Seemed So Out of Context
This post is brought to you by staying up past my bed time, listening to the Postal Service, and the very sad truth that I didn't want to get to a year long gap between posts (just under the wire!).
I am not at all the same person I was when I stopped blogging. I've been through panic attacks and graduation. I've spent several months just sitting in my room in front of a computer and I've finally worked my butt off in the real world. I'm still the exact same nerd, but I'm a more socially acceptable one. I get up in the morning, brush my teeth and go to work where I answer phones and joke with my colleagues and generally find myself feeling more and more comfortable away from the the constant schooling that was my safety blanket. At this point in my life I can say with slight wonder that I am actually supporting myself. I pay for my bills and my extras and I finally have health insurance again, which I'm happier about that having extra money.
So what am I doing here? I'm really not sure, but I feel like if I'm paying for it I should be making it useful. It might be horribly personal or I might post weird pictures of my cats.
Weekly Dose of Jack: 01
This is going to be the start of something new. I'm going to attempt to photograph Jack every week, or post old pictures of him that haven't been posted before. At least it gets me posting something...
Wonder/Wander
A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them. -Lemony Snicket
I had a nice long talk with my dad today. It seemed appropriate for my birthday to be talking about my future. So far all I have done is school, well and that one month working at the nursing home but we don't talk about that. When I was in high school my parents, mostly my dad, didn't want me to have to work. My dad worked in his father's grocery store as long as he can remember and my mother remembers her high school days working in the hospitial where her mother was a nurse and, for some reason that I only vaguely understand yet, the didn't want that for me. So I went to college and still didn't work.
But now things are a little different, I graduate in December and I keep talking about looking for work but I've really made no motion to do so and then my dad asked if I would be coming home for Christmas. Perfect excuse, so the job path is deverted until the new year.
I think he may have wondered about me though because he asked me what I wanted to do. I know that he knows that I know I don't want to work retail for the rest of my life. I have flirted with many jobs ideals, all of them involving something more than BA. Today my dad asked me about my most recent one, library science, and I was off and running. I told him all about the programs that I've looked into, what they require, why I like UW overall, and where I want to end up with the career.
"Wow, you've really researched this," he said.
And that's when it hit me, I have really researched this. I have never looked at a job and looked at schools and made decisions and visualized how I want to further those goals and what career path I would love forever. So even if finding a job proves difficult in the next few months, I've got a goal and the supportive parents who don't think I'm at all weird for wanting to become a librarian.
For anyone who cares, I want to become an archivist eventually and I would love to work with digital collections specifically. Although I keep visualizing myself as that angry public librarian...
Geeky Noveling
So, NaNoWriMo has not been going at all well for me. I haven't reached my target word count for the past three days. I had a paper due this morning and watching CNN took up all my evening last night. May I just say, in as subdued a manner as I can manage, WHOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! I know this isn't a magic cure all but I'm still particularly excited.
Anyway, my point in posting was that while I have not gotten very far on my novel, I am totally geeking out about LaTeX. Holy eff, how have I never worked with this before? A friend's boyfriend who geeks out over similar things and is a Comp Sci person too was talking about it sometime last year and I just kinda blew it off. Then I saw a lot of talk about it from people who were writing their novels on Linux computers (my laptop runs Ubuntu) and I couldn't find anything comparable to Q10 (which I love, but does not play nice with things besides Windows) that worked on my laptop so I decided to take the plunge and try something completely different. I am in love. I have so far been making each chapter a text file and then setting it into my novel latex file and compiling it to check the overall format and I heart it. I'm using Kile on Ubuntu and the sffms class to layout my file. Also I've been typing the story mainly on Writer, which allows me to add to it from my laptop and my desktop.
Procrastination, Or Justifying Writing A Novel
I have a paper due Wednesday and I'm not done with the spreadsheet for my professor, but I've written some of my NaNoWriMo novel. I haven't gotten as far with it as I want to, but ideas are buzzing around my head and I'm feeling pretty good about this novel, even if I don't make the November deadline.
My story Jack, Or Things I Know About the World is kind of a weird fantasy/alternate universe/finding yourself drama. The main guy's personality is based off my cat... Yeah, I promise I'm not a crazy cat lady yet, it just really worked out. He's slightly quirked but loyal. The main girl is a bit of a ditz, but really she just wants a daddy-figure. And then there's a guy named Richard, who may actually be two or three different guys, but is probably just one and a half.
Anyway, the preface (or Chapter Zero) is up at a blog I've made for the challenge. I'm probably going to post more, but not until I've worked and reworked each section. The preface has been looked over about five times already. There's also a pre-preface but it was written before the challenge and is basically plotness that may/may not actually be given away early on so I think I'm going to keep it to myself until I decided how the story will actually play out.
Oh, where's this blog you say, it's here(Blogspot).
Cheating A Little
So my roommate has been talking about doing NaNoWriMo and I have been thinking about doing it as well. I'm currently not exceptionally busy and most of my busy work is on the computer - I'm currently organizing data for my current prof's research into dental caries and mostly that just involves marking up a bunch of bio/dental journals articles on tooth disease. So what is a girl to write about? I've had a story idea in my head for a long time and all the characters kinda lept into place recently. Just yesterday I sat down and actually wrote up an entire summary/outline which I never actually got to with all of my other incomplete tales.
Of course now that the summary is written I've found room for a prequel, which I haven't fleshed out as much, but at least the characters are almost fully formed. Then I was looking for something else and found a random txt file and inside was this weird snippet of dialogue:
What A Cat Knows About War 1671
The only difference between me and the cat outside my window is that I am slightly warmer. Past the calico, snow takes the color away from the landscape. In a few minutes the men's vehicles will take the color away from even the snow, turning the fields into a muddy plain. The cat is still staring at me, mouthing a silent meow.
"Do you realize your breakfast is getting cold?"
"Sorry," I mumble, broken from my thoughts.
"That cat is staring at me again."
"It's probably hungry."
"I've seen enough mice around here to feed an army."
"Maybe they are."
"What?"
"Feeding the army," I said with a piece of toast in my mouth.
I don't know why it's in first person but it really reminds me of what I want for the main character in the prequel and if I don't actually count this dialogue in my word count it's not entirely cheating right?
Also the year in the title was, I think, completely random, but I looked it up and it's the year the Ottoman Empire declared war on Poland, who knew (or cared probably)? The story takes place in alt!Earth so it doesn't really matter what year there was a war, but there is indeed a war.
The Calm
So my life this week has consisted mainly of knitting and sitting in front of the TV. It has been a nice change from the 40 hour work week and the constant time with family (just kidding guys... but not about the work week).
Jack has been enjoying himself as well:
Also I've got some small knitting projects done over the summer. This is my most recent and I'm enjoying it throughly. It is a little tighter at the base than I'm used to but it definitely stays on better than most of my slouchy hats. After some fashion advice from my mother I've decided slouchy hats are probably my "thing". I'm actually starting a wall of them (I havee four hanging over my bed) and they are nice to make when you just have a skein.
Name: Star Crossed Cable Beret
Needles: 4 (Clover DPNS) and 8 (Clover Circ)
Yarn: Cascade 220 (less than a hank) Cordovan
Also, to throw some more pictures at you, this is what I'm currently attempting to spin. It is a 75%/25% merino/tussah silk blend and it is aptly called "Yellow". However, as you can see in the picture there are shots of blue and red running through it and it is so pretty to look at (and much more shiny than I could convey while still getting true to the color). The fiber is from Woodland Woolworks (I had a gift certificate). I luvs me some WW as it is the nearest fiber arts shop that sells spinning wheels. I got my Kromski Symphony there, used, about a year ago.
This is the start of my spinning of it. The first single, and it's DK-ish but very thick and thin. I'm not used to spinning silk and I'm still not a very even spinner, but I'm hoping after I ply this it will be around a worsted weight and I can get a nice hat or some house socks out of it. Also as it's spinning it is turning very barber pole. I really like it as it's hard to see all the color in the roving but the blue/yellow/red mix nicely together.
Tangled
This week I have been ignoring all responsibilities and not even looking at HTML code in favor of something more tactile. I've been crafting. I have a newfound love of cross stitch as it is the perfect counterpart to pixeling. In fact I'm currently pixeling some ideas for cross stitch patterns.
This is "Pocket Garden of 4-leaf Clover" from Stitchin'spiration. It's a freebie there and my first try at "blackwork", which basically means instead of those little x's i cross stitch I am just stitching lines. You can make some very cool geometric designs as you can see. I am only about a fifth of the way through the chart. Someday this design will become a bookmark, if I ever get back to Eugene and my sewing machine.
Website will be completed someday when I have access to my Windows tools (I'm still on the Linux laptop).
Deja Vu
Side note: I can never remember where the accent goes in that word. Also I can never remember the correct button combination to get said accent to show up magically instead of having to be a cheater and copy-pasting from somewhere else.
So the whole lack of a database connection happened again. The only connection I can make is when I create a new database it decides to give the old heave-ho to one of my other database connections. I actually had to go in and create a brand new user for the database that this site runs off of. It is entirely to weird for my brain to handle tonight and I was majorly hyperventilating.
You see I hate having to contact people to fix my problems. They're my problems and I should be able to fix them. I feel annoyed when something I can't come up with a solution to a problem that I (even if it's just in my own mind) created. I think that was my main problem with the help desk I interned at. Do people seriously not have the presence of mind to try and solve their problems themselves?
How hard is it to check and see if your computer is actually plugged in? When did it become ok to just say something is wrong here and I sure as hell don't want to take the two seconds it might take to deal with it when I can call someone else and end up on hold for 5 minutes. Fine you don't 'get' computers. But do you get common sense? Seriously, you can get up in the morning, turn of your alarm clock, probably figure out how to turn on your tv, change the channel, maybe even get in a car and drive, but you can't be bothered to understand you computer? The one thing you use the most of at work? You could probably tell me more ways to create a macro then I would know what to do with, but you can't even think to restart the computer when things are being weird/you get a blue screen/your mouse isn't working. Please, it might not be the problem but at least it saves us from having to tell you to try it to rule out the easy solutions.