Meanderings: February 25, 2000

Friday,
February 25, 2000

I've decided to do a wildly fragmented entry for today. Call it the effects of late nights on a tired mind. Or maybe it's just because I've been talking to myself a lot this week, I dunno. Anyway:

Payday, thank Allah. Of course, within an hour and a half I'd spent 90% of my paycheck paying off the First Card bill and my 1999 tax ding. Ouch. I need to have Lyndon take out a wodge of cash from the joint account before he leaves tomorrow (yes, I don't have ATM access to our joint account. It's a long, sordid tale of bureaucratic cluster fucks and magstrips that wear out if you sneeze on them. Granted, I can still use my card as a debit card, but it's a pain in the ass nonetheless).

Someday, I shall have money in my account again. Money that isn't actually earmarked for other stuff, I mean.

Julia, you're an alto/mezzo? So am I! We'll have to work up a repertoire over some single malt in Chicago (which should go down a treat -- the bar attached to the hotel is called BIG: A Brasserie and Bar, and all the bartenders play musical instruments and do solos every hour. Better yet, we should bring our own horns and jam).

Between you, me, Jimbo, Vera's operatic soprano, Elizabeth's verse demon and whatever other itinerant writer/musicians we can scrounge up, we might even get a pickup band going for the SFF.Net party. The Rock Bottom Remainders -- HA! I laugh in the face of girly-man Stephen King!

So, let's see -- I need to pack my swords, my fencing gear, my SFWA Musketeer uniform, my laptop, assorted muscial instruments (but not my beloved, belated 12-string. You go to hell, clumsy Swedish moving company, you go to hell and you die!), enough European chocolate to keep everyone happy, and other necessary items like, oh, clothes. Yes, clothes might be a good idea. Um, maybe it's time to call UPS. . .

Tina, stop reading journals and finish that assignment. Good girl.

Attention Wondrous Fabu-Friendz fans!

The latest episode in the adventures of Heros that Do Good and Look Good Doing It -- The Wondrous Fabu-Friendz: The Media Munchkin Strikes Back -- is now available on the web in all its fulsome glory. Thrill to the adventures of the Glitter Queen, the Groovilicious Rakoon Torche and the rest of the Fabu-Friendz as they come up against their most cunning enemy to date -- Leonardo DiCaprio!

Official complaints and Lucasfilm lawsuits may be filed here.

Oh, I am a Happy Camper(TM). Decided to bite the bullet and downloaded the trial version of Dreamweaver 3.0 for the Mac. Big mother, and extremely slow -- then again, it's on a 6-year-old PowerMac 6600 with 74 Mb of memory and not enough hard drive space to turn on Virtual Memory. That, however, will be rectified when the boy brings me back a new 3 Gb hard drive from Boston -- whee!

I mean, it's just time to move on from HTMLPro. I've proved that I can code on Notepad, if necessary -- now I want something big and busty that will put in the image widths and heights for me and do all that funky LAYER and DIV stuff without adding extraneous tags or code.

And best of all, I don't have to actually buy it until next month, when I should have money. Theoretically, anyway.

And last of all, Lyndon finally got his new passport. He'd warned me about the picture last week, but I didn't fully understand the horror until he showed it to me. Since he doesn't read Swedish, he couldn't understand the instructions on the photo booth at T-Centralen, and thought he'd be able to get four different poses -- he was actually leaning forward and trying to puzzle out the instructions when the flash went off.

And since he didn't have time or money for a retake (had to get the form in to the British Embassy so that he could get the passport by today), it was a choice between 1) a picture that looked like it had come off a warning flyer advertising an escapee from the local Institute for the Criminally Insane, or 2) your typical Gestapo passport snap. He picked the Hitler Youth pose, and gave me the other snap off to the left.

In real life, he is a kind, gentle man with a sweet smile, laughing eyes and a beautiful sense of humor. Just look at this picture from the old one -- what a sweet-faced boy, ready to go out and find an awfully big adventure in the wide, wide world. It's not his fault that, ten years on, a cheap Swedish photo booth made him look like a member of Hannibal Lector's Gourmet Cooking Circle.

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