wickedqueen.net

I am sitting in the lobby area of the Z Center athletic facility, conducting interviews about Facebook use via instant messenger before my workout. It occurred to me this morning, as I was trying to figure out the logistics of all the interviews I had scheduled and my desire to go to the gym, that I didn’t actually have to go in to the office as I’d been planning–the wireless is just as good at the Z Center and either way I’d be on my laptop.

And this way I shave off about 20 minutes of walking around campus, which is kind of important because I have like six interviews scheduled today. I’ll do two interviews here at the gym, work out, mail birthday presents at the campus post office, and bus it home so that I can be there by 3:15 for my next round of interviews (I have to be back at home for them because one of them is a phone interview that I’ll be recording with Skype, and it doesn’t run well on my laptop, plus my headset is at home, plus I realized this morning while getting dressed that I need to do some laundry because I am currently wearing my second-to-last set of gym clothes).

And THEN, I just got a message from City of Heroes that Issue 9 has gone live, which means that there is some serious new content up. I just made level 45 on Monday night, so I’m excited to try out my newly beefed up ice armor,* but I also want to see how the new invention system works. I never bothered to look at it on the test server, so it’ll all be new to me. I just hope nothing is severely broken.

Also, thanks to craigslist, it looks like I’m set up for housing in California. This is a relief, although of course I haven’t even BEGUN packing. I’m having a party next week to give away stuff that I don’t want to move, and have decided that I am getting rid of my bedspread because I hate it. This is a recurring problem for me. Some of you may recall that my current bedspread was the object of a long and arduous search for a reversible pink and green comforter. Which it is, but you know, they’re kind of UGLY pink and green. Not the shades I had envisioned, and over time, they have become more and more objectionable in my eyes, especially since my friend Matt bragged to me about the awesome zebra print bedspread he found for super cheap in Australia.** And of course moving pretty much makes ALL your possessions less attractive.

Probably I should stop buying bedspreads online. The future is great, but given that I keep hating bedspreads that looked pretty good on Amazon Marketplace, it might be best to return to my old-fashioned shopping roots for the next one.

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*For the two or three readers who might possibly care: when I hit 41, I initially took Electricity Mastery as my epic power pool, since Andromeda Sparks is an electric/electric blaster. Unfortunately, it really sucked, so I respec’d to Cold Mastery instead. So far I’ve got an area of effect sleep power and this ice armor, which is pretty cool–it takes both defense AND damage resistance enhancements, and I’ve now got two of each on it, so I expect noticeably improved performance.

+This is not slighting Travis, because Travis has video blogged.

I’m still in the process of unpacking all my crap, and the landlady is still in the process of finishing my kitchen. There’s a lot of good furniture, however (I rented it furnished), and most importantly, my apartment is equidistant from a) a library and b) a liquor store.

And when I say “equidistant,” I mean, “two blocks in either direction.”

Hannah sure wasn’t kidding when she said it was the scariest building on the block, but I’d say it is a fine place to settle.

Tomorrow I am going to MIT to fill out the paperwork for my visiting student ID, which I assume will allow me to use the gym as well as various more scholarly facilities. I’m a little nervous about it because I have to take the bus and it’s not that I mind buses–hell, I love mass transit of all kinds–but I am very, very bad at following directions, figuring out the way to a place, and for that matter, figuring out where the hell I am at any given moment. My sense of direction, or more specifically my complete lack of one, is the stuff of legend.

Fortunately (?) the only way that the transit website trip planner will show me how to get from here to there without transferring requires me to leave at 9:00 am, and my appointment is not until noon. I figure I can wander around and try to get my bearings around the campus and still have time to actually find the relevant building.

I am fully planning to post photos of the new apartment, but you’ll have to wait until I have everything put away and decorated. So far I’ve put up only a few items: my Hello Kitty white board on the fridge, my frippy bunny painting in the kitchen, my photo montage/bulletin board in the hall, my photo montage/mirror in the bedroom, and the Scary Child in the living room.

Nothing says “home” like the Scary Child.

Recently I’ve been having trouble sleeping. This happens periodically, when there is stuff occupying my mind. I am something of a brooder by nature, and so sometimes I end up lying awake for hours worrying about things, including, sometimes, that I worry too much and can’t sleep.* It probably doesn’t help that for the past few nights I’ve been reading that Al Franken book I got at the library booksale right before I try to sleep, as it angries up the blood, but novels with complicated plots are worse because once I start reading a story, I really don’t want to stop until I’m DONE.

Several people have recommended melatonin, which I plan to try. I’ve taken valerian in the past but I don’t know if it really did that much for me, although it certainly makes the cats all hopped up crazy, worse than catnip. My friend Laura said that melatonin helped her with pretty much precisely the same sleep problem, namely, having a brain that refuses to stop winding itself up over insoluble issues great and small, and if nothing else, a placebo effect might at least help me relax.

Last night, however, when the landlady’s carbon monoxide detector sounded its THIRD FALSE ALARM this week at ONE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING and the fire department came because the detector automatically summons them and so of course the landlady’s dog, who distrusts everyone,** went batshit crazy barking, so the landlady kept yelling at him to be quiet to absolutely no effect, and then I had to get out of bed and get dressed and let the firemen in to check MY room for carbon monoxide, which of course wasn’t there, either, just like it hasn’t been anywhere in the house any time that the alarm has gone off this week, and meanwhile, the separate security alarm kept emitting low battery (I suspect) beeps EVERY THREE MINUTES just as it had been doing ever since I first got home around seven–last night?

Probably melatonin wouldn’t have helped with that.

ETA: And it’s like CNN is reading my sleepless mind…

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*I’ve heard that this is the point at which you should worry about your worrying. That doesn’t help, either.

**I have been here for well over a month now and he still freaks out every time he sees me, although he did finally stop growling.

Surprising no one with whom I have more than the most passing acquaintance, my apartment is a high glitter environment. Cosmetics, various items of clothing, and infrequently implemented but high concentration items such as Halloween Costume Glitter Spray and one particularly memorable Glitter Bath Bomb (by Lush) have all left their mark on the place, and it is one that is pretty much impervious to even vigorous vaccuuming.

My dryer lint tends to be one part glitter to three parts cat hair. Sometimes I notice glitter on the cats themselves. It is entirely possible that I am developing Sparkly Lung as I type this.

But none of this really explains why the sweater I am wearing today is shaking off glitter like Tinkerbell sheds pixie dust every time I move my freaking torso. The sweater is not a glittery one. It is not kept in proximity to any glittery clothes–wait. I believe it may have been washed in the same load of delicates as my sparkly discount prom dress.

While it is comforting to have some theory about it now, this also means that the glitter content of my underwear drawer has probably jumped considerably as well. There is going to be glitter EVERYWHERE. Urk.

This always happens. I add one piece to the overall decor of my apartment, and it’s like a Rubik’s cube. Everything has to move.

Actually, I guess it’s two pieces–I got a big collage photo frame over Christmas at Famous Barr (it was on sale), and then realized when I got home that I had another smaller collage frame that had been sitting around forever with no pictures in it. So this weekend I finally got around to printing out a bunch of photos for them.

I decided to do a childhood theme in the big one, which holds eight 4×6 prints; since Dad started scanning and posting all our old photos in his domain photo album, there are a lot of good pictures to choose from. So I’ve got me leaning evilly over baby Sophie, baby Sophie looking goofy (this one doesn’t seem to actually be in the photo album; I must have gotten it elsewhere), me and Dad and Sophie playing in the yard at the Henderson house (this is one of my favorite pictures ever; I have it set as the desktop on my computer), me and Sophie in the Henderson house, me and Sophie right after I gave us both haircuts, me, Terri, Sophie, and Michael on the porch of the Henderson House, and then, somewhat newer photos to represent Hannah: Dad fixing Hannah’s bike at the Schoolhouse and Mom restraining a crazedly jubilant Hannah at the Henderson house.

It turned out that this collage frame could only be hung horizontally, which was not my plan. So I had to move another frame that could be switched to vertical, and then I thought I should go ahead and replace the photos in THAT frame with a few more childhood pics, which I did, and now I need to move another frame over to the other wall so that the black frames are all together, and I’m thinking, hell, I have access to better photos now; I should replace the ones in THAT frame, too.

And while I’m at it, maybe I should put new photos in the cat collage frame, too (shut up). The current photos have been faded pretty badly by the sun, and Legba isn’t even represented. It’s a chain reaction of mementos, dammit.

In case you were wondering, I got the entertainment center into my apartment, although I still need to go to Home Depot and get plywood cut for the cabinet’s back and shelves. E. from my cohort has a jeep, which turned out to be JUST big enough to contain the EC. She helped me get it into the apartment and wouldn’t even take my $10.

I’ve rearranged the furniture again to accomodate it, and I think I’m going to have a lot more room available in the living room once I get those shelves in. I’m also thinking of using the bottom shelf of the cabinet for liquor storage. I didn’t use to have so much liquor that it didn’t all fit in the kitchen, but then my friend Katherine, who was a bartender, moved to San Francisco and gave me all her booze. Maybe I should just have a party.

In other news, my cat Bart (short for Bartimus) has been diagnosed with (probably) a recurrence of the Demodex mites that afflicted him LAST YEAR.

This is very upsetting, because I had to give ALL THREE CATS LIME SULFUR BATHS ONCE A WEEK FOR TWO MONTHS to treat that infestation, and he seemed to recover, and in fact looked fine until last month, when he was starting to get a few scabs here and there that I thought were the result of tussling with the other two, but then over the past week I noticed him licking patches of his stomach raw again, and it was just like the damn mites all over again.

So we went to the vet this morning (boy, the #9 bus sure is crowded at 10:30 on a weekday morning), and they couldn’t find any evidence of the mites on his fur or skin, but then again, they couldn’t find any such evidence last year, either–they only found them when they ran a stool sample, because cats tend to efficiently groom the mites off their hair and into their digestive tracts.

Which I remembered, and so I had actually brought a stool sample, but it takes some time to check them (they have to send it out to the lab), and anyway, the vet said it really did look JUST LIKE last time and every other feline Demodex infestation, so we might as well assume that yes, they really did just lie dormant for ten months.

Fortunately, since they really don’t know shit about feline Demodex, the recommended treatment has changed since last year. They gave me a bottle of Frontline spray to use on all three cats weekly and a two month supply of liquid heartworm medication to give Bart daily–they treat canine Demodex with heartworm meds routinely, but canine Demodex tend to live further down the hair shaft and are thus more vulnerable to internal medicines that then permeate the skin; they don’t really know how much it will help with a cat.

The medicine is labeled for cattle use, however, and is cheap, so we’re giving it a go. If he isn’t improved in the next couple of weeks, she said to bring him back for steroids, just in case it’s actually an allergic reaction to something, but I kind of doubt it. He never had allergies before, and the last time he had these symptoms, he also had Demodex mites. I just hope this treatment actually works.

Hey, Madison peeps… does anybody have a truck? And want to drive me to St. Vinnie’s to pick up an entertainment center that doesn’t fit in a station wagon, as it turns out?

I will pay you $10. It is all I can afford, what with the extravagent purchasing of entertainment centers.

It needs a back on the cabinet part, and the cabinet part also needs shelves, but plywood for those purposes shouldn’t be too pricey, and Home Depot will cut it to size. I was seduced by the prospect of so much DVD storage.

This weekend I rearranged some furniture in my living room to make room for a combination laser printer/copier/scanner that I acquired for free a couple of months ago,* but only recently confirmed actually worked.

The furniture rearrangement led to a shift in available wallspace, which required the shuffling around of a few pieces of decor. The next thing I knew, I was dropping a big wad of cash at the Poster Master on State Street for a few new prints and posters.

I ended up with a mermaid poster AND a mermaid print for the bedroom (now officially mermaid-themed), and two new Mucha pieces for the living room: a poster of an ad he did for Absinthe Robette and a print of the Evening Star (I picked her because she was the nakedest).

The new poster arrangement in the bedroom, however, with Mucha’s Four Seasons having to be moved to the right to accomodate my naked mermaid print, crowded out my “Outstanding Student in Philosophy and Religion” plaque from undergrad. I ended up moving it out into the living room, where I was able to find a handy nail over the bookcase.

I hope people don’t think I’m putting on airs.

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*Seriously, for FREE. Opinion is split over whether there is anthrax in the toner cartridge or it just set up a porn server on my computer when I installed the drivers. Works great, though.