I did, in fact, get the call center position my lover was referring me for. Orientation is Tuesday. I’m getting 8.15/hr during training, then 8.55/hr when I switch to second shift in a few weeks. I’m just glad to HAVE a job. As in, bringing in money. Not yet, obviously, but a couple weeks. I can finally feel less like a mooch. Yay!
I ended up not adding the scalloped border, because I’m not all that sure of my ability to make it work, and honestly the whole thing looked pretty without adding more. It’s the four-color rainbow blanket, and I added two rows of shimmery white in single-stitch around all four sides (gods was THAT a pain in the ass, since I did double-stitch for the rainbow stripes and had to find places to anchor the single-stitch down each side) for a contrast, and it really brought out the colors and made the whole thing more vibrant.
I know it’s not totally even (some of the rows waver a bit), and to anyone who actually crochets regularly it’s probably pretty amateurish. But the point is, it’s made with caring. I’m taking pics of it tomorrow to post, and then it’s in the mail, and actually BEFORE the kid is born, no less. Damn, I’m impressed with myself.
My lover has been telling me for awhile that her work will be hiring soon. It’s a call center, whatever, I can do that, and it has excellent benefits and all the overtime you can show up for.
At last, last night she sent me the link to the customer service rep position that had just reopened for hiring. I sent my resume and application last night, including sweating over a cover letter for almost an hour. I want this job. And I’m feeling very confident in my ability to GET this job.
I can’t keep affording the gas to drive to Nashville weekly or biweekly, but it was really great while I did it.
So I’d basically given up on it. But then, another friend of mine is having a baby next month, and I decided to make them a blanket. Within a few days of that, Becky was complaining to me that Emma’s baby blanket had gotten lost somehow (dropped out of the baby bag in a store, nobody had found it) so I’m back on for finishing the blanket.
The blanket I’m making for Emily (my friend Robbie’s daughter) is a totally different style than Emma’s patchwork squares. On my mom’s suggestion, I’m using four colors and going in stripes, but I’m doing three rows of one color, using two strands, then two rows with one strand of the first color and one strand of the second color, then three rows of the second color, and so on, so that it fades nicely from one to the other. I’m going blue to green to yellow to pink back to blue, and the only transition that isn’t smooth and fade-looking is the pink-to-blue. But it still doesn’t look bad at all, and I’m about two thirds of the way done with it. Wish me luck!
So my first real foray into web design is to design and build my boyfriend’s personal and business websites. Both are on EnigmaNostra.net, meaning I need a splash page from which people can choose which to go to. He wants a sci-fi, techy feel for the personal side and a more gritty, battle-worn mechanical/techy feel for the business side. I started with the personal side, since I know how to design that kind of layout better. For the business side I need to use his web-host’s store manager thingy and I know nothing about it so I’m putting it off.
Anyway, with much implementation of tutorials – everlasting love to those who put their nifty photoshop tuts online, btw, thank you all – and experimenting with filters and layer styles and other assorted shiny things, I have put together a mock-up of what the layout will be for most pages on the personal side. What do you think, Internet?
Wow. Just…wow. If I had known how much fun this would be, I’d have gone for it a LONG time ago. It feels great to have finally gotten past being straight friends’ “bicurious experience” – I swear, I was the bicurious experience for at least three straight female friends in the past few years – and have actually had SEX with another woman. Btw, I think pussy is habit-forming. Because I’m looking forward to my next fix…I’m even cleaning my house so I can host. THAT’S drastic.
Of course, I kinda cheated and did a double-goal on this one. Had sex with a woman…AND had a threesome at the same time. Hells yes. I love my life. I’m still kinda in the “I can’t believe that happened” phase, but I’m looking forward to tonight’s festivities.
Oh. And if you’re thinking of getting a tongue ring for oral sex, if you’re going to be going down on women, DO IT. Apparently it’s a great addition. ;)
I would put up a pic, but I haven’t got one yet. She’s a rescue, about 6 months old, Australian Shepherd mix. Beautiful face, coloring, coat. Needs a bath, but that’s to be expected from a shelter dog.
I’ve got mixed feelings, kind of thinking I rushed into this. The house isn’t really ready and I’m worried about her and our cat, Isis, getting along.
We’ll see how it goes, I guess.
Guess what my Mommy got me for Christmas?
Harp lessons. She’s spoken with a really good harp teacher in Nashville, and I’m to call her and decide on a schedule for weekly lessons, and then I will inform my mom of how much it will be per month and Mom will send me the money so I can pay the teacher without eating into my income. Yay!
Further, this harp teacher runs a harp ensemble. Like a small orchestra, but with only harps. I need to work some stuff out with her, like do I need to pack up my harp and bring her to lessons, or does she have a practice harp for students to use during lessons? And since I want to join the ensemble, again, what’s the practice schedule and do I need to bring my own harp? I think I probably won’t have to bring Kari for the lessons, but probably will for ensemble. But we’ll see.
I’m just looking forward to having a more structured approach to this learning process. It should really help!
After a month-long hiatus – well, longer than that since I shot the D’Eagle – while at home in California for the holidays, I’m going to the range with Boyfriend today. He’s taking this…girl…with whom he almost had extrarelationship relations at one point, and she’s pretty hot for him still, and she wants to learn to shoot. And Boyfriend being who he is, he loves to teach people to shoot, and so he’s going to the range and she might meet him there.
So, in the interests of intimidating her off my territory, as it were, I’m going, too. Although honestly, I kinda wanted to just go and shoot my D’Eagle again anyway, since it’s been so long. But it is impressive, too, so it’s a dual-purpose range trip.
However, I’m going to say that with this range trip, I’ve accomplished this goal. I’m still a bit wary of it, and I’m much more paranoid-cautious with the D’Eagle than with any of Boyfriend’s guns, but I think I’ll always be that way a bit.
But the point is, that I’m no longer scared to shoot it. I’ve learned enough about it and myself and built my ability enough that I’ve got the confidence I wanted. I’m not one-handing or dual-wielding it or anything, and I probably never will – although shit, how cool would that be? – but that’s not what I really wanted.
So I’m going to call this goal achieved.
So my boyfriend bought me a Desert Eagle handgun as a present for college graduation. It’s a beautiful gun, it really is. Freaken hand cannon, heavier than shit. It’s almost five pounds unloaded, and while that may not sound like much, try holding that steady with your arms extended for any length of time. It’s heavy. 10” long from hammer to end of barrel, and that distinctive barrel silhouette that I so love. I’ve got it with the interchangeable barrels, so I can switch it between shooting .50AE (as was its original design) and .44mag, which is a slightly cheaper and more common round.
Either way, it is a god damn hand cannon. It is huge. It is a beast. And it is gorgeous.
And also, it kicks like a motherfucker when you shoot it. I’m a good shot with most guns, I don’t prefer rifles but I’m pretty good with most handguns. My boyfriend’s sidearm, a Springfield XD Compact .45, is one of the ones I’m best with, although I also get damn nice accuracy with the Sig Sauer P226.
Anyway. The point is, before I got the D’Eagle, the biggest caliber I’d shot was the boyfriend’s .45. And the .50AE is substantially bigger and more powerful than that. I’m pretty skittish around guns, for all that I know how to be safe with them and usually am a good enough shot. I just never quite trust them, for some reason. Or maybe it’s that I don’t trust myself not to have some fatal lapse in judgement and really damage something or someone, despite being careful.
And those fears are magnified tenfold when I make the jump from a heavy-duty but still manageable .45 to my beastly hand cannon. Part of me wonders if maybe I should just ask my boyfriend to sell it off, because as lovely as it is, if I’m not going to shoot it and get good with it, what’s the point in owning it? But I don’t want to just give up.
Last week we took a trip to the range with the D’Eagle and a couple other pistols, largely for the purpose of getting me a little more comfortable with it. Boyfriend helped me by only allowing me to put one round in the mag at a time. He was right, it helped me to worry less because I knew that after a single shot it was safe again, and I didn’t have to keep worrying that I could do something stupid with it. I worked through a full mag each of the .50 and .44, then called it a day, largely because I was shaking so badly. But despite my shakiness, I did well in my aim, putting at least one round of each through the dead center of the target.
And then yesterday…yesterday was PumpkinShoot. We rounded up 30 leftover Halloween pumpkins and some friends, loaded up all the guns – between us and our friends we probably had 30 guns between six people – and went out to a field in the middle of fucking nowhere to shoot at pumpkins. And I took the D’Eagle, and put probably three mags downrange with it, plus letting other people shoot it.
And I actually had FUN with it! I even got comfortable enough that, at the end, I put a full seven-round mag through it in as close to rapid-fire as I could with a .50 cal. Not the quick triple-tap like my boyfriend can do with his .45, since the .50 kicks the gun so far off the target with each shot that you HAVE to pause to realign at least a little, but in pretty quick succession. And was actually relatively accurate with most of the shots. I exploded one of the pumpkins while it was in motion (we were bowling pumpkins and shooting at them as they rolled) even.
Very. Very. Cool. And a grand improvement.
So I was going to be working out by now, only I found out that the expensive super-bras I ordered (when you’re a DDD cup, you need freaken steel-girder bras to hold you in place if you want to work out) were the wrong size. I could work out wearing those, but they would only provide low-impact type support. And I want to run and play sports and stuff, which requires high-impact support. So I had to send them back and request an exchange to get the next lower size. This wouldn’t have happened if the damn things were sized according to normal bra sizing – you know, number from 30-whatever, then A, B, C, D, DD etc cups. No, this is a “measure yourself and pick size accordingly” and I mismeasured or something. Blah.
But, they should be coming in soon. I hope. I’m getting a little annoyed at my gym membership just languishing there unused.
National Novel Writing Month has begun!
I’m behind – literally just over half of where I should be, my word count should be over 6,000 and I’m at 3,877 right now. But it’s a start! And I’ve got a synopsis, and half of an outline. So I actually know my plot, and my characters, and all will be well!
Well, it’s been awhile. I left my lovely home in California on Sept 22 to drive across country with all my shit, to move in with my boyfriend in Tennessee for two years. Since the drive included some big changes in elevation (my home was 6 ft above sea level, and we went through Denver, which is almost a mile above sea level) and pressure changes at those extremes are bad for a harp, I had to practically unstring my baby before I left. None of the strings came off, but I loosened them all dramatically, until they wobbled when plucked instead of sounding at any kind of pitch at all.
Well, we made it here with no incident, and put Karizoe (my harp is named, it’s a word meaning “lovesong”) in the closet in the spare bedroom which is becoming my office, in her case, to keep the cats away from clawing on the case…then proceeded with the moving in and sorting crap and stuff. It wasn’t until the day before yesterday that I finally had some time to sit down with her.
Retuning has been an absolute BITCH. By the time I was halfway through the third octave (Karizoe is four and a half octaves), I tried the lowest octave again, and every string had dropped pitch by at least a full step. Sigh. So I started again…by the time I got back to the third octave, where I’d stopped, all THOSE strings had dropped a full step, too. I think I’ve probably retuned her half a dozen times a day yesterday and the day before. But the good news is, the strings are resettling themselves to pitch, they’re finally holding tuned where I put them mostly. Minor drops, not even a quarter step usually. I’m hopeful that by the end of today, I’ll be done with the bulk of the retuning process and be able to just tune her up once a week, by octaves instead of the every-string-with-the-tuner method.
Unfortunately, my lesson book has gone missing in the move. It was the Sylvia Woods folk harp book. I can remember about four of the exercises, and one of the tunes. And there’s not a lot I can do, except start toughening my fingers again with simple repetition, until I either find it or buy a new one. Grr.
I’ve been busy moving myself across the country lately, which has really left little time for language-ing. But last night, when Boyfriend and I went over to a friend’s house to hang out for the evening (we do this three or more times per week with this particular friend, usually staying from around 8 pm to sometimes as late as 3 am, never earlier than 11 pm) I brought with me the notebook in which I’d been constructing my language.
Since I decided that my language was going to have a new script, and a syllabary one at that (not like English, but more like Chinese or Japanese, where each character represents a syllable rather than a sound), I had to create the script. After a few haphazard attempts two nights ago, I decided to create it systematically. First I separated the consonant inventory into four groups, then assigned each group a “base” design. Each phoneme within the group has a different flourish at either the top or the bottom of the base design. Then, to create the syllable, the vowel is added with one of six separate horizontal strikethroughs. Together, each symbol gives the initial consonant sound, and the vowel that follows it, which together make the syllable; at the end of a word, the bare consonant symbol may be used to indicate a coda on the previous syllable, but only on nouns.
I’ve begun transcribing the lexical items I’ve already created from IPA, in which I wrote them, into script, and am toying with names for the language. Squee! I’ve got a couple thousand more lexical items to add, but that’ll take time.
Oh, and I started on the grammatical features, too. VSO order, and verb affixes to indicate which speech act is going on (statement, query, imperative) and a couple of those have nuances which require multiple distinct affixes. I get the feeling I’m going to have to pare down in a while, but I’m just having such fun playing with devices and it’s hard to stop. grin
So I’ve stalled on my progress, dammit. Cross-country move takes a lot of your time and attention, doesn’t it? Only four more 20×10 squares to crochet, then putting them together and border around the whole thing, and I haven’t worked on it in two weeks. Damn, damn, damn, damn. Must work on it tonight. I’ll stick Metalocalypse on and crochet while I watch.
I’ve finally gotten serious about my diet again. Eating less, not always eating healthier but at least lower calories. Going to check out two different gyms today to see which I want to join. I’ve got the necessary stuff to let me start working out properly – as a well-endowed woman, think DDD cups, I need heavy-duty workout bras – so I should be truly back on track soon! Don’t have my scale unpacked from the move yet, so I don’t even know how much I weigh right now.
But, it’s a start.
I learned in the first week of my newly pierced tongue.
Because the first week, you cannot have food you need to chew. And even foods like mashed potatoes and stuff, you have to eat very very slowly, because otherwise your tongue HURTS. Just soreness from how much tension the muscle requires.
Also, you do not realize how many functions of the mouth your tongue governs until you can’t use it for much. Ow. Even as a linguist, I had a hard time figuring out how to get around the swelling to talk like a normal person. Good news, once the swelling was down and the bar exchanged for a smaller bar (the initial bar is longer to accomodate swelling of the tongue), you talk normally.
Looking forward to being able to use it during sex. That should be…FUN. Hehehehehe.
So I’m trying to get serious about taking better care of my hair. I haven’t had a trim at all in three months now, so my ends are pretty bad. I’m stuck with budget products since I’m pretty broke most of the time, but I bought myself a leave-in conditioner since that’s what a lot of people suggest for protecting one’s hair from daily damage. Wonder if I should look into a different shampoo/conditioner? I currently use Garnier shampoo for color-treated hair, and Tresseme conditioner. Anyone have any suggestions for a relatively inexpensive (around $10 a bottle max) shampoo or conditioner that might be better than those?
Unfortunately, I’ve had to schedule dental work for the 7th of next month, which means I’ve got to wait until after that to get the piercing. Blargh.
