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Monday, November 16, 2009
You can watch a short video clip from Global TV, Your town: Fort Chipewyan.
I know all the people interviewed...
Current mood:  chipper
Sunday, November 15, 2009
and I have been rolling for a while so here is where we are.
I passed my first class with 93% which wasn't what I wanted but was a fair grade. I think it would have been better if the practical final hadn't been hell on wheels. Wanna hear about it? I'll write it up and put it on the cooking blog for you all. :)
I'm not in bakeshop, which is awesome :) This week is bread. Anyone want to know how to make challah? ;)
basenji's are awesome, the boy is awesome, I am awesome :)
and that is life.
( Pregnancy, in which there may be TMI )
Speaking of freedom, today I went and saw 2012. It was so long, and so cliche. It was silly, predictable and corny and so not worth 8,000 won. On a side note the crazy cult church I went to for a while is now convinced that the world is ending in 2012. *sighs* Come on folks, you are a christian based cult. "Thief in the night" and all that jazz. They also think swine flu is a plague from god and that no precautions can protect you, only following the church doctrine. Back to the film - the place was PACKED. Its playing here every half hour on the weekends - two cinemas, three theaters each. People brought kids so young they needed booster seats - here is a film where 90% of the world's population dies horribly and folks bring their kids. The movie was about 3 hours long and subtitled here. That was an awesome combo.
Heather, the super awesome lady, sent me a wonderful pile of candy and books! I am starting with the Horlarious ones. So far I've gone through Closed Circle, about a bunch of sadist film stars who have a drug magic cult to counteract the effects of Charles Manson (??) and mostly just kidnap hippies and then sexually torture them and use a series of pipes to expand their rectums until they could accommodate a horse. A kind of psychic lady develops a split personality, 'sees' their behavior, and they are eventually exposed. I am midway through DEMOGORGON, which is less silly and better written despite the cover. So far its about the evolution of demons and part demons to make the antichrist, and the greek guy and bastard offspring of some deomon beast hybrid thing who are trying to outrun/outsmart the thing/s. Ok, so its still super silly, but not *as* silly, and not nearly as low budget s&m porny. Lest you think I only read horrible books - or that Heather secretly thinks I am too dumb to tell the difference - she also sent me some really good looking novels, but I am saving them for after the funny bad ones! I've been knitting again, I am going to try to do some stuff for folks around here for christmas. We'll see I guess, how that goes.
We have given into Wicket about the bed for now - I got up in the night and saw her shivering in her little dog bed, so we are letting her back in until her hair gets longer. The dog shirts aren't enough. She really is a good dog. She doesn't chew stuff up, and she doesn't bark or growl. She is getting better about licking people a lot, and we are working on the jumping. She comes when she is called, and she loves to cuddle or play, or go for walks. Aside from her vengence poop in the hallway last week she hasn't had an accident in ages. Go team Wicket <3.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Too bad you can't make the dolls more curvy. And the dog only comes in that colour.
^-^
( NSFW )
Current mood:  amused Current music: Peter Murphy - Cuts You Up
Off to Tarasmas.
Busy busy busy.
Current mood:  rushed
Several of you have asked when and how my book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History, will be available for purchase. I've been told that the official date of January 31, 2010 is more or less accurate, but it could be as late as February/early March, depending on how the final stages of production proceed. Sorry to those of you who were hoping to get it as a Christmas present. The list price has changed several times - I've seen it listed for pre-order at $111.95 but also as low as $76 (at Barnesandnoble.com right now). I consider $76 to be a very reasonable price for a 500-page hardcover academic volume. The irony is that while sales only really take off once a (much cheaper) paperback edition comes out, the press will only put out a paperback edition if sales of the hardcover are good. I do have some hopes though - stay tuned! I realize that even $75-100 is a lot to pay for a specialized volume.
Friday, November 13, 2009
No, seriously, it is RIDICULOUS that chemicals in my brain can do this to me.
Ridiculous.
I refuse to be held hostage by a bunch of freaking neurotransmitters.
I have spoken.
Current mood:  crazy
Ian spoke to the vet at the SPCA today who maintains that Sierra's shot is fine and that the other vet just has different standards, and also cautioned *against* vaccinating too soon/often. So it looks like we will go get the rest of Sierra's shots there just to avoid hassles. It's a long walk but she certainly has the energy for it, so meh.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
9:07PM
Weird: the best Subnormality in a while.
Well, Arthur may hate French, but he sure does love Japanese. Of course, our little Japanophile doesn't know any Japanese except for Totoro and Pitagora Suichi, so he's taken to inventing his own Japanese words. The first and more important of these is badicklebop, which means 'backpack', or so I'v been told. I can see it becoming a regular part of the lexicon ... but maybe we should try to find him some lessons locally before he invents Japanese from scratch.
Well here is a pic of the freshly de-coned dog, anyway!
How come it never goes smooth?
I took Sierra to get her stitches out today, at our local vet. That part was no problem - she was very good and lay on her back sweetly; didn't make a peep. However, having spoken to the vet tech on the desk, there appears to be a problem with her vaccinations. According to the sticker in her file she got her initial vaccine on September 16. According to the tech I spoke to, the booster needs to be administered no later than a month after that or it is basically null and you have to start over - this would have been October 16, before we had even seen her... Basically we need to know whether the date on the file is a mistake (could have written down 16/9/09 instead of 16/10/09, but it is in two places so doubtful), or whether maybe her vaccine was re-done while she was in foster care or at Le Refuge for her spay... Otherwise we are going to have to pay to get it done over, which obviously we are not thrilled over... Especially since we have the choice of paying for the exam before the shot at our local vet (that plus the shot is about 80 bucks) or renting a car to get her up to the SPCA vet (assuming they will even agree to do it for free). Ugh.
I sent an e-mail to our SPCA adoption counselor but I am most unimpressed.
Current mood:  annoyed
November is kicking my ass.
I didn't really notice because I was trying to keep busy, but this week between the new schedule, night shift, and George going AWOL for so long, it kind of all came down like the proverbial ton of bricks.
If you need me, I will be hiding under the nearest available rock.
Apologies to people waiting on a NaNo update from me. I'll get to it, I swear, even if it looks like I won't hit 50K. Right now, it just doesn't feel that important.
Current mood:  depressed
A quick thought on the way out of the door - ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) longpig often has trouble sleeping (although not so much recently.) I have always had a tendency to wake up a couple of times in the night, but when I go to bed, and even more so when I go *back* to bed, I'm out like a light. I can turn the alarm off and go back to sleep literally before I've woken up enough to realise that the alarm went off.
(I've also had a tendency to sleep-walk occasionally, and to hold a conversation in my sleep which I won't remember when I wake up. At various times this has terrified me - what if I told someone a secret, like about what I got them for Christmas, while asleep? Luckily, sleep-me is discrete so far.)
So, the question in my mind, is how did I get this way? I wasn't always conditioned to sleep so well - in fact, I clearly remember going to my parents aged 10 or so, and asking them "How do I go to sleep? I've forgotten" which confused them greatly. They gave me some good tips, but I was disappointed that there wasn't a formula.
So, my method is to read books. From a really young age I used to read a *lot*. I'm talking about getting a book from the school library, and finishing it in two hours (when quiet reading time had finished, and I was supposed to be doing maths.) After that, I'd get *another* book before we left school, and finish that in the evening. We'd go to Milton Keynes library every other weekend or so, and I'd carefully select 10-20 books (they put up the limit at some point) and finish them before Thursday.
All this time, I'd *always* read when I went to bed. There's a point, though, especially when you're lying down, that your eyes defocus or close, and the book slips from your hand. To start with, my response was to shake it off, prop myself up and carry on reading. But as time went on, I trained myself that when I woke up once after reading, I'd quickly find the book, jam a bookmark in it (if my finger was still in the page) and lie down to sleep.
Later, I got into video games, movies and friends, and didn't have as much time to read. My sleeping during that time was varied, but never awful - I'd have some nights where I couldn't sleep for a long time, but usually I'd drop off. Sometimes I'd read a book, in fact.
Much later still (we're talking maybe a couple of years since I read a book cover-to-cover) at university, I started getting into reading again, and I discovered something crazy - reading made me fall asleep. I'd start reading, and drop off. I've slowly trained myself out of that, but I can still produce the state that it put me in, and fall asleep pretty quickly. If I put my mind to it, I can even sleep badly on a sunny day - I've always been a non-sleeper in daytime.
So my theory is that you can train yourself, by doing a specific thing until you are too tired not to sleep, to not only make that thing a trigger for sleep, but learn to recreate the mental conditions for sleep.
And to read a lot of books!
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