Yesterday evening, by the time I got home, I was lazy and did not want to go out running. So to replace that, I did a longish, intense-ish bout of weightlifting.

Owowowowow. And instead of just being that in my legs if I had just gone out and ran (and not even that if I were not to go for distance), it's everywhere owowowowow. Hope I learned my lesson.

(I won't be able to go out running this evening, because weather radars are so beautifully intensely coloured right now. So I'll have to do the other-muscle-group-workout tonight. Tomorrow morning, expect to require spatula to get out of bed.)

(But I did 12 push-ups. For the first time. 12! Push-ups! Yay!)

(Owowowowow.)

---

I owe special thanks to twistedchick and turnberryknkn for sending support for my fight with the Bureaucracy Monsters yesterday. Between them, they equipped me with:

Suspenders of Disbelief (for dealing with stupidity), Seven-League Boots (for jumping over obstacles), Quill of Creative Thinking (never runs out of ink, and can be transformed into computerized programs as needed.... Mordenkainen's Miraculous Meddling Middleman Macerator, capable of conjuring adamantium Clue-by-Fours into existence above the heads of offending Opponents of Progress at an altitude of the caster's choice, anywhere from a meter up (for a not-so-gentle love tap) all the way up to the Kármán Line, (for when nuking the site from orbit with a Rod from God is the only way to be sure.

My friends are awesome.

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Slept quite a bit and had my morning coffee, but I'm fairly sleepy still and I don't know why.

Fighting the Bureaucracy Monsters on two fronts. Send moral support.

Off to the other lab soon.

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Back from the Memorial Day Darkfriend Social in (mostly) sunny Livonia, Michigan.

The social has had its usual salutary effect: Rested, clearer-headed, happier. Also, hurt myself laughing several times, so there's that. There was music (thanks, you know yourselves) and three thumbs up (thanks, you know yourselves) and eagle-eyed shopping companions (thanks, you know yourself) and fooooooood (see above) and chalk pictures and whiteboard dialogue (see above) and Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum (which link y'all need to click on if you've never been there and heard of it) and an awesome Vanguard Solo Demonstration by the Vanguard Of Your Demise (....whom I now have parked on my own account... at level 20... hmmmm.)

The flights there and back again were uneventful, even though, on the way back, my seat was entirely surrounded by a gaggle of teenage boys on a school field trip or similar. That does sound like it would be one of the minor gateways to hell, but it was strangely peaceful instead, to a great extent because my immediate seat-mates were reading comics.

Back to work and moderately busy. So will go do moderately busy things now. Thanks again, our awesome hostess, annewashere.

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One of those things that I should have realized years ago: The word "disgust" is (of course) linked to "gusto," also to the Portuguese (read: Latin-based) verb "gostar": To like. "Disgust"=="make-not-like."

Huh.

---

How do they rise...

---

Traveling this afternoon, setting out for the wilds of Michigan. See y'all on the flip side!

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From the files of "I guess this is a good thing": I finally tried Minecraft, which had for a long time sounded very, very attractive, and happily found out that I was not in the mood to get sucked into it.

I just didn't have the patience to explore, figure things out and build things up the way the game requires. I did play through the demo---one day and one night---and survived the night, but did not feel like going forth. Given that this is the mother of all sandbox games ever, it is probably great that I did not feel the full attraction while playing the demo.

But I have, strangely, been for a while in the mood to walk on a beach searching for pebbles and shells, so I found a little indie game that's got a similar theme: Miner: Dig Deep. It's a $1 game that is (Google tells me) sadly only available in the US, for direct download onto XBox. You're a miner. You dig. You find ore, you sell ore, you get more tools. You are kerosene (and therefore time) limited; with no light you can keep digging, but your chances of being crushed under a boulder approach 1 the longer you stay under without a functioning light. It's exceedingly simple, has got a non-grating music track (v. important, as the music will loop and loop and loop) and scratches that particular itch a little for me [1]. It's probably worth your $1, although it would be much more a game to be played on a mobile platform, I'd say.

Friend Google tells me that there's this Flash game, Motherload, that's somewhat similar, but I haven't tried it yet.

[1] Of course the game provides absolutely none of the tactile, visual or auditory sensations of the experience I'm craving, in fact nothing except "search for little things among a mess of other little things." But it keeps me in, anyway. Don't ask.

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Had meeting (off-campus) this morning, have meeting (on-campus) this afternoon, ILLITERAL abounds.

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This morning a falcon carried a dragon into space, and I wish it a safe flight and a smooth mission, and a safe return next Thursday.

There's more tea in my near future, and then meetings, and then two off-campus meetings. Vague wishing that a supervisor would get back to me about that one proposal draft that he asked me to write last week, which I finished yesterday. Maybe going out for a run early this evening.

Work now.

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Cleaned All The Things. Well, didn't vacuum, but between the massive amounts of laundry and kitchen scrubbing and bathroom scrubbing and office fixing, Cleaned Nearly All The Things.

Ran/walked ~2.5 miles, the majority running. Also did some resistance training/weight lifting.

Pulled, reaved, combat-droned, overloaded, and of course sniped Many Things.

For the first time in [mumble] months, took out some photos from camera and processed them. Still have a lot to go.

Went to Turkish grocery store in Columbia. Nice place.

Didn't work.

So it goes.

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Last night on ME3 multiplayer, I---
a) Managed to promote the adepts,
b) Got, for the first time, six medals in a gold geth farming game as an infiltrator, including the "5 headshots" that I was aiming for,
c) Brought the soldiers to lev. 20 as well, although I'm still very ineffective with the human, slightly better with the batarian, passable with the turian and I still haven't dared deploy the krogan,
d) Managed to consistently not-utterly-suck at silver games against Reapers,
e) Got the "Veteran" achievement, which is slightly more impressive than it would normally be, because an update had reduced the counts of all the count-based achievements to zero (though it had not ungranted the achievements you'd already earned, thankfully.)
e) And, to give you what I'm most inclined to brag about even though this is the least-dependent on my skill, finally got Widow X.

Since I rely on the Infiltrator exclusively (so far) for earning all the gold for the Premium Spectre Packs, out of one of which came my nice shiny antimateriel stick, I like to think that she bought it herself. Q.E.D., Quinn Enjoys Disruptor (Ammo). (Her name is Elli Quinn, because of course it is. And since it works the other way too and I play her almost exclusively against geth, maybe I can put her in gray and white without unduly confusing other players. It's not like I spend a lot of time out of tactical cloak anyway.)

Oh, and before dinner and sitting down to play, I managed to go out and run for the first time in [mumblemuttermonths.] So that's an actual achievement right there.

Just came back from off-campus meeting. Coding this afternoon. Work now.

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This morning: Dentist doctor ILLITERAL.
Tomorrow: Off-campus meeting ILLITERAL.
Friday: Embassy doctor ILLITERAL.
Next Tuesday: Dentist ILLITERAL.
Some time around next week: Potentially other ILLITERAL.
In conclusion: ILLITERAL.

(I may be able to write here in bits and pieces anyway, but the beating second form of this particular Bureucracy Monster Boss I'm currently fighting requires many, many fetch quests.)

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A major, major head of the Bureucracy Monster: Not slain, but serious progress made as of yesterday. Serious enough that I feel I should time-mark it by noting it here.

Also, a link: Mark Watches and Mark Reads are websites by Mark Oshiro where he reviews TV series and books that he hasn't watched/read before. Very well done, strongly recommended, tight spoiler policy in place etc etc. Anyway, he's currently doing Buffy/Angel. During Season 4 of Buffy, he did something different from what he usually does, for "Hush": He live-blogged his review.

Put down your drinks before reading.

(Possibly slightly NSFW---it's all text, no pictures, but his helpless flailing sometimes catapults into uncontrolled bolded all-caps profanity. Which we do not begrudge him, because come on, the Gentlemen.)

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"...and you'll give us a mile square of land, to be governed with our laws in perpetuity..."

It may work for the people there. I hope it eventually does. But we have truly come a long way when the colonized now try to invite the colonist.

---

Saw Avengers, finally, on Saturday.

Five-word review: Moment of Awesome Stack Overflow.

---

Just came back form adding coffee to my coffee: Got a Raspberry latte from Starbucks, which turned out too sweet even though I asked for a double-shot, so I now added some more coffee to it from our lab machine. I will be rather buzzed, I suspect. That might be a good thing, because we were out dancing last night, then went to Plato's with the gang, and I got only about six hours of sleep. But it was for a good cause.

Work now.

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Shameless copy-paste from dglenn's comment to yesterday's very brief ILLITERAL entry:

For some reason when I read this, in my head it was in Jack Teagarden's
voice singing it to the tune of "Misery and the Blues". Blame this migraine?

Meetin' in the mornin'
Meetin' in the evenin'
Busiest double-E that you ever knew.
Got my share of sorrow
Illiteral tomorrow
Seems there's always something that is overdue.

I don't know that I would "blame" anything per se, though I'm sorry you had a migraine, dglenn. Better today, I hope?

(When I saw the comment this morning I went diving in YouTube, and lo, the song and the performance are both awesome. It might be a little in the day for such hardcore blues, which makes you drunk just listening to it, but do I care? No. Hence, awesome comment.)

Can't brain with certain parts of my brain this morning: Said "See you" to the labmates as I walked into the lab; tried to give the ECE account the password for the university system and the University e-mail the password for GMail; I don't know what else I'm going to do through the course of the day. Managed to drive, though, without confusing gas with brake. So that's good.

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Meeting in the morning
Meeting in the afternoon
ILLITERAL

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Rearranged my regular Gevalia order: Replaced two tins of fancy tea with two boxes of less-fancy tea, replaced generic light roast beans with Colombian medium roast beans.

Put in another order at Foam on the Range, consisting of a floral soap variety set (for me), a shampoo bar (for me) and an aftershave lotion (not for me). If you like soap, hand/body creams/lotions and scrubs, and you haven't tried Foam on the Range, you're doing yourself a serious disservice. Your skin will thank you. And me.

Eyeing wireless keyboard/mouse sets and plug-in earphones and larger TVs on Amazon and elsewhere. Hmmm.

Will go buy plane tickets for the Social now.

Bye bye, monies. You will have bought some happiness, whatever the clichés say.

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Tooth better this morning, although I can still... taste... the cement or whatever it is that's holding the temporary crown there. Also, slight ache. But I'll live.

Members of Three Left Feet will be reassured to know that by the expedient of going home and going to bed almost immediately I seem to have headed off the pre-sickness-brokenness of last night. Not shivering in the wind probably helped, too. I think maybe it was a combination of being still a bit shaken from the dentist and not wearing enough layers that made me so miserable.

---

Over the weekend, I started reading War and Peace, for no obvious reason. Yes, that one.

Well, the reason was that I wasn't feeling like starting any of the other new books that I have on my list (and reader). I didn't feel like re-reading anything either, so one of those books that I put in there because I vaguely felt I had to get to them one day would be it. (Others in that particular category: A Tale of Two Cities, Sense and Sensibility.)

The thing is, War and Peace is a strange book. I am sure if I lived in Russia in mid-19th Century, I would have found it daring and interesting and great; as it is, I was entertained enough by the vignettes of society life to get through Book I, though not able to form an attachment to or care about any character whatsoever, and found that Book II, where the scene shifts from the drawing rooms of Moscow and St. Petersburg to the army camp in Austria, could not hold my interest at all. At which point I was cured of the "don't want to start new thing" and started Banks' Use of Weapons. (Midway through; rather happy, thank you.)

But I am almost certainly interrogating Tolstoy's text from the wrong perspective. And I will likely get back to it between books. I am told that the later parts of the novel are more philosophical musings than narrative, which is just fine. Even throughout Book I, which I read without really getting engaged, I kept catching bits of sly humour and being entertained. (...and honestly, I'm wondering how much of that humour is actually humour and how much of it just looks like satire to my 21st Century middle class Western-culture eyes. See also, Wrong Perspective, Interrogating from.)

---

Car left for regular maintenance. I had been hearing a knocking sound from the rear axle when driving slowly down a quiet street recently, so I asked them to have a look at that too. I hope whatever it is (my money's on bearings) will not be too expensive to fix (if it is bearings, it will be, so sigh). Waiting for a phone call. We'll see.

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Things you don't want to hear your dentist saying, v.3, p.57, line 45:

* [placing one of those cotton bullets in your mouth] "It's bleeding too much for me to take an impression, bite on this... we'll wait for the bleeding to come down." [disappears for fifteen minutes]

The good side is that I didn't feel any bleeding or taste blood, so maybe it was not bleeding that hard, just hard enough to make the impression-taking difficult? The bad side is, well, everything else. The four fillings last week had went rather smoothly; this one---big enough to necessitate a crown---not so much. Have a temporary crown and aches at divers points in my jaws right now. Hopefully within two weeks I'll have a permanent crown ready. In the meantime, trying to eat some soup so that I can take painkillers.

So it (ow) goes.

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And I now sit down to write, who usually writes here in the morning.

Why yes, ILLITERAL, how'd you guess?

(I have gleaned, from reading of others' experiences, that in some far-off places Fridays are considered "slow" days, or days when nothing much happens, or where you can just ease off nto the weekend. I seem to have my worst ILLITERAL days on Fridays of late, in contrast to that. Oh well.)

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Mockingbirds have beautiful voices. They are the ones that imitate car alarms and sing fifteen different songs one after another; there's one near my apartment building which occasionally perches at the top of a telephone pole and just singsingsing*bounce*singsingsings for a long time. They really have beautiful voices.

Ordinarily.

This morning as I was walking to the lab, I encountered one of those sights common to spring and summer around here, vis. a couple of mockingbirds dive-bombing and harassing a crow. (That happens so much and sometimes in so tree-less areas, such as the middle of large parking lots, that I suspect only some of them may be "drive it away from our nest" and the rest is "because we can.") The crow was, well, crowing, and the mockingbirds were screaming at it. And when they scream like that, their voices are harsh, even as gravelly as they can make it.

Up to this moment of writing, I was thinking of pointing out that the voice difference is interesting, but I just now realized that... mockingbirds imitate.

In this case, they seem to be imitating the crow.

Huh. Now it's even more interesting.

---

I downloaded the trial version of Fez this morning, or rather, left the XBox downloading it. I'll blame paradoxicmotion's reviews ElseNet if I disappear into it.

---

Thing I mostly failed at yesterday: Doing a semi-passable French braid. Thing I might have succeeded at this morning: Doing a semi-passable French braid.

So it goes.

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We couldn't watch Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy because the Blu-Ray disk wouldn't work. It would happily play all the previews, show the "loading menu" animation, and get stuck at a blank screen while the player claimed it was on the "Menu."

Thankfully, I had asked for the following movie night's movie together with this one, so we got to see The Hunt for Red October instead. Now I get that line of Joker's in ME3, or was it 2?

Anyway, good movie; it was pointed out how no one except for the Norwegian actor bothers to put on a Russian-sounding accent, but then what are you going to do? It's Sean Connery, and Sean Connery has no accent, Sean Connery needs no accent, and you can't tell Sean Connery to put on an accent because, well, Sean Connery. And it would have sounded hilariously wrong for anyone else to affect an accent around his glorious Connery-ness.

The evening was well-attended, and dglenn showed up afterwards to pick up Chastity and bring us new music he had written, which was cool, so thanks.

Now of to complain at Netflix.

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I sent out the e-mail yesterday but forgot to post the reminder here. Anyway, movie night tonight. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

ILLITERAL for both things-to-do and things-to-deal-with reasons.

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Dentist visit this morning; four fillings. Will go back for another next Monday, for a big filling that will require a crown. Eating soft things and mouth generally unhappy. Also, intermittent network connectivity issues at work not helping with the general mood of anything. Therefore, ILLITERAL.

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Well.

Reading Catching Fire now---just turned off my reader at "this is no place for a girl on fire" before I entered the lab---and my face feels permanently stuck in the O.O expression.

At this rate I'm going to finish the trilogy by Monday, and at this rate I'm going to be able to stop just staring and going "what." at random moments by next Friday only.

These aren't the greatest books I've ever read or anything, but good heavens, the intensity and immediacy are totally unequaled in my experience.

Also, now I want to see the movie again, having read the book.

( And one spoiler )

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In the past two days I very rapidly tore through Mark Reads Harry Potter: Sorcerer's Stone and ...Chamber of Secrets, and Mark Reads Twilight. I want to write more about those books (and recommend them, and link to them) later, but right now I don't have much time.

This morning I finally started reading The Hunger Games and, just like everyone said I would be, I got sucked in really fast. There's something about the immediacy of writing that I can easily see as the reason for these books being such a page-turner. Don't spoil me about the latter two books yet. I do know to expect to be depressed, but that's all I know.

Tomorrow night I'll be seeing the Yunus Emre Oratorio at Strathmore. There might still be tickets, if the locals would like to join. The tickets were cheap. I don't know if they'll perform the version in English, but there'll probably be some translations involved.

Work now.

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