the sunshine home for the bewildered

This is for people in the US only, unfortunately, but a code for Amazon has $3 off digital purchases, plus some new albums like Adam Lambert's For Your Entertainment and Rihanna's Rated R are on sale for $3.99 each, so you could essentially get a whole album for 99 cents.

There's also some good stuff in the 50 for $5 each section, including The Crane Wife and a Flight of the Conchords album.

I already downloaded a copy of For Your Entertainment, but I figured for that cheap, I should buy the official version as well. I also apparently had $12 in mp3 credits already (they give you $5 whenever you buy anything to do with music (such as the headphones we ordered a few months back) and then I forget to use them), so I bought Rihanna's, too. I still have $8 left, so I should see if there's anything else I want.

I am declaring today a skip day.

I'm knackered, I have no brain power at all and am planning to go to bed at the same time as my nine year old which is 7.30 which is in just under an hour and boy does that seem a long time to have to stay up.

I'll do an extra day on the end, 'k?

1. Helped my mom and Tom move some furniture yesterday, which earned us $50 off the rent. Woohoo!

2. My hair is blue! It was really a huge pain in the ass, made even worse by the fact that we no longer have a bathtub faucet (well, the faucet is there, it's just broken so you can no longer switch from shower to bath; it's on shower permanently), so I couldn't rinse my head under the faucet, but instead had to do it in the shower, getting blue all over everything, including myself. But I like how it turned out, so yay.

Title: The House on Mango Street
Author: Sandra Cisneros
Number of Pages: 110 pages
Book Number/Goal: 67/75 for 2009
My Rating: 4.5/5

This is a series of vignettes about Esperanza, a pre-teen girl growing up in a latino neighborhood in Chicago. It's very, very short, even shorter than the 110 pages it appears to be, because each story starts halfway down on the page, and often end with just one paragraph or a few lines on the next page, so there's a ton of empty space. The stories are all just little ordinary things, like reading somebody's memories rather than A Novel. I enjoyed it a lot.

Mooch from BookMooch.

I did hear back from the mods, which I didn't expect. Basically, the problem was my tone. Oh, and the mod who actually suspended me and deleted my posts didn't read far enough back--or ahead--to notice that the thread had been and continued to be way off-topic.

I honestly didn't realize that TWoP had a long history of being faily. It's a shame, because I really liked the SGU snark, as well as the recaps of Flash Forward. Oh, well.

I had to start again, because the stand mike wasn't working. It'd be fine if I had a desk, but with it on my lap in the back bedroom, I get echoes, and it picks up the ambient noise every time I shift position.

So I started...and realized quickly that the mike that connects to the jack on my laptop apparently picks up the broadcasts from the Catholic radio station whose tower is about a block away. While there's a certain irony in having the Catholic station ruining my attempt to record the NC-17 slash, I'm getting down to the wire here, and this is not helping.

Fortunately, I don't pick the station up after sundown, which still gives me a fair chunk of recording time. I've also ordered a USB headset mike that should get here on Wednesday. I kind of wish there were an adapter so I could use the jack mike at work, because my headset is crap.

I got hardly anything done yesterday. I was really tired and went to bed early, then ended up napping a couple times during the day, too, and then have been tired for the last several hours which means I just sort of sat here not really getting much done (but I didn't want to go to bed until I had finished a few things). :(

Also for some reason there's some sort of fuckup between Verizon and T-Mobile, so when people with Verizon call our phones (T-Mobile), they get a message saying all circuits are busy or something. D:

Anyway! On to the happiness...

1. The excerpt for this really bad gay romance is hilarious. I am almost tempted* to pay the $6.99 for the full book because I know it would provide much enjoyment in ways the author never intended.

2. This whole hair-dyeing thing is going very slowly because I am lazy, but I did use the toner on my hair yesterday, and here is a picture of me post-toner. My hair's still pretty yellow, but it definitely took out the worst of the orange. I meant to do the blue today, but that didn't happen, so hopefully tomorrow.

3. There is a World of Warcraft version of Peggle! It's only ten levels, but I will take anything I can get! Also it's free, yay. (And it's not an add-on for Peggle or Peggle Nights, but a stand-alone edition, so you can play it even if you don't have the others.)

4. Carla's going back to Indiana to visit her folks (and friends) in January and her parents are actually paying for the ticket! This is pretty rare for them, and not due to any lack of money.



*Not really, but maybe if it were half that price.

• 19:30 blogs.techrepublic.com.com/geekend/?p=1609&tag=leftCol;post-1871 #
• 19:45 @bibliotech I ADORE Mike Carey! I went to a reading of his here in 07. Alas, I have little memory of it, it was right after a seizure. #

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From soupytwist:

I have been thinking about this topic lately, so I would like to hear if you have any Thortz on ambitions - if you have any, what they might be, how you go about achieving them if so. :)

I'm a little weird with ambitions, because in many ways 'ambition' to me is linked to a lot of bad behaviour, politically motivated actions and relationships and all the stuff I dislike in the workplace. It's stepping over people and on people and being fake. Someone who is 'ambitious' is someone I probably don't like. And I actually know it's not true, Allegra and Dylan have the ambition of being published authors, Lucy an illustrator, another colleague a musician - these are ambitions I wholeheartedly approve of and support.

However, business ambitions aside, having things to aim for is, I think, a fairly necessary part of life. Or at least of mine. If I thought I was going to continue on exactly as I am now for the rest of my life that would be horrendous. Because for me at least growing and stretching myself is very very important, to improve myself in whatever way I can. Because I'm never going to be perfect but I can get better and be a better person. And also I like challenges (I curse 'em, but I like 'em!) and I like using my brain and learning and knowing things.

That's a bit vague isn't it?!

Do I have specific ambitions? No. But I have some waffley ones!

• To raise a happy daughter. Especially given the issues that both Henry and I come with with mental health and intelligence and social (in)ability. I know she will face her own issues and problems because she's human and all people do but I want to be someone who she knows she can come to for support and who she trusts. So that whatever is going on with her she knows she can come to me and I won't condemn her.


• To challenge myself. At the moment I don't have many chances to step outside my comfort zone, but when the opportunities arise I try to remember to take that step. I think it's important to me. I spent a very large amount of my life hiding in my own head and not interacting with people (do you know that I am fascinated with mutism, especially elective mutism? It's something which ... when I find myself thinking of the attraction of not having to speak I know to take my brain and mental health in hand), for a long time the world inside my head was more real than the outside world. Now I balance between the two and every new achievement in the outside world I feel expands and strengthens me. I grow when I do new things.


• To have a job which challenges me and which I enjoy. (OK, this one's been harder the last few months but as I said to my parents today 'there's a light at the end of the tunnel, it may be a train, we don't know right now, but there's a light.') Ideally I want a job where what I do helps people. (Actually in my current post I do help people, kind of, but something a little more direct.) At the same time, while I'm good at customer service (the peril of being someone who's bad at reading people and wants to please people, the life skills transfer over into work skills too!) I'm also good at systems and processes. I don't know the name of what it is I want to do, and I'm not sure how to get there, but whatever it is it involves problem solving and troubleshooting systems to make them work for the people who use them and the customer. And helping people. Recently I've been most interesting in researching posts in the charity sector but without many specific skills or qualifications it's a little tricky. (Living in the small of the back of nowhere doesn't help either.)

I think all of the above add up to - my ambition is 'to be a better person', better in terms of being good, better in terms of being effective, better in terms of ... being a person! Just better.

(PS soupytwist - That probably was absolutely nothing like you were expecting - sorry!)

1. Carla got her new computer today! My old laptop (which she's currently using) is really starting to die (looks like it needs a new hard drive), so instead of saving the new computer til Christmas, we decided she'd just start using it now.

2. Had a nice walk tonight. Four miles, which is longer than we've done in a while. She's been busy with school, I've been busy with work, there's yoga two nights a week interfering with our schedule, and then for the past couple weeks she's been sick. But tonight Alexander wanted something from the Apple Store, so we walked down to the Promenade and back. Stopped at El Pollo Loco on the way, yum.

3. Speaking of chicken, I was boiling a whole chicken earlier today for use in enchiladas and I kind of forgot about it on the stove and so it got cooked way longer than I meant it to...but that ended up being a good thing! The chicken was just falling off the bones!

• 10:59 $1200 to fix mah car AGATSFSDQ!!!! >:O #
• 11:32 Is scratched paint and broken
  side lamp from little bump in parking lot. I was thinking it would cost maybe $200. Hah! #
• 11:32 @thessaliad I has bought! #
• 11:34 @bibliotech @darkrose why must people be so very douchebaggy? #

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Okay, I should have known better. But I was enjoying the SGU thread on TWoP, with all of the lovely snark. And I appreciated the fact that most of the posters seemed to get why having sex in someone else's body was skeevy, and why it's problematic that the black guy in SGU is yet another Angry Black Man.

( Seriously--I should have known better. )

( Supernatural 5x10 )



I also watched Modern Family, but I don't really have anything to say there. There wasn't anything wrong with it, per se, but it was the weakest episode so far and I just wasn't finding much to get excited about. (Probably because the main storyline was about Phil and Claire and I just don't care about them.)

1. Thanks to the people who recommended Sally's, I have hair dye! We walked down there last night and it turned out they had quite a large selection of non-natural colors by four or five different makers. I ended up gettin Manic Panic, so we'll see how that goes. Last night I did the bleaching (here's a pic of me all bleached) and later today I'll do the toner and then the dye itself.

2. We got our Walmart order in the mail today with this nice lined sweatshirt. It's so cozy! I really wish there was a Walmart near us because it's so nice to find clothes in large sizes that aren't horribly expensive. But if it's something we're pretty sure is going to fit okay, the website is a good option (I love the 97 cent shipping).

Title: Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet
Author: Sherri L. Smith
Number of Pages: 167 pages
Book Number/Goal: 66/75 for 2009
My Rating: 3/5

When a pipe bursts during Ana Shen's middle school graduation, flooding the field and cutting the ceremony short, it doesn't seem like things could get any worse. Then comes the announcement that the gym is flooded, too, and the graduation dance is cancelled. The dance was going to be Ana's big chance to tell Jamie Tabata she likes him before they go their separate ways for high school, but when her best friend Chelsea ends up inviting Jamie and his family over to Ana's for a graduation dinner, it looks like there might be hope after all. Assuming Ana can keep her grandmothers' rivalry from ruining everything.

I'd seen several reviews for this on 50books_poc and wasn't really that interested, but after reading and loving Flygirl, I decided to give some of Smith's other books a try. This...is definitely no Flygirl. It's cute enough, and it's nice to see a biracial main character (or any character!) who isn't half white, but I wasn't wowed or anything.

I really think the book could have used a lot more editing. Most of it is fine, but it starts to fall apart at the ending, which seems really rushed, plus has a couple of chapters that don't really fit. At one point her grandfather starts telling a story and instead of just making it quick or summarising, we actually get a random flashback chapter in his POV about the event he's relating. We also get a few paragraphs in one of the grandmothers' POV towards the end, in a story that has otherwise been very tight third person with only one POV. It just seemed sloppy.

Also I was really excited about the story being set in LA at first, but it ended up being more frustrating than anything because the author gave all sorts of conflicting details. The kids have gone to school together since kindergarten, yet for some reason they all go to an elementary school in a totally different zone than where they live. (One person going to a far away public school might have some excuse, but not a whole class.) Then the high school mentioned is not the high school that middle school feeds into. Neither is it the high school she would actually be going to for where she's supposed to live. Which being less than a mile from the beach would be Santa Monica and she'd go to SaMoHi, not Uni (also everyone keeps saying University High and I'm sorry but I have never heard anyone call it that; it's Uni). Plus the author gives a freeway exit that they're supposed to live near, which is not less than a mile from the beach, either.

I really don't know what she was thinking. The jacket flap says she lives in LA, so it's not just that she didn't know what she was talking about. It's like she wanted to use real names of stuff, but didn't want to be specific, so she ended up taking bits from all over. If you don't want to be specific, then either be vague or make up names of school and stuff. But if you're going to be specific then you have to get your facts right!

Of course most of the people reading aren't going to know or care, but it really took a lot of fun out of it for me.

• 21:02 @bibliotech @darkrose Jesus, as someone with a damn brain I'M offended. #

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1. I got all my Jump translations done yesterday, instead of just One Piece (which usually shows up late Wednesday nights, but was already up when I woke up at noon). So today I can just relax, no set schedule. Woohoo!

2. I got more writing done!

3. I got Super Mario Wii in the mail. So hard to wait til Christmas!

4. Speaking of things I ordered from Amazon, last month or so my mom was talking about wanting some books she used to borrow from my aunt, but now my aunt lives in Oregon, so that's not so doable. Anyway, I told her about BookMooch and said I had a ton of points if she wanted me to mooch her something. So I got her a couple books and then she remembered another author she wanted to reread and said if I found anything I could just give them to her for Christmas. I found one, then decided to look on Amazon for the others and I finally remembered to do that last night and found four of the five I needed being sold used through Amazon fulfillment, which means just like any other Amazon purchase, if you order over $25, you get free shipping. The books were like $3.50-4 each, compared to the ones from other sellers that were just a few cents, but shipping for a book is $3.99 now, so since I got enough stuff (we had one other thing to order that we'd been saving until we had enough to get free shipping) and got free shipping, they ended up being cheaper (plus I get them altogether from one place rather than a bunch of different sellers).

So, ever since the gall bladder mess* I've had pretty serious acid reflux issues. Normally this isn't a problem since I'm on medication for it. However, even with the medication, if I eat too much before sleeping, I end up with this thing where acid backs up into my throat and since I'm asleep and not exactly noticing, I keep breathing. You know how sometimes, if you breathe at just the wrong moment while drinking a glass of water, you get water in your airway, which then freaks out because, oh hey, turns out you're not supposed to breathe liquid? Yeah, it's like that, only a) it's acid and b) you're sound asleep when it happens.

Obviously the answer is not to eat right before sleeping, but last night, I'd been up for over 24 hours and hadn't had food for something like 10 hours and I was getting shaky and weird. I woke up after breathing in acid three different times because, while I wanted to stay awake after the first time, I simply couldn't thanks to exhaustion and medication.

I feel like death warmed over and I have a massive migraine.


*short version: it wasn't stones so it took six weeks, during which I had three ER visits, to diagnose. On the plus side, the time between the diagnosis being made and my surgery was something like 10 hours. Also, Medicare doesn't suck.

Title: Push
Author: Sapphire
Number of Pages: 192 pages
Book Number/Goal: 65/75 for 2009
My Rating: 4.5/5

Precious is sixteen, illiterate, and pregnant with her second child by her own father. But when she gets kicked out of junior high and starts attending an alternative school, her life finally starts to turn around.

This is written in an experimental style, very stream-of-consciousness, with lots of dialect to mimic the way precious talks. Some parts are even written as if Precious had written them herself, complete with spelling errors, which gradually improve over the course of the book. I didn't find that a barrier at all, though. It was really easy to read (I zipped through it in two sittings). The last fifty pages or so of the book are essays and poems written by Precious and the other girls in her class.

Pretty much everything bad you could imagine happening has happened to Precious and it sometimes seems like overkill, but overall I really enjoyed the book. And I'm glad the ending was optimistic but realistic and not all magically wonderful.

I'm definitely interested in seeing the movie, though probably not til it's out on DVD. I was looking at the cast, though, and um...wtf? The teacher is described as dark with dreads, yet somehow in the movie she is really lightskinned and has wavy hair. It's like they made her as close to a Nice White Lady as possible without actually casting a white actress. D:


(This is something else I would totally have nominated for yuletide! Damn it! I'd especially love fic about Jermaine.)

HERE'S SOME ART

On the sketchblog (WARNING: WILDLY NSFW/NSFL/I DON'T WANT TO GET IN TROUBLE SO I AM WARNING YOU A LOT) and on the website.

DeviantART even got a look-in, but, as usual, I only put pandering-to-the-masses rubbish on there, so w/e.

I'm going to bed. My new job is going marvellously, by the way. NHS GUM clinic reception is hard work, very hard work, but lots and lots of fun. I love it. :)