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| 01:03am 14/07/2007 |
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Further continuation of Loki's misadventures.
He's cute when he's like this. He gets sleepy and will curl up in cute places for five minutes
every three hours.
For the other two hours and fifty-five minutes, he's more along these lines:
What you see here used to be an orderly stack of papers, but is now a goddamn mess, and I couldn't clean it up, because he wanted to play, and cleaning up is what you do when he doesn't want to play (see picture above).
Left to his own devices, he will drag everything smaller than him under the couch to add to his little nest. Any attempt to, say, retrieve my car keys from this nest will be met with claws, teeth, and large amounts of not fun. |
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| 11:05pm 06/07/2007 |
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Ok, this post is going to be walking a thin line. I'll try not to get too emo on it. If you don't like bad news, skip to the last bit, which is about kittens.
Between drinking far too much, doing too much, and running the AC on minimum to keep the bills down, I'm not doing well. Not to mention my friends thought I was having a heart attack the other day and almost dragged me to the emergency room. Great job if they did, since I'm currently uninsured except optical and catastrophic injury (which only counts if it's in my car).
Anyway, reasons for all this: My parents were both in and out of the hospital for the last two months. A lot. My mom passed away last month. My dad's in a nursing home now.
Then I get laid off at work. Yeah, I hate my boss, he's retarded, the place is, hands down, the most comically incompetent workplace in the western hemisphere. But it was also good money, which I now don't have.
Then my niece breaks her leg. She's a brat and a spoiled princess on the best of days, but this was just her ticket to sympathy gifts. She's perfectly able of walking with crutches - when no other option presented itself and I couldn't carry her ass downstairs, she made it with no trouble. When her parents aren't watching, she hops around the room playing with the cats and the dog. When her parents are watching, she whines and moans and screeches if you even think about brushing against her cast. It's a bit draining, and I've only been helping out four hours a day.
Monday this week, my niece's brother (from a different father, so no blood relation to me) found a kitten in a garbage can while he was out trash picking the night before trash day. Madison whined and cried until her mom agreed to find it a home, and then I somehow - I can only assume mind control was involved - agreed. I'm in the house alone, so some logical break in my head thought a kitten was the solution.
Took her to a humane society clinic - they didn't do much, but explained nutrition and other care, and sexed the kitten. Assured me she was female, which is good news - females don't spray and are much less likely to be aggressive as adults, so you can wait longer to get them fixed. Estimated she's between 4 and 6 weeks old, probably not old enough to be taken from her mother, and definitely not old enough to be put in the trash. She cried constantly for about two days, and barely ate. Damn she had some lungs on her, too - constant screeching like some sort of primal bird of prey.
So I named her Freya after some consideration. Today, I got suspicious myself. I don't know much about cats, but I know my way around a human female, and Freya wasn't looking very female. Took her to the clinic again, and sure enough, she's male - brining the suggestion that I have him fixed ASAP and declawed sooner than planned.
After this little switcheroo, Freya needed a new name. Wife of Odin and mother of a quarter of the Norse pantheon doesn't work for a male. There was only one obvious choice, though.
Loki. Trickster demon, thief, hermaphrodite, father of Hel, mother of Fenrir. Freya fit the bill pretty well, and since he'd only been called Freya for two days, it worked out just fine to start calling him Loki.
He earns the name, too. He also earns the name Stupid, which I briefly considered making official before Loki came to mind. He has a talent for finding things that shouldn't be here. He's produced two matchbox cars from god-knows-where, they must have been stuck under the radiator for nigh on fifteen years. He finds it greatly amusing to be well behaved and not walk on the keyboard when I'm working, but to lay across it and play with my mouse (causing god knows what kind of havoc as dozens of random clicks and key combos register at once) as soon as I look away.
Yesterday, he tried to jump into the room on the other side of the TV. THUNK! He also fell in his water dish. Freaked the hell out, ran under the couch, locked the claws on all four feet into the underside of the cushions, and absolutely refused to let go and come out for an hour. Maybe the TV run in will teach him not to worry about the other cat he keeps fighting with in of the brass kick plate on the kitchen door. My "favorite" event so far: I came home on the 4th to find kleenex EVERYWHERE. Every room of the house, on the floors, the furniture, up on shelves I know for a fact Loki's too small to climb to. "Her" name was still Freya then. "Freya... Where are you?" He pokes his head out of a kleenex box he'd torn the plastic off of and pried open from the end and looks around like he owns the place. |
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| 02:50pm 12/05/2007 |
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"Nice building here."
"Yeah, the neighbors are super nice and the landlord even lets us have small pets."
Now the door opens and four cats are sitting there. One of them has a good go at clawing my legs apart, but thankfully had been declawed.
"Oh, uh... yeah, I see you have cats."
"Yep! I have five!"
"I... I only see four."
"Oh, no no. My favorite's over here, isn't that right Alexander?"
See, cats I don't mind. Four cats is pushing it. The ashes of a fifth cat in an urn on the coffee table just about pegs it, but addressing this cat by name and professing to love it more than the four rolling underfoot... I have a high tolerance for crazy. That was it, right there. |
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| 02:11am 02/05/2007 |
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So... I bought a DS. Yes, I said I wouldn't. Yes, I know I will never get work done ever again. No, I don't actually do anything at work anyway - last week I inventoried copy paper and cleaned up a spill. Great use they make of IT personnel around here, eh?
Dropped a week's pay on it and some games. Since Zelda for the DS doesn't come out until October, I got Spectrobes and Pokemon to satisfy my notorious obsessive-compulsive collection behavior in games (When I mentioned I was using these games as Zelda substitutes, I was asked "What the hell kind of substitute has you putting rock cocaine in your coffee?" The good kind.), and New Super Mario Brothers because it's awesome like that.
Also grabbed Phoenix Wright: Justice for All from the bargain box. Funnest game I've played in a while, even though it's cheesier than a Laurel and Hardy movie. It does raise an important question: What the FUCK kind of prosecutor brings a whip to court? How the hell am I supposed to cross examine that shit? |
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| 01:49am 11/04/2007 |
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Not sure exactly what to make of this but...
I went through one of the ungodly huge piles of audiotapes my grandmother accumulated over the years. Unbelievable piles, phone conversations with relatives, Christmas mornings, birthday dinners, even one box that includes audio recordings of various episodes of MacGuiver and M*A*S*H before she got a VCR.
A bit was pretty interesting, though. Apparently, when I was a year old, my mother had an astrological reading done for me, and recorded the whole thing - three tapes, front and back. This is the first I've known of it. Pretty amusing stuff. Almost solid hilarity.
The first ten minutes is almost solidly talking about how I was going to grow to be a very religious and meditative person, deeply spiritual, shunning of creature comforts, never taking poisons into my body. In the lot, she was right in saying I would likely leave the Catholic faith, but she was very wrong in saying I would most likely become Buddhist or Hindu. Other than one half-hit, the rest of it was a lark. "Meditative" maybe - I'm pretty good at meditation, but it's mostly an exercise in ignoring people, and has involved little soul searching. Definitely not shunning of creature comfort, as I type this on a creature comfort connected to a global creature comfort, sitting on a nice leather creature comfort and watching reruns on another creature comfort. Oh, and that whole thing about poisons? I was taking poisons into my body while listening to the tape. Just about choked on my rum when that part came up.
It goes on and on, always very amusing. It gets into the woman troubles I'd have in my life. While I have woman troubles, they sure as hell aren't the ones in the tape. Purity of body came up again. Yeah, right. That only lasted as long as I was unable to get a date. I'd marry at a very young age, and my mother would hate her. I'm 24 now, which I don't think is "very young" anymore, and I'm certainly not getting married any time soon. The reader suggests that she not interfere. This is the exact OPPOSITE problem I've had - when my mother isn't asking me if I'm gay and assuring me she'd "take me to that school to get fixed" if I was, she's trying to hook me up with random women she meets in public whose names she doesn't know.
Further discussion of the mystery woman who never materialized gets into some weird shit about tribes that I barely understand, but she sums it up that I'd probably marry a black girl. While certainly not an impossibility, her reasoning doesn't jive, as she describes some sort of bizarre New Ageish stuff, and describes this girl as the sort of loony I lose patience for very quickly.
Getting into my talents, it talks about my artistic and athletic prowess. lol. With a capitol LOL. I'd never have a grasp for words or speaking, but I'd be fit and strong, and would have a powerful talent for art, sculpture, and possibly gardening. I've been called a lot of things, but I've never been accused of being fit nor strong.
Reality check: I'm virtually colorblind - the most interesting thing I ever said at an art gallery was, "Is that French?" The cactus I used to have on my desk dried out and died. I've successfully neglected the most hardy and unkillable plants into derelict soil and if my lawn weren't overrun with some freak strain of grass that can't be killed and never grows more than two inches long, I'd've killed the lawn long ago. The only thing that grows in my yard is Rose of Sharon. And if you've ever grown Rose of Sharon, you CAN'T KILL IT. EVER. If you can kill it, please come and kill mine. I planted one that I got from a cutting, and it's spread through the entire lawn, growing up through cracks in the pavement, in the middle of the lawn. There's even one sprouting in the muck in the gutters. Occasionally neighbors or family have said, "Oh, those are beautiful plants, do you think I could have one?" and I dig up forty or fifty saplings for them - in some parts of the yard, I can dig up five of them in one shovelful large enough to produce flowers within a year of transplanting. Lastly, and now this might sound slightly conceited - because it is just a bit - but I like to think my grasp of words is self evident.
The same part gets into my play activities as a (then future) child. Encouraged my mom not to buy "specific" toys like soldiers or cars. Instead she should give me blocks and other "imaginative" toys. Now, as evidenced by the fact that most of them are still in boxes in the basement or attic, my favorite toys generally involved cars, robots, robots that turned into cars, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Not blocks. Even now, overly abstracted video games fail to hold my attention (For example, try as I might, I can rarely keep attention focused on any card-based video game).
I also would never have an analytical or problem solving brain. I'd struggle at math (which after the hard sciences was always my best subject), have difficulty with even simple mechanical tasks (considering that this was made 23 years ago, I think my computer experience can be considered this), and when confronted with puzzles or questions would withdraw and wait for somebody else to figure it out. This last bit is one of my favorites, since while I get annoyed with puzzles, I'll usually break them before running away, and I never leave a question unanswered, even if I have to slap some Grade A Home Made Michigan Bullshit on it.
And this is only tape one.
Edit: Listened to about five minutes of tape 2, which was made three years later according to the date on it. Gets into past life stuff. Pretty crazy stuff here. The life described sounds the first chapter of Dune. I guess in a past life, I was Paul Atreides, and this guy named Scott from my day care that's mentioned several times I guess would have been Feyd-Rautha Rabban. I'd much rather be Duncan Idaho.
Edit^2: Yes, the bricks are still in my driveway. |
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| 02:14am 06/04/2007 |
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I found out who delivered the bricks. They won't come get them. They insist they were ordered for my address and that it was paid in full.
This shit is making less and less sense, and I have a feeling before I'm rid of the damn things, I'm going to be far more inconvenienced than having to park my car accross the street.
I'm thinking about building a wall. Just need something to build the wall around first. Maybe I'll build that, too. |
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| 08:44pm 04/04/2007 |
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There's a very large shipment of tan bricks in my driveway. I had to drive across my neighbor's grass to get out this morning.
Why did I buy a lot of bricks, you say? I didn't. I didn't order them, nobody is doing work on my house that requires them. They just drove up in a truck, lowered three stacks onto the driveway, and left. Didn't ask me to sign for them, didn't tell me who they were for, didn't even ring the doorbell. By the time I got my shoes on to go out and yell at them (and I'd come up with some real zingers while I fumbled with the laces), they were gone.
I spent a good chunk of the day after work going to every house in the neighborhood with similar brickwork to mine. None of them needed a ton of bricks, and none of them seemed to wanted to take them anyway.
So what am I going to do with all these bricks? |
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| 02:27am 30/03/2007 |
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I love Best Buy.
Cashier: "Would you like the extended warranty with that, sir?"
Me: "No."
Cashier: "Are you sure? It's only two dollars and covers all wear and tear."
Me: "Well... Hm... Actually, maybe. Does it cover fall damage?"
Cashier: "Fall damage?"
Me: "Yeah. Two stories, out the window. Right onto the pavement. Pow!"
Cashier: "No, sir, I don't think that's covered..."
Me: "No, no, I mean, the computer was what fell out. The microphone just sort of got pulled out by the cord."
Cashier: "No, no. I don't think that's covered either."
Me: "Oh. Well I guess it won't help me that much. Thanks anyway."
Cashier: "How about some magazine subscriptions? You get five dollars off for every one you decide to keep for a full year!"
Me: "Yeah, I'm sure you do."
I think the poor manager cries every time I walk in. |
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| 01:04am 19/03/2007 |
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God is trying to starve me to death.
First, I burn my dinner. This happens every time I get the idea to cook for myself, and sometimes is worse - at least there's no additional damage to other appliances.
Second, the pizza I break down and order... dipshit delivery boy drops it, cheese down, on the driveway. I told him to just forget it, and he gave me coupons for a free pizza. By this time, I was goddamn hungry, and didn't want to wait another half hour.
So I go to McDonald's. God thinks he got me here - they screwed up my order and I got somebody's... Something, I don't know what it was, but it didn't have meat on it, and had an inordinate amount of sauce that tasted a lot less "special" than what goes on Big Macs. I can't check the receipt, because I got my own receipt. But God underestimates how annoyed I was at this point. I don't know what it was, but I figure it can't be any less healthy than what I was ordering anyway, so I ate it.
Actually wasn't half bad. |
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| 09:53pm 13/03/2007 |
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Not long ago at all, I spend nearly my entire month's income on new video games I've never played before.
And what have I done with the intervening time? Played good old Freespace 2 until 4 AM every night after work.
On an alternate note, Windows XP seems to have gotten rid of a good deal of the old win16 legacy shortcut keys. There are things I just can't seem to do from the keyboard, at all. Usually, this doesn't matter. However, let's just say mouse wheels are a royal bitch to put back together after you take them apart to clean under them. They do make a nice satisfying crack when you swing them by the cord against a wall and then step on them, however. |
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| 03:46pm 06/03/2007 |
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NWN2 is giving me Baldur's Gate flashbacks. It's even MORE like running the pickup group from hell through Blackrock Spire.
So far, I've found a dwarf fighter who wants to be a monk. Talking to him about it, he sounds exactly like those WOW players who want to be warlocks. He has absolutely no concept of what a monk does or how, but he lost a brawl with one once and thinks they're the most unbeatable fighters ever. Then there's the rogue who, for some ungodly reason, specializes in two handed weapons. Note: Sneak attack doesn't work with a damn claymore.
And, true to 90% of "I'm shadow, so I can't heal" priests I ran into in my WoW career, the only cleric I've found so far is evil, so she hardly has any healing spells, and judging from her stats, I think she meant to roll a bard. Clerics shouldn't look like this: STR 11, DEX 11, CON 12, INT 14, WIS 13, CHA 21. Twenty one. Charisma. That's supposed to be a dump stat.
At least the game does seem to be more in line with the BG style than the first Neverwinter Nights. And they put a bit more love into the dialog - get waylaid by bandits, and you get about a dozen different options - beat them up, scare them away, pay them and run, but my favorite: "[Bluff] Does the patrol chasing us have to pay the toll too?" and (if you succeed) the bandits pack up and run, leaving all the toll money they collected behind. |
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| 06:53pm 05/03/2007 |
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Yet again proving my fiscal responsibility, I spent far too much money on video games today.
Of notable purchase is Neverwinter Nights 2, which I've been considering for a while now, and Jade Empire Special Edition. Why I got that, I don't really know - I have the Xbox version already. I guess when you're already balancing game boxes on your elbow while you flip through the racks, your resistance to further purchases approaches zero. |
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| 06:28pm 12/02/2007 |
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I'm a pretty nice guy I think. I fixed a computer the other day. It was quite a mess with spyware, and had a very nasty browser hack that redirected every search engine through a porn site. In the process of fixing the hijack, I discovered their son's very impressive collection of lesbian porn. Kid's not bad at hiding it, too - system32's a great place to hide it from computer illiterate parents, but the tech guy will find it every time.
I fixed it up, set up the basic security, showed the family how to use it, and told them to use Firefox instead of IE. I told the kid, while his parents were out of earshot, to use firefox when he looked at porn and to clear his browser history afterwards.
I was back out there two more times last night and this afternoon - same browser hijack again. They were starting to think I didn't actually fix the problem. So, I ask the kid if he used Firefox, and he says, "No, it didn't have yahoo on it."
So, I showed the kid how the goddamn address bar works (The idiot's 16 years old, he should know for himself) and how to change the start page, even showed him how to set up plugins. Then I showed his mom his little collection.
He won't be breaking that computer again for a long time. |
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| 12:31am 16/01/2007 |
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So, everybody who knows me knows my opinion of people who wait in line for hours for new releases. I got every game I ever really cared about just fine by calling around the afternoon of launch day or waiting until the next Tuesday for the next shipment.
Well... In my defense, I DID only wait 27 minutes. |
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| 03:38pm 09/01/2007 |
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So, when the new parts I put in my computer started also failing, I started to think something else was wrong with it.
Sure enough, power supply got damaged on top of everything else. So anything plugged into it was playing Russian Roulette waiting for the day it would get fried.
It's a Dell, too. Meaning nowhere in the civilized world can I purchase a matching off-shape non-standard power supply except direct order from Dell themselves. For $350.
Yeah, screw that. New computer. I'll scavenge what I want to keep from the corpse of the old one sometime later. The only thing that annoys me is that I now have to go through another fresh install of World of Warcraft and sit through a four hour update cycle. Meaning I'll miss Ahn'qiraj tonight, and with it my last chance to get Doomcaller's Footwraps. |
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| 01:12am 01/01/2007 |
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I hate getting gifts. Always an annoying process and nobody outside the corporate world is ever satisfied by the results.
This year, I bought people food. Food is always good around the holidays, right? Well, two of them went particularly poorly. For example, it's MY fault the hickory smoked salmon I bought my parents spoiled. I mean, it wasn't because they left it sit on the counter for a week, no, it was MY fault.
Bought another relative a ham. Nice big one. They're hard on cash lately, and he'd said they wouldn't be having a Christmas ham this year. Anyway...
"Where'd you get this?"
"Kroger." (Huge kroger sticker on the damn thing)
"What kind of ham is it?"
"Uh... it's ham."
"I mean, what kind?"
"Spiral cut? Honey glazed? It's a ham."
"Is it cut? We don't have a slicer."
"Spiral cut I think. You can borrow our slicer either way."
"Where'd it come from though?"
"From a PIG'S ASS, you dumb son of a bitch." |
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| OMG! Computer asplode? |
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| 03:14pm 21/12/2006 |
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Woke up this morning to a funny smell. One that I'm pretty familiar with, sadly: The magic smoke came out of the computer at some point, and I needed to start fixing crap.
So, over the course of the morning: New hard drive, new video card, new NIC, and new sound card (The old sound card didn't break, I just wanted a new one). I'm now in the process of reinstalling important stuff like firewalls and antivirus, and am soon to face the unenviable task of hacking back into all my accounts because I've broken the third law of nerdism and become dependent on the "Remember my Password" button. |
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| 06:34pm 18/12/2006 |
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It was 65 degrees today. Week before Christmas. Middle of winter. Average temperiture here in Michigan about now is roughly 5.
I don't much like snow anyway, so I'm not complaining about the warm weather. People almost know how to drive when the roads aren't frozen.
On the other hand, I'm going to have to dig the lawnmower out of the back of the goddamn shed, put oil and gas in it after going through the mess of winterizing it so it will start come spring time (unlike last year, when it needed a new engine and the mechanic yelled at me for not winterizing it properly), and cut the lawn in the MIDDLE OF DECEMBER. |
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| 04:29pm 03/12/2006 |
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Everybody said Daniel Craig would make a lousy James Bond. Then he made a pretty good James Bond.
And now he's not a good James Bond anymore. Why? Because he wants the next 007 movie to give Bond a gay lover in place of the standard stereotype big-boobed-ditz-with-a-gun Bond Girl.
Now... I don't mean to sound homophobic here, but James Bond isn't gay. Over twenty movies, I think his heterosexuality has been expounded quite effectively. I mean, the guy's been with enough women to shag the gay out of Richard Simmons. He's earned a degree of plausible deniability on the gaydar, regardless of how he holds a pistol. |
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| 07:32pm 26/11/2006 |
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I must admit I wasn't being entirely truthful to Thomin. He'd really like to join the guild in Naxxramas and I didn't want to scare him off the idea.
Edit: Why is it that when I post images, LJ decides to ignore the resize scaling I put in and instead expand it to full format-breaking width? |
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viejoloco's journal
