My ex-minion, babyzerochica, is in from AZ for a week as a BDay surprise for her dad and popped by the land of lunacy to say hi today. She has her own minions now! *sniff* They grow up so fast...
Ran into mel_mel_chan as I was leaving today and we plan on doing some more rendezvousing at the con this weekend.
That's right, animefest is this weekend, starting tomorrow (Friday). Yoshitoshi ABe, who wrote/designed Haibane Renmei (both manga and anime) is one of the special guests, along with Yasuyuki Ueda, who produced HR. I hope to make it to one of their panels - they are having one each day.
We decided to hop the train tonight to run down to the hotel to pick up our con passes because of the bad traffic being reported. We got there, immediately found the tunnel to the hotel, popped into the bottom section - right where we needed to be, got our badges and popped back up to hop on the next train. Took no more than 20 minutes from the train stop, to the hotel conference room for the passes then back up to the train stop with at least five minutes to spare. Sweet.
I will be riding down there alone tomorrow (leaving sometime around noon after running a bunch of errands) and meeting rat at the con after he gets off work. He will be bringing the two smaller guys and Shuichi will be riding with me all day in his new baby harness.
The con ends Monday afternoon so don't expect to hear too much from me for a while. I know I will feel like I have been run over repeatedly by a truck by the time I get home each evening but I will try to check in once a day, just to see how life is doing with everyone.
AnimeFest begins this Friday and they still have not put out a schedule nor when we can pick up tickets on Thursday evening...
My body has been hurting a lot lately - not a good sign right before a four-day con. I have been avoiding pain killers but I think I will try to go to bed really early tonight and take one before retiring.
The pms headache keeps coming and going. The doc has decided to put me on the four-periods-a-year pills to try and cut down the times I get headaches. I will start that Friday.
All I want to do is crawl back into bed but I have to be there this week, especially since I will not be there on Friday because of the con.
I have been somewhat avoiding the internet for long periods of time most evenings so I can get things done or just relax. I had hoped to get the final day of akon photos out before this weekend but I don't think I will make it. Oh well.
It also looks like I accidentally threw out two camera batteries the same time I accidentally threw out all that money.
I won't get home until 10pm tonight so I am going in late today. It's the annual faculty convocation night with the breakout session afterward, then tomorrow we have to be there at crack-o-dawn to do the staff convocation. I really hate this, but we HAVE to be there and get our stupid participation points.
Lots of stuff has not gotten done yet because Snake does not come to work and does not answer my emails. All I need is an okay to do something, but Snake just cannot get around to making a simple decision about things and the excuse is the new baby and the appendix problem earlier this month. Some of this could have been done months ago but Snake avoids doing things he doesn't like doing until the last minute and expects us to jump on the boat and be willing to scramble to get it done. Not gonna happen anymore, at least I refuse to do it.
Snake expected me to stay late Monday night because he had not gotten around to doing the performance reviews due OVER A MONTH AGO. I had something to do and said I could not stay. It still hasn't happened and HR is yelling about it. Did Snake come in Tuesday or Wednesday to do it then? Nope. Tough shit if it causes trouble. If you have ADD and use that as an excuse and you are not taking medication for it, I have no sympathy for you. If you ARE taking drugs, they need to be adjusted because they are NOT working.
I plan on pulling the Dean aside and explain all the admin work I have been doing and Snake has been taking credit for. If I am going to do admin work - PAY me for it. I make grunt wages. I hope the Dean will finally see the Snake cannot do this job (or refuses to do some aspects unless pushed and pushed), but the Dean continues to give excuses for Snake so I doubt that will happen.
It is pointless to take it to the store when it is working. We are wondering if it just got too hot yesterday - I was running it for hours and hours at a time.
I don't do it very often, but that morning I had forgotten my medication and had driven back home from work to get it, was still freaking out about the potential eviction, and on on the way back to work, ran a very old yellow light.
The camera caught me and this evening I got a notice from the police saying I owed $75 for running a red light. I got pretty pictures and everything. After finding out it will not show up my my driving record, I can quickly pay it and be on my merry way.
Having some checking account padding really helps in times like these...
I also discovered I was still being charged every month for the anime club's website - keeping the banner ads off it - after I thought I had cancelled it when I wasn't getting reimbursed as promised. The bannerless option has been cancelled and the site looks terrible now, but it needs a redesign anyway - getting rid of the frames would help minimize the banner crap a LOT.
rat ran into the neighbor this morning and asked about the smoke and if the crew had come in to fix things. The guy basically said they were putting out an effort to keep it to a minimum. How nice of them! rat shook his hand and called me to tell me the good news a few minutes later.
So, we have decided to get them something to thank them for their courtesy - something simple like a plant. Since they have a cat, what kind of easy-to-find houseplant is not toxic to a cat? We truly don't want to hurt Buddy.
Stayed home again today with gimpy gut. I will have to go in on Thursday, gut or not.
The following week is the week all the ft faculty come back and all the bullshit we have to do with that stupid faculty convocation and breakout session afterward on Thursday evening (staying until at least 10pm), just to turn around and come back to campus at oh-dawn-thirty on Friday for the required staff convocation and required department lunch afterward. Ugh. The older I get, the more I hate forced socializing.
And the week before classes begin is one royal piss hole of fun...
So I will be running around next week, trying to make sure all the crap Snake should be handling gets handled without me taking any blame for anything. On top of that will be course cancellations (Snake will expect ME to pull all the names, give them to him, then he will hand them back to me hours later and expect me to do the calling - I prefer emailing the students so I don't have to talk to them and listen to their stupid questions about stuff they should already know). And has the little shit been keeping track of the class numbers like his job requires? As far as I can tell, not at all. Instead, he has been running around in that stupid mascot costume (he is one of the few on campus it fits), flirting with little chickies and basically being useless for our department. But stuff for the gaming class has been purchased and he had to go off-campus for hours to get the copies, whoopie...
On a different note, rat found some local rent homes that will be available in September. MUCH nicer neighborhoods. He is kinda pushing this for some reason, and I am letting him have at it. I just need to find the strength to do more de-trashing and re-organization.
Strange thing is - we have had NO SMOKE in the apt since last week. Not even on the weekend. Either Bunny left the guy next door (and rat hasn't seen her cat Buddy in any window) or she is on a business trip. I guess the latter, but we shall see...
Monday night we went and looked at rent houses. OMG! They were mostly horrible and WAYYYYY out in north bumfuck. The money we would have to pay for gas to drive one-way to work would be terrible.
One house is almost next-door to our apts and so we pulled up and went into the backyard, as the dogs on ALL THREE SIDES barked continuously. The place is TINY. How in the world three bedrooms fit into that little space is beyond me. It also had a funny smell outside. For some reason, it is 'up' from the ground, just like the other older homes along the street. Weird.
Anyway, that adventure really shot a big hole in our plans to escape the apt.
Tuesday, I stayed home with a flaky and painful gut and a feeling of being stupid and utterly tired. I ended up sleeping much of the day, which does not make sense, since I slept almost the entire weekend away, too. I think I must have some kind of bug in my system...
I moved a few more manga to the new shelves. I am still looking for a missing Gravi Sound Story. I think it may be in a pile of creative stuff I haven't gotten to yet.
The cleanout is moving at a snail's pace now. Being sick so much is NOT helping...
All my plans to work on some more cleaning went up in smoke this weekend.
I pretty much stayed in bed most of the weekend, sleeping, marathon-watching Fruits Basket (and finishing it), turning the a/c on and off to avoid the cigarette smoke pouring in, dodging the bucket holding 'lake 206' when going to the bathroom, doing a little beta work (yay!), doing a little fiction writing of my own (another yay!) and being a slug. I did manage to get the final bit of Chikara's arrival story done but that took about four days to do it. Writing dialogue can be a pain for me when it is not in the context of a piece of my fiction.
Anyway, the antique vanity is still covered with shit I had planned on throwing away or packing up, the Gravi fanart did not get hung, I didn't get the art table de-trashed and the artwork organized and put away....
What a loser...
Hopefully I won't be falling asleep at my office desk for the next few days...
Hmm, maybe I can convince rat to help me with the Gravi fanart in a few minutes...
Oh, they never came back to check our progress with the cleanup...
We haven't been able to make a big dent this week, what with working last week, needing sleep after not having any the prior weekend and days after, needing to run real life errands (and more to do today) and poor health because of the stress.
I hope we will pass enough tomorrow (Monday) - showing we ARE still making an effort to move stuff around and such. Got one bathroom floor in some semblance of order - no more boxes. Got the rest of the kitchen counter organized, with the myriad of drugs mostly contained instead of scattered about.
We went out yesterday and got some media towers - now some of the DVDs, manga, VHS tapes and CDs are a little more organized. It's nice having all the Gravi media in one place - it looks a bit impressive, especially with the Japanese collection above the English collection. I go by and touch them periodically - I am proud of what I have gathered. I need to find the various fansubs and put them with the group, too.
Also got one of the cabinets built to shove art stuff inside and have been doing some shoving.
Didn't make the dents where I wanted to, but my damned intestine is causing all sorts of havoc today and was bothering me yesterday to a degree. We are both really tired because of this and it will continue happening for a long time. We also know the dents will look smaller as we go along and we will be moving stuff into area previously cleared, mostly because we will be rearranging over actual dumping.
My body really does hurt right now...
We got otaku to recognize the DVD player/burner again, but now it takes a long time to initially boot up. If it's not one thing, it's another...
Why did I purchase so many fucking doujinshi? One of the long-term projects will be to cull and hopefully sell a lot of doujinshi, especially the DBZ and Yu Yu Hakusho stuff. I will still hold onto certain circles, but the other books really must go. I will probably do bundles on ebay, just hoping they will sell, and quickly.
I may even sell my very expensive hard-bound official DBZ books - the ones I paid at least $30 each for back in the day. I will have to see if anyone is selling them on ebay or not.
I also have some official DBZ collectables I think I need to let go of, but not through Goodwill.
rat just called me from Half-Price... Seems we got $70 this time, mostly because I had in the pile the book, "Wicked", which was a first edition and actually worth something.
I was happy to see it go...
My "White Dwarf" gaming magazines seem to have a bit of value, too. Well, most of them ARE pristine and I only looked at once, so it's nice someone will find them useful.
We have slowed down a bit. I know I will need to gear up for the weekend, starting tomorrow. The dent definitely will be smaller this time but we only have a few hours each night to do things before we keel over from exhaustion accumulated from last week.
I am making a pretty good dent tonight but I think I will be petering out soon.
Both rat and I were zombies at work yesterday - nodding off at our desks and stumbling around when we walked. Gee, I wonder why?
We went over to the Container Store after work to get some stuff for the kitchen, had some dinner at the Warehouse (I could only eat one bowl of Wedding Soup - I think my stomach has shrunk again) then got home to try a little work. I only got started in the kitchen and I found myself wilting. At about 8pm we decided to game to give ourselves a little break and I kept falling asleep while I was trying to help him with the clock tower battle. I passed out until 11pm, then woke up, went to bed and passed out again almost immediately. I am still feeling the effects of last weekend but I really cannot afford to take time off to sleep at the moment. We need to show another major dent by Monday and I don't know how far I am going to actually get this time.
The a/c still leaks and the smoke stink still comes through...
We have until Monday to show more progress - this is a good thing, and possible.
Lifestyle change...
I lost a few hours today because of cramps, upset stomach from both sinus drainage (still have that now) and the soup I choked down for lunch. I had to keep prone so I would feel better. rat brought me a can of Mandarin oranges for dinner and I ate half around dinnertime and half for late evening snack along with some Captain's Crackers - something to help with the drainage.
Inspection is supposed to happen today and we will know if they are going to continue to pursue the eviction. I feel like I made a dent but I don't know how they will feel. No room is complete - that will take a while - but the living/dining is pretty good, the dinette and master bedroom is getting there, the hall is good and the kitchen has been started. I have not even begun to tackle the two bathrooms or the media/art room. That last one is going to be a monster and I don't expect to see much difference in it until next Monday.
I am hoping they will see I am working hard to get this done. We have been very conscientious about getting rid of any stuff we put outside during the day. The trash bags are removed late at night (when it is not so blazing hot) so in the morning I can begin again.
I think I am going to go down to the office shortly after they open and make an appointment for a guess-timate time. I need to know when they show up so I can put on some clothes. Yeah, I do a lot of this in mostly skin - I can wash off easily and get back to it. Plus, when we have to shut off the a/c because of the smoke, it is cooler to be in skin.
I look like a dalmation on the lower half of my body and arms - bruises all over. I don't know how I got the one on top of my foot or where the cut came from. My back tells me about it a lot and now I feel it in my hips and butt. It is probably from sitting on the floor for hours and picking stuff up. I haven't been able to sit on the floor without a cushion for years, so it has been an interesting discovery. It is like some pain receptors have been turned off while others are functioning normally.
Thanks: --> to Lia, my sensei, who has inspired me to draw again. I
wouldn't be doing this without your support, Domo Arigato!
--> to Talon, for sending me her fabulous fics, inspiring me with her writing to draw my first
illustration for a story and actually liking what I drew.
--> to Dasia, for her words of encouragement when drawing her original chara.
--> to Joules, a wonderful epic fic writer, for liking my art enough to want to post them with Talon's
and her own stories.
--> to Lutra, the other half of the epic team, for being so supportive.
--> to Jacque' & Becca Raddittzu, we met on eBay as bidder and sellers and now we are face-to-face
friends. You showed us the real DBZ with your fansubs. It's all your fault the house is full of
doujinshi! *LOL*
:: welcome to bakayaro onna's mindless ramblings, rants & raves :: 
