gypsygirl

Not quite 8:30am and I've already filled my laugh quota for the day.

Was chatting with one of my coworkers, and the subject drifted into Hebrew words and phrases we were familiar with. He was trying to remember the "writing on the wall" from the book of Daniel, "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" (KJV); what came out was "many, many tickle a parson".

We had a pretty good snowstorm last Tuesday, two to three inches. The weathermen thought the temperatures were going to drop below freezing overnight and make for difficult driving (around here, everything shuts down when there's ice on the roads... our cars just aren't set up to drive on ice, and our people just get stupid when trying to drive on ice, so it's just safer to keep as many people home as possible), so the university shut down a bit early and sent us home. On our way out, while cleaning the ice off the cars we played around in it a little. A couple of girls built a snow bear in the bed of one's pick up (sic 'em bears!), we had a minor snowball fight, and I made a tiny snowman from the snow on E's hood.

When we got home we discovered that the weight of the snow had bent the poles of the canopy we'd put over my scooter.

I'm going to have to see if I can find something with stronger poles.

So New Year's Eve I was getting ready to head out to Beth and Marcel's 4th yearly karaoke bash when I found that my car wouldn't start. My poor car is fourteen years old, and it's been going downhill for the past year or so, dying at intersections, juddering, etc. Now, it's dead. It might be resurrectable, but at fourteen, I really don't want to put more money into it. On the other hand, I'm not quite ready to buy a new car right now. I'm trying to pay off my school loans, and getting further into debt isn't part of my plan. So, instead of a car, I got me one of these:

Granted, mid-winter is probably not the best time to start riding a scooter, but I'm still having fun.

I recently finished my recording of Dayspring by Harry Sylvester for Ignatius Press. It's already up on their website, and I've started a new recording for them, The Eternal Woman by Gertrud Von le Fort. It's considerably shorter than either of the other two books I've done for them, and I'm nearly halfway through already. The only difficulty with it is the length of the sections; only four of them but two are about 20 pages and the other two are upwards of 40. That's over an hour of recording for those last two sections. I've had to divide them into three so that I don't blow out my vocal chords.

I'm also currently recording The Sky is Falling by Lester Del Rey for LV, another scifi, since I had such fun with the Mack Reynolds one I did for the SFFAudio Challenge.

Saw this in California a few weeks ago while I was visiting Mum.

Take a closer look at the far right of the bed.

Only it was the Heart of Texas Fair, not the State Fair. K, one of the girls in the Woman in Black, which I'm stage managing, was given some tickets at work, and she invited me and M, another girl from the play to go with her. She'd never been before, and really wanted to check it out, and since the fairgrounds are right next door to the theatre, we didn't even have to pay for parking.

When we got down to the end of the fairway, we came across the freak show booth; K had also never been to a freak show before, so we went in. For the most part it was a collection of live, stuffed and preserved animals of the conjoined twins gone more wrong than usual variety. One of the stuffed animals, however, was purported to be a chupacabra.

After looking at it for a couple of minutes M said, "That's just wrong. That's a deer butt, upside-down."

I was telling one of my coworkers about it, and he dubbed it the "chupacabr-ass"

On our way out, we saw one of those "Old Timey Photo" booths. Yet another thing K had never done (not that I had, either, incidentally... but then I'm not really one for voluntarily getting my picture taken). I agreed to join them in the photo under the stipulation that I was not going to wear anything frilly. They did have something in the Annie Oakley style, so I was happy.

I recently bought a set of shelves from Ikea for my tv and for some extra dvd storage space.

When I'd put it together, I found that it was a bit too tall for the space, and I didn't like the amount of space between the shelves. So I decided to modify it. I set the shelves to a spacing that I liked, and then trimmed the uprights to the height of the top shelf.

I decided to use the scraps to make two little shelves to put at the back of the bottom two shelves to create even more dvd storage space.

I used the scraps I'd trimmed off, along with a plank of 2x2 that I bought to make the two small shelves.

I'm thinking of staining it a darker colour because it sort of fades into the yellow of the wall, but that'll be later. For now, I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.

It's talk like a pirate day, mateys!

So I was having a nice bottle of Sweet Leaf Half and Half tea when I happened to glance down at the cap, on the inside of which had been printed a... can it be called a fortune when they're giving you instructions rather than predicting the future? Well, whatever you call it, it took rather more liberties with my opinions than fortunes usually do. The instructions I was given:

Um... sorry Sweet Leaf Tea, I don't like girls (gals?) in that way.

As of yesterday morning, I am completely moved in and settled! Today I've been putting up pictures and mirrors, and I still need a few rugs and a towel rack for the bathroom, but other than that, I'm done, and the rest of this week that I took off from work, I can just rest and relax! I've put some photos of the house on flickr in case anyone's interested (but they're mostly for my mother's benefit).

I've spent the last three days moving into the new house, and I ache everywhere... even my arches ache! Going from a second floor apartment to a third floor room is exhausting. I think, when it comes time to move out of this place, I'm going to hire people to haul everything for me. I'm ok with packing and unpacking, but let someone else do the heavy work. Though, I must admit, I had lots of help yesterday, with all the furniture. There were four of us moving everything out of the apartment, and then two more friends showed up to help move everything into the house. It was nice that we were able to get everything over in one load of the u-haul (plus a few things stuffed in people's cars).

Today I've been putting things away, and I'm no longer feeling as overwhelmed as I was last night, mainly because I got all the stuff I don't use often (camping equipment, suitcases, etc) into storage areas, so there's not as much clutter out in the room. I'm taking all of next week off work, so I'll have plenty of time to finish clearing up. First thing I need to do tomorrow, though, is go to the post office, because I had gotten the wrong house number stuck in my head, and so they're going to be trying to deliver my mail to a non-existent address!

Ooh, and internet connection's already up! Yay!