Writer's Block asks: What is your most memorable power outage?

2003, Hurricane Claudette. ( cut for rambling )

Finished Pride and Prejudice and Zombies last night and Dead Until Dark this afternoon. P&P&Z was a fun read, especially since in the back of my mind, Darcy and Jane will always be Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle for me, and reading about them taking on the undead was enjoyable. And NINJAS. It would have only been better if there had been a way to somehow incorporate pirates and robots into the zombie/ninja mix. Much love for this book. The Sookie novel was okay, as in I didn't think it was bad. Maybe the next couple of books in this series will warm me up to the characters. I do like Sam, even though he's the typical "doesn't see what's in front of his face until someone takes it away" guy. Hopefully they'll hook him up with somebody later on. The book does make me want to see if S1 of True Blood is available on Netflix though.

Chapter 1.1

Just got World War Z, Dead Until Dark, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in the mail today. I know what I'll be doing in my spare time! And of course, I found and read the first pages of History is Dead: a Zombie Anthology on Amazon right AFTER I put in my order. Dammit. Oh well, I'll save that for next month.

Tomorrow is pay day! Whee! And have I mentioned that it rained recently?! People didn't know how to drive in it! We're still in Stage 2 drought, which is making everyone in town do a mandatory water rationing, but every little drop helps. Luckily, we've gotten some water in from upstate, so that's filling our wells back up to the halfway point.

And still, I saw a guy watering his green, green grass at two this afternoon. TWO. HEAT OF THE DAY, PEOPLE. *headdesk*

No more rain in the near future though, and another day in 100 degree + temps. Ugh.

Well, my first try at these legacy challenges was a dud, mostly because my game crashed and I lost everything, so technically, this is going to be my first go at a Generation 1 through 10 legacy. Not doing the Apocalypse Challenge, just the regular run through. Will more than likely move this on over to bossy_muses later on. Still trying to get the hang of screencapping and camera manuvering, so the first couple of images might not be wonderful.

So, let's get started, shall we?




( It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. )

*looks at subject title* Um, yeah. I kinda got carried away and now it looks like I'm going to have enough chicken stir-fry/General Tso chicken for dinner tonight, lunch tomorrow, and probably another dinner. Kinda screws up my New And Improved Organized Issa (tm) plans, seeing that I had worked up a menu and grocery shopped accordingly. Oh well. The pork chops will keep in the freezer and I can maked baked apples with the two granny smiths I had wanted to braise the chops with.

Anyway, chicken is good, which is surprising, because chicken and I don't quite get along very well.

( food! )

Will post a picture when my camera battery charges up.

FINALLY got around to taking pictures. Click on each of them for a larger view. I haven't gotten around to finding artwork or to bringing my paintings from home to hang up, so the walls are really bare at the moment.

( cut for pictures )

Spent the afternoon playing Tales of Vesperia. Right now I've got everyone at level 25 and I'm in Dahgrest. The Karol + Yuri stuff just kills me dead, especially since there's a hint of hero worship on Karol's part. And I'm probably reading too much into any of the Yuri/Estelle scenes, but I can't help going "awww" over the two of them.

Trying to do a drabble meme I found on my flist, but I'm stuck. All I can think of are angsty/blah stuff that I wound up deleting before I even finished.

If anyone's interested, here's the rules.

1. Pick a character, pairing, or fandom you like.
2. Turn your music player on and turn it on random/shuffle.
3. Write a drabblet/ficlet related to each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts, and stop when it's over. No lingering afterward! No matter how whacked out your drabble is. :)
4. Do ten of these, then post them.


I started to do Balther/Ashe, but kept on getting stuck on the first sentence of every song. Then I went Rikku/Gippal, and everything was all angstypants, even when the song was happy. Tried a Jet-centric go, and even got a bunch of Miles Davis tunes, but nothing. Writer's block or just out of practice? I don't know.

Spent a bunch of time on Youtube listening to this and this and watching this. The last one is definitely my favorite part in the entire book, mostly because when I was little and Mom and Dad read it to me, both of them did awesome Smaug voices. They were different, but I loved them both. I'm sure they both were sick and tired of me asking for that chapter at bedtime too. :)

Setting aside my replay of FFX because I finally got a 360. I spent yesterday balancing my checkbook/budget and while it's a splurge purchase, it's one that I can afford without my bank account screaming in pain. So no more fighting Dad for playing time at their house! Whee! There was a new guy at the Game Stop, so we had to go through the "You're a girl so obviously you don't know anything about games" spiel. Granted, it wasn't as bad as it could have been, but he did think I was buying the console for a little brother/boyfriend/random guy/etc. and I really wasn't in the mood to correct him.

But anyway. Now I have a 360. Are any games that you lovely people might recommend? I'm not much into 1st person shooters, but other than that, I'll give anything a go. And if anyone knows any RPGs for the system, I would love you forever. ♥

Restarted Tales of Vesperia, which is like playing it for the first time, seeing that I haven't had a chance to really get further than the very beginning yet. Power leveling everyone in the Shaikos Ruins and shipping Yuri/Estelle like woah.

Four day work week means that if I spend a little time every day after work cleaning one room in my apartment and then doing the laundry Thursday night, I can spend as much of the three day weekend as I can playing.

Things I need to do:

* pay rent & water
* clean kitchen
* clean bathroom
* put away laundry
* go grocery shopping (if not, we're going to be living off popcorn until supplies run out)
* vacuum
* dust (how does so much dust gather? It's not like I have a lot of furniture or anything!)
* talk to furniture store about status of bed frame
* pay Penny's bill
* mail off Netflix movies

Mom had foot surgery today. Nothing too serious, just repairing a broken toe and some other minor things. Still, she was in there for almost two and a half hours, then it was another hour after that in the recovery room before I could see her.

Waiting room people were good. Got a toddler running around looking at the fishies in the fish tank, a few kids getting into tickle fights while their mom tried to get them to be quiet, a teenager at my left watching movies on her portable DVD player without headphones (which was okay, because she had some good movies) and a mother/daughter duo at my right who were discussing Twilight and its fandom.

My favorite:

Mom: I don't know why these newfangled vampires have to be all sparkly and stuff. What was wrong with the old school vampires? You know, like that Keifer guy?

Daughter: Moooom, you're missing the point!

Mom: Look, sunlight does not equal sparkles. Sunlight equals death. The end.

Oh random Mom, I ♥ you.

Nod to subject line: I was kind of zoning in and out of my book and starting to nod off during Hour 2 (talk had gone past Twilight and onto some other stuff that was less entertaining) when all of a sudden I hear the beginning of this song coming from my left. Yay for 80's fantasy movies! And yay for Bowie drowning out the toddler across the room, who was looking like she was in need of a nap or lunch or maybe even both, because she got cranky. The Muse also wants to write a re-do and twist of the movie, with everyone being slightly older. I told him no, because we still have to edit two NaNos before November. He just shrugged and went back to doing the crossword someone had left out on the table nearby.

Anyway, Mom is at home and fine. I was going to spend the night over at her place tonight, but she shooed me out of the house. She doesn't like people fussing over her, even though she's the biggest mother hen type I know. I did make sure that they had dinner for tonight and plenty of things for breakfast and lunch, then I'm heading over there tomorrow night to make something for them and to check up on how her foot's doing.

Lemon merangue pie made for Father's day has come out horribly. The crust turned out okay, but the lemon filling is lumpy (and how it got lumpy is beyond me, because it was fine in the saucepan) and the merangue went from stiff peak to almost runny as soon as I stopped whisking them. I didn't do anything differently than what I usually do either. Maybe my kitchen is too humid? I dunno. Hopefully, it still tastes okay, because I know that Dad will more than likely try to eat it, even though it doesn't, just so he won't hurt my feelings.

I've been assigned to make mashed potatoes for dinner. Am deathly afraid that my kitchen!fail will continue.

[Edit] Kitchen!Fail has ended; mashed potatoes turned out good. Pie wound up just looking weird but tasted normal, which was also good. Still have no clue as to why the egg whites fell the way that they did.[/Edit]

1) I now have a home phone! Whee! It comes with a five cents a minute long distance plan, but I really don't see myself using long distance any time soon. Everyone that I usually call is in town, or still in local distance range. But yay, phone! No more shelling out $$ when Mom and I start going on and on when I'm on a pay-as-you-go type plan for my cell. Cell is still nationwide coverage, so if I need to use it to talk to the relatives out of state, I can use that instead of my landline.

2) Got a text from Al's air card saying please to be stopping with the downloading of custom content. I've almost burned through the allotted free 5GB of download space for the month. Oh well, it resets itself on the 22nd. Good thing it tells me how much I've used, because it charges you extra once you've gone over the limit.

3) Two co-workers and I are planning on going to RenFest! Granted, it's not until October (we're hoping to go on Halloween, which would be awesome) but it gives us time to look for/make costumes. I've gone once before, but it was for only a day and we got a late start, but we're thinking about camping overnight so we can shop one day and then take our time with the shows the next. Should be lots of fun. *starts looking for patterns*

4) I don't know what got into me, but I took out all my clothes in my closet and ironed them. Even the winter stuff. Lack of TV as motivation? I also thought that my landlady would have to let in the phone guy, so I went on a cleaning spree last night. I don't think it was that untidy to begin with, but I didn't want either her or the phone people to think I was a slob. The plus side is that I can just take clothes out of my closet and get dressed in the morning, no more killing time ironing things the night before!

I did find my camera, but I left it at my parent's house. Will be downloading over the weekend when I go visit.

I went into the pet store last week to get a new filter for the Think Tank at work since it was starting to get really grody-looking. I didn't see any filters on the shelf, so I went to ask the sales clerk if they had any in the back. Long story short, I got the worst customer service I've ever gotten. So I wrote a mean note to the corporate office. I don't usually do things like that, but poor service is a pet peeve of mine, especially since I'm expected to make customer service my number one priority when I'm on the clock.

( cut for blah blah fish blah )

And I think my muse is back from wherever muses go when they take vacations. I've been itching to edit last year's NaNo, so I went to open the file that I had saved on Al and realized that I had deleted it. Fortunately, I had also saved it on a jump drive. Unfortunately, I had only used it here and there and had cut/pasted all the text onto the file on Al, so it has great big gaps where about 90% of the story should have been.

I'm taking this as a sign that like much of my NaNo writings, was done while on a sugar high at three in the morning, and therefore a bunch of gibberish that made perfect sense to me at the time. And since about 90% of the story is now gone and I don't remember the plot at all, this gives me another opportunity to rewrwite everything.

And I kind of have an idea of what I want to do for this year's NaNo, but another idea the muse brought back with him from his hiatus is elbowing this year's idea to the back, even though this year's idea has been elbowed to the back already by NaNo '08 and isn't really all that pleased about the possibility of being put on the back burner. But this idea has Death in it! ( cut for rambling )

In other news, I've deleted all my games from my PS2's memory card, so I'm playing everything from scratch, starting with FFX, since it was my first ever game for this console. Just started last night, but I didn't get very far. Trying to level farm Tidus at the very beginning is time consuming, especially since I did much of it swimming around with Rikku, then later on with Wakka. Finally called it a night right before getting enough points to almost get to Haste on Tidus' grid and met Yuna. Will play more tonight, probably just to spam the ferry fight before Kilika so that everyone gets a bunch of points and then save Kilika's temple for tomorrow. After that will probably be X-2, then XII or VIII, and then both Personas. The goal is to actually finish Persona 4 instead of leaving it in limbo for months on end. Who needs cable for entertainment? Not me! (though I'm missing Food Network something awful right about now. No more Good Eats! Woe.)

Playing around with my tablet and Painter X's options. Finally figured out how to fix the pen sensitivity so that I'm not pushing down so hard on the stylus. Scribbling around with a self-portrait that kind of looks like me, but will need a lot of tweaking and such.

( cut for size )

Bed is still not here. Sleeping on the floor is getting old and painful. Hopefully it'll come in this weekend.

I should be putting up perishable groceries instead of paying my light bill online. Okay, so the light bill took only a minute to pay, but I should be putting up perishable groceries instead of reading my flist and two legacies at the same time. Oy.

Also, need to start thinking about making the lasagna I was planning on making before too long.

I now have all of my clothes (except the ones that I still need to wash) over here at my place. I decided to say the hell with waiting for my bed frame to come in and just move over here now. Wandered in at around 9:00 last night, puttered around for a bit, then wound up falling asleep on my sofa in the middle of Mr. Darcy's great big speech about how ardently he admires and loves Elizabeth. Woke up to a blue screen at 1:30 this morning and thought that it would be better to sleep on the air mattress I lugged over from home.

Note to self: curtains need to go up in the bedroom today. 7 AM is awful bright over here.

Didn't stop me from rolling over and falling back to sleep, where I had the weirdest dream that I was married to a pirate and our houseboat was coming under attack from people that mistook our land for a golf course. I spent the majority of my dream bailing out water from belowdeck after one of the guys onshore put a hole in the hull with a golf ball. And all of this was done with this song playing in the background. (linked to a youtube clip with Sims singing it, just because)

Speaking of Sims, Al is not strong enough to install Sims 3. Dammit. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to read other peoples S3 legacies on legacychallenge and simply_sims3 until I can upgrade or figure out where I can put a desktop in my apartment. I would have had to uninstall Sims 2 on Al anyway to make room, and I'd rather not lose all the custom content I have anyway.

I went to the apartment today to drop off some groceries and saw that I had a note in my door.

Apparently I am late on my rent, which I thought I had paid when I first signed in. *headdesk* I spent a good fifteen minutes going "WTH?" followed with a lot of "???" while putting up groceries, which isn't a good thing to do when one is dead tired. Hopefully the milk wound up in the fridge instead of the pantry, seeing as the two are close to the other. Then there was the mad "I had to pay a double deposit and then $330 extra when I signed in that should have covered my rent and..." then in the middle of a good start to an Issa Smash moment, the light bulb clicked. All of that went towards MAY's rent, not June's. *double headdesk*

So tomorrow morning I'm going to call and apologize for being late and then tell them that I'll be there during my lunch break to give them the check I owe. I'm not quite sure on their billing policies, because I didn't get a bill in my mail box, so I don't know how much I owe for water either, which is another thing that I'll have to ask her. And I've checked my mail for the past several weeks and I haven't gotten a thing from the electric company, which makes me worried that I'm going to be missing THEIR bill and if they turn the lights off, I'm going to flip out.

Also, the guest buttons at the gate do not work for my apartment, so any time that Mom comes over, she calls me and then I have to drive out the gates, circle around, drive up to the gate, swipe my card in the reader, and then let her through. Will be bringing that up with the manager tomorrow as well.

It's pretty much the same around here.

1. pack up boxes.
2. move boxes to apartment.
3. lather, rinse, repeat.

But! My furniture has come in! Yay! *does the Kermit dance* And I even got my mattress! The bed frame is still on order, but that's the only piece that I'm waiting on now. Moved in my books last night and I've got my comics boxed up. (five big ass boxes' worth! I didn't know I had that many!) Fought the urge to go "Hey, I didn't know I had this issue. *reads*"

Served my first meal in the new place. Granted, it was ham and cheese sandwiches and my guests were my parents, but still. First time to eat at the new table!

Feeling meh about the new legacy I started with my sims. Apocalypse legacy went dead early on and I decided that there were way too many restrictions (not to mention being completely devoid of zombies) so I deleted it and stared another one in another community. We now have the Bumm Legacy, because their house is on a beach lot and they're living up to their beach bum status. The founder would rather play in the sand than go to work and his wife would not be moved from her sunbathing (in the dark, no less!) even though it started to hail. The only thing that got her off her beach towel was the fact that she went into labor with Generation Two just then. I sense chaos in their future, especially since they now have triplets. (Pregnancy hack? I see no pregnancy hack. *whistles*) But other than that, they're kinda boring. I saved up enough money to buy them a pottery wheel, so they're going to open up a side shop selling Jasmine Dragon tea sets to people that pass by while our Founder follows up his lifetime want of becoming a professional party guest.

1. Had a killer migraine at work and managed to stay all day. Had some Excedrin in my purse, which helped a lot. I felt a lot better after 12:00, so I'm glad that I stayed. I don't know if anyone questioned why I had half the lights off or not or why the contrast on my computer monitor was so low, but I really didn't care. Damn bright lights.

2. Furniture store called and everything but my bed and mattress will be delivered Saturday! I haven't moved in-moved in yet because the only furniture I have at the moment is a rolling chair, my TV stand, and a floor lamp I put together. Might move in once the couch is there, but if not, then I can wait a bit until the first few weeks of next month (which in reality isn't as far away as that sounds) if I want to sleep on something besides the sofa. (which is also an awesome napping couch, but I'm betting that I'd still get a crick in my neck from 7+ hours of sleep every night)

3. Long weekend up ahead means I can move more boxes! Dad is off work so far, so I can ask him to help with the heavier stuff, like my bookcase and my comic shelf.

4. TIRED. Can't wait to get all of this done so I can finally relax in my new place without having to worry about packing/unpacking everything.

Am tired. Got a few hours' sleep last night (my own fault because I thought it would be brilliant to pack up as much as possible to make up the lost time that happened from 2-7 PM when a quick 30 minute nap turned into a long snooze instead) putting stuff in cardboard boxes. Woke up at 7 this morning, kept on packing (and how in the hell did I manage to keep so much stuff in a 10 x 12 bedroom without falling over everything in the first place? Gah!) and went to sign papers at 11:00. Got there, and the first thing new landlady wanted was a money order for half of the month's rent. I didn't know I was supposed to get that, so I ran to the bank for the money and then ran to HEB for the money order. Luckily, everything is within a ten minute drive from the apartments, so I was back soon to get everything else squared away.

Unloaded car trip #1, drove back to the house, loaded up car trip #2, drove to apartment, unloaded, made the mistake of sitting on the floor to unpack and organize my movies (note that one entire box was nothing but VHS tapes of the X-Files that I had recorded back when I was in middle school/high school where I had to pause to get through the commercials) and then promptly flopped on my back and couldn't get up for almost fifteen minutes.

Car trip #3 has been postponed until tomorrow, and it looks like it's going to be my bookcase and six or seven boxes of books that will more than likely go into my new bedroom. It feels weird not to have the TV in the room; there's this big naked spot where the stand used to be. It looks nice in the corner of my new living room though, but the TV looks too small for the space. Will hopefully look better once I start getting more furniture moved in. If not, then it'll just have to look teeny in comparison to everything else.

Drove back to the apartments when I realized that I had left both ceiling fans going, seeing that I was going to be back with car trip #3 and I wanted the place to be nice and cool when I came back. Noticed that not only the covered parking spaces are extremely well lit, but there is are several security lights around my unit and the front porch light automatically comes on after dark. Very cool.

And now that all my movies and games are at least twenty minutes away from me, I have a strange urge to either pick up on Persona 4 where I had left off last week (I think I'm in September) or watch my DVD of A&E's Pride and Prejudice.

To do before Friday:

* buy furniture (it is of the lovely)
* get misc. items to cook with (ie. pots, pans, etc.) (shiny new stuff!)
* rec' Mom's overstock of above items (OMG, I'm getting THE mixing bowls! *is insanely happy*)
* get an electric provider (Power will be on by Friday)
* turn in deposit Woe, for 1st time renters must pay double deposit fees. :(
* buy groceries
* buy cleaning supplies
* call furniture store to confirm delivery date

To do this weekend:

* Organize kitchen
* Organize bathroom
* box TV stand/movies/etc.
* measure windows for curtain rods

Had a minor freakout episode this morning while at work. I was minding my own business and doing my job when I got a sudden "what if the furniture I ordered doesn't fit?! What if I can't put everything into the apartment? Ack!" that came out of nowhere. Everything will fit and it's going to look great. Will be posting pictures once I get everything situated.

Apartment of Choice accepted my application. All I have to do now is get a money order for the deposit to them next week and I can move in on the 15th. Yay! Will be going to furniture shop tomorrow and I've already wrangled up some boxes to pack up my stuff here at home.

Unfortunately, this means that all new moviegoing is going to have to be put on hold until I get everything settled. This can be a good thing though, because that means that by this time two weeks or so from now, hopefully all the good seats (read: the ones in the middle where you can put your feet up on the metal railing and not have to worry about anybody's head being in your way in the row in front of you) in both Wolverine and Star Trek will be open again.

Speaking of the final frontier, ( is it considered a spoiler to talk about casting? )

Sooo...recap of week: has been made of win, even if the AC at work is not working right again. Will be bringing a fan on Monday.