my world…lesseee…..

I’ve been watching Kim Possible and as a result pretty much constantly have the theme song stuck in my head.

I’ve been re-reading Harry Potter. I still teared up when Neville got his house points at the end of book 1…I’m currently on book 3, and Ron and Hermoine are sniping over Crookshanks and Harry’s pouting and angsty and cranky ’cause he’s about to go through puberty and turn into a real woman, but Neville just faced down a boggart and totally rocked it. I <3 Neville.

What else? Um…I’m loving the New Doctor Who series. I admit it 100%. Matt Smith is made of win and good acting…the fact that he’s kind of goofy-looking bothers me not at all…Eccelston was goofy and I adored him. The most recent episode was just…awesome. Venice, vampires and relatively correctly period clothing…MAGICAL.

Speaking of period clothing…I’ve been on a vintage gown kick lately…I’ve decided that I need something 18th century. Panniers and all. Satin. With bows.

I imagine there is other stuff too…but I can’t remember it all right now. So here…you can look at some of my homework. Exciting, no? No? Oh.

Apr

The wettening

By rei 7 Comments

Categories: my cats

There are certain ways in which it is pleasant to wake up.

Breakfast in bed is nice.

Slowly surfacing from slumber snuggled in soft sheets is splendid.

Even just…waking up after a night of restful sleep to the smell of fresh coffee. Totally acceptable.

A less acceptable way to wake up is struggling out of dreams to the sound of your name called from another room in a tone that sounds somewhat urgent, stumbling blearily out of bed and stepping out of the bedroom doorway onto a confusingly cold and squelchy carpet. And then forward onto the linoleum floor, which your brain is beginning to process is covered in an inch or so of rather chilly water.

Apparently, at some point last night, Robin aided a framed painting I had hanging behind the toilet to…no longer be so much hanging as plummeting. Unfortunately, the exciting journey which said painting was enjoying was curtailed by it’s disastrous collision with the PVC pipe which fed water into the toilet. What followed was…well…squelchiness.

It could have been worse — first of all, that cold and soggy floor COULD have been soaked in something less benign than clean water. It could have been the congealing blood of a congressman unaccountably murdered in our living room in the middle of the night…slightly more realistically, it could have been fluid that had already passed through the toilet rather than just entering the tank. And aside from a few galley books, I think we mostly suffer from from some very wet carpet and rather wet clothing. Heck, I needed to clean out the closet and spare room anyway. Burgandy is bringing over her shop vac and Anna is going to loan us her dehumidifier, so we’ll have two going to suck moisture out of the damp house. And because this was his early day, Briggs was up at least an hour sooner than he would have been any other day, so that’s an hour of flooding curtailed. All in all, only about a third of the house is really wet, and most of that third was storage and such…it would have been nice if the part that flooded was the tile and linoleum portion with the drain, but fate was still kinder than it could have been.

However, the situation is undeniably inconvenient. First of all…did I mention that is NOT the way to wake up? And I know Briggs had it worse than I, as he had to wake up and not only encounter a horribly flooded house, but also deal with figuring out where the flood was coming from and how to make it stop. He had to call out of work, and I don’t know just how much homework I’m going to get done today, but it probably won’t be as much as I had initially planned. Our water is currently off, which is always so much more troublesome than one expects, and of course, the toilet is out of commission at the moment. Also, we have piles of mostly dry and slightly damp and a bit soggy stuff out on our porch, which will all need to be dealt with. We also have a good sized bag of various clothes and such that were on the floor of the closet that are more than a little damp, and will need to be sorted and washed.

All in all, this is not exactly how either of us wanted to spend our day.

And now the shop-vac has arrived and we can begin extracting moisture. Wish us luck.

Apr

bad customer service and what to wear

By rei 3 Comments

Categories: my cats, rants, school and weather

So…we finally got a confirmed (theoretically) shipping date from Lenovo. May 10th.

But Rei, you ask, wasn’t the shipping date originally supposed to be April 6th, making this shipping date more than a month later than what they originally promised?

Yep. Real glad we paid for that two-day shipping.

On the one hand, it IS nice to at least finally know when my computer is being sent, so that I can stop wondering…but on the other hand, well, I think the other hand is fairly obvious. Also, on the other hand, Lenovo doesn’t treat their customers great — they didn’t even bother sending us a shipping delay notice, so if Briggs hadn’t been the type to check the site for shipping status every two hours, April 8th or so would have rolled around and we would have been wondering where the heck my package was. Apparently the bad customer service isn’t an anomaly — Briggs was trolling and posting on the Lenovo message boards and not only was everyone else having similar problems, one poster directed him to forums for previous Lenovo releases, informing him that the problems are the same, each time a new product comes out.

If there were a comparable product available, we would probably cancel our order and buy from someone else, but as it is, Lenovo holds the position of a hot chick who knows she can string guys along and treat them like crap and put them off about putting out because no one around has the rocking body she does. Regardless, some guys will decide she’s not worth it and hook up with a sweet, nerdy girl with a great personality and feel they came out the winner…and I understand some other customers are doing the same — one guy who was ordering one for himself before putting in a company order is pretty much decided on taking a step down in power for better customer service from another company.

But I WILL persevere.

Now that I’ve ranted endlessly about my computer and regurgitated what Briggs has related from his forum experiences, do I have anything else to talk about? Um. Briggs and I had salmon for dinner on Sunday. Briggs brought home enough salmon from the store that we were physically unable to finish it all, and my raccoons, Vincent and Violet, got the bit that was left over.

The weather keeps fluctuating and it’s driving me mad. I know this will sound silly and girly, but I’m having wardrobe difficulties. I was starting to get into my spring clothes and step away from my warmer winter wear, and a glance out the window at bright sun and blossom-speckled trees makes me reach for light-weight cottons and flowy dresses, but the temperature has been flipping back and forth between spring and winter…so I’m trying to get back into a California clothing mindset, wearing at least a couple layers when I go out.

My Design and Technology teacher hated all but one of my proposed logos for the project we are working on. Apparently, he likes things really simple, which is bad news for me. And even the stuff that was simple (a couple I liked pretty well) he didn’t like/get. *sighs dramatically with hand to forehead* I’m so misunderstood!

I am probably going to see Kick Ass this weekend. I’m pretty excited about it.

Briggs gave the cats their monthly dose of Advantage this morning.

Yeah, I’m out.