Mishaps and other haps

My tummy is full of my favorite ice cream. I ate it all. And a small piece of the styrofoam bowl.

I have just seen six of my friends.

All four of my wooden chairs now have petably-soft, fluffy matching cushions.

My car is clean of salt and dirt and full of gasoline.

I have a lot of coffee in my freezer and a pot is being brewed.

I made chocolate cookies last night and there are many left over that will join me for snacks at work this week.

I talked to my mom for a while this morning and she had a good conference yesterday.

There is still a lot of time before bedtime and I will use some of it to read.

Everybody has them and the more time you spend with a person, the more of them you discover.

For example, a certain chap has been periodically experimenting to determine the range of screeches he can elicit by variations in the ways he prods my ribcage.

But that is fairly old news and that manner of torture has been fairly well refined and fine-tuned.

Recently, a new weakness of the nightmarish variety has emerged.

Maybe a month back, I watched the extended version of Return of the King for the first time. One of the scenes that has been added back into this movie includes the Mouth of Sauron. THE MOUTH OF SAURON IS FREAKY!!! If I watched this scene before bedtime, I would seriously have trouble sleeping. Why? HIS TEETH ARE TOO BIG!!!

Mlitiagrl has already watched some of the documentary material– so we were discussing this and she noted that they decided to enlarge the mouth of this character 200% to make it look weird. It certainly worked. Nothing should have teeth like that.

But Mlitiagrl has also determined that she can freak me out by pulling a fuzzy cap over her face and doing toothy things that resemble the Mouth of Sauron. This, combined with the scary Cheshire Cat, is making gaming (and hanging out with people) difficult at the moment. I am never quite sure I am safe.

Yeah, that’s one that has been on my reading list for a while now. Maybe I’ll get to it soon, though. I finished Snow Crash last night and have started Neuromancer. I really enjoyed Snow Crash & highly recommend it– I think I liked it better than Cryptonomicon. I should also read The Kite Runner soon, since my mom gave me the book. Oh, and the Iliad since I have been meaning to do that for quite a while and my chap reminded me of it since he has been listening to it on his ipod.

But anyway, I have had two brushes this week with people who went to London this month. One brush was in the form of a postcard from a gamer friend who went for a few days and apparently enjoyed seeing “King Lear” at the Globe and the other brush was in the form of Maretta, who went for J-term to do lots and lots of Theater stuff (i.e. 11 plays in 3 weeks).

So I have been thinking that I should plan for more traveling in my life and one of the places I would like to go first is London. I would like to go sometime next year if I have the money and vacation time saved up. I don’t know if others would be keen on doing something like this, but it would probably be more fun going places with people. So I am throwing that out there for people to consider.

Huh. My phone registered that it received voice mail around 4 AM this morning, but there were no new missed calls. That is kind of odd. Since my phone doesn’t really have voice mail set up, I have no idea who called. Probably was some random weird thing, like when I send a text message and it says it has been sent, but the intended recipient does not receive it.
So if anyone called me, MY VOICE MAIL DOES NOT WORK BECAUSE I HAVE NOT TOLD IT TO WORK. However, you can leave a message on my answering machine at my home number.
Maybe I will fix that this weekend, though. I don’t really *want* voice mail on my cell phone– as long as I know when I have missed a call, I can easily and efficiently return the call. However, this voice mail feature is starting to annoy me and maybe it would annoy me less if I just set it up. I don’t suppose I can delete the feature entirely.
I guess my stumbling block is that I want to sort of Descartes-engineer everything– let’s take this cool gadget and strip it down to something basic, known, and essential and then add things as they become necessary.
On a related note, I am not currently using KDX because my computer will not currently run it. Something about me not ever upgrading to Windows XP … and not ever adding more RAM to my computer so that I can run XP. This has probably been explained, but in case it hasn’t, I’m not intentionally ignoring people … I’m just sort of behind (in some ways) in the tech division.

Because it is becoming incredibly easy. I haven’t been carrying around cash at all the past couple of weeks and I am spending less money. It’s kind of amazing. I should pay some bills this weekend, so that is going to suck some money out of my checking account, but I am entirely unmotivated to have paper money on hand. If I can round up people for ice cream this weekend, I am very likely going to AVOID using paper money to purchase ice cream.

So what’s the problem with paper money? Well, if I need $5 and take out $20 in order to have $5 on hand, eventually the entire amount will be spent. Paper money cannot anticipate and precisely fit my needs. Paper money is usually too much or not enough.

Also, it produces coins. Coins are hard to spend because they are heavy and bulky to carry– and if you don’t spend coins, you have to store them until you are ready to convert them into an amount that will live in the bank. If you avoid paper money, you can avoid coins.

True, it will be years before paper currency completely vanishes, but I’m starting to think that I won’t mind when it does.

I think Larry was the one who posted about Spamusement on the old Neuroboard. It triggers my silly in just the right way, I guess.

I have reached that point in Winter when I start to crave fruit. I don’t know whether it’s something biological that drives this, such as vitamin deprivation, or if it just sounds like a good idea. Maybe both.

So I went shopping for fruit after work yesterday and purchased: pineapple (fresh and dried), strawberries, apples, oranges, grapefruit, canteloupe, and dried pears.

Later my chap came to visit for a bit, so it was an all-around good evening.

However, then I fell asleep and dreamed that Alice recommended some bugs for a snack. We both tried them and determined that they were not very tasty. They were much too crunchy and alive.

So no bugs. But I do endorse the fruit. Particularly fresh pineapple. I am crazy about it.

I have been eating a lot of bacon sandwiches lately, which is sort of unusual for a vegetarian, I guess. However, my bacon is Smart Bacon. I am not sure how “smart” it really is, but that is the name of it. I rather think it is smart, but more in the sense of “well put-together” than in the intellectual sense. It is made out of soy, rather than piggies, but it tastes and acts a lot like the traditional meat bacon. And it has a lot of sodium, like many soy meat-substitute things– and many meat non-substitute things, but otherwise it is not too bad for me. It works well between bits of toast.

I just realized the other day that my official two-year anniversary as a vegetarian is coming up. It is February 13th, which is the day between Febtoberfest and Valentine’s Day. That should be a terrific weekend! I should make snacks and share them with people or something! Maybe we could plan something for Sunday gaming?

Tons and tons of snow fell yesterday and last night. Driving home from work wasn’t too bad, actually, since most of the snow fell overnight. The roads were coated when I left work, but it only took me maybe an hour and fifteen minutes to get home. On really bad snow days, it has taken close to two hours. When the roads are clear, it takes me about 40 minutes to drive home.

Once I was safely home, I was glad to let it snow up to my third-story window. It didn’t snow that much, but I would have been perfectly happy opening the window this morning and rolling into a snow bank. It certainly would have negated the usual falling that happens when I tumble out of my window. I expect that I would have suffocated in that much snow, but at least I wouldn’t have broken anything.

Since I didn’t have snow when I was a kid (it was too expensive), I really don’t mind having some around. Sure, it makes driving a life-or-death ordeal sometimes and I really don’t like to be driving in it. But it is kind of comforting and pretty if it’s snowing and you can just hang out and watch it for a while.

Last night’s snow was a wet, slushy snow: it had plastered itself all over my wiper blades as I was driving home, so that they were completely ineffective by the time I reached the last mile or so of my drive and I was mostly driving blind. I guess it’s good that I am pretty familiar with the roads in my neighborhood.

But the great thing about this wet snow was that it created icicles on the unobtrusive streetlights in my neighborhood (these streetlights are so Modern/minimalist that I can only see them when it’s snowing). So the purple light from the streetlights made the icicles look like they were glowing– thus, electrical icicles. They were pretty.

I took the opportunity to cook yesterday since Saturdays are good for that sort of thing. I made broccoli-cheddar soup, which turned out pretty well. Later I made a new variation of chili which is edible, but a little scary. I think maybe I put too much fresh pepper and orange peel in. It tastes bright, which is odd because chili is not really supposed to be bright– it is supposed to be more spicy/earthy/comforting. So I have frozen the bright chili in microwaveable containers and will take it to work. If it is the only food available and I am starving at lunch, I will be more than happy to consume the bright chili.