Eseme's Den

Hello! I've got a lot of things to work on in my life, and I'll be offline, or online other places than LJ for a while. I won't be reading or commenting, and if anyone needs to reach me, LJ will not be the best way to do it.

Hope everyone keeps up the amazing writing, I've enjoyed it and the community a lot.

Small children go to kindergarten and bring back the plague. Advice on ramping up my immune system is greatly appreciated. I am going to see my mom on Friday and get her recipe for elderberry tea.

I will also be seeing my sister and my adorable niece who have traveled down from Nova Scotia. I am extremely excited, as I typically see them once a year. I have birthday presents for cutie, which I hope she will like.

I am going to try and get more photos of things I have made online, at Ravelry and other places. Doll and toy photos will go on a blog I have for that. I am planning on getting a few doll photos today. I am not sure anyone but ashbet cares, but I will link to them.

I am working at loosing weight that I gained from my extremely sedentary job and tendency to damn the consequences and eat dessert. Thanks to watching what I eat and counting calories I am down about 13 pounds since January. The plan is to get back down to a healthy weight and then do some serious work on my wardrobe.

My hair was purple for a while last spring, and I want to get back to that. Another weight loss reward! I cut it the shortest it has been since I was 10 last summer, about bra strap length. I don't like it and am growing it back out, aiming for waist length and gelling out my hair stick collection again.

The Angel is on 250 units of sythroid for his thyroid, and has more energy. He has a host of other health issues, and is seeing a neurologist soon and will hopefully get more help with his headaches.

So life goes on and I will try and journal it better!

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

I cannot post much on the Kobo tablet, but I have decided to post anyway. Short stuff, but hopefully interesting. I am not good at short, I tend to think in paragraphs.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

That is what we are at, up here in Maine. Single digits, your eyes ache after a while. It was -6 yesterday.

On the plus side, that means that the amazing Gelato Fiasco was selling gelato for 38% off (1% per degree below freezing, with a caveat that if it is -68 degrees why will not pay us to eat gelato). We are thinking of going there today.

Gelato Fiasco

I have been super busy with holidays, snow, and birthdays.

We got a foot or so of snow the week before Christmas. It melted a bit. The weekend before Christmas was a 2 day ice storm, Sunday-Monday. The weekend after Christmas we got about 6 inches of new snow (it was about 8-10 where I work, and the drive home December 30th, Sunday night at 9:30 was not fun).

More snow yesterday into today. It is incredibly light and drifts everywhere, because when it snows at -6 there is nearly no moisture in the snow.

There has been much shoveling, and biodegradable kitty litter on the ice. More shoveling today, in half-hour increments, as it is still extremely cold.

I got, among other things, a zany fascinator for my hair, a lovely hand-made mug, and a book on the history of the Lego mini-figure for Christmas. My display of Holiday Lego sets won the cube-decorating contest at work and I got a $100 Wal-Mart gift card. I bought all the cleaning supplies that we use (ALL of them) and a new magnetic whiteboard/cork-board for a message center.

I crocheted 2 small Totoros, 2 tiny Totoros, a chibi Cuthulu, a chibi ninja, and I am at work on a Psyduck pokemon. I also made my niece a sweater and hat, and a hat and scarf for her Raggety Ann doll.

Visiting my sister, her awesome partner, and my niece at Thanksgiving was a truly wonderful vacation. My niece is the most cheerful, happy, and non-fussy baby I have ever met. She is also very friendly, gave me a head-but kiss as soon as she saw me.

Life is cold but good, and busy.

Tuesday, my eye ached. Wednesday, it was clear I might have pinkeye. Thursday I saw a doctor, and was ordered out of my workplace (after seeing the doctor). Friday I was out of work again.

Today I am feeling tons better, and have no eye pain, just in time to shovel tons of snow.

Life, it is crazy!

I am still weeks behind on LJ... sadly.

I hope everyone else in the New England region is all right and has power. We do, and thankfully were able to find someone to plow the end of our driveway, so I only shoveled out the front door to the carport, and the cars inside the carport. The one person who has parked outside in the driveway... had a car totally free of snow, thanks to the wind.

Well, she moved. Changed jobs, moved to another town, packed up everything and went through a lot of stress.

In the middle of the holiday season.

Yeah, things have been crazy. And I've been offline or minimally online for weeks or months.

I am starting to get settled, and to catch up on things. You may get some comments on VERY old entries.

For those who need my new address, please email me or private message me on LJ. Anything you have on file is out of date!

I hope everyone has been well, and had a much less hectic holiday season than mine!

So, I said I would take the yammering about dragons to a post in my own journal (as opposed to the comments of someone else's journal).

Terry Pratchett has a theory about human mythology, that it is turtles all the way down. There are a lot of how-the-world-was-created myths which involve turtles, and a number of cultures have at one point or another believed that the world is carried on the back of a turtle or tortoise.

For me, it's dragons all the way down. I started reading stories about dragons at some point in grade school. I'm pretty sure one of the earliest things I read was Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, consisting of Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons, Calling on Dragons, and Talking to Dragons. I still have my battered paperback copies, although I like the covers on the library's hardcover copies better.

Then I read everything my small library had with dragons in the children's section. During middle school, I got access to a new library, and discovered Ann McCaffrey. I'd already read Jane Yolen's Pit Dragon series (it was in the children's/j section for some reason, while McCaffrey was in the YA section).

In sixth grade (middle school started at 7th, so this was before Pern), I wrote what I considered a novel (about 80 typewritten pages, single spaced) about a girl who went through a portal in our world and ended up in a fantasy kingdom which she happened to be the long-lost princess of. Yes, I was twelve. There were dragons, and in order to drive off the evil guy trying to take over the kingdom she had to hike into the mountains and find the dragons and ask for their help. There was a boy living with one of the dragons, in a cave. Again, I was twelve.

I read this out loud to my entire sixth grade class, and to one of the second grade classes, when the teacher heard about it. I thought I was so cool. And of course, I was going to be an author when I grew up.

In eighth grade we had to make a magazine as an English project. We could pick any topic we wanted, but we had to design a cover, write a letter from the editor, a short story, a book review, and an ad. I picked dragons, of course. Then I had the problem that all the dragon books I knew of I had already read. The teacher insisted that we had to read a new book for this. So I went to the library and ran a subject search. I came up with two books I had not read with the subject of dragons. One was Terry Pratchett's Strata, which turned out to barely have dragons in it (which won it a less-than-enthusiastic review from FLAME magazine), and Douglass Adams' Last Chance to See, which is the funniest book I have ever read about endangered species (the dragons were komodo dragons). I wrote a story about a girl finding dragon eggs, which is in an entirely different setting than the first one, an ad for a dragon BBQ service (dragon shows up to BBQ your food, not the other way around), and included both book reviews.

The dragons were dormant for a while, though I continued to read fantasy and the occasional book with more dragons. Then I had this assignment in grad school - write up the mission, goals, and vision statements for a library (real or imaginary). Clearly, this needed to be more fun, so as in eighth grade, I added dragons.

THAT idea stuck around. A couple of years after the assignment, it was still kicking around in my head, and I decided to try to write a novel. I've tried this before - I have the beginnings of two other novels on my hard drive. But this one actually made it past ten chapters. It's not done, even over a year later. But its dragons, which is not a surprise to anyone who knows me.

Dragons. All the way down.

There is this Words! meme going aroud. Comment and I use 5 words to describe you.

Below is 5 words from Lissa:

( Words! )

Moving is like an abyss, but without cookies. Hence the icon.

Moving sucks. The current game plan:

I work today. I may get a few more boxes packed. This is my last day of work.

Monday I pack. I madly pack. All must be packed.

Tuesday Dad acquires a U-Haul trailer. And we load it up with the stuff here in Maine. This includes some furniture which I either bough from the L.L. Bean employee store, or was handed down from my parents or grandparents.

Wednesday Dad and I drive to Small Town, New York. I'm not saying where that is in a public post- do not tell the internet where you are. We unload the trailer as fast as we can and try and drive to Syracuse by 8:00 or 9:00 PM to sleep.

Thursday we drive from Syracuse to Buffalo and all my stuff in storage. We work very hard to get it all packed up, so that I don't have to pay for another day of storage (this would be the 31st of January). Then we drive to Rochester to get stuff from the Panther's closet. He will now have a closet again. Then we go to a hotel and sleep.

Friday- well, we might end up getting stuff from the Panther on this day, depending on how loading the U-Haul went the day before. We then drive back to Small Town. We unload as much as we can. I would love to return the trailer to U-Haul on this day, so we pay for one less day of use. That may or may not work out.

Saturday we either keep unloading the trailer, or start arraigning my apartment. By this point it will be a sea of boxes and unassembled futons. Dad will have to leave sometime around 1:00 PM as he has an early-morning appointment in Massachusetts on Sunday. This is when I would have liked Time Warner to show up and turn on my cable and internet, but they don't do house calls on weekends (so I've decided to give them less money in return for less service).

Sunday I will try and listen to the Superbowl on the radio while I unpack. My parents are Patriots fans, living in Maine and all. My mom is a bigger fan than I knew- Dad bought her a Patriots sweatshirt and she wears it while she watches games. I find that a little alarming... Anyway, this really matters to her, so I want to know what's going on. I'd rather not go to a sports bar or something deep in Giants country and root for the Patriots. Sounds hazardous to my life. Besides, this way I can unpack at the same time!

I start work Monday.

People reading this in Rochester or Buffalo might think: "Hey, she'll be in town. We could have dinner with her or something." That's a great thought. But I'll be insanely busy, and will likely be moving stuff until after dinnertime, then sleeping and getting up at hours my father considers morning and I really don't. Plus all this fun will be happening at the worst possible time of the month for me to be doing heavy lifting. So I'll be frazzled, snippy, and possibly screaming at times. Plus, we might not even have time, given the schedule we will be working on. Sorry!

I hope to make it to Rochester for SimCon, but I may not have any vacation time then, so I can't be sure at this point. I do know I will have a small housewarming party later in February, consisting of me and lissa_dora. Hey, I said small! This will be kind of odd for me.

I don't get visitors. When I lived at RIT, I had people other than me in my apartment about twice in the year I lived there. When I lived in my first off-campus apartment I had visitors more often, but tended to weird them out by being a hostess. I'd try and have nice food and stuff to do- for them it wasn't an occasion but it was for me since no one ever came in my place and saw my stuff. But I had people other than me in my apartment maybe ten times out of that year.

Visitors were common at Frank and Suzzanne's place, but they were generally in the public areas of the house, not my little room. I dated a viking who turned out to be smarmy- he saw my room but almost no one else did. I had no visitors while I lived in Buffalo at all, with the exception of one weekend when the Panther came and by then the apartment was such a mess that he was kind of alarmed. "Can't move, stuff might eat me." Well yes, but when you live in a place where no one else has been for over a year, you get in the habit of leaving piles of stuff lying about because it is easier than cleaning up and no one else will see. And since I was only in that Buffalo apartment for about half the week anyway, I wasn't really living there myself.

So, a new apartment, and a visitor who has never seen any of my belongings. My inner hostess is channeling Martha Stewart and trying to decorate, thinking about what china I have and do I have wine glasses, planning some sort of menu, and trying to make me nervous a month in advance. I'm trying to shove her in a box. We'll see if that works. Someday I'd really like people dropping by to be a normal thing as opposed to an occasion.