I had my physical the other day, and mentioned my "finger migraines" to the doctor.

Result: diagnosis of Raynaud's. The usual treatments are "keep affected areas warm" and calcium channel blockers, but CCBs are a poor choice for me since I have low blood pressure. (Unless, you know, I really WANT to faint all the time.)

So my plan is to keep my hands warm. I have a pair of handwarmers at my desk at work, but I think I need to knit several pairs of fingerless gloves to stash in various handbags, around my house, in the car, etc.

Since it turns out that I dislike knitting socks, I think I know what I'll be using all my sock yarn for....

I wanted to finish either the cardigan or the lightweight summer sweater I'm working on before taking back up my Clapotis, but I think at least one pair of gloves is going to need to take precedence over everything else.

Tags: knitting

New t-shirt:


Put A Cork In It:

I should've paid more attention when I mounted my cork board. I stuck it up RIGHT where I use the wall for my projector when I'm cheating. :P That's kind of annoying - that means either remounting (and with drywall that's UGLY because of the bigass drywall mounts I use) or taking it down every time, and I don't really forsee that one working all that well.

Bah humbuggery. Suggestions?

Jewels:

Since I have a grand total of 8 earring holes (more to come! watch this space!) getting earrings that are part of a set is going to be interesting, but I think I'll just stick with these little 20g rings - or move to 16g ones that're identical except for the obvious gauge difference. I say this because while I was out today buying random groceries and shit, I saw this pair of purdy dangly earrings which go well with my hair when it's down and pulled back a bit.... but uh.. 2 earrings, one for each side, plus 7 little captive bead ring ones are an odd look. I did see a woman at Walgreens yesterday when I was picking up dad's new antibiotic that had graduated sizes of pearls all the way around her ear, though, which actually looked really nice on her coffee-colored skin.

Dad:

Is ill. Again. I know he'll be fine, he's doing to well otherwise for this to be the thing that is his final straw - but I can't help but worry about it anyway. He made funeral arrangements for him and mom not that long ago, a couple weeks. They're being cremated and put in temporary urns. I promised him yesterday while we were out (I was taking him to the doctor, with his 102 fever and coughing up of crap) that I would scatter his ashes where he wants them. He said he wanted to be put in an ocean, and I told him I didn't care where he wanted it, I would fly across the world if I had to - but to tell me where he wants to be scattered, and I'd take him there.

Then he said he'd really rather have another 40 years, he still wants to fulfill his life's ambition to be shot by a jealous husband. *little hearts*

Renaming:

Since I'm taking my maiden name back, I've been making a list of places I have to change it, and finding out what it takes to do it. Apparently it's easier to go back to your maiden name after a divorce than it is to go to your married name after a wedding.

Doooooooodles:

My sketchbook is spontaneously becoming fuller with little random doodles spread through some of the empty pages between peoples crap that I wrote down on client stuff.

Drawing:

I'm doing more of that this morning. Then I'm hanging out with mom and dad for a while again, and since I'm hyped up on white chocolate caramel latte (with hazelnut syrup) I'm going to take advantage of that and draw my little heart out first. .... now to move the damned cork board.

Three things make a post:

Spike's black-and-white Lucas & Odessa, which is no longer online, was why I got PayPal. I'm sad L+O isn't there, because fat, 16, angst-ridden Odessa pinged my marrow. All of Sparkneedle is still there and this entirely non-verbal hallucination speaks directly to my imagination with no apparent cognitive filter. Now I can catch up with Templar Arizona.

Jessica Abel co-wrote Life Sucks, about schlumpy vampires created to staff a stop&rob convenience store by its ancient Romanian owner. Oh yeah -- it's the logical outcome of Harvey-Pekar/Buffy trainwreck. Very funny, but nowhere near as profound as La Perdida, but then, not much is.

Reading comics : how graphic novels work and what they mean by Douglas Wolk is art history + literary criticism. The first half is Theory & History and I couldn't put it down. Though I did start with floppy Archie comics as a kidlet, I've been pretty much a graphic-novel snob for the past two decades. The context Wolk provides for the spandex world finally helps me get them for the first time. The second half are essays/reviews on twenty-one important comics producers (that darn Alan Moore again, prevents one from simply writing "artists"). Wolk cautions they're not a 21 best, but 21 folks whose works sparked thoughts. There's plenty I disagree with, but the essays are well-written, considered, and fun. I'm gobsmacked that lit-crit could be a page-turner, but then, it's comics!

Tags: comics
Current Mood: comic

I keep not writing that long post about Can We Talk About Race, mostly because it involves using my brain.

Anyway. What I've read since:

• Little,Big by John Crowley, which was in bits very good and in bits quite bad.


• Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard. This bit of history is more speculative than most histories that I'm used to, because it's based largely on an oral history given to one of the authors by an elderly African-American quiltmaker, Ozella McDaniels. McDaniels reported a "quilt code", in which quilts were used to lay out preparations and directions for slaves escaping to the North. Tobin and Dobard argue that quilts are connected to African memory boards, and they have to speculate about a lot of things that are lost to history because they weren't written down and no one still alive remembers them. An interesting read, especially if you're into American (USan) history.


• Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports by Michael Sokolove. This book got a lot of people on edge with the title -- is this guy against women's sports? -- but he's very strongly pro-women's sports. What he's anti is accepting the sky-high rates of ACL tears in women's soccer, which he believes are caused by failures of adequate cross-training, overconcentration in a single sport from a young age, and overexposure (too many games/practices per unit time). What he suggest be done to protect girls is not to stop them playing, but to involve parents in asking for ACL injury prevention programs, get coaches to work on ACL injury prevention (very few do), and to revise the youth sports culture in the US.


• The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz. I've been talking this one up all over livejournal since I read it; it's both a social history of the American family and a cogent argument that if you base your national family policy on a nostalgic ideal that is not only difficult to attain, but impossible to sustain, you will mostly screw everyone over*; instead, you should base your national family policy on reality. (The problem, of course, is that some people in charge want to screw almost everyone over.)
  
  * except for rich white married heterosexual couples

The above list is pretty typical for me: lots of nonfiction, one fiction book that took me ages to slog through (I started reading Little,Big in 2007). I used to love fiction. I know the switch happened sometime while I was at university, but I don't really know why.

Now reading: The Ghost Map and Bonk (both nonfiction). I have two fiction books on deck: Acacia and Victory of Eagles; I'll start one or the other when I finish Bonk.

Tags: books

I managed to resist the Buffy Effect for once.

I am very very amused by "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog". Joss really does tremendous, snappy dialogue. I don't think I'm familiar with Felicia Day, but Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion are fan-tastic.

If I'm going to stick around, maybe I should come up with my own X-out-of-Y ratings system. For now I'll give it two thumbs up while laughing.

Current Music: "It's a brand new day ..."

Following up on the last couple of entries here,  as you may have heard, the HHS has proposed redefining contraception as abortion.

Since some people assumed feminist bloggers were making this up or overreacting, the actual document is here in .pdf format.

Almost all of the text is below.  This gets really long, so I have cut it.  I have bolded the parts I feel warrant especial concern, and I have made comments in red throughout.

If my understanding of something is faulty, that's probably because I am not a lawyer.  I think, however, I have a pretty good idea of where this is going.

 

So.  Now you see why I'm so worried.  That is subtle, insidious, and entirely horrifying.

What is just as bad is that I had not known that there were already federal laws in place which specifically prevent medical institutions from refusing to hire people who will not perform their jobs.

People, I understand conscience.  I really do.  I don't want people to have to do things they do not want to do.  I strongly feel, therefore, that people who cannot cope with abortion, who object to contraception, should not be in medicine.  Those two things are cornerstones of health care, as well as basic human freedom.  Anyone who would deny them to a patient based on their conscience does not have anyone's best interests at heart.  Only their own.

I also understand these people do not want to have anything to do with what they see as taking a human life.  Again, if that is the case, if a person's grasp of biology and medicine is so weak that one can actually believe that a fertilized egg is of equal or greater importance than a woman's right to determine the course of her own life, I do not believe that person has any place whatsoever in medicine.

I'm not really open to debate on these points, and I am warning everyone of that well in advance.  If you wish to debate, do so in your own journals.  That is what they are for.

This, if passed, would be disastrous, and I urgently request that you do something.  Write a letter, speak to someone, pass the word around.  This must not go unchallenged.  Too much ground has been lost already.  This is a very real danger to the reproductive freedom of all human beings.  If this sort of thing is allowed to spread, it is going to affect you, your siblings, your children, your friends, everyone you know.

Please write or make a phone call.  Please do something.

Please.  These are your rights, too.

Tags: abortion, feminism, halp, misogyny in action, politics, rage
Current Location: Morningstar Hall
Current Mood: pissed off
Current Music: Tarot -- Ice

Well, celticmistress stayed with me overnight on Wednesday, and has now moved on to Michigan. The last I heard, early this morning, was that she was home; I am assuming that she's been sacked out or recovering ever since. I know I would be after a drive like that.

A wonderful foster home has been found and, to the best of my knowledge, celticmistress's cats will be there very soon. That part is a little out of my hands at this point, given that they're a long way off.

But I thought I would let you know that she left a nasty situation despite a critical lack of support from key individuals and some incredibly annoying delays, and has successfully returned home with self and cats intact.

Thank you to everyone who helped spread the word. Thank you, thank you, thank you. This goes way above and beyond anything I had expected, and I am insanely, incredibly grateful for your help, because I could not have done this without youall. I don't know who it was who forwarded the link to the foster couple, or who forwarded it to them. I don't know how it happened. I do know that without the collective effort it wouldn't have happened at all, and my friend might very well still be stuck down there.

And, Babe, I don't think I said it the other night, but I will say it now, right here in front of everyone. I am so, so proud of you.

Love you, babe.

Tags: animals, cats, halp, happy
Current Location: Morningstar Hall
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Within Temptation -- Stand My Ground

[WoW]
Was scanning the talent trees for the next expansion. A couple things come to mind:

Whichever Blizzard guy said a couple months ago in the priests forum, "I've seen the Discipline tree, it's totally reworked and is now incredibly awesome" was lying through their teeth. The Discipline tree is the same %@#$#^ secondary/PvP healing and support tree it's been since the last expansion. There are some damage talents in there, but with the major holy damage talents still marooned in the Holy tree I'm not sure what the point is. Though I guess Searing Light affects Penance, making me think they're anticipating 54/17/0 as a (the?) major Discipline build. That might work--it would reduce the reliance on spellcrit anyway, and bring smite gear more in line with shadow gear. But just looking at it--there isn't enough there to make it competitive with Shadowform, and if my experience is anything like normal, half-heal-half-damage isn't a role that any PvE group is able to deal with.

Also the fact that it seems to rely on PW:Shield as its primary healing spell is really bizarre.

And they got rid of Sanctity Aura? Shit.

The top mage frost talent seems a little... weird. Though if you've also picked up Winter's Grasp it's at least not just stupid.

Final episode of Doctor Horrible, my reaction:

=D
XD
=o
O_O
D=
T_T

For firynze and lunaratu both:

armored
squirrels.

So, I'm housesitting/dogsitting for my Aunt and Uncle for about a week. I always enjoy perusing the free On-Demand movies. One of the ones currently available is "They Live". Man it's been a long, long time since I've seen this heap of awfulness. There really aren't enough movies these days starring Roddy Piper.

Current Mood: amused

Hey, all! Long time no post, I know. Not a whole lot going on as work was very, very busy, and my mom visited me last weekend, so I'm just getting adjusted to the "free time" thing and catching up on sleep. Oh and reading a lot. This weekend I WILL get some writing and sketching done, I mean it!

The inside of my apartment building is a real mess these days because they're taking out all of the carpeting in all of the hallways on each floor. When the carpeting was first removed, I got to walk on the remains of the adhesive that was underneath the carpeting, fun stuff :p

In other news, I saw The Dark Knight today and like most others was blown away by Heath Ledger's electric performance. It really left me wanting more, so sad that can never be. I was in the gym thinking about the movie and listening to The Pink Album and was struck by how well many of the songs lent themselves to a mental review of the Joker's memorable scenes (try it, it's fun!). It got me to thinking: for those fellow TMBG fans on my lj friends' list, if you've seen the movie, what TMBG song do you think would make the best theme song for the Joker? Just thought I'd throw that out there :)

That's about it for now. I've been trying to keep up with the stack of books to review, but the stack keeps growing! And that's just the books sent to me, I haven't gotten near the ones people have given or loaned to me yet. I'd better get back to it. In the meantime, you can always check out my most recent reviews on www.culturecartel.com. Any and all feedback is welcome! Have a great weekend, all.

Love,

"Kay"

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: "Everything Right is Wrong Again"