Gonzai Gallery

So let's see...

1. Going nowhere, literally. The occasional walk and that's it. Falling off the eating wagon as well, but so far no weight change.

2. Maintenance mode. Nothing new in the cleaning but nothing already done is backsliding.

3. Keeping up with TV OK, and proceeding steadily with the movies. Finished A Storm of Swords and Under the Dome, and just started on back issues of the Atlantic. Getting better with the music, listening a couple hours a week to various music samplers. Also, Freebo is a good musical artist if you are a dog person, and the Lone Bellow are awesome.

4. Financially spending too much, but that happens with multiple birthdays, holidays, conventions and car insurance in the space of six weeks. The car's tuneup and new glasses will have to wait for a while, but I should be able to cover this.

5. Look at that. Still at the same job. Which is not to say I don't have a dozen job postings saved and some really strong leads for vet work if shit happens. The boss hasn't been too bad this month, although the supervisor isn't around much (gone again this week on short notice) and the junior attorneys are being a pain. Hanging on, anyway.

My goal was to finish 'A Storm Of Swords' by the premiere of GoT. Whoops. Six days late. But I got out ahead of the tv show at least. For 24 hours. Since they decided to throw in some stuff from book 4 or 5 (the Theon stuff). But I was familiar with that storyline, at least, and I knew the rest of it. On to 'Under The Dome' now, try to finish that before it hits TV.

I didn't really( make resolutions this year, ) ore like self guidelines. And it would probably work better if I checked in on them monthly instead of waiting for December. That said...

1. The gym. I haven't been there. Not once. I have walked at every opportunity, but that's it. Renewing this plan, because I have absolutely got to.

2. Cleaning. Kinda haven't done much of that, either. Did clean up a section of my bedroom, and this weekend the computer room is getting cleaned, period. Guests for Superbowl and Mom's bridge upcoming, it's got to be cleaned.

3. Media. Kept up with the TV, but didn't make much headway on the backlog. Kept up with the movies and saw A Clockwork Orange, Raging Bull, M, Midnight Cowboy, Forrest Gump, plus downloaded the films that are public domain. TCM will get me a long way on the plan in February, or would if I wasn't going to be home most weekends in February. The goal for music was one recording per work day, did more like half that. Note to self, maybe a variety of artists instead of a dozen by one artists would help on that. Books - DIdn't expect to get through more than one a month, considering I'm on the A Song of Ice & Fire series. Almost finished A Clash of Kings, a week early. So, acceptable but could be better.

4. Wow. Things are looking up. 1.5 car payments left now. When Mom & I were at the bank last week, the banker kept pestering me to get a credit card, which she assured was fee-free. I finally said yes, and she gave me a card - with a $10K limit. !!! The one I have is, uh, a lot less than that. Then she sent me a copy of my credit score, which I haven't seen in years. It's...about 200 points higher than I expected. Add the new card and the paid off card and yikes, I'll have a credit score to brag about. Never thought that would happen. Meanwhile, I've already done my taxes, and I'm getting a fair amount back. I thought I'd owe the State, but I'm getting some back there, too. In the mail tomorrow. So optimistic in this area.

5. So far, the year has not been particularly good or bad. My health sucks, but Mom's health seems to have levelled off. The money situation is better, but work is dicey still, with very little for me to do and money problems there. Not great, but not disastrous.

Back at the end of February...

Well...

My supervisor spent much of last night and today trying to e-mail her husband's documents to herself, without success. I suggested plugging the Kindle into a computer through the USB port and transferring them that way; she said she didn't have the right cord for that. Meanwhile, she couldn't get a Wi-fi signal at the office or at the restaurant across the street. She finally gave up and told me to give it a shot (I'd been offering to do that all week). She thought it needed to be deregistered and reregistered to her, so that's what I did first. And all of her hubby's docs disappeared. Yikes! So I called Amazon help. They like me. I had both CSRs cracking up. Anyway, they suggested deregistering her and restarting the gadget. Worked like a charm; his docs were back. Then came the fun part of trying to transfer them. The CSR thought she could find them in the cloud, but they were never Amazon docs, they were proprietary to the seminar he went to. I suggested buying a cord and transferring them to my computer; they said the docs wouldn't work on the computer because they were in Kindle format, but that there was a USB cord built into the power cord. I had no idea. Nifty! So I plugged it into the computer directly and...turns out the documents were all .pdfs. Moved all of them onto a thumb drive to give to supervisor tomorrow. Meanwhile, I loaded up the newly me registered Kindle with classic authors for Mom (who will be the primary user) and sent her off to read Mark Twain. The case and light should be here next week. Phew.

We have Kindle!

I finally finished reading the book, ten months after I bought it and 3 months after I started reading it. (I had to get a move on, the Horde is collectively reading a Civil War historical tome and I didn't want to start thinking dragons fought for the North and the South was full of wights.) A few thoughts, without spoilers:

1) Damn, but the TV show hews closely to the book. I'm not sure I've ever encountered film that faithful to its book.

2) Every once in a while, a visual piece is superior to its written source. This is one of them. Even with the addition of naked women, the TV show is an improvement on the book, and I think it's the POV. The show is omniscient; we see everything and without bias. The books are limited by the POV, not everything is seen or heard and it's all very biased.

3) That said, the books are helpful for the details and the history. You can exposition-dump history in a book, but not on TV.

Time to read about Reconstruction (yippee) and then maybe on to Clash of Kings. Hopefully will have a Kindle by then. It would help.

I almost didn't watch this, because I absolutely can't bring myself to care about Hemingway. The only writing of his I ever finished was 'The Old Man & The Sea', almost certainly because it's so short. I didn't get far with anything else. But I watched it anyway since it's Emmy-bait, and I'm glad I did. Because Gellhorn, whom I can't recall having heard of before, was a much more interesting person!

Aka neadods bait:

( Virginia County Removes Sherlock Holmes )

Went Christmas shopping with Mom, which is a bit troubling - she couldn't remember what she was getting for whom or where, even with a list and my prodding, and she made me shop at Kohl's (long story but I refuse to shop there) - but I got some clothes, a plant for the office and Season One of Dollhouse out of it. Oh, and I get to inflict some Newbery winning books on my nephews for Christmas. I read ALL of the Newbery books through 1982 or so and I'm more than happy to pick some for the boys. (A Wrinkle in Time, Across Five Aprils, and Johnny Tremain, to be specific.)

Then home to watch Maryland spoil NC State's championship bid, and watch Despicable Me. I love the minions. Seriously.

Today was Mom's hip replacement surgery, and I had to have her at the hospital by 5:30am. Which meant, amongst myself, the dogs and her, I had to get up before 4am to get everything done. Fortunately I did get it done, we walked into the hospital at exactly 5:30, and after a lot of slow test/paperwork/procedure finally sent her off to OR at 7:15. I settled in for a wait. The good news is the waiting room had free wi-fi. Bad news - a lot of websites were blocked from it, including LJ and all of my e-mail accounts. I was able to catch up on news but that was it. I tried gaming - that worked OK at first, then it started blocking gaming sites 10 minutes on, 10 minutes off. I gave up and switched over to reading Doctor Who: The Quality of Leadership, which includes stories by terri_osborne , neadods , tiggerallyn , puppetmaker40 and kradical , among others. I have had this book since February of 2009 and I finished it today. Yes, I am most embarrassed. And for better or worse, it's the only work of fiction I've read in the last 18 months. Yikes.

Mom came through the surgery fine (the anesthesiologist told me she only used half the allotted morphine; I asked if I could have the rest. Yeah, I went there :) ) She'll be in the hospital until at least Sunday. I wandered off and got lunch while I waited for her to be moved to a room, then went up there to wait for her to wake up. She was reasonably awake when I left. I tried to get home before the rain started but failed miserably - anyone want some wet, muddy dogs? 

And oh yeah, just if anyone was wondering - Mom is not in THAT hospital. She's at GBMC, where just about everyone was quite glued to the television over the Hopkins situation, which needless to say was a bad case of a seriously messed up person being allowed to have a gun. I imagine there'll be metal detectors at hospitals next week. Terrific. Off to my PT now.

from neadods :

• Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."
• I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity
• Update your journal with the answers to the questions
• Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions (I'll also answer more, if asked)

1) Desert Island, one book or author. It is...? - Harper Lee, 'To Kill A Mockingbird'. It's perfect.

2) Book you most wish you'd written. - See #1.

3) Book you most wish you'd written because unlike the idiot who did, you'd get it right. - Huh. While I can think of a lot of books that ran off the rails at some point, I can't think of any where the idea was THAT good that I could improve on it.

4) The favorite of your fandoms.  - Changes on a daily (sometimes minute to minute) basis. In terms of durability, probably The Lord of the Rings. I was into that at age 7 and still am, although there was a 20+ year gap involved. Making me run around and squee this week? Dexter. And so many in between...

5) What got you into making plaques? - I like wood burning, but there's only so much of it you can do for yourself. So I started making them for other people, and it took off from there. Gotta finish a bunch of critter plaques tonight.