The Oldenfeld.net forum is free of spammer accounts. Not that they could do anything but artificially inflate the member count and cause me grief since I have all accounts set to admin activation only, but still… they were there and now they are not. Hah!

Of course, that was the total of my efforts on the site today. Not so hot. Tomorrow I’ll do some content work for a little while. Chipping away is pretty much all I can do.

My passion right now is on research for Wedding Tarot. I’d be more judicious of the time spent only I’ve put this project down for months in the past without a thought so I’m sort of stuck in this ‘seize the moment’ thing. Maybe it’s the waning moon pushing me to complete this leg of the research (because heaven knows this will not be the end of it), maybe it’s procrastinatory serendipity (finding desire for a wayward project when I should be working on others), or maybe it’s just that whole ‘should’ issue: it’s my time and I’ll be damned if someone else is going to tell me how to spend it. Not that anyone really is, it’s me reminding myself that there are other items on the to-do list. Ahh, internal dialogue, gotta love it.

Today was a bit slow at work. The last two days were spent tidying up random loose ends (i.e. the stacks of low-priority paperwork and filing on my desk) and fighting the urge to plan my next party. I have the ground-work layed in my mind, I just have to nail down a few more details and execute the invitation design (which came to me in a flash of inspiration this morning).

But for now, back to the Wedding Tarot research. *shuffle*

I suppose I could warn you when I’m going to do that. If only I knew in advance myself!

So, let’s see, where did we leave off? Cousin M was in town and I played hookie (with permission) half a day to take her to lunch and show her around T-town on Wednesday. It was the Loop for lunch, five hours of driving around Tallahassee (I’m still a little uneasy about looking at a map and trying to see what sort of screwed-up loops I made), then dinner with Mom, J & K at Marie Livingston’s. Yum! Since Cousin M’s hosts were the early-to-bed type we got her home just after seven and I ran a couple of party-related errands before going home, myself.

Since it was only just eight o’clock I figured there was no sense in wasting time so I started draping the walls. Wow. Somehow I did not expect to have to move one wall of furniture and–should I ever be crazy enough to try this again–that so many trips up and down the step-ladder would be needed. My thighs are still protesting all of the steps but hey, it’s a great glut workout! Three hours and a quart of sweat later I had drapedthe four walls I was going to (because I ran out of sheeting), hung up the silver stars with their kick-ass mini lights, and draped caution tape over the bookcases and vertical-blind valance.

And wouldn’t you know I came home Thursday to a note on the door saying Pest Control was coming by on Friday.

Thankfully I did not get a call from the office on Friday, so I can only presume that the decorated table and prominent bar-cart convinced whomever not to report strange activity.

Would you believe that on Saturday I was actually 2 hours ahead of schedule??? I know, totally unheard of for one of my parties. Usually I’m waiting on at least one appetizer to finish when the first guest arrives right on time. Instead, I was cooling my jets at two o’clock (having already showered and primped and changed my shirt four different times) just waiting out the clock until I could reheat the final appetizer and start the popcorn popper.

This turned out to be a good thing, though, as just as I was getting ready to start the popcorn there was a knock on the door: the Bard was 45 minutes early! See, I must have known something like that was going to happen, but it was actually fine (though I did tease him about it for a little while), but it gave me a chance to give him his birthday present before the party started and he kept me company while I finished up the last-minute preparations.

‘It’s a Disaster!’ Movie Night was a rousing success. All of the food went over wonderfully, there was plenty of it (which means I don’t have to cook for a few more days! yay, leftovers!), the guests mixed as wonderfully as I thought they would, and the movies provided ample mocking factor. Here was the rundown for those that might be interested:

4pm: Dante’s Peak and Spicy Appetizers (cheeses with pepper jellies, jalapeno and ham corn muffins, black bean dip, salsa, guacamole and chips, and–even though it’s not spicy–bacon wrapped artichoke hearts or, as Palmie refers to them, Crack)
6pm: Twister and Tasty Cow (‘nother cow/same cow) Roulade (with garlicky green beans and red potatoes)
8pm: Posiedon (2007) and Pineapple Upside Down Boat Cake (with blue jell-o sea!)
9:45pm: Armageddon with S’mores and Rumballs

And the house drink was a Mudslide, though I do try to keep my bar fairly well stocked in case someone wanted something different. I also provided a pleathora of popcorn toppings, both sweet and spicy, though I think most people preferred it merely salted.

We finished up the movies just after midnight with a mass exodus for the door. We were all exhausted, but that’s a great way to end a party. I made sure everyone had their favors (small boxed sets of Worst Case Scenario cards, compass/carabiner clip and emergency whistle) and was safe to drive home before starting the clean-up. It actually only took about an hour to put away all of the food, load the dishwasher and clear the table of it’s debris. In fact, the only thing waiting for me Sunday morning was to take down the draping, rehang the pictures on two walls and clean out the rented popcorn machine for it’s return today. Otherwise I vegged out and did some reasearch for Wedding Tarot.

Thankfully I had this week’s Random Acts… in the can already so I didn’t have to worry about that tonight. Instead I wandered through StumbleUpon for a while, flipped through some old music books, and fiddled with a story that might end up on New Bard’s Press. Tomorrow I forsee spending a lot of time clearing out the Oldenfeld.net forums of the rest of their flotsam and making some content changes. One of these days (someday soon, hopefully) I’m going to overhaul this site, add some pages for the different long-term projects (like Random Acts… and Wedding Tarot) and make a space for I-Friday submissions, too. It’s still on my to-do list to get back into that habit.

I feel like, right now, I’m in a planning stage. I have a lot of big ideas that I want to see through, if I can, but I need to figure out how to balance them with the things already on my plate. Do I need to let go of some projects, again, decide which are more feasible first, or do I just need to find some stronger internal motivation? It’s probably a strong case for of the latter, so if I can keep the ball rolling I might just pull it off!

I cleared out almost 200 spam accounts on the Oldenfeld forum then made out the master to-do list for the party, Saturday, and got to work. I’ve moved furniture, cleared side tables, started the basic decorating, packaged the favors, and verified the disposable items. I’m in pretty good shape, I think.

I also managed to tidy up one of the hall closets in the process of digging out the party supplies, as well as the floor of the pantry (I’m still not sure exactly what happened in there, but it involved some non-perishables, a gallon of emergency water that decided it didn’t want to live, and a bag of what might have been, at one point in time, potatoes. They were unrecognizable, despite what the label said, and had formed a rather strong attachment to a partial box of citronella candles. I decided it was the better part of valor to bury them as one…

Anyway!

The largest part of the decorating is still to be done and almost all the food but Thursday will be soon enough for all of that. Wednesday afternoon and evening I’ll be hanging out with my cousin who is interviewing at FSU this week so not much will get done tomorrow night. But I have until 3:30pm on Saturday to have everything finished, so I anticipate that will be sufficient time (the party doesn’t start ’til 4, but I want to give myself a few moments to chill and collect before guests arrive).

To do my damnedest not to let my inbox get /that/ out of hand again. Seriously, folks, we’re talking 13,000+ among my actual email inboxes plus another 5,000+ automatically shunted off to Junk Mail. It’s not that I never check my mail, it’s that a lot of it I skim during the day but they don’t actually come off the server until I download them at home. A decent system as it means I don’t accidentally delete something important, but then I put off actually going through them at home and deleting that which I do not need. Sigh…

A lot of the issues are yahoogroups I’m on. I’d go digest but I detest reading them that way, so I’ll delete them rather than read anything. Some I will be adjusting to special notices or no mail in an effort to save myself the headache of nights like tonight where I pretty much glue myself to the computer ’til it’s done. But now that everything in there is read and saved on purpose I’m going to do my best to keep up with it. Honest.

But I did manage to get two weeks of RA… scanned, edited and uploaded so I’m good there. Yay for a teeny bit of a buffer. I’ve got another week about 3/4 sketched, but that really is the longest part. Inking is quick and the editing is merely a matter of dropping out the bits of blue pencil that the scanner picks up, resizing it and saving it for web. I admit the current family vacation storyline is dragging out a bit, but we’re almost through it so this is a good thing. Truly random stuff for a month or so then I can start with the Major Deviation for a few weeks.

But now, with the inbox overhauled, I can actually /find/ the messages that require action on some of the otehr web-properties so that I can get those done and such. Tomorrow night will be split between Oldenfeld updates (mostly mucking out the would-be forum spammers from the member list) and beginning to decorate the apartment for the party. Maybe some advance food prep while I’m at it.

By that I’m referring to HP7. I’m not going to write any spoilers in here, so don’t fret in case you haven’t read (or finished) it yet. I will say that I enjoyed it for the most part though it wasn’t until about page 400 when I really got into it. The first 300 pages or so had some very snark-worthy moments but I am happy with the ending as it stands. I’m not quite sure about what JKR meant about the whole ‘some people aren’t going to like it’ bit? Maybe certain shippers out there will cry and gnash teeth in angst? Eh, whatever.

Now that that’s out of the way… I suppose I should get around to seeing the 5th movie at some point. It’ll be a couple weeks, at least, as next weekend is the Disaster Movie party and I have tons to do to get ready for it!