• Submitted my art for the SGA Big Bang.
  
  
• Went out for anniversary dinner. Fondue is yum.
  
  
• Proposed to significant other, proposal accepted. Shiny black stainless steel wedding bands deployed. Really like our rings, they're interesting enough and no conflict diamonds were involved. (I don't care for diamonds or traditional wedding rings, so I wanted something fairly simple that would still stand out. And I especially hate gold-tone jewelry, no matter its material or form).
  
  Ignore my wrinkly "old man" hand. My hands super dry because of the recent shift in weather.
  
  
• Mrs. Bunny chewed my main mouse's cord in half and nibbled at my backup mouse's cord. Mea culpa, I should have been supervising her but wasn't.
  
  
• Finished reading In the Cut. I don't know why, but all of the sudden I wanted to read it. Must have lost my mind, as I knew how it ended and knew I wouldn't like it. Not my most shining example of the return to bookdom.
  
  Mini-review: Needlessly dense, dull, distant, stuffy, waste of time.
  
  Long review: Any possible edge is blunted by the slow meandering crawl towards a resolution. Dull vagueness isn't the same as mystery.
  
  The use of an unreliable narrator coupled with first person voice is pure laziness on the part of the author. Why bother writing the important parts when you can just say that the character doesn't have that information?
  
  There is no urgency from the characters, despite the protagonist's multiple brushes with murder and mayhem. She is attacked and also stalked by multiple men, yet doesn't seem to care. If anything, I felt she was suicidal and was simply waiting for death to conveniently appear, generously meted out by one of her improbably numerous male admirers.
  
  The ending appears as if by magic, and while clues and hints are scattered throughout the story and the plot inevitably to leads up to a climax, the build-up is incomplete and unfulfilling. It's probably meant to seem sudden and shocking but is instead abrupt and jarring.
  
  The book was considered edgy in 1996 for its portrayals of sex and female sexuality, but I find the sex suffers from romance-novel omission and euphemism even while struggling to shock with its pseudo-explicitness. And I find the faux-feminism of the book useless, the female characters are passive, letting things happen to them that most women I know would rail against or take precautions to prevent. In almost all the sexual encounters the men all take the lead. The lead character just accepts everything they do, she wants it in some way - even when she professes otherwise.
  
  The book is short, and doesn't make use of that at all. It could be a one-two punch in the gut, visceral and sharp but instead it's like one of those nightmares where you try to run but never move. I don't know what I was thinking. ::smacks own hand::
  

Tags: life
maybe he's caught in the mood: accomplished
he just sings whatever he's seen: Michael Penn - No Myth

Wednesday I pretended to be an IT project manager so I could attend Microsoft's Portland Windows 7 launch. I went for a variety of reasons: for the novelty, to experience the sheer ridiculous geekery firsthand, to observe the ratio of men to women (50 to 1, without a doubt). But most of all, I went for the much vaunted free copy of Windows 7.

The advertising slogan Microsoft is using - "The New Efficiency" - sounds like some creepy Cold War-era code name for Nazi medical experiments or something. I don't know that I would have chosen it for my advertising campaign slogan. Too bad I don't have any need of advertising slogans. "The new mapsandlegends, same as the old mapsandlegends!" "mapsandlegends, not synonymous with cheese wheels!" "We switched your regular mapsandlegends with this instant mapsandlegends. Let's see if these pygmy mountain goats notice the difference."

The first hour and a half was boring as hell. First, I wandered around because I apparently got there super, ridiculously early, then I sat through two short talks by IBM (blah Hyper-V, buy our blade servers for $10,000 blah) and En Pointe (we do stuff, but we can't really articulate what that is without 5.2 million buzzwords). At least it was somewhere I could relax while I nommed on my peanut butter granola bars.

Scant snackery was provided, two kinds of granola bars, one bag of trail mix, a bottle of water or a can of soda. And pears. I hate raw pears because they're usually not sufficiently washed and they have that bitter aftertaste to the skin. Were apples just too expensive, or was Microsoft afraid that they might be indirectly referencing the competition? I'm jealous of the morning attendees with their fancy continental breakfasts. But hey, at least I didn't have to roll out of bed at six a.m. to get ready for my prentend career day. I should probably be grateful that there was even any free food made available. I'm sure I could have toddled over to the Little Caesar's just down the road and jawed at some cardboard pizza slices, but thankfully that wasn't necessary.

I expected the Windows 7 presentation to be as dry and dusty as the first two, but the speaker, Chris Avis was actually informative and interesting, as interesting as four hours worth of technical minutiae about new operating systems can be, anyway. I didn't care about the whole DirectAccess and security group policy bits, though that was more because I find them inherently boring and ultimately useless for my purposes. I'm not sure if I like BitLocker, considering that I like to use my USB cards and drives to move data between computers and I don't want the added hassle of dealing with encryption and passwords just to transfer files. I don't like that it makes USB thumb drives invisible to Macs and unusable to PCs without Vista or Win 7 (you can read files if you have the password, but you can't write to the drive).

All in all, it was a worthwhile five hours, with the end result being that I'm now the owner of one shiny, free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Retail for this version of Win 7 is $320, which I think is completely insane. It would need to be able to cook me dinner and run a hot bath before I'd be willing to fork over that much cash for a single-license operating system. I'm not sure I'll be upgrading right away, considering that I'm not having any problems with XP on any of my computers, but some day I may feel the urge to get with the times and stop using my eight year old operating system.

Tags: geekery, life
maybe he's caught in the mood: geeky
he just sings whatever he's seen: The Beatles - Mother Nature's Son

I put it to you, internets, that no one these days needs 30 or more SCSI cables (along with 10+ SCSI terminators). You remember SCSI, right? Back when it ruled the computer age, before this newfangled IDE and SATA crap, SCSI was a mysterious force to be reckoned with because if you didn't terminate your SCSI chain just right your devices and drives would petulantly refuse to show up.

Why, oh, why do we have 30 SCSI cables sitting around in a box? And that was just one box. I know we've got a least two or three more boxes of mixed power/computer/a-v cables. Oy vey!

I also found like 15 pairs of size 50-56 men's pants. The lowdown here is that in my early 20s, I felt strangely compelled to wear giant pants and belt them down to a wearable size. I'll freely admit that I may have been insane, but that phase has long since and thankfully passed. Now, nobody in this household has ever come close to fitting into those pants, nor has anyone worn them for many, many years, yet there they are, sitting in my closet, taking up space that could be filled with more SCSI cables (when I find them). Out with the pants!

Untangling myriad serpentine cables and sorting through ginormous pants is backbreaking work, I tells ya. Time for lunch.

1 metric ton of towels, 2 quadrillion t-shirts unearthed. How the hell did I end up with so many t-shirts? And none of them are my Smiths shirt. ::shakes fist:: At least I have three boxes of clothes that I'm leaving by the dumpster and an entire trash bag of clothes that I'm putting in the dumpster. And ewwwww, they're all so musty and dusty after two months in storage. I don't even have allergies but my nose is still very angry with me for breathing this noxious odor.

While I approve of the large amount of Legos that we (as mostly grown-up adults) apparently own, I think it would be nice if they were all in the same place. Do I really want to root through 30 boxes to make that happen? No.

Damn. I found a letter from my dad in an old photo album. It's 20 years old. Written only three months before he died. I just...I can't believe it's been hiding in an empty, unused photo album for eight years and I just now found it. I can't believe he's been dead for 20 years. On one hand I'm glad I've had time to grieve and heal but something like that, the way I found him dead that morning, that's something so visceral and immediate that you can't ever really forget. Normally, I'd be all John Sheppard-like and just ignore my feelings, but this is actually making me cry. I couldn't reread the whole thing, it just makes me want things I can't ever have.

I will now take a break and watch NCIS to recover from emotional fragility and crick in back from picking up heavy, cloth-filled totes.

Tags: life
maybe he's caught in the mood: full
he just sings whatever he's seen: The Decemberists - Sons and Daugters

Oh. My. God.

You want the fucking dishwasher out of your house ASAP because it's taking up space in your kitchen where you want to put your new shelf.

But you wait over 24 hours to get back to me EVERY TIME I EMAIL YOU TO ARRANGE A TIME FOR PICKUP. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK, LADY? Do you actually want to sell this thing or are you just toying with me?

Also, the name she assigned to her gmail account is "ACCOUNT". So that every time you see an email from her, it says it's from "ACCOUNT" rather than the name or username of the person. Get off the goddamned internets if you can't figure out how to use Craigslist, you rackafrackin' bejesused douchebag.

Tags: life
maybe he's caught in the mood: enraged
he just sings whatever he's seen: The sound of my fists clenching in rage.

I swear. (Don't pay attention to the teeth-gnashing and moaning, I swear I'm not a zombie. You don't need that pesky brain, anyway, right? Mmmmmmm, brainsssss......)

Tags: life
maybe he's caught in the mood: amused
he just sings whatever he's seen: Law and Order: SVU

So, obviously I've been super-lame about updating recently. I'm reading my friends list every day, but things are completely off-the-hook insane right now.

The basics:

We're in the middle of a month-long stealth move out from under our psycho roommate. Yes, we can has new apartments, thank you internets and my RL friends.

J got offered a job making $50,000 a year as a web programmer, which we've been on tenterhooks about. I almost can't believe it, I have to pinch myself sometimes.

Craigslist has turned out to be a real boon in the secondhand furniture department. I can find good-quality inexpensive furniture that's still attractive and doesn't look like it's been a beer-soaked wet-dog-roosting porch couch for the last 15 years (not that those aren't in abundance, as well). The hard part is arranging transport when you only have a truck available on specific days.

So, yes. Furniture transporting, stealth moving, job hunting, and working full-time haven't left either of us with a lot of free time.

I promise to be a better mapsandlegends in future. ^__^

Maybe I'll make a music post to celebrate the new digs when we've got internet available at the new place.

Tags: life
maybe he's caught in the mood: ecstatic
he just sings whatever he's seen: They Might Be Giants - They Might Be Giants

So I see that today is Father's Day, which I wouldn't have really noticed except for the fact that my friends list has a lot of Father's Day posts on it. Lots of lovely David and Baz photos. While I normally don't like children, even I can admit that Baz is cute. David seems like an amazing father.

I don't really pay attention to Father's Day because I don't have a father around to remind me of the day. He died 20 years ago last Sunday, Flag Day. If there's anything to be grateful about such a thing, it's that he didn't die on Father's Day itself.

The problem is that my father was absent for much of my life. My parents weren't married and after they broke up I saw him occasionally, but not regularly. I was almost given up for adoption, but for some reason my father chose to assert his parental rights. Not that him doing so ever did me much good, because that was pretty much the last time he really seemed to be all that interested in me. (And maybe if he'd allowed the adoption, I wouldn't have to deal with the one thing in my life that does haunt me every day, childhood sexual abuse at the hands of my uncle.)

I only knew my father for 15 years. He died at age 38 of a massive heart attack, caused by congenital defects.

I have no memories of him before about age five (because I have almost no memories of anything before age five) though I do remember once being woken up around 7am on a Saturday morning and being made to wait outside my grandmother's house for my father to pick me up. It was foggy and cold, the way some spring mornings are, and I waited alone while my mother sat in the kitchen watching. I thought this was an unusual thing, having not been involved in one of these weekend visitations before. It seems strange to me now that a mother would force her child to wait alone outside for a visitation pick up, it's something I would never do if I had children (which I don't, and never will).

I remember seeing my father most when we lived in three particular houses, from the ages of nine to thirteen. I think that the only reason I saw so much of him then was that he was married to a woman with children and she probably urged him to spend time with me. I remember spending weekends at their trailer, playing Space Invaders and Tank on the Atari 2600, staying up by myself to watch The Ghost and Mrs. Muir on late night TV. I remember the tadpoles my erstwhile stepbrother and I caught at the nearby creek and the time I cried the night before we went to King's Island. I remember seeing The Last Unicorn and Return of the Jedi with my dad.

One Saturday evening during a visit, he asked me to go find the stepkid, who was out somewhere in the trailer park, so we could go and pick-up fast food for dinner. While I was out looking, the kid came back on his own and my dad took him and left without me. This is one of the few things he did that still actually hurts me. He asked me to look for the kid, then left me behind. It just underscored to me how unimportant I felt he always considered me. The stepkid was good enough to go, but his own, real, flesh and blood kid? Forget her. That seemed pretty indicative of our relationship as a whole. (As an aside, who leaves their ten year old daughter alone to wander around a trailer park without supervision while they take the other kid and go get dinner? I know it was the 1980s, but come on. Apparently, neither of my parents was very fond of making sure I was supervised in my youth.)

There was another winter night near Christmas when I waited hours and hours for him to pick me up, sitting in the dark living room, watching every car to see if it was his wife's green whatever with the round tail lights. I think he finally showed up. I was probably nine.

When my dad and his wife moved into a small neighbohood close to mine, I went to see him instead. Those were better times, when I could see him at my convenience rather than his. I remember making steak and the birthday where he gave me $50, most of which I spent on magazines with pictures of Duran Duran. He stayed in that house after he and his wife divorced and I watched The Breakfast Club for the first time ever on cable tv, back when you changed channels with those little converter boxes with the sliding channel selector. I stayed weekends and he bought me my favorite foods and we finally had some time without interruption to have a real relationship.

That was too good to last, of course. When I was thirteen, he packed up and moved to Florida for some reason. He wrote occasionally and I gave him a hard time about the lack of contact, but there wasn't a whole lot I could do, except miss him. He asked me to come and visit him, so I got on a plane for the first time in my life (alone), and naturally missed my connecting flight in Atlanta, had to wait four hours for another flight to Gainesville, which I spent riding the inter-concourse tram and wandering around the airport. We spent a good week together, he bought me all my favorite food and critiqued my taste in music. There was no money for the return trip, so I had to take a Greyhound bus for 14 hours just to get home.

The next time I went to visit him in Florida, I was fifteen and it was part of a family vacation with my aunt (his sister), my uncle and my cousin. Because I hadn't seen him in so long, I chose to stay with him for the week while they went galavanting off around lower Florida. Things went along just fine until Wednesday morning, when I woke up because his alarm was going off. My dad lived in a tiny duplex with no bedroom, so he slept on the couch and I took his air mattress. I lay there for several minutes wondering why he wasn't getting up to turn off his alarm. I stumbled over to the end table and turned it off, and when I stepped back far enough to see into the kitchen, to my horror, he was on the floor.

I tried to revive him in the way that a naive fifteen-year-old would, and having no luck, ran to the other duplex unit to get his neighbor, Neil. Neil, I think, knew my father was dead, but he told me to run across the yard to another neigbor's house so they could call 911, and to stay there. What happened next was pretty much a blur. I think my dad's landlady ferried me around. I had to go to the hospital to say goodbye before they did the autopsy. I called my mom from there and at first I couldn't talk. The conversation went something like this: "Mom, he's dead." "Who?" "Dad, he had a heart attack, he's dead."

Since my aunt and her family were somewhere in southern Florida, my dad's landlady, one of the few Christian people I've ever met who has actually lived up to the name, took me in until state troopers could track down my aunt. She let me stay in a spare bedroom, fed me, made her teenage daugters take me with them on a trip to take their niece to the movies. She was so nice and I couldn't have needed it more.

The police eventually found my aunt and I've since forgotten or blocked out most of the rest of the trip. I don't remember how we got home.

The real tragedy of him dying at this time of my life was that we'd just begun to reconnect. I was getting old enough to have common interests with him, I wasn't as much of a child that he might have felt was a burden or maybe didn't know how to relate to. I was becoming someone he could actually talk to and debate with. And then, in a flash, it was over.

My last memory of the whole summer was after my brothers set fire to our house (another great event of the that summer) and going over to my aunt's house, where I could hear her arguing with my mom about how I stole some of my dad's belongings (some VHS videotapes) that had been brought back from Florida. All I had to remember my dead father were some VHS videotapes he'd made from old school A&E programs and HBO/Cinemax movies, which I was legally entitled to anyway as his sole heir, and she was quibbling over them. (What a fucking bitch. Is it any wonder that I ended up disowning her a few years ago?)

The fact of his death was ever present that summer and I made sure to remind myself that he was dead every time I woke up so I wouldn't have to remember it later, so it would be in my memory and undeniable, so I wouldn't wake up and not know he wasn't alive anymore. Time has healed that wound, if by healed you mean inured.

I don't think about him anymore because there's no one here to remind me. I'm away from my mother's side of the family and I don't associate with any of his relatives because they're pretty much all assholes like my aunt or super-concentrated yuppies who don't even care that I exist. And it's not because I didn't love him, or that I don't wish he were still here, it's because this was the pattern he established over my whole life. I didn't see him for years at a time, and to some part of my brain, this is just the longest absence yet. Maybe that part of me is still watching for him, out the window, to show up in his ex-wife's green whatever with the round tail lights.

Tags: life
maybe he's caught in the mood: contemplative
he just sings whatever he's seen: Elliott Smith - Everything Reminds Me of Her

• I want the World War Z movie to get out of development hell and get into theaters already. Want want want!
  
  
• Thinking about buying Pride and Prejudice and Zombies when it comes out. Oh, yes, it's an actual book, using the text of Pride and Prejudice and mashing it up with a zombie story. I'm sure it will be a travesty in terms of the disservice done to Jane Austen, but I'm going to choose to view it as Jane Austen crackfic. With zombies. And we all know that zombies are like bacon. They make good things even better.
  
  
• I actually read Confessions of a Shopaholic and do not approve of the movie. Even though I profess to hate chick lit, I do occasionally read it. I enjoy the lightheartedness of the stories, though I find very few to be actually well written. But that's not the point, really, is it? You don't read a Jackie Collins novel for the literary value, you read it for fun and sex and glamor! And if there's literary value, it's just an added bonus.
  
  
• My knee does not hurt. This is good.
  
  
• I've been ignoring the shows I normally watch. SGA because the latter half of S5 is vomit-inducing. CSI because most everyone has left. Can Nick and Greg just start fucking on screen now? I'd tune back in for that. NCIS and House because I'm lazy, Dexter because I'm forgetful. I did catch up with NCIS and House, though. Can I just say that I fucking hate Cuddy's bangs? Her hair in general this season has looked like refried ass. Also, what's with all of the constant random firings and rehirings on this stupid show? It gets old after a while, this whimsical "now you have a job, now you don't" game.
  
  
• I still have the cold, but it's almost gone. Just the lingering cough and ear congestion to get rid of.
  
  
• YAY!!! FUN CRAMPS!!! Three days worth, to the point where I had to lay in bed with the heating pad and hold J's hand for comfort on top of taking ibuprofen. The red tide is pretty much done making my life hell this week, but won't have gone without a struggle. I wasted an entire 15 minute break rinsing a sizeable bloodstain out of the seat of my pants. What a joy that is, let me tell you, especially when all you have to work with is hand soap and paper towels. My uterus has been working hard for the money overtime and now I think it needs to go on a vacation until next month.

Tags: life, zombies
maybe he's caught in the mood: sick
he just sings whatever he's seen: The Beatles - Rocky Raccoon

• Head cold of doom has invaded. ::wheeze, hack:: I can't laugh because it devolves into coughing fits. ::wheeze, cough::
  
  
• I want the 1990s back. Music was awesome. And the internets were born. And I was young(er).
  
  
• Red tide on top of head cold, bah. I'm not fit for company this week, I might kill someone. And then cough on their corpse.
  
  
• Have been diagnosed with Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome in the left knee. What this means is that I've been hearing creaking noises from the knee for more than a year when walking on stairs. Which doesn't bother me so much, since there's not really any popping or grinding, but it's been occasionally aching over the last few months. It's not serious, but the doctor recommended a short course of physical therapy to strengthen my quadriceps muscles to help support the knee. Also, I got to have x-rays taken of the knee, and they talked me into getting a TDAP vaccine shot (tetanus, diptheria and pertussis [whooping cough]) since I couldn't even remember the last time I'd gotten a tetanus booster shot.
  
  
• I'm pissed that my eye appointment for today got cancelled this morning. I made this appointment back in the early days of February and now I can't get in any earlier than March 17th. For fuck's sake, is it really necessary to wait six weeks to get my eyes checked? It's because I'm doing it through my HMO that it's taking so long, but I have my reasons for doing it that way. First, I only need the eye exam, I'm not buying glasses from them. Anywhere else, it would cost more than my $25 co-pay for the exam without glasses. Second, I need the complete prescription from a doctor who will actually give it to me, and most places are not inclined to give you your prescription if you're not buying glasses from them. Even if it's the law, they try to weasel out of it since they're not making a huge profit by selling you overpriced glasses. I'm going to do the smart thing and use my prescription to order glasses online and save myself $300.
  
  
• Yes, you can buy glasses from the internet, and it's reliable and inexpensive. Seriously.
  
  
• Thank you gblvr for the Valentine's Day card, even though I'm super-late responding. ::snuggles you::
  
  
• Did I mention I miss the 90s?
  
  
• I was very sad to notice the Last.fm was incompatible with my former version of iTunes, so it didn't log six months worth of music listening. I suppose I'll live with only 241,000 plays.
  

Tags: life
maybe he's caught in the mood: sick
he just sings whatever he's seen: Bel Canto - Paradise

Today was my 11 year anniversary with J. I feel so old. :)

We ate dinner at Noodles and wandered around the Goodwill on Broadway. I found the Friends soundtrack I'd been looking for. I'm not really into the show, but there's a song on the soundtrack I couldn't get anywhere else. I recently woke up humming "Sunshine" by Jonathan Edwards (this is something I do - I wake up with bits of songs playing in my head, over and over, it's weird) and then I heard it on the radio the other day, so I've been kind of obsessed with it. Well, Paul Westerberg does a cover version, but it's only on this one random original Friends soundtrack, which I am not paying $5 for just to get one song. So I got it very cheap from Goodwill and have ripped the track. Now I have no other use for the CD because I already have the Toad the Wet Sprocket song that's on it. I might give the rest of it a listen, except for the Hootie song. (I don't care if everybody on my friends list hates me for saying this, I've never, ever liked Hootie, just...ew.)

I also found the Holy Grail of my You Don't Know Jack thrift store quest - You Don't Know Jack TV. I've been looking for it in thrift stores all over town for years, but they've only ever had 1-3 or Sports. I love You Don't Know Jack and I love that both of my PCs play the old discs. I also love that I got this copy of YDKJ TV for $2, half off.

So, I've challenged J to a grueling match of You Don't Know Jack TV to celebrate. I have no edge, though, because all of the questions are from 1997, so it's not like I can wow J with my knowledge of SGA and CSI.

Tags: life
maybe he's caught in the mood: crazy
he just sings whatever he's seen: Jonathan Edwards - Sunshine