House update stuff... sort of. It's not so much good news as potentially good news -- but on the top end, it's great news.

There's a government program to help homeowners keep their utility bills down by providing free home weatherization services. At the beginning of October, one of Obama's help-the-people programs gave the program in my state $56 million dollars. (Presumably all states have some version of this program, but I don't know for certain.) The local paper ran an article on the stimulus package the program had received, and described their services. The article said that in addition to doing things like spraying in insulation and putting plastic sheeting over the windows, the program also tests the AC & furnace to make sure the units are operating within efficient parameters... and replaces them if they aren't. Sounds too good to be true, right?

I called and was told that my income is low enough to qualify me for their services. (Here's to being broke!) So I submitted an application and received notice that I had been approved. Last week I took them paycheck stubs to prove my brokeness, and chatted with the retired contractor who volunteers with the program.

He said that the program was swamped with applications since the stimulus grant had been announced, and it would be after the beginning of the year before anyone could come and look at the house. It will be him or the other volunteer contractor who comes by, and they will make a list of all the work that needs to be done... and then they'll send one of their contractors out to do it. Free.

It's not a done 'til it's done, and I don't want to celebrate prematurely. But he and I chatted about the age of my units and the state of the house, and his opinion was that they'd probably do the following: repair a bunch of damaged duct-work, re-blow insulation, replace the furnace, replace the AC, replace the water heater, and either replace or repair the windows in the back of my house that have broken glass. For Free.

Obviously, this is huge. HUGE. With all that work done, it's highly likely that the value of the house will be high enough to cover the mortgage and tax liens. It really is possible that I'll be able to list the place in the Spring. I won't know for certain what they'll do until the contractor comes by after the beginning of the year and makes a list. Here's hoping!

My winter project list continues to be on track -- I got the insides of my kitchen drawers and cabinet doors painted this weekend, and the downstairs hallway. Next weekend I start painting the outsides of the cabinets, which requires removing all the hardware and laying the doors somewhere to dry where the cats won't jump on them. Not planning on doing all of them at once, but I'd like to have them all done before the end of the month.

I also watched Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace this weekend. As much as I love Pierce Brosnan (and wow, do I), I think Casino Royale is by far the best of the Bond films. I'd heard Quantum of Solace (Worst. Title. Ever.) was a sequel, so I rented them both to re-watch CR so I'd be up to speed, and I'm glad I did. It's not so much a sequel as a direct continuation; doesn't even pretend to be it's own movie. (You all probably knew that already, but it surprised me.)

Anyway, Casino Royale was so good I'm not sure anything could have beat it. Quantum of Solace (seriously, what does that even mean?) was a good action movie, but CR just raised the bar in a way that QoS didn't.

I <3 Dame Judi Dench; she rocks as M. I so would not want to piss that woman off... she's 5 foot 3 inches of intimidating.

So there -- now I'm caught up with the movies of 2008. (Relevance is over-rated.)

In other bits of randomness, has anyone else thought that those cartoon-version-of-yourself-avatars make the person they're portraying look like a sexualized 12 year old? I find them highly creepy.

It's an imaginative title, is it not? Yes, in case you're wondering, it IS difficult to be this creative.

We're about six eps into the fall season, and the shows I'm enjoying the most aren't the ones I thought they'd be when the season started. Some sure bets fell down the list, and a couple of new additions have proven to be more consistently entertaining than I would have guessed.

( The good, the rest... )

1. Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day, is opening next week to a theater... nowhere near me. It's being released only on the east coast and in California. Needless to say, I'm very disappointed. Article here.

2. Fans of Nathan Fillion, Castle, Firefly and kilts should check out Fillion's appearance on Craig Ferguson's Late, Late show. Fillion seems like such a great guy; the kind of guy you'd like to drink beer with, y'know?

3. Tom tells me that Fox is going to air all 13 episodes of Dollhouse that have been shot. However, the direct extension of this statement is that they won't be ordering any more. I'm having a difficult time being upset by that. I really enjoyed the first episode of this season, but like a couple of my friends have mentioned recently, I'm hitting Echo-overload. Last season had its flaws, but they did a better job of mixing it up. I'm also getting a bit tired of seeing Echo hit in the head and glitching as a plot -- what happened to the other dolls, to the Alpha story line, or to the humor? Anyway, I thought the show had amazing promise, but I don't feel like it's lived up to my hopes.

4. Speaking of hopes, I'm still excited about the premiere of V on Nov. 3rd. I think the ads have been cheerfully creepy.

5. Lastly, I haven't seen it yet, but multiple people tell me Paranormal Activity is the scariest movie they've seen in years, or ever. So if you're a fan of creepy horror, check it out.

So... hi, everyone who's still checking. I do this thing where I go introvert for a while, but this absence was particularly long. It was a combination of things, the biggest contributor being the house situation -- after more than six months of hard physical labor, I hit the end of the selling season and it still wasn't ready for the market. Moreover, my last analysis of like-sales in the area showed that I was unlikely to sell it for enough cover the mortgage and liens. Bummer, to say the least.

I got that news about a month ago, and since then I've been trying to get back to a sustainable living style. Over the course of July, August & September, I set aside all my hobbies and recreations in lieu of working on the house, and by the end of September, I was exhausted and very grumpy. Since then I've unpacked my fall & winter clothes and made peace with the idea of being in the house over the winter. All the work I've done needed to be done and will still be done next Spring, so it's not like I wasted my time. I'm going to spend the winter sprucing up the inside of the place, but on a much more relaxed schedule. I think I might paint the kitchen this weekend, and I'm actually looking forward to doing it.

That's enough for now, I think. I'm planning on getting back into the habit of posting once or twice a week. Next time I'll pick a lighter topic. :)

All right, so we've got two episodes of Supernatural down of the possibly/probably last season, and I have some thoughts. Those thoughts are mixed, to say the least.

( Let's do the good first, then the bitching. Spoiler warnings, btw. )

And I can't quit screaming about it! Seriously, it's all caps and exclamation points and Monique's bad Irish accent from now 'til Halloween!

Go see the trailer! The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day.

( For more squee'ing, and an explanation, if you need it... )

Gmail was down for about an hour yesterday, and I got three phone calls from students telling me they couldn't turn in homework because of it, and could I pass that message on to their professors? Sure, sweetie, you wanna not learn the stuff you paid lotsa money to learn? I'll pass that right on.

But the good news is that the campus email is finally working. They had to pitch the old server and re-build a new one from scratch, and every update pointed out that millions of messages were involved, lest we think that was an easy job. Most of those messages seem to be in my personal Inbox, so I'm going to go work on that now...

The campus email server is still down (that would be 14 days and counting) so the campus faculty and staff have created gmail accounts and we're doing as much of our work as we can that way. Students are emailing papers via gmail, agendas to meetings are being sent via gmail, messages are being...

Scratch all those present tense verbs -- the Gmail server is down. Which, btw, means that if you've emailed me this afternoon I haven't seen it. Sigh.

Mercury will be in retrograde most of this month, so I guess we'd better get used to it.

The Fall semester is in full swing at our little college in Kansas, and it's been a hoot. For the last two months , there's been no one here at all some days, and nothing to do most days. When I was working in the bookstore, it was a round-the-year job, but inside the departments, we're definitely on the academic year.

One day it was like the "Open" sign flipped. Suddenly there were people everywhere, and they all wanted the same things at the same time. And people keep saying things like "you must have been so bored!" or "Bet you're glad to see us again!" or "Isn't it nice to have people to talk to again?" I, of course, can't say, "Actually, I'm an introvert and an only child (sort of), so: No. I was fine. Who are you again?"

But the real fun has been the software crash that has rendered the campus email inoperable. The day before classes started, the ISS dept. did a major re-launch of the portal system that drives our campus. There were a thousand little glitches, but the email part of the architecture suffered a fatal collapse and has been down since Aug 18. Ten days is an eternity in tech-time, and the entire campus has been crippled by it. There was even an article in the local paper about how badly it all sucks.

The administration has spent years building up enrollment in the online classes, and for the last two weeks students have been dropping their online classes like hot potatoes. We've all tried so hard to train the students to use their campus email accounts so that campus announcements and class-wide emails will get to their target audience, and now everyone's back to gmail/yahoo/hotmail accounts. They've had to extend deadlines for adding/dropping classes because that also involves email. I can't submit tickets for repairs or facilities services, because that's all done via the email portal. I can't check the campus calendar for meetings. I can't disseminate meeting agendas. I can't get to any of the important information that I have stored in my email folders, like my various PINs. I have had to actually talk to people on the phone to relay information. Like, how 1980's!

It seems like every conversation I've heard for the last two weeks has started with, "I was going to _______, but without email..." I feel a little sorry for the ISS department. I don't know that any of us will get raises this year, but odds are worse for them, I think. They've been under fire for most of the last year for various reasons, and one can almost hear the sound of straws breaking camels' backs all over campus. Whether or not it's anyone's fault is almost a moot point at this stage -- someone made the decision to hire that vendor...

Television Without Pity has posted their reviews of the fall line-up, and since I haven't talked TV for a while, I thought I'd use the excuse. It's a good bet that the TWoP review lists will be linked on the main page for a while, but just in case, here are links to the individual lists so you can go make your own decisions. Best New Shows Worst New Shows Best and Worst Returning Shows Remakes and Retreads My own favorites, bitches, and my intended watch list are ( after the cut. )

It was pretty cool all the way around. I am now 42, which means... I'm not sure, but Douglas Adams says it's a magic number, and I'm sure this is the year major amounts of my bullshit gets resolved, so that's worth celebrating.

But mostly let's celebrate the fact that my house is 95% painted, shall we? Months and months of prep -- scraping and priming and repairing every spare minute of my time, and finally the bulk of the work was done. Dad & his wife came up and busted their asses for days. There were extension ladders rented and paint sprayers used and paint spilled and many trips made to the hardware store allllll the way across town, but we just about knocked it out.

The cherry on top was getting to see a couple of friends from KC that I've hardly spent time with at all for the last couple of years while I've been occupied with my nonsense. They not only showed up and worked their butts off during a heat warning, they also brought me a window unit AC so I could sleep at night after doing all that work. Unbelievable. Thanks, M & JH!

I have to do small amounts of touching up, some trim-work on the second story, and the porch needs to be finished, but I'm definitely on the last lap of one of the major pre-house-selling projects. I have two rooms left to clean out and pack, the garage to clean out, and there's still a bunch of clean-up work to do in the yard. But for my birthday I made a huge leap forward in the Great House Selling Project of 2009.

I'll post pics sometime this week. Place looks spiffy.

Guess it's been a while since I posted, huh? All the things I could have mentioned in the past couple of weeks -- Harry Potter movie, work on the house, my home computer being the target of a malicious hacker... ( and this is what brings me out of my shell? )

I received a letter from my attorney saying that the bankruptcy Trustee has made the decision that they will NOT be seizing any of the tools, inventory, supplies or materials in my jewelry studio. It's all mine, to do with as I will. I don't have to worry about keeping track of anything I sell, I don't have to make decisions about what to keep based on whether I'm going to lose a key piece later.

At this point, I believe all the actions of the court that concern or affect me have now been completed. I think the next step, which could be any day or not for another year, is for the court Trustee to declare the case closed. But I am now officially past the point where someone is going to come into my home and take my stuff away.

I can't even say how happy this makes me. I am so very close to being done with all this shit. Sell the house, pay the tax debt... maybe by Christmas I can have a savings account again.

In the meantime, I'm going to go pack and clean in the studio.

A friend forwarded this to me today, and I find it hilarious. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Walkman, Scott Campbell, a 13-year-old blogger, used his Dad's Walkman for a week. Here is his review of the product:


"My dad had told me it was big, but I hadn't realised he meant that big. It was the size of a small book... It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape... I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down 'rewind' and releasing it randomly... Did my dad...really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?"


I found my Highlander VCR tapes while cleaning out for the move, and I've been trying to watch them. It's so bloody annoying. They skip, the audio sucks, you have to fast forward through the first epi on the tape if you only want to watch the second... Good lord -- and yet, I remember quite clearly the World Before Home Recording, when tv shows played when they played, and movies were only available during their showing times on HBO -- and before that, they were only available in the theater! I know! How did we survive?

So let's take a moment to appreciate all the little things -- CDs and TiVO and iPods -- that give us so much joy in such small spaces. (And let's not think about the Mayan calendar and how we only have so many years left before our technology eats us all.)

P.S. Despite the bitching, I am enjoying the ability to re-watch HL. Thanks, Michelle. :)

Linda was my mother, and she passed away nearly twenty years ago from liver failure brought on by years of alcoholism. Every year since then, Grandma has called me on the date of her death, June 15, to mourn and grieve and tell the story of Mom's passing.

Grandma never lets go of pain. Her stories -- all her stories -- are about the awful things that have happened to her over her life, and Mom's death was the most recent capstone. Ever since 1991, she's called me in mid-June to describe in graphic detail the last few days of Mom's life. She's remembered every conversation with the doctors and with Mom. My particular pet peeve is her continual insistence that "it was just such a surprise!" Look, Grandma, I love you, but death by alcoholism is not a "surprise" unless you are repressing to an astonishing degree.

So this June 15th, I sat down to call her first, all geared up to have the Mom conversation and prepared to bite my tongue through the 'surprise' bit, and...

And this year, Grandma forgot.

She's 93 years old, she's losing things. Apparently, she's finally lost track of this, too. And it occurred to me that if Grandma's forgotten to tell the death story, then after all this time we can -- I can -- finally put Mom to rest. ( So this is goodbye. )

I have a terrible weakness for those faux-motivational posters. Probably comes from having exposure to a corporate environment that had been completely conquered by the Successories brand these things mock. Anyway, this was recently forwarded to me, and I'm putting it up as a present. You know who you are. :)

I'm pushing the house into shape one armload at a time. ( Since last I've mentioned it: )

A friend of mine recently said she was going to see the Transformers II movie, to which I responded, "On purpose?" She went out looking and found this review. The entire review is hilarious, and I highly recommend reading it, but I especially wanted to share the beginning:


Critical consensus on Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is overwhelmingly negative. But the critics are wrong. Michael Bay used a squillion dollars and a hundred supercomputers' worth of CG for a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot.


Hee. My strongest Michael Bay association previously was the South Park episode where they ask Hollywood writer/producer/directors to help them come up with a plot and Cartoon!Bay spends a few minutes describing explosions. "That isn't a plot, Mr. Bay. Those are special effects."

"I... don't know the difference."

"We know."

But now? Now I'm going to think of him as an art movie director. Who needs plot when you have arresting visuals?

... and go watch this instead. It's edited clips of Edward Cullen, crushing on Buffy in his super-stalker way, and Buffy being, well, Buffy. Which is to say: unimpressed and armed with stakes.

Hee.