At least for the first half of the month. With the first 3 articles turned in this evening I’m starting on next week’s comics. As soon as those are finished I expect to be able to get at least the next 2 articles finished before going in for surgery on Thursday. I might even be able to get more done, depending on how productive I can be this weekend.
Went to the grocery store and stocked up after work. Combination of the usual 2 weeks worth of food and extra supplies for post-procedure: fruit smoothies, pudding, soups, jello, etc. All light stuff to give my digestive system a chance to adjust with the minimum (I hope) of tummy upset. Tried one of the fruit-protein smoothies. Oh, god, I hope it was just a matter of it not being cold enough or something because, y’all, it tasted like vomit. Seriously. I’ll give it another shot and maybe try mixing it with sprite or something but if that doesn’t work I’m tossing that particular one. Nasty!!!
But, you know, at least I can supposedly eat normally. Last time I had to recuperate it was my throat surgery, so really no solid anything for quite some time. Still high on anesthesia I was sick at just the thought of popsicles and pudding for a week, I asked V to get me some baby food, figuring at least it wouldn’t be sweet. And for the first day it tasted great. The next day, the super-drugs having worn off, I realized the oh-so-error of my ways. Luckily, a client of ours had a small child and she could use the unopened stuff. The desserts and some veggies were still good, but if I never have to eat pureed turkey dinner, etc. again it will be too soon!
Tags: articles, food, groceries, baby food
Shopping recap for the weekend
10.75 spent on a pink martini glass lamp for the bar
79.57 total spent on shoes
(4 pairs, average 19.89 per)
26.30 total spent on accessories
(5 items, average 5.26 per)
317.36 total spent on clothing
(23 items, average 13.79 per)
1 dress
5 jammies
1 pr shorts, 3 pr pants, 4 skirts
9 shirts
And that’s what I did with my weekend. Not including a trip to the grocery store, a stop at the liquor store and 2 meals out. But you get the picture. After a whole month of not shopping, I suppose I was due for a splurge. Granted, of the above, most of it was on store charge accounts (nice to have for the few times a year I go and refit my wardrobe, lol).
Most of the clothes are work clothes (obviously not the jammies, those are for recuperating from surgery and so forth) that will get me through quite a while. The shoes were an attempt to find comfy sandals/casuals with mid-height heels for walking around in at DragonCon and I think I finally managed to cover those bases (I can’t do 3 days in flats or tennis shoes without serious tendinitis pain and my current heeled options aren’t con-floor friendly).
And speaking of jammies! Even though I was specifically looking for nightgowns and sleep shirts I saw this one tank-and-short set that I _had_ to have: it’s got martini-swilling monkeys on it, hello?!?
Tags: clothesshopping, monkeys, jammies, martinis, dragon con preparedness
I teetered a bit on that whole no-shopping thing this weekend but it wasn’t much. And it was in the name of research and good will as while he was ringing up my purchases I sweetly asked if i could conduct a brief interview. So, yeah, total expense account. I can only claim laziness and cravings for the meals out Friday and Saturday but it still wasn’t at all extravagant. So I didn’t make it an entire month, but I got close! And I’m going to stick with it until Friday, anyway.
Work-wise I’m in the midst of wrapping up my last 4 articles for the month. It always feels good to get another month in the can which leads directly to another check in the mail. Always a good thing. And since it gives me most of a week before I need to start writing the next set of articles that gives me time to not only work on this week’s comics but scripting all of next month as well. Back to the photo editing for the articles, though.
Not totally, of course, there was the scanning and the PhotoShop cleaning of the print pages which did get done. And all those grays I was erasing stray marks to be able to pick them up better? They totally dropped out anyway. Apparently 20% cool gray is ass for scanning. Oh well, just tweaked the levels and left them out. I was kinda worried how they’d print anyway so it’s probably just as well. If it’d been only a little uneven I just would have gone back over it with the airbrush to fix it. Oh, well, live and learn.
Other than that, nothing had really happened tonight. I had totally planned to start on this week’s strips tonight, at least getting pencils down but, well, no. Didn’t happen. And I’m not going to beat myself up over it, either. I can definitely get Wednesday’s up tomorrow night so there’s no crisis and after pushing myself so much these past couple of weeks I think a night off is not uncalled for.
Now about July… July is going to be a “chill” month for me. Of course I still have the comic and my eHow articles to do but here are some things I’m not going to be doing:
*taking on new projects
*scripting Act 2 of Wedding Tarot (it’ll wait til August)
*committing to new projects for future months
*throwing a party (it was a possibility, but no, I need the break)
etc.
I also plan to curb the superfluous spending for the month of July, kinda like a lifestyle detox. Of course, that just meant that I ordered the print gocco machine tonight rather than waiting on later this month, but I’ve been planning to order it for 2+ months now and it will actually be used for an article, at that. But enough excuses. Aside from things like gas and groceries and necessary art supplies it’s gonna be nix on the other frivolities. We’ll see how that goes 
So. I’m over thirty and apparently my skin just got the memo because the last few months I’ve been having such odd issues with my skin, well, hatin’ on me! It’s not so much blemishes, I doubt I’ll ever be rid of those if Mom’s any indication though it’s nothing like high school *shudder*, but for the first time in my life I have _dry_ skin. Not even dry skin, but selectively dry skin. And I’ve always had (and still have by and large) oily skin so the fact that it’s dry in some places just totally confuses me.
So I’ve been testing various moisturizers and all and so far there are plenty that work great on my arms and legs but not so much on the face. My Sephora order came in today containing two items that are safe for sensitive skin and also for oily skin. Hopefully between the two of them (one to use before bed and the other to go under my makeup that’s supposed to “mattify” as well) I’ll be able to improve the situation. Getting older is hell, though I do prefer it to the alternative!
So I engaged in a bit of retail therapy last week and I was really surprised that my ring from ice.com came in so soon. Isn’t it pretty? It’s almost too pretty, but not quite, lol.
Anyway, aside from admiring the new pretty I managed to get two of this week’s comics completed and the third about half-way there. Which is good because I need to pick up non essential items from the living room and dining room tomorrow night because the carpet cleaners are coming Wednesday! Lovely two day warning, huh? But, hey, it’s a freebie due to renewing my lease, so who am I to really argue. I figure I’ll stash the dining room table (thank goodness its lightweight) and chairs on the bed and roll up the rug so they can cover the most area. The Abyss is still off limits and I’ll probably just close both bedroom doors just to avoid the headache. It’s the high-traffic areas that need it anyway.
Or would that be May? I always get those two confused
Anyway, I debated with myself for about an hour about whether I was going to go to the grocery store today or tomorrow. I didn’t actually NEED the groceries until tomorrow evening but I knew I wouldn’t want to deal with the store PLUS cooking tomorrow night so I resigned myself the tackling the list today. And as a reward for not killing half the people in that store for being absolute imbeciles, I had dessert before dinner.
But really it’s been a productive evening. I finalized another article, started on the pictures for the third of the month (due Thursday, so I’m actually on track to not panic) and pencilled Wednesday’s comic in full and paneled and lettered Thursday and Friday. I even did penance for that dessert on the stationery bike. Not a bad evening. If I keep it up for the next two nights I’ll be able to start getting ahead by this weekend (wouldn’t that be freaking awesome!).
Probably because it us. Had a great weekend visiting Drew in Orlando. Spent a pretty penny at IKEA for some organization stuff, kitchen supplies, and some more linens and such. Lots of fun and we apparently lucked out crowd-wise which was good on several levels. Saturday night we wandered through Downtown Disney, which Mom had never been to in it’s current incarnation (the last time she was at Disney there was a small shopping area known as Lake Buena Vista that we _think_ is what is now The Marketplace) before getting a late supper at Outback.
You’d think that living and working in Orlando would be hell as far as traffic and such goes. For some, maybe, but Drew managed to find an apartment that is right next to a major shopping center with just about anything you’d need on a regular basis (and then some) and is within 3 miles of work to the point that he doesn’t have to get on any toll roads or the Interstate for his usual business. Go him!
Since Mom wanted to drive, I got to spend the trip down there and back blocking the pages and panels for the Script Frenzy project. Now just to transfer them from the scrawled notes into Celtx and I should be able to reach goal with no problem. But first, time to finish the comics for next week and work on the next eHow article. Back to the merry-go-round!
K’s boyfriend managed to pull off an early surprise birthday dinner for her tonight that Mom and I went to. Quite, quite fun and I purposefully only ate half my steak and loaded potato so I’d have lunch for tomorrow. Such good birthday cake.
Before dinner we needed to kill some time and pick up K’s gift certificate for a pedicure so at the Mall I found something majorly surprising: a denim skirt, knee length, in a blue that doesn’t look dirty or stone washed. ON SALE. Rock on! There was also a funny moment when Mom and I picked up identical jackets from across the room. The hounds tooth pattern was too large to look right on anyone our size but still, that was a bit too freaky.
Palmie has also informed me that our travel plans for next year will preempt the Memphis road trip in favor of hostel-ing it in England for a week. Hey, who am I to argue?!?
I knew people sacrificed for their art, I didn’t think it would be the pads of my fingers from sharpening colored pencils! Ouch! I have a blister after prepping 48 of them this evening. Apparently you pay through the nose for them AND still have to sharpen them yourselves. Oh, well, they’ll be fun to play with.
Slow day at the office today. Not that work was especially slow, but I was. Sleepy, tired, etc etc etc I just couldn’t keep focused for anything. So I took a lunch break and did a little shopping (40% off coupon plus a $25 gift card made the colored pencils much more reasonably priced, lol) at Michaels and Fashion Bug, hoping that would snap me into a more productive afternoon. Not exactly. Actually got a little light headed for a while. Shopper’s high or is that cold coming back? It passed so I’m not going to worry about it.
Mostly lounged and watched TV tonight so far but I did manage to get Tuesday’s Random Acts… inked and uploaded. Now to work on an eHow article. I’m kinda hoping I get a second (well, first) wind in a bit.
Whoops! Tuesday was insanely productive: I drafted almost an entire article before work (yeah, I was up _that_ early) and wrote another one once I got home, plus did visuals for one of the articles. There was actually video involved but something pesky happened when I resaved it and the audio just went absolutely horrible. Oh, well, took alternate stills and got those edited tonight. Article 3 of the remaining 4 will be knitting related and I’m working out a kink in the pattern but should get it done tomorrow night.
Also, after I posted Monday night I actually completed Thursday’s comic a few days early and just finished the pencils for _next_ Tuesday–holy cow, y’all, I’m actually crawling ahead again! If I can keep it up I might build up enough to increase my update schedule again. That would be sweet! It would also tighten up the lag (possibly, I could also end up extending occurrences into arcs, but then again maybe not) from it’s current 8-9 months to maybe only 3 or 4. Dare to dream, right?
Also got the taxes mailed off, several of the shipments for the Vegas welcome bags in at work, and a fair amount of work done on a variety of projects. Tonight, since I was ahead on the comic, I went to dinner with Palmetto and then we stopped by Target because I wanted to pick up the next season of Girls Next Door and then wandered Kohl’s because I hadn’t been since before Christmas. Found 2 shirts and a red case for the iPod. Best thing about the case? 2 things, actually: 1)80% off and 2)it’s made so that all the ports are accessible! No more having to take it out of the case to charge it or transfer tunes! Rock on!
Having someone (professional) do my taxes this year. A rather expensive experiment. Granted, I came out ahead by a little bit when all is said and done and I did learn some things from the tax dude and got to ask some questions about the self-employment tax estimates, etc. The system wasn’t set up to prepare those forms so I still have to do that on my own, but he gave me pre-addressed envelopes. (*mutter* for what I paid them they should be pre-stamped and filled with cash */mutter*)
Will I do it again? Not sure. I feel slightly more comfortable about my ability to do it myself but I really do like the fact that someone with WAY more experience than me is the one who scheduled the business deductions, etc. And at least I know now what this sort of thing runs and won’t face the same sticker shock. Not to mention I get to take today’s fee as a deduction NEXT year. I suppose it all washes out in the end.
In other news. Yay for a weekend spend mostly snuggling with Spectrum. Despite the rain we did manage to hit all four comic shops on Saturday along with Word Traffic. A couple of ethnic restaurants and Comedy Zone Saturday nights, some movies at home and dinner Sunday night with Mom and Molly rounded out our long weekend together. Oh, but I hated to see him drive away this afternoon! He did make it home safe and sound, though, so all’s well. And Vegas is only 2.5 weeks away 
Only a handful of days left in the year and I’m happy to say that I’ve met my obligations for the rest of it so far. Articles and invoice submitted, comics done for the year (the next one will post New Year’s Day so I count it as next year, not this one) and Christmas finished with. I’m even fairly current at work. This is pretty cool.
In the TV saga we’ve decided to just go ahead and exchange the set at Best Buy. J’s going to come over tomorrow evening or Saturday and haul it around for me and I’ll just hope for a non-dud this time. It would have taken several days to 2 weeks at the repair place (esp considering the impending weekend and holiday) so since the purchase is less than a week old (maybe a week and a half at most) it just makes more sense to exchange it and have it over with.
Nothing else of note except I really hope I’m not coming down with the flu just in time for NYE. I’m ridiculously tired and achy and grouchy and potentially feverish. But maybe if I take it easy this weekend I can avoid it once more this year. Always the optimist (well, mostly, and tempered by reality keeping me from being cockeyed).
Today was the first day back at work after the holidays and while it wasn’t a bad day by any stretch of the imagination, my internal calendar is screwed all to hell and back. I actually thought I had another night to finish the comic until about 3pm this afternoon. Whoops! So it was a nap, dinner, and then the comic.
Now, I had thought to put a movie on to test out the new dvd player but low and behold when I turned on the new TV that Santa (aka Mom) brought me I found something very strange. After not one full day of use it now has two sound options: mute and BLARE. I tried every setting I could on every remote and even called the toll-free philips customer service line. Which was not exactly helpful but I’m sure no one is surprised at that. I explained the problem much like I did above and this little automaton asks “So you’re saying the sound is fuzzy?” Um. No. I’m saying it’s too loud. “Have you tried the volume controls?” *headdesk* Seriously, people, I mean, sure, some idiots might not be able to find the volume button on the side of the set or the remote, but no, I assure you I’d found them. For pities freaking sake.
Anyway, supposedly I get to call AZ Electronics (”which is at ### Carolina St, which is in Tallahassee, which is in Florida”–no lie, folks, I told her my zip code in order for her to find the nearest service place and she feels the need to tell me what state my own town is located in. Now, I could understand if she were telling me that the nearest registered service place was in Georgia or Alabama–in which case we say screw you–but seriously?) tomorrow with the reference number, it’s under warranty (no, really? durr) so no charge for parts or labor, and arrange for an appointment to bring it in for repairs. The fun part? I can’t lift the damn thing. My arms aren’t long enough. Andrew even had trouble with it because it’s so wide and awkward.
And I do not relish telling Mom about this, tomorrow. I wonder, though, if it wouldn’t be easier to just take it back to Best Buy for an exchange at this early stage of the game. Of course, it doesn’t bode well that after 24 hours it flakes out on me. I really expected more from it. Sigh… Good thing I didn’t commit the 19″er to someone else otherwise I’d really be screwed. Sure, I have the little 13″ set tucked away in a corner somewhere, but I’m thinking that the NYE Twilight Zone marathon with palmie and jun would be far less entertaining on 13″.
As of mid-morning today. Whew! That feels good. What’s weird is that I am only making one gift this year. This has a lot to do with the fact that I am still not finished with some from last year. Seriously. So this year I chopped the gift list to pretty much family and near-family and skipped everything else. On the one hand I’m kinda eh about the abbreviated plans but on the other I like it. The simplicity appeals to me, and we know that’s an aberration of ginormous proportions.
Also, tomorrow is the 52nd strip of Random Acts… TaDaa! I did what I set out to do and its still fun so I’ll be continuing. I would have celebrated more but I’ve managed to screw up my writing plans for the first half of the month so the deadline is pinning me down seriously. It’s okay, I’m on, like, Plan C at this point, but I think it’ll be the best of all of them and I should have no problem completing them before leaving town Friday morning for my weekend away.
My goal is to be totally caught up so that I can have 3 days without thinking about any of my work things–any of them! Not going to think about them replacing the office carpet while I’m gone. Not going to think about my articles. Not going to think about the comic. It’s a weekend of not thinking. Well, okay, not much thinking. I will only dally by taking pictures, if plausible, of the Arts District in NOLA for future reference for Wedding Tarot. And since I haven’t had time to ‘work’ on that in ages, it doesn’t count against the not thinking about works. I love my logic!
Tis the season and all that. The UPS dude had already come by with the Sharper Image box by the time I got home but the Sephora box had also arrived AND one of the Amazon boxes. While a good half of it was for me and me alone, the other half was actually parts of birthday and Christmas presents.
Exercise just didn’t happen. Aside from the arduous task of opening all those packages I had to do tomorrow’s comic start to finish and cook dinner. Pretty much nothing else got done. Oh, well, there’s always tomorrow after writing and the SCA meeting to finish what I didn’t get to tonight. Sure, that’s the ticket!
Hey, we get Christmas Eve, why not?
Not entirely unexpectedly the boss let us go early today so I took the opportunity to run by the hardware store (mini power tool! vroom! and parts for an eHow article I’ve had drafted for a while, now) and grocery store (forgot dish detergent last night; pah!) so I got home at the usual time but at a much higher productivity level. I could have stayed and worked til 5–definitely had enough to keep me busy–but the paint fumes made me disinclined to acquiesce. Besides, Drew flew in last night and had Mom’s car so I was her ride for the afternoon. She was ready, we split.
Got completely sidetracked when I got home, though, and watched Free Enterprise before getting anything done. Luckily the comic was inked, just needed color, and all that I really had to do for dinner tomorrow was the pies and chop some vegetables for the dressing. I’ll have plenty of time for the other stuff tomorrow because Mom caved to the demands of the boys to move dinner from 2pm-ish to 4pm. Now, granted, J&K will have already been to at least 2 dinners by then and Drew will probably have gone to B’s for her family’s dinner so essentially we’re holding our dinner for people who will be too full to eat it! We fully realize it, but oh well. But this means I actually have to eat breakfast or something in the morning! Unheard of on Thanksgiving!
And I’ve been wreaking havoc on the web today, too. Started a couple of days ago (I think, I can’t remember what day it is anymore) when I actually managed to widgetize the Secret Project blog like I knew what I was doing and it actually worked. Holy cow! Then today I figured I’d have to be brave and do some more such coding only to find that the wonderful WordPress peeps fixed the stats-incompatibility issues so I didn’t have to! Yay! Of course, then I had a brainstorm on how to fix something that had been bugging me on the Oldenfeld site (granted, it’s something no one else would ever know I fixed because its a very back-end thing and I still haven’t patched the forums yet… sigh…) so I went into the panel and made the change and it worked but somehow changing the ftp user made the files invisible in Cyberduck so I copied them over (all 5.6MB which I’d already copied to my desktop just to make it ‘easy’) only to create an issue with a directory inside a directory that borked the front page. Dur! So then I had to delete the 5.6MB and the directory I accidentally put them in so I could reinstall the 5.6MB without the superfluous directory. But! Hopefully, once this is done, the ftp will be accessible as a stand-alone and not part of my other sites, etc. This is actually more of a safety feature than anything else, to make sure someone is able to get into the site should something happen or when the day comes and I hand over webmin to someone new. If I ever get so lucky, lol.
Throw money at the problem.
(No, I’m not talking about the strike, though I suppose that would fit as well: AMPTP, ante up!)
I restarted Minnie umpteen times lsat night, ran updates, etc. No luck, the keyboard was still sluggish and intermittently responsive. Tonight after the pre-turkey grocery run I even changed the blasted batteries one more time. I unhooked and re-hooked the wireless pluggie thing on Minnie. I shook, I slammed (the keyboard) and nothing.
So then I got dressed (I was already in my jammies, folks), shut off the oven (which was roasting chicken thighs for the dressing) and hauled ass to CompUSA (Hallelujah Chorus for them being 5 minutes away, if that) while my hot chocolate cooled and tossed the plastic on the counter for an Apple keyboard and Mighty Mouse. I have had it with knock-offs to save $20-$40. Just no. Not worth it. The piece of shit Kensington desktop that they sent me to replace the first piece of shit Kensington desktop I purchased was what? Oh, right! A piece of shit. Or, alliteratively: Kensington Krap! I went through two sets in 11 months (and, honestly, the mouses didn’t even last that long since I used the wireless mouse on my graphics tablet about 4 of those 11).
And so what if I went back to a tethered keyboard and mouse? Frankly the wireless feature wasn’t doing all that much for me so you can tie me up and whip me with those precious white USB cords if it means I don’t have to fight with my peripherals!
I can has ports?
And while I was at it, I bought a seven-port hub so that I don’t have to swap USBs each time I want to use a different peripheral. Boo-yah! Between the still-open port on the new keyboard and those as-yet-unused on the hub I have a total of 5 USB slots open. The iPod and the digital camera cable would conceivably take up two of those if they didn’t live in my purse and camera bag, respectively, but even then. Dude! I can has ports!
Didn’t quite catch up, did I?
I was rolling along fairly well during Saturday’s write-in but once I packed up and got home I was beat. Intending to get back to it I did some NaNovel-related resesarch but couldn’t convince myself to actually write any more.
Then reality intruded: I need to have 2 more articles in to eHow by end-of-day Thursday and I haven’t started on next week’s “Random Acts…” yet.
So last night, before bed, I did some reading for one of those articles and today, after laundry and grocery shopping, I picked up some supplies for 3 other articles this month (writing for Arts & Crafts does come with a certain amount of visual expectation, at least to my mind). The painted ceramics items are curing in the oven now and I’ll go back to drafting those instructions as soon as I finish this post. Once that draft is done I’ll start this week’s comics.
The thing that’s getting me right now is that I am so incredibly exhausted all of the time. Ever since the party I haven’t been able to perk back up. I don’t know if it’s the shortening days affecting my circadian rhythms or maybe I’m feeling the time-change more and haven’t adjusted yet, but I find myself exhausted by 6pm seemingly no matter what. Even now, not quite 9pm, my eyes are heavy and I really feel like I could just sleep for days.
I could really use some caffiene right about now. Too bad it’s still firmly on the ‘not on your life’ list.
Really, not bad at all, and I managed to not spend any money today, woot! Though I do have at least one more shopping trip between here and the party. Still, not so bad.
Tonight was mostly inking this week’s strips while listening to an audio book (another perk of working in the office) and while it did take most all evening, it’s done, so there ya go. Plus watched Heroes and knit a few more rows on the Grecian Plait sleeves (I’m in that unfortunate part of any pattern where you have to count rows between increases… ugh! But at least I’m doing them both simultaneously so if one’s wrong, the other will at least match!).
Did some prep work on a slew of props for the party and I think after I shut the computer down for the night I’m going to read a trade magazine to fire up the creative juices for tomorrow night: writing at home! Dun dun da! Now that the office is mainly tidy (there’s still that bit under the desk and all) I think I might actually be able to work in here with fewer distractions. We’ll see. I have two more articles to write to finish out the month so hopefully that’ll be Tuesday and Wednesday night and I can edit and upload them before the weekend’s over (read as: Sunday). Tick-tock, tick-tock.
