I may have been a little too glib about the amount of burning I was experiencing due to my mishandled jalapeno peppers – I pretty much burned NON STOP until around 10am the next morning. I was in a significant amount of discomfort to the point of giving some serious thought to .. well, I don’t know what. It seemed a ridiculous thing to go to the ER for, and I hate being laughed out of emergency for my imagined ailments and Patient Zero symptoms. I spent a lot of time fantasizing about swimming pool sized vats of sour cream I could stick my arms in (which, as I later learned, wasn’t too far off from what I should have actually done), and eventually settled on an appropriate course of action: flopping around the house, moaning dramatically about the burning. THERE WAS SO MUCH BURNING! It just wouldn’t stop! In fact, if I stick my finger in my eye, it still burns. And when I chew on my fingernails, they’re burny. It’s been over 48 hours, and I now know what it would feel like if I lit myself on fire (hint: not good at all).

Even though I was burning from the inside out, we left the house just before midnight on Saturday night to collect Josh and go see some meteors. We drove up Cypress Mountain past my favourite lookout to a picnic area away from city lights, and set up a small camp for watching. At the time I felt very proud of myself for being smart enough to wear pants and thigh-high socks to thwart the mosquitos, but it turns out pants are completely fucking useless: mosquitos got me anyway (I am delicious), through my many layers of clothing. I didn’t discover the bites until much later (thankfully after I had finished burninating), but I am annoyed about them. I WORE PANTS! What more can I do to avoid bugs? See, this is why I never go outside. I rarely get bitten by anything inside my house, and I don’t have to wear anything let alone stupid pants.

I tried to take some pictures of the meteor shower, but I’ve reluctantly concluded that my camera sucks. I’m on my second entry-level DSLR (after my k200d died I bought the K-x), and I kind of wish I hadn’t taken the leap from bridge camera to grown up camera. I used my trusty Canon S5 IS for years, and I loved it – it took the most awesome pictures; some of my favourites ever. Hell, even the pictures I took with the k200 were pretty good .. but the K-x I just can’t get behind. It feels cheap, it’s a battery hog, and I don’t like the images it takes (which is much more my fault than the camera, but still). I’m tempted to find my Canon and bring that to London instead of my DSLR – between that camera and the iPhone, I should have enough picture-taking devices on hand. And in the meantime, I will research new bridge cameras but absolutely not buy one. See? I am being RESPONSIBLE!

Less than 6 weeks until LONDON!

how high? real high coz I’m just so fly

It was less “Michael Douglas on a rage bender” and more “Kimli can’t walk and read email at the same time”, but last night there was falling and there was down and now I walk with a limp. I turned my ankle, banged up my knee and dropped my phone (which thankfully came out unscathed), but that’s nothing compared to the invisible injury: I apparently scraped the hell out of my wrist and hands, but didn’t discover it until I was elbow deep in chopped jalapenos for a salsa party. My skin feels like it is on fire. I do not care for it.

Tomorrow there shall be much eating and a variety of television-related festivities at SPARTA. It should be good fun, and as the weekends roll on we inch ever closer to our trip to London (I can officially start packing in 12 days!). I am all kinds of excited about all things – work is great, there will be meteors tonight, and I’m about to go make muffins – things are good, and I find myself wanting to share the good with those around me.

good.

I’m sorry, but this made me laugh really, really hard.

Um, spoilers and stuff.

Courtesy of Comics Alliance and some hilarious people!

My iMac lives!

I dragged it to the Apple store on Tuesday night in the hopes that they would be able to fix the various things that had gone terribly, terribly wrong. I had been able to get into the machine earlier thanks to some advice on the internets, but the machine was still all kinds of broken. Still, I managed to get into Disk Utilities and determined that whatever had exploded was not caused by a dead or dying hard drive, which was a huge relief. I packed up my machine (hooray for hoarding original boxes), and was off.

My assigned Genius was as good as his title, and quickly determined that my problems were caused by a corrupt government operating system. Unwilling to give the thumbs up to a fresh installation there in the store, I opted to buy a 500GB USB drive so I could manually save my data, having long since disabled Time Machine (a mistake I won’t be making again). The Genius installed a good copy of Lion on the portable drive so I could boot off of it, and sent me on my merry way. Total cost of repair: $80 for the USB drive. Hooray! Love for Apple!

I’ve spent the last two nights setting things up again (wisely moving my machine into the living room so I can squat next to the router – the Lady Cave is wi-fi only which makes for slow downloads [108 hours and 24 minutes remaining on your Lion download lol]), and this morning I successfully transfered the entirety of my iTunes library back onto my iMac for an extremely easy sync of my iPhone. I was worried about losing all my music – I lost 20GB of music in last year’s tragic hard drive crash – but I was *terrified* of losing all my apps. Yes, I could just download them all again from my various Apple accounts, but at last count there were 1348 apps in my mobile directory. Even if only 504 of those are actually installed on my phone, that’s a lot of downloading that I didn’t want to have to do. And I don’t! I love successful data restoration!

Tonight I will install the remaining items I need for day-t0-day life, then move back into the Lady Cave. Once all my information is back on my hard drive, I will use the USB drive for daily Time Machine backups in case my OS explodes anew (which better not happen – I do NOT want to go back to Windows, damnit). The time, stress and $80 I spent on my machine was a small price to pay to have everything back in working order, and I am grateful for all the advice and support I got both online and at the store.

Happy endings: AWESOME.

Now, back to work. I have 10 days to get all the hilarity out of my system before I need to be Very Serious for my next project – no snark allowed, no matter how tempting.

In honour of World Cat Day (seriously, that’s a thing), I give you .. KITTENS!

photo by cindy hughes

This is Dapper Charles. HE IS A KITTEN! It’s Kitten Seasons, and there are too many kittens in shelters waiting for a home. Black cats are usually the last to be adopted, for reasons I do not understand – LOOK at this guy. He is gorgeous! Charles is playful and affectionate, and would do well in any kind of home – dogs, other cats, small humans, or even as an only cat (but no one should ever have only one cat). If you would like to celebrate World Cat Day in style, consider giving Charles a home. He’s currently being fostered via HomeFinders Animal Rescue Society, so please contact them to arrange your destiny of ADOPTING KITTENS RIGHT NOW.

photo by cindy hughes
charles is also delicious

If you were raised in the 18th century and are afraid of black cats and women wearing pants, perhaps Denny is more your style:

photo by cindy hughes

Denny is a shy boy who needs a little coaxing to come out of his shell. He’s soft and fluffy, and has had all his shots and his baby-making-parts removed – he’s ready to go to a good home that will love him madly. He’s playful once he feels comfortable, and would do well with other cats or on his own. Plus, SOFT AND FLUFFY. Denny needs someone to be his champion, because the shy kittens are often overlooked for the more outgoing ones – but he’s full of love and adorable kitten beans. Like Charles, Denny is being fostered via HomeFinders Animal Rescue Society – contact them to meet this gorgeous ball of fluff today.

photo by cindy hughes

ADOPT THESE KITTENS FOR WORLD CAT DAY!

CAPITAL LETTERS!

Leonidas, my 27-month-old iMac, is dead or at least very, very ill. Yesterday morning I was having some extreme performance issues (I swear this never happens, I just need a few seconds to rest, let’s cuddle instead), so I attempted to reboot as my years in technical support have taught me that seriously, rebooting fixes everything. Unfortunately, at that point it may have already been too late for my iMac – whatever was going wrong was going wrong hard, and while I could move my mouse around the screen, nothing else was responding. I wasn’t really panicked at this point; Leonidas has experienced an odd lockup or two before, so I simply leaned on the power button for a manual reset and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

My iMac will get to the screen with the Apple, but go no further. The spinning spoked wheel gear thing spins forever, and nothing else happens. I’ve tried unplugging all my peripherals, reseating the cables, resetting the PRAM, resetting the SMC, booting into safe mode (progress bar takes 45 minutes to complete; nothing happens), letting the machine cool down (it was very steamy in my Lady Cave), trying another outlet .. nothing. My Mac will not boot.

I’m out of things to try at this point. I do have the installation disc for Snow Leopard, but I’m running Lion (haven’t yet upgraded to Mountain Lion) and wasn’t sure if I could use that to attempt to boot from disc – at any rate, I don’t want to do that without first seeing if the hard drive is salvageable, because I don’t have a recent backup (I know, I know). I have an appointment this evening to drag my machine in to an Apple Store, but I don’t have Apple Care and the machine is long out of warranty. I can’t afford to replace it at the moment because I am all of the poor, and I’m trying hard not to freak out about the possibility of losing my main machine and everything on it.

I don’t have time for this. I prefer my crises to be of an easily-fixable, non-technical nature – and I really hate to say it, but if this happened on a Windows PC, I would totally know what to do. I don’t have any experience fixing the innards of malfunctioning Mac machines, so I need to get someone to make it better for me .. and I really kind of hate that.

I don’t have a choice, though.

Here’s hoping for a cheap and easy fix that leaves my machine and data intact :(

noooooooo

It’s been a very unproductive long weekend ’round these parts, mostly on account of the heat. Each year for about one week in the summer it gets kind of unbearable in Sparta; fucking with our sleep schedules and generally reducing us to piles of motionless lumps of flesh or fur. I try not to complain about it too much because a) it never lasts long and b) in the grand scheme of “summer heat”, we get off extremely easy. Still, I’m tired of sleeping. It’s too hot to put on clothes let alone go outside, so we’ve watched a lot of Olympics and also last night’s Mars Landing, which was amazing and arousing at the same time. GO SCIENCE!

We did spend most of Saturday outside at Renee’s place, celebrating her belated birthday. She’s the only one of us with occasional access to a backyard (complete with tramampoline), so we had a golly good birthday BBQ with badminton and beer and other things that start with the letter B. I made Miranda’s mango salsa, which is quickly becoming a crowd favourite and has usurped Vince Dip as the potluck dish of choice – it is delicious and summery and full of nothing but fresh local goodness. It’s fantastic with tortilla chips, even better on fresh spinach, and we are not above eating it right out of the bowl with a spoon. I may have to make some today, because it is too hot for actual cooking and also it is crazy delicious.

The upcoming week will be a short one due to today’s holiday, but it’s going to be busy nonetheless. I’m looking forward to being back in the office – I have a lot of work to do, including the start of a shiny new project and the wrap up of the first chapter of another. Plus, the office has AC. I will gladly work for AC.

i plan to be this happy about something someday. YAY SCIENCE!

I hope I never get to a point in my life where dressing professionally means applying less glitter instead of more.

don’t try this at home. or ever.

Oh, hi.

How’s it going?

I’ve been experimenting lately, with mind-bending drugs taking a bit of a break from the blog. It’s a lot less relaxing than I hoped it would be – instead of revelling in the “I don’t write unless I want to”-ness of it all, I find myself sodden with guilt and assorted panty juices. Not writing is hard. I want to write all the things, all the time. I want to share everything – and that’s sort of the other half of the problem: I’ve really got nothing to share. When I’m not sleeping, I’m working. When I’m not working, I’m naked and thinking about sleep. I’m not complaining (except for my vague Twitter complaints about micromanagement and my attempts to avoid strangling people who touch my work) – I really, really like my job. I love what I do, my co-workers are great, and stuff is fun. You know how I like fun – so yeah, this is crammed right up my alley hole.

There’s just not a lot going on beyond that, and the last thing I want to do is write post after post apologizing for the whole lot of nothing. Sure, stuff will be happening soon – I’m officially allowed to start packing for London in three weeks – but until then, I’m working and sleeping and being naked and thinking about dongs all the time.

Oh, here’s something new and completely fascinating: I worried I’m starting to lose my hearing. I’ve been poking around the internet and I think I’m going to go for a hearing test – things are always too loud or too quiet, and I absolutely can’t hear anything if there are conflicting noises layered on top. It’s beginning to freak me out – I kind of like hearing things – so I figger I should do something about it. Given my past history as a melodramatic hypochondriac, I’m pretty sure I have some form of incurable hearing cancer with a side of fatal ear pox. When I’m gone, think fondly of me and remember how I used to be able to hear once.

Okay, enough guilt updating. I have work to do – heading out to Langley again tomorrow – and then it will be long weekend times complete with BBQs, fireworks, and sunburned boobs.