Home Is Where the Heart Is

Quick check-in here --

Yes, we're in the hurricane watch zone for Matthew; the current track has the eye sliding past us just off the coast, but with a Storm Of Unusual Size, we'll still get plenty of weather where we are, a few miles inland.  We're not in a flood zone, but we're expecting EPIC rain tomorrow and Friday, and stormy winds of great storminess.  I've been told to expect that the power will go out, and to hope it won't be out for more than a day.

We have hurricane supplies, including lots of water; the house is stoutly built, and we just got shiny new storm windows and doors installed in February.  These are windows of great windowfullness, let me tell you!  We did NOT have to bolt sheets of steel to the outside of the house this year, which is an exercise that I do not miss.

As soon as the storm is past and we have power and internets again, I will post again here and on Facebook, so you'll all know I'm okay.  Wish us luck and fair (or at least reasonably just) winds!

clocketpatch and I tagged each other on this meme, and I had intended to start it yesterday, but I felt too lousy even to answer comments or respond to my Flist, so I'll start today.

1 - Turns out that yesterday's lousy feeling was me coming down with something; I woke up this morning feeling even worse.  Why is this a positive?  Because I called in sick to work.  Because I can do that.  I don't get shit for it, I won't get a cut in my paycheck, I won't get quietly abused and mistreated when I get back for daring to stay home and keep my germs to myself when I need to.  Damn, I wish I could give this gift to everyone!!  I spoke to one of my insanely smart co-workers, passed on a small but complex task that needed to be attended to first thing, and knew it would be taken care of and not screwed up.  Daaaaamn, I love my job, I love my co-workers, I even love my bosses.  *pinches self*

2 - Doctor Who tonight!  We've cut the cable, so we get the new episodes via Nook video, and it takes 48 hours before each one is available.  We could have watched it last night, but we were both too bleary.

3 - Speaking of Doctor Who -- my beloved Missy is being sucked into that fandom, to my intense delight!  We've started watching selected bits of classic Who together, as well as New Who beginning from the top.  Can't wait to share David Tennant with her!  This also means we'll be discovering Matt Smith together, since I missed nearly all of Eleven's era.  I know all you Elevenophiles (unadekaphiles?) out there will be grinning at that thought.

Bonus #4 - I'm off to take a nap.  I love taking naps.  *pats child-self on head*  Yup, it's true, kid.  Someday you'll realize that naps are bliss.

Well, I got my third prompt filled for the Obscure & British fest, and now I have to decide, welp, what next?  (Now that I have enough energy to try to get back into regular writing again.)

I have more than one WIP, and I'm not used to this, and I'm waffling.  So, clearly, the best thing to do with waffles is eat them with strawberries and whipped cream, or maple syrup and butter, or powdered sugar and jam.  The second-best thing to do with waffles is:  poll your flist!  Right?

[Poll #1976899][Poll #1976899]

So, May is a very lively month.  Mostly in a good way, I hope.

Right now, Missy and I are in Orlando, teetering on the edge of the Mouse Event Horizon.  She is very definitely NOT a Disney person, having burned out of it a couple of decades ago or maybe more.  I, personally, have been to Disneyland three times, and enjoyed it, and I will quite cheerfully go to my last rites without ever setting foot in Disney World.

So why the hell are we here?

( Invasion of the Librarians!! )

Something I did not have to do:
- stay up hideously late the night before my wedding, finishing the dress(es)*

Something I did have to do:
- get a new cell phone just before flying out to Seattle
- learn to text using it (I've never had a phone that texted until this)

Things we both had to do:
- deal with several nights running of anxiety dreams which got more and more ridiculous as it went
- deal with recurring guilt over all the effort other people were putting in on our behalf

Things we did that we wanted to do:
- get married (very important!)
- spend time with the people we love
- do fun touristy things with the people we love

Things we did not do:
- have any fights in the process
- end up in tears on the day
- gain too much weight during the trip
- forget anything really important (the biggest snafu on the day was a slip-up in who was supposed to get ice) (seriously, that was the biggest glitch)
- go over budget

Things I have not yet done:
- completely unpack
- get back onto East Coast time
- make more LOLMacs so I can wind up the summer re-runs
- finish re-reading the Spider's Web manuscript and related notes so I can get back into writing

One thing I have done is to set up a Dropbox folder for people to upload pictures.  If you have pictures and I haven't sent you a Dropbox share, let me know and I will do so!


*That was actually a huge personal anxiety.  I've done it before and I was really, really determined that it would not happen again!

I finished my partner's wedding dress last night.  Completely finished!  One down, one to go!

Um, except that I finished her underskirt three weeks ago, and it's already an inch and a half too large in the waist, so I'll probably take it in before the wedding.

I have an estimated two nights of work left on my wedding dress:  clean-finishing and hem.  I'm threatening to leave ten minutes' worth of interior clean-finishing undone, to do the night before, in the name of Tradition and Not Angering the Gods/Goddess (or tempting fate, or overbalancing karma, or something like that).

Pictures later.

I miss writing.  And watching TV.  I'm looking forward to getting back to both.

The wedding website has a countdown thingy . . . 9 days to go.

o_O

. . . aka Why My Day Was Much Hairier Than Expected . . .

If your company has a PBX system -- especially if you have an older PBX system -- get international calling restricted or blocked NOW.  Also, do a security audit of your voice mail system.

According to the AT&T Global Fraud division, between midnight and 5:30 am, hackers accessed my company's PBX system via a vulnerable point in the voicemail system, and made several hundred calls to East Timor.

It's a kind of fraud I'd never even heard of before today.

After losing most of my day to phone issues, I worked late (and still didn't get all the time-critical stuff done that I needed to).  The last three hours I was in the office, I realized I was getting dead-line calls about once an hour, with the same out-of-state phone number on the caller ID . . . the hackers trying to break in again.  Creepy.

To anyone who was expecting to hear from me today, forgive me.  I'm dead tired and must internet another day.

I just checked the date on my hurricane-prep post from last year, which was when Irene looked likely to hit us.

August 23rd.

Meanwhile, the papers have overflowed all week with the 20-year retrospective of Hurricane Andrew.  Yes, 20 years ago, the first named storm of the season, storm A, didn't form until late August.  (And landed as a Category 5.)  When you dig back into the archives, 20, 30, 50 years, you do find that at one point is was common for the first named storm to wait until late July or August.  Now, it's June or even May.

( a tale of shutters and smugness )

I had my follow-up appointment with my gastroenterologist earlier this week.-- this was Young Dr. Young, the one whose colonoscopy put me in hospital.

I was told that none of the 24 polyps they biopsied showed any signs of being precancerous.

( Crankiness, but not ickiness, behind cut )

I noticed that my last several posts have been dreary unhappy crap, so it's obviously time I posted about something else.

I finished reposting Reverb to AO3, and I'm now starting on the review of Phoenix Rising.  This means going back to a much earlier point in my development as a writer -- Phoenix Rising was my second MacGyver piece, the first one to cross the 50k wordcount threshhold and get me my Novel badge.

And, of course, I was still learning a lot.  And I haven't revisited it lately.

So far, I'm not wincing horribly, but I'm doing a lot of cleanup, especially of long tangled sentences.  I have this image of all those jettisoned semicolons piling up in a heap beside my desk.  If anyone's short a few, do let me know!  I've got plenty and to spare!

In other news, many of the uglier glitches in the LiveJournal RTE are no longer glitching as horribly.  Since I post something ZOMG Every Single Day -- and every post involves images, links, and text -- I've been able to notice changes in the glitch level almost every day, which has helped keep me from terminal rage.  The Bad News:  LJ released crapware.  The Good News:  they really were working on it, constantly, every day after the stupidly premature release, gradually making progress on the bugs.  It's still not bug-free and probably never will be, but it no longer creates daily Code Rage for me.