magedragonfire

I know someone on my friends' list was looking for Flight Rising stuff at some point, but I totes forget who. Oops?

Registrations are open today, anyway! (You can put MageDragonfire as a referrer, if you want, too. :p)

(Also, speaking of dragons, I had this designed for my OOC Furcadia avatar. I'm still not over about how awesomely Degu did, ahaha.)

Reasoning does not exist when trying to deal with making cats do what they do not want to do, sigh.

Somehow, Simba managed to tear out one of his claws about a week ago. I'm still not sure how; he might've done it while over at my folks when we were gone for the long weekend, or he might've done it around here after we got back. We didn't notice, at any rate, until it started to smell; infected by that point, of course. (I'd actually had him squawk at me the evening before when I'd touched his paw, but thought at the time that I'd accidently squished it too hard.) One trip to the vet later, and he was outfitted with a cone of shaaaame and accompanied by a packet of antibiotics, along with instructions to soak his paw in epsom-salt-laden water twice a day.

Haaah.

The antibiotics have been bad enough, of course - I managed to get the first one into him almost entirely because of surprise alone, but he's refused to eat the treats that you can stick the pills into, and has since gotten downright belligerent about taking them. I had to try about ten times this morning to get his first dose of the day into him, between the clamping the jaws shut in the best imitation of a toddler and the subsequent spitting it out after I did get it into his mouth. Only two doses left to go, thankfully.

The bathing bit, of course, has gone over like a lead balloon. It takes both Trav and I to hold him still long enough to keep his paw in the water for more than a second, and even then he still manages to worm free before long. I've been doing his morning baths just by keeping a moistened cotton ball over the site, but this is probably less effective than the full deal.

The cone just makes him look ridiculous, and he gave me the most hurt looks after we got back from the vet with it on. :p He has been enjoying neck scratches and bellyrubs much more than he usually does in the meantime.

At least his paw doesn't smell like awful any more. A good sign, I s'pose.

I had an odd twinge of nostalgia last week. It just kind of came out of nowhere, as far as I can figure. It's a bit funny in hindsight, actually; I managed to attempt to revisit two series of media that I had enjoyed in the past, each with five entries. I had previously consumed the first three entries of each. I now owned all five of each, but for some reason had never touched entries four or five. Time to fix that, thought I, about both series! (Although, of course, I never put two and two together about the similarities between them until I sat down to write this. Hah.)

But, of course, one could not blindly charge into entry four in either series. It had been quite a while since I'd done anything with the two, and although I remembered broad themes, could not remember details that might come in handy. So, hey, why not start at the beginning? They were things I enjoyed! Surely I would enjoy them again.

( So I embarked into the Magic Kingdom of Landover... )

( And then in a direct u-turn, we enter the land of Nosgoth... )

...I've got other contemplations I should write up, too. We'll see how that goes. I've kind of been figuring that unless I force myself to write, I won't do it out of sheer lazy, or something. Hrm.

Finally got pics of my Rogue uploaded to my Ravelry account. It took about forever for a sunny weekend to come along so we could take some pictures in decent light. :P More this way!

The yarn for Travis's sweater arrived a couple of weeks ago, and I've started on a sleeve for it. It's a really nice green, but dang, I needed to go down forty billion needle sizes from what was suggested to get gauge. That's never happened before; usually I end up going up a size or two. But it goes! In any case, it'll go quicker than Rogue, now that I've learned how garment sizing and finishing works. Most of it's just stockinette, with a mock-cable pattern in the upper quarter, too.

I think? Maybe? I am declaring it done.

Rogue, that is. My last post, I said "...maybe I'll just tear out the arms and re-knit them - again - in the round to make them look nice and not finish the sweater until next year. ...Again."

And this is exactly what ended up happening. Sleeves were ripped and redone (and I have now ended up making a total of five sleeves for this sweater; apparently I am most of an octopus), they are now are not terrible bag-things, and are actually attached to the sweater.

I have been working on this thing for three years. I almost don't know what to do with myself, now.

(...oh wait except I do, since I ordered the yarn for Travis's sweater earlier this week, oops. I have promised that I will have it to him by next January.)

( More yarnery )

Pictures tomorrow. Maybe of the Ohm shawl I did, too, just so's I can get something on Ravelry for that.

In other news, my father nearly bit it over the New Years holiday while I was out of town; there were shenanigans involving comas and stupid-high levels of ammonia, among other things. Obviously he is (mostly) better now, but he's still going to end up needing a liver transplant before too long. Still have not processed all my feelings about that particular episode yet; probably will not for a while.

For some reason, the cat's been being a bit of a dork, over the past couple of days. He's figured out that our new desk is great for sitting on top of. What's not so great is that he chooses to sit directly in front of the computer monitor. This thing is fucking 29 inches. It's a large goddamn monitor. He still manages to sit/stand right in front of it so as to make 3/4s of it entirely opaque.

And he also chases the mouse pointer and attempts to bite at it, but what cat would not do such a thing, when faced with high def mice?

This is probably related to Trav being gone hunting for the week; Simba doesn't have his regular person to bother, so he turns instead to me for shenanigans. (Or Eris, who we're catsitting for my folks. She's even less pleased than me about it.) Goofball.

Also, since Trav is gone and not around to eat delicious baked goods, I of course have urges to bake dozens of cookies. I have already made one batch; two more are in the works. I'll probably end up fobbing most of those off on a LAN party, but, damn. I couldn't get the urge to bake when I could just toss them at Travis's coworkers or something? I need to friggin' find a job; I'd end up being so tired of baking, I'm sure, that it'd solve the problem right well.

I also made a pretty nice olive and pumpkin seed bread last week, but bread is a different animal entirely. I will never not love playing with dough.

We had our week of fall in Vancouver, and winter has duly arrived. It's been rainy and cold since Thursday. And, I mean, cold in the house. This is an entirely new sensation - or at least one not felt since I moved out of my parents'.

The old apartment was entirely populated by old people, or something. S'the only way I can explain why the heaters remained on in the middle of July. We had to wear shorts in January sometimes, and even then were still sweating.

This place does not have this problem. Each room has its own thermostat. Its own thermostat that I can fiddle with and have it be cold or hot at whim! Mostly, so far, it's been cold, but the novelty's wearing off. Maybe I'll turn up the heat a bit tonight so my fingers stop being icicles.

Orrrrr maybe it'll give me that last bit of incentive to finally finish my goddamn Rogue. Maybe. Finally. Or maybe I'll just tear out the arms and re-knit them - again - in the round to make them look nice and not finish the sweater until next year. ...Again. They're rather baggy and long (I needed to make the XL to accomodate chest size, not arm size, apparently), and I unfortunately did the increases in a way that makes them really visible once the sleeves are seamed up.

Each project I finish makes me a better knitter, but, goddamn, it makes Rogue take even longer to get done.

The Telus guy was finally in to install le internets today, so I can stop going crazy now! :D

(Kind of ridiculous how much more 'alone' it feels when I don't have my usual outlets. Especially in a house full of boxes.)

We're basically all moved in - it's just more unpacking that needs to be done. I've mostly got the kitchen put to rights, and part of the living room. The spare bedroom needs a lot of work yet, as does the office, but kind of hard to do the latter until we have a proper desk in here. We ended up just trashing the two we had before because they were both old and ugly... and our movers (Trav's brother and brothers-in-law) didn't want to carry them all the way up the stairs, haha.

I do think that between all this packing and moving around boxes (up and down three flights of stairs at the old place, and between one and three here at the new) and cleaning, however, that I'm starting to get kind of back into shape. Hopefully I will be finding a job soonish so that I can keep being that way.

tl;dr about food/grains.

Reading an article in my troll-through of the Sun, and... Well. Most of it is pretty helpful advice, although I knew just about everything in there myself, buuuut... I kind of have to take umbrage with their little blurb about multigrains/whole grains, especially "What's more, multi-grain products typically contain endosperm, a source of starch and calories."

...Yes? Okay? Endosperm is in fact what's left when you strip the bran and germ away from a grain kernel. It's what flour is mostly made out of. Yes, even whole grain flour. 'White' wheat flour is just the ground up endosperm; mostly the inner endosperm. Whole grain includes the bran and germ, too. Flour without endosperm would have almost no structure to it; it'd just be... bran. Which, while great as an additive, doesn't exactly hold muffins or breads together.

In other words, I'm not exactly sure why this reporter chose to pick on that fact like it's some kind of bogeyman? Smacks of fearmongering and shoddy, ill-researched reporting, to be honest. This isn't even something nutritionally-related that could be open to interpretation or affects some people differently or whatever-have-you - it's plain fact, trivia, something that you could find out by opening a fifty-year-old book on grain biology. There's really no excuse for it.

In somewhat related news, in my hunting for jobs a couple of days ago, I came across a listing for a gluten-free production bakery looking for a baking assistant. Great, I thought - they're not too far away, and I certainly don't mind doing gluten-free baking. Except... On their website they trumpeted their use of aluminum-free baking powder in all of their goods, including breads. This is also okay. What wasn't okay was their justification for doing so: that yeast is always bad for celiacs and people with gluten sensitivities. Which is outright oppositeland in some cases. Yes, some celiacs/gluten-sensitive folks have allergies or problems with yeast, and obviously those people should abstain from eating it. But to suggest that it's unilaterally harmful, in the face of evidence to the contrary, is kind of shady.

It bothers me probably more than it should. I'd be happier if they just said 'we just don't like yeast', or gave no reason at all; there's no arguing with either of those things. But to seemingly base your decision on something that's not actually right... eeeeugh.

I obviously didn't apply. :P

WELP. I, uh, really hope that my disinclination to write not-very-much about anything does not continue once I actually get a job.

...Although, honestly, it's been less 'not wanting to write' and more 'being dreadfully tired while still having ideas flitting about brain'. I've been cooking away ideas on roleplays-to-be-done and fanfiction, of all things - I haven't written fanfiction in a decade! - but - ...oh my word, do I feel old now, that that fact's just sunk in - it's been so blasted hard to focus my brain on actually getting all those words down that I've just left them to percolate for the moment.

Perhaps this week I'll actually get some of them out of the brain and onto... well, not paper. In a text file somewhere, I guess.

For!

I have a whole week's break from classes, because I am finished my practicum a whole week earlier than everyone else in my class, hee~

( Class Ramblings and Pictures of Goodies )

I've managed to finish a couple of video games. Mostly 3DS/DS, of course, since I've been on transit for a while. Radiant Historia was intriguing, and even if parts of the gameplay were non inspiring (I totally didn't find out about the 'skip' function for scenes that had already been seen until after I'd finished it), I found the writing in it really awesome and most of the characters pretty engaging. An enjoyable tale! Even if most of the internet seems to have Raynie's motivations wrong. (I seriously do not understand how they manage to misunderstand her so - but, whatever. Maybe I'll spell it out in some of the percolating fanfiction I'm contemplating.)

Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask was diverting and fun as usual for the series, even if I was dreadfully unimpressed with the episode's antagonist. ( Spoilers, sweetie. )

And then there was the Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3. I laughed. I cried. It was probably the best love letter to the series they could've written... although I would've liked to see more Kaidan, but I'm biased.

Anywhoo. Time to go and see if I can't get some decent unboxing photos of my little giftie.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Thoughtful Reflections - BG&E

Soooooo for the last month, pretty much nobody has seen me. Friends haven't seen me. Family hasn't seen me. The Internet has not in fact seen me. (I missed you, Internet!) I suppose Travis managed to see me a couple of times, now and then, but even that was brief and fleeting.

This is because I've been pulling twelve hour days at school (plus the whole hour and a half commute there and back) for the past month. On a Saturday, once, even.

That was because I signed up to be on the school's gingerbread competition team. Every year, the Hyatt Regency downtown has a Gingerbread Lane event, a competition with three categories (professional, amateur, and secondary school), a ton of awesomely decorated houses (and not-quite-so-housey houses), and a donation drive fund thing for Make A Wish. VCC has been sending in entries for a few years, now, and had actually won first place in the professional category three years running. There was a biiiiit of pressure on our shoulders.

So, a team of 24 baking students, one instructor, and one fuzzy deer statue (oh deer) worked in two four-hour shifts outside of class hours daily for three weeks. What did we come up with?

Welcome to the Gingerbell Bakery!

The piece is 3' by 4', and juuuust under the height maximum allowed at 47" tall. Everything in there is edible (except for the string lights on the tree) and was made in-house. My particular projects were the floor tiling, the gingerbread tables and the arrangement of goodies on them, the wee little gingerbread cutters on one of the tables, and the spice cabinet/bookshelf and the jars accompanying it. I also wrote a whimsical little story about the entry that's posted up on display beside it - some of which is paraphrased on the photos linked up above.

The cabinet assembly alone took me almost a week and a half, and it had to undergo emergency repairs on the last session before transporting it to the hotel because it both started leaning forwards precariously and got a huge crack across the bottom board from stress fractures. I'll be having nightmares about that damn thing for months.

...But, all things said and done, it was kind of worth it. Even the waking up at 5:30am part and the Christmas carols every morning in November part.

We did, after all, win first again. :3

Current Mood: tired

Welp. Iiiii just kind of got into a large fight with my mother. And I don't even have Travis here to complain and sniffle at about it, since he's out hunting. Yay. Sorry, LJ-friends. You're up.

I was over at her place for dinner (apparently I am a bad child and never go see her, or something), and, you know, things were okay. We ate, we chatted, we sort of watched Van Helsing in the background as I entertained the Eri-cat.

Of course, the chatting eventually turned sort of political, since she has a habit of watching news stations of all sorts (Canadian and American) when she's on her days off. We always tend to get a bit scrappy during these discussions - I'm a socialist, and she's of the opinion that socialists are head-in-the-sand want-all-the-tax-monies communists (and yet she detests the Conservative party and thinks they're a bunch of crooks. idek.). But usually it doesn't ever get terrible. That's fine with me. Insult my politics all you like; disagree with me about welfare and spending and social programs. Whatever. We did actually agree on a few things tonight, though - mostly education-related - which was a bit unusual, but all the better.

Aaaaand then the topic dipped towards the USA's elections, and she mentioned part of her wanted Obama to win, and another part of her wanted to see Romney in there. I grimaced and groaned and asked her why she would ever want to see Romney elected, and she said, and I quote: "Because maybe someone needs to stand up for the white man."

I gaped at her for about a second, got up, thanked her for dinner, told her I'd see her in six months (which was probably unnecessary, but goddamnit, there are reasons I don't really go over there a whole lot - she's also got a history of homophobic comments), got my bag, and left. I didn't really trust myself to say anything else, and it would've been all the worse had I engaged right there and then, I know it.

She of course called about five minutes after I walked in my door, demanding to know what the hell, what I thought I was doing eating her food that she cooked and then storming out and slamming the door (which, to be honest, I only minorly slammed because it didn't close right when I tried the first time - the door handle's been fussy for years). I explained that what she said was offensive and disgusting, and she said "well obviously we can't talk about politics any more" - which I agreed with - and then went all "MY OPINIONS" on me. I thanked her again for dinner and told her I wasn't really interested in continuing the discussion, that I didn't even know what to say. She hung up on me.

So, um.

Stace had a period where she didn't talk to mom for a few months after they had an argument. I wonder how long this one's going to last... because, damn. I know her. She won't think for a second that what she said was the least bit wrong, and won't apologise for it.

...'Course, I don't think what I did was wrong, either, given the context - but I still feel like shit because of what happened and have an inexplicable urge to just go bawl somewhere.

Current Mood: upset

Hot damn, have I really not posted to this thing since January?

...As you might be able to surmise, I've been having problems of the not-writing persuasion lately. Between being plain ol' busy, general anxiety, and just losing the will to get started on just about anything, it's been like pulling teeth to sit down and bang out more than a couple of sentences at a time. I don't like it, but I also don't know what to do about it. :\

(Noting that once I get started, the writing usually goes okay for a bit, and that it definitely isn't the 'sit down' part that's been the issue. I do a lot of that - or had been doing a lot of that up 'til this month, but we'll get to that.)

( Six months condensed )

Honestly, I probably don't have the time right now anyway, aaaaas I started my pastry chef-ery course at the beginning of the month. It's kind of awkwardly placed, from 1pm-6:30, and held downtown, so there's about 45 minutes of travelling back and forth, too, so it just feels difficult to get anything done besides it. I mean, I've always been kind of bad at time management, but this is just seeming to make it worse.

Something I have to fix, if I really want to go into professional baking.

We've had theory and demonstrations about quick breads and pies and puff pastry these past few weeks. Been doing reasonably well - excellently in the theory component, anyway. I'm not positively sure, but I think our demonstration-marks have been averaged across the whole class; they're okay, but not what I was expecting.

Tomorrow's the big shift change - we start the 'for reals' bit, a month where we rotate through various production stations, making everything again on our own to stock the bakeshop in the college. We'll see how that goes. I'm on quick breads/muffins this week - which is easy in terms of the baking itself, but is apparently the most difficult because our station also has to tend the ovens. Our instructor put me as the leader of the group, and has said that she'll be helping us out this week to show everyone how the flow should be going. Not sure if this is a vote of confidence because of the former, or not, because of the latter. Guess we'll see how it goes.

( And here's some other nerdity. Mostly ME and Pern-related. )

Aaaaand with that, I should probably get to my 'homework', such that it is. I think the most valuable thing I might get out of this course might actually be time management skills, with the amount of planning ahead we have to do. I kind of hope so, anyway, because damn do I need the help with that.

Harper's Conservative back-benchers are clamouring again to erode the rights of women.

Said backbencher is, clearly, an ignorant prick. Of course children should have - and do, if I recall correctly - human rights. Embryos are not children.

For once, the comments on the article there - or at least, the highest-rated ones - are not completely stupid. The very top-rated one even addresses how these male MPs should be keeping thier noses firmly out of it. I was kind of tickled to see that, even if the subject matter makes my blood boil.

Fuck this government, seriously.

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Your comment redesign sucks balls. It's slow, the subject lines being relocated to comments is not helpful at all when looking at collapsed comments, it's slow, it's not any prettier or serves any design purpose, and it's slow.

I find a certain humour in this prompt.

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I bow to the gods of presents.

Often enough I'll try to light a candle for the solstice, too, but half the time I forget. I make a terrible pagan, really.

fiat

fiiiiat

sitting in front of our apartment~

A whole week earlier than we were told, too!

We still have to finalize the payments - we're adding me as a cosigner on the loan for it, just to see if we can't get a better rate that way; I've undoubtedly got more (and better) credit history than Travis. It doesn't really matter too much, though, thankfully.

The only slightly shitty thing is that it started snowing tonight. Which is awesome in and of itself - I love snow, it makes me happy, we never get enough of it here, and I'm surprised it's starting this early, honestly - but it means that I'm hesitant to drive the Fiat to work tomorrow instead of the old reliable 4x4 truck. And it'll get dirty, and possibly saltwatery. But then I can't show it off. :(

(Really, it's not a terrible problem to have.)

So a few weeks ago, we had to fill out a questionnaire thinger here at work as part of a consulting/productivity/employee happiness thing. I had only been here for two weeks at the time, so I imagine my insight was very, very useful.

(pffft)

Part of this involved filling out our job description and the most important tasks we did, how much time we spent on them, and all of that. On mine, I put down the most-important-seeming things: invoicing, receiving payments, calling companies looking for payments so that I can receive them, and so on.

I conveniently forgot to mention that the one thing I spent the most time on was removing staples from piles of paper, and then putting staples back in to those piles of paper.

*resumes unstapling and stapling*

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WHY THE FUCK IS THERE A SPIDER ON MY LJ FRONT PAGE GET IT OFF GET IT OFF

(does that answer the question?)

I think Livejournal keeps thinking I'm in China, or something. I have no idea why else most of my menus would be continually switching to Chinese. (Maybe it thinks I need to start practicing the language again?)

Just got back from shopping a little while ago. Made my largest purchase ever. Trav and I just put in our order for a brand spanking new Fiat 500. (Sporty model, hehe.) Unfortunately they didn't have the right-featured one in stock for us, so it'll be a few weeks - possibly not 'til Christmas, but I think probably before then - but it will certainly be a sight better than driving the stupid truck every day to work. It just needs to hurry and geeeeet heeeere.

I think I'll make pumpkin bread today. It's that kinda weather.

I am currently at work.

Knitting my sweater.

With the full blessing of my supervisor, who is sitting just a few feet away from me and can see exactly what I am doing.

I do not even work in a yarn store.

It's been a bit of a slow day.

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magedragonfire

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Reasoning? What is Reasoning?

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This was a triumph, still alive, old meme, etc.

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