The GenderAnalyzer had this to say about this blog:
We guess http://cosmicbabe.greyduck.net is written by a man (53%), however it’s quite gender neutral.
I was born with a uterus (with which I’ve kicked out 2 demonspawn) and I have breasts (with which I fed said demonspawn). I still have all those parts, and a really cute haircut, too!
But I’ve been told by a few guys that I’m not terribly feminine. (I told those guys to suck my cock. *GRIN*)
Found that little Analyzer gem at The Breda Fallacy. There’s lots of other good stuff there, too.
And InternetBumperStickers has a new sticker of something I’ve been saying for years:
This year, I am most thankful for my beloved family, heart-warming friends, and delightful pets. I am especially thankful that they put up with my idiosyncrasies and occasional lunacy.
Had to work today. Thank heavens Starbucks was open!!! It was a 2-quad mocha day, busier than I expected but still slow enough that I was able to play on Dragon Cave for a while (and snagged a chicken and a silver – yay!).
My house is awfully quiet, as both of my demonspawn are at their Auntie Lyse’s (Anxiety is hanging out with her Sis and the Dustinator during her school break). Both my demonspawn are also now on Twitter, which is ironic considering that I still have no cell phone…hopefully will get one Saturday though. At least I can (and do) update occasionally via the web.
Have to work tomorrow, too…and going to do my very best not to enter into any retail establishment on Black Friday. Not that I wouldn’t love to go to Powell’s (since it’s payday!), but it would probably be an utterly insane madhouse. Yes, bookstores are my absolute most favorite place to be outside of my own home — but I don’t love even Powell’s enough to deal with hundreds of people under the same roof.
I’m not dead, just cut off from civilization. At least it feels that way, since I’ve been without a cell phone for 6 days now, and I had no clue how much Twitter helped me feel connected to friends until I could only access it on the computer. Le sigh. In theory, I will have a new cell tomorrow, if Geoffrey’s boss remembered to bring his old one (that he is kindly giving us for free!) to work. Otherwise, it won’t be until Friday or Saturday…and I really, really don’t want to go into any retail establishment on Black Friday.
Currently doing laundry and trying not to think about the fact that I will be working on Turkey Day (and the next day). At least I get to inflict my green-bean casserole on my coworkers, as we’re doing a Thanksgiving potluck at work. I may chuck my usual hardcore work ethic right out the window that day, and forego the between-call projects that normally occupy me for at least 90% of my non-phone time (unless I’m up at Exile Island, and then I mostly just websurf). Hell, if I feel sassy enough, I may even just play on Dragon Cave all damned day. (Work’s connection is fast, and I’ll have room for new eggs!)
I will be making Thanksgiving Day dinner on Sunday, and it won’t be turkey because I don’t especially like turkey. It will be Limerick Baked Ham (simmered in cider prior to baking, how’s that for scrumptious?!). I sent Geoffrey to pick up the ham, and told him to get one that’s 3 to 5 pounds, per the recipe suggestion. He brought home an 8-pound ham. Alrighty, then, it’s good that I have a REALLY big pot to simmer it in!
I’m going to cut my hair. Not off, mind you, just get it changed up a bit so it’s not the boring all-one-length thing. A few layers to soften it up and make it look bouncier. Bouncy is good.
I’ve decided that working up on Pill Hill is the equivalent to being on Exile Island (but less tropical, and much less pleasant). The last 3 times I’ve been sent up there, I’ve spent anywhere from 30 to 40 hours of my 40-hour sentence up there alone, despite a supposed scheduling of 2 people up there at a time every week. Somehow I have miraculously managed not to gripe about it at work more than once a week…at least not out loud. Too bad there isn’t a Tribal Council in my department immediately following a return from Exile Island, because I can think of one or two people who need to be voted off the island. (Why, yes — yes, I am a Survivor fan. And tell Santa I want a purple buff for Xmas.)
I am SICK AS HELL, and work has actually made it worse. Due to a lovely fubar by the IT department, the “operator saver” has not been working for the last 3 days for anyone in our department. (It’s a prerecorded greeting that kicks in at the beginning of each call, because the average number of calls we take each shift is 700-ish, and sometimes more than a thousand! If any of us had to repeat the greeting for every single call, our voices would be toast in no time.) I started the week already sick, with seriously horrid coughing, and congestion of both head and chest. By the end of the day on Wednesday, I was drinking codeine cough syrup like soda and it felt like the inside of my throat had been scrubbed raw with sandpaper. By the middle of my shift today, although the coughing is significantly reduced, my throat felt like I’d been gargling glass shards; no matter how much I babied my voice and sucked on honey throat lozenges, by noon I had to take a Vicodin just to be able to talk at ALL. In the hopes of helping soothe my poor abused throat, I’ll be talking as little as possible this weekend. (Undoubtedly there will be some who will find that state of affairs utterly delightful.)
Tonight was, infuriatingly, the second Friday in a row I couldn’t spend time with my Number One Internet Fanboy, because I don’t want — and he doesn’t want! — him catching what I’ve got (and no way to tell when I’m no longer contagious, until I’m all better again). I’m too sick to do much of anything, really, except the bare necessities. Okay, there are a couple of non-necessary items on the weekend agenda, but only because they were commitments I made before getting so aggravatingly sick: I have to pick up some books I have on hold at Powell’s (did you know you can order on the website and they email you when the order is ready to be picked up?!), and… I have to take a couple of 16-year-old girls to see Twilight. Oh joy and rapture. <—sarcasm!!!
At least it’s not animated. And there might be some sort of redeeming eye-candy in the flick. I hope. *sigh*
I’ve misplaced my cell phone. I use it as an alarm (along with two other devices, because I am the Queen of the Snooze Button) and it definitely woke me up this morning. I realized I didn’t have it when I stopped at Starbucks to fill my thermos on my way up the hill…but I honestly don’t know if the damned thing actually left the house with me or not.
So, through the wonders of the Intarwebz, I’ve suspended the service on it — so that if it’s not in my house somewhere, no random stranger can find it somewhere and use it to call Barbados or Uzbekistan or something. If a more thorough search than I managed tonight doesn’t turn it up by tomorrow evening, I’ll have to shell out for a new phone. Because I’ll be damned if I go more than 36 hours without it. Grrrr.
Wow, something verging on miraculous happened — my eldest survived her teenage years!
It’s been a wild, and wonderful, and tumultuous, and delightful, and magnificently crazy twenty years.
So let me tell you the story of Angst’s birth (you can skip this unless you’re really curious):
And now for something completely TMI…
Geoffrey and I went shopping today. It’s not something we do together very often, but shopping with him is truly enjoyable — he’s interested enough in what I look at to share the experience (and my excitement when I find something super-nifty), but not so interested that he hovers, or gets easily bored and tries to drag me out of a store. Today we went to Sock Dreams and Powell’s — the largest bookstore in the country. (The only way it could have been better is if I’d also hit Yarnia or Fabric Depot — the largest fabric store in the country — but the budget didn’t allow for a trifecta shopping run. *grin*)
We got some socks for each of us (including some over-the-knee dark green socks for me — which Lyse cannot stealborrow), and some books that we’ll both most likely end up reading. This trip was non-fiction only (for us, although we did grab some fiction for Yule gifts for a few people), which prompted me to think about how over-crowded and disheveled our non-fiction bookshelves are currently. I will have to reorganize them soon. Anyway, we got a couple of books on guns and a couple of books on country/sustainable living. I try to grab 1 or 2 of those every time I’m in Powell’s — I really like the Foxfire series (I read all of them when I was a kid devouring the small-town library), and the “Best of Backwoods Home magazine” books. Also got a nifty huge tome called The Big Book of Self-Reliant Living, which looks kick-ass amazing!
Went home to relax, and soon after my eldest and her fiance showed up. The Rocky Horror Picture Show cabaret is doing “Eighties Night”; Dustin is going as the Reanimator, and Angst is going as Jessica Rabbit:
Then Geoffrey decided to hand her his (unloaded) gun, so she could channel a Bond Girl:
She’ll be 20 on Monday. OMGWTFBBQ?! I’m not old enough to have a 20-year-old daughter, am I?
This has not been a fun week. Monday was insane at work, per usual, but I didn’t actually feel sick at all. That changed Tuesday, when I started coughing so bad and my voice was so hoarse that I left work early and went straight to the doctor’s, who gave me prescriptions and a note to be home until Thursday. Work on Thursday was insane, largely due to people calling out sick so we were short-handed. I had another doctor’s appointment that afternoon (to discuss migraine meds) and I got even more nifty prescriptions. Today was actually pretty mellow, despite being short-handed again.
The only thing that has saved my ass since Tuesday is Theraflu® Nighttime Severe Cold & Cough Caplets. They are better than NyQuil LiquiCaps, probably because Theraflu has way better drugs (NyQuil changed their formula, and it is lame). The antihistamine in the Theraflu is the only reason I can breathe.
Lyse and I have a new plan for our future farm/ranch: mini-critters! I wouldn’t mind having a miniature horse or two, and Lyse is wild for mini-moos. (This doesn’t mean we’re scrapping the other plans, for alpacas, goats, chickens, bees, a greenhouse, and probably a dog or two…I prefer the cutest puppies ever that grow into well-behaved working dogs, Australian shepherds. It will be soooo fun!)
So I play this silly Dragon Cave game online, where you collect and breed dragons. And in the forum for the site, people come up with all kinds of topics to discuss. The latest one, that really blew my mind, was about whether or not it bothers you to inbreed your dragons, and whether you’ll keep a dragon that someone else bred if it’s inbred. What stunned me was how many people were completely and militantly against it.
There isn’t any kind of “genetic coding” in the game, for crying out loud. The only coding of any kind in the breeding is that the offspring will always be the color of one of its parents, and “rare” types won’t breed together. Everything else (gender, for instance) is totally random, except in the 2 colors of dragons that are always female (pink & purple, in case anyone wondered).
And these are imaginary pixel pets! Not real animals. Not people. Just drawings, for crying out loud. But more than one person in that forum thread seemed offended and disgusted that people would even dream of inbreeding their dragons. One person went so far as to say that morals have to be absolute, and that you should never do anything online or in a game that you wouldn’t do in real life, and that if they had their way it would be impossible to inbreed the dragons on that site. WTF?!
The whole POINT of imagination, near as I can tell, is to try out things you would never do in real life, and to enjoy a bit of escapism. I mean, I’ve killed about a bazillion things in Diablo II and other computer games, but in real life I’ve never deliberately killed anything higher on the food chain than a hamster (which was dying from poison, so I put it out of its misery as fast & humanely as possible).
The kind of people who would ban inbreeding imaginary dragons are the kind of people who creep me out. Because they’re the kind of people who would legislate thought as well as action, and that’s Just Not Okay.
