I am forever and always making up stories.  When I was a weird loner six-year-old and sat by myself on the playground, I used the scraps and sticks I found on the ground to construct imaginary villages and told myself stories about them.  At the same age or a little older, when I learned to play solitaire (patience and clock, mostly) I would likewise make up elaborate stories represented by the quest to reunite the suits in correct numerical order--each was a royal or noble family, scattered in some disaster, scrambling to find all the children and heirs and get them to safety.

So now I kill a lot of time and brain cells playing Chain Rxn [sic] on Facebook, which in addition to being vaguely pretty and making pleasant chiming noises, calls to mind something like the growth and spread and death of civilizations or species--the precariousness of the chain at some points, the sudden blooming spread at others, the unpredictable and uncontrollable caprice of it.  Or maybe I just have terraforming on the brain.

I read Charles Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus a few weeks ago--someone recommended it somewhere, in a thread discussing The Thirteenth Child and the fail ascribed thereto.  It was wonderful and fascinating and possibly broke something in my mind (or maybe that's just the spring, or being twenty-seven, or helping my friends move from one apartment to another one time too many).  I am spending more time than usual thinking about having an environment to shape, and shaping it to one's own use, and the use  of future generations.  I play a lot of Chain Rxn and think about how much I'd like to have a garden.

What with one thing and another I have just today started playing around with LibraryThing for the first time.  I'm using it for my non-fiction books and my surviving textbooks (mostly from undergrad, a double handful from grad school, three from high school), so that I can integrate them into a more rational order than 'alphabetical by the name of the department I took the relevant class in.' 

Which means I have to choose a call number system.

Currently both the library where I work and my local public library are on Dewey, and I must admit to some degree of aesthetic preference for it. 

OTOH, Library of Congress is ... Library of Congress.

Decisions, decisions...

A few weeks ago I had the anxiety dream where I was desperately searching for clothes to wear to a job interview, complete with bizarre choices that would never occur in reality and a lot of running from room to room and digging through piles of clothes that, even if I could find the right ones, would have to be ironed, etc. etc.

You know, a right proper anxiety dream, the kind where you wake up and realize that isn't happening and breathe a sigh of relief.

Last night, on the other hand, I had the most tepid anxiety dreams imaginable: I was in an airport (I actually generally feel pretty comfortable in airports) and there were bugs (I hate bugs) including a millipede (I really hate millipedes) and some ants (ants don't bother me that much) but they were all on the floor several feet away from me, so in the dream I just turned down another row of seats so I wouldn't see it.  Problem solved.   Then I dreamed that I'd gotten my utility bill (they've gotten kind of fun and exciting lately, since they keep going down as the weather warms up) but it had gone up... by about twenty dollars.  And in the dream I thought "Hmm, I'm going to have to adjust that in my budget." 

I didn't even remember that I'd dreamed any of it until I was brushing my teeth, and then concluded that ... I guess I'm not very anxious?  But my brain feels it should make the effort anyway?

Seriously, though.  Weak.

Occasionally I run across a journal article title that makes me stop and go "Wait, do I know the person who wrote that?" (One time, I actually did.)

Here's today's, from Communication, Culture & Critique:  "Darth Vader Made Me Do It! Anakin Skywalker's Avoidance of Responsibility and the Gray Areas of Hegemonic Masculinity in the Star Wars Universe."

As far as I know I don't know Joshua Atkinson or Bernadette Calafell, but I feel I would like them if I did.

Abstract:

I'm at my parents' house for Easter, and on the way in shaws_ghoti and I listened to the first two periods of the Red Wings game in the car.

As a reflection of the weirdness of my childhood reading material: every time they mentioned this guy all I could think of was this guy.

I was traveling this past weekend, Thursday to Sunday, and as a brave experiment i went without my laptop and the internet (apart from a few people's Twitter updates routed to my phone) for about seventy-eight hours straight in the process.  It was a pretty excellent weekend with friends, and I really hardly noticed I didn't have my computer--I can think of when I would have skipped a nap or some much needed downtime to obsessively check email, if I'd had it, but it was just as well I didn't.

Of course, it was a busy and distracted weekend, as represented by my twittering:

• Off to the airport, and then Boston, and then weekend of awesomeness and also drinking. Forecast for the weekend: 70% chance of drunk!tweets11:53 AM Apr 2nd from web
• Sitting at the gate working on my zen.1:17 PM Apr 2nd from txt
• Doors closing, phone turning off, time for a nap.1:48 PM Apr 2nd from txt
• Away from internets 26 hrs now. Feeling slightly lightheaded but mostly okay.12:55 PM Apr 3rd from txt
• I am not as drunk as they all think I am. But still fairly drunk. But look! I can spell!10:06 PM Apr 3rd from txt
• Good morning twitter. I do not have much of a hangover except for the realization of how much I spent on drinks last night.7:25 AM Apr 4th from txt
• Also unless you count the dream about crazed possibly superpowered Dr cox helping Sam rescue Daniel from evil clutches of govt.7:35 AM Apr 4th from txt   [NB: I don't even watch Scrubs!  But I have been watching a lot of Stargate lately...]
• And then there were drag queens. Awesome awesome drag queens.8:55 PM Apr 4th from txt [NB: This is thirteen hours later, after going to a drag show, not continuing description of my dream.]
• Lol drunkies! God bless geeks.12:36 AM Apr 5th from txt [NB: ...There is actually no good explanation for this one, besides the obvious.]
• Was entrusted with bag of produce last night to deliver to a friend this morning. Amazingly still in possession of produce. \o/9:29 AM Apr 5th from txt
• On the ground at mke. choc chip cookies and turbulence are not a great dinner combination.7:12 PM Apr 5th from txt

So that was my weekend in 140 character bites.  On the way home, I finally read Blood Feud by Adrian Dater, which chronicles the rivalry of the Detroit Red Wings and Colorado Avalanche from 1996-2002.  Despite the foreword by Scotty Bowman - the Wings' head coach during that era - I was a little worried that it, you know.  Would be insufficiently biased toward the Red Wings, so I kept putting off reading it.

Here is what I learned from reading Blood Feud:

• Claude Lemieux is nice to children and named his first child after Brendan Shanahan, a close friend of his,
• That one time when Marc Crawford lost it and started screaming at Scotty Bowman, he was being exactly as crazy as he looked, and there is now a complete transcript to prove it,
• Newspaper sportswriters think TV sportscasters are idiots,
• The Avs totally started it,
• The Wings finished it.

There was more to it than that, but all in all a totally satisfying read for a Wings fan.  Also, now I want to go watch my DVD of the March 26, 1997 game again.  Hmmm.

 

I went out and got supplies today, and have started working on...

( A thing for a certain baby-on-the-way... )


And in even more exciting news, the snow has started.  Logically  I knew that Winter was going to come back for one last blast, but.  Really, snow, you don't have to do this.  We can all just walk away.  Nobody has to get hurt.

Today I had to return a piece of mail labeled with my address but somebody else's name.  This happens fairly regularly, and wouldn't have been notable, if the return address preprinted on the prestamped envelope did not include the phrase "Correctional Institution."

No, really, sir, NOT AT THIS ADDRESS.


Also, it turns out that if you spend your lunchtime reading a string of creepifying stories out of Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things and then after lunch you go up to the stacks by yourself to hunt around for a journal you are sure exists but is nowhere to be found, its absence will take on a really upsetting and ominous cast in your mind.


On a brighter note, I have worked out something suitably nerdy to knit as a welcome-to-the-planet gift for my niece-to-be.  Now I just have to go buy yarn.  Well, and decide for sure on colors.  (Does pink or yellow go better with lavender and green?)

About an hour ago I sat down to start reading one of the books I got for Christmas (thanks again,  fairmer!), Wen Spencer's A Brother's Price.  The cover looks like this. 

Seventy pages in, in a fit of OMG! Wen Spencer!  Where have you been all my life! I managed to put down the book long enough to go search for more of her books on Amazon.  The results looked like this.  Scanning down that line of Baen covers, I immediately concluded, Wow, I don't want to read any of those.  

Then I, you know, got ahold of myself and went and checked out www.wenspencer.com, where I was reassured that I do want to read them, and in fact I probably want to read all of them.  But which one first?  Or, well, second, because there's still lots of A Brother's Price left to enjoy...

Last night I went out with the archery-practice gang (as a subset, through Wes, of the Wisconsin Scottish contingent) to a Milwaukee Admirals hockey game.  The Admirals (AHL affiliate of the Nashville Predators, but we won't hold that against them) won 4-0 over the Iowa Chops AND there were kilted men throwing axes down on the ice during the second intermission, so an excellent time was had by all. 

It so happened that I was sitting next to a six-year-old for the entire game, which made me unusually conscious of the sorts of behavior I was modeling/reinforcing, such as:

1. (Eleven seconds into the game:) Fistfights between grown men are FUN AND AWESOME.
2. (Throughout the game:) The chant of [Opposing Goalieeee], [Opposing Goalieeee], [Opposing Goalieeee], YOU SUCK! is pretty hilarious.
3. (Explicitly, though happily without an actual example:) You must never, ever say that the other team is never going to score a goal because as soon as you do you'll jinx it and they will score.  Because, you know, if you're going to watch hockey, you need to be superstitious and crazy about shutouts.
4. (When I was left watching him for a few minutes:) If a strange man wearing a kilt tells you stick your hand out, go for it, it's bound to result in something cool.
5. (Also explicitly, and even more happily without an actual example:) It doesn't matter who puts the puck in, if it goes into our net, the other guys get a goal.
6. (During some stoppage in play or another, by means of general approval when he did it:) The only thing better than doing enthusiastic air-guitar to All American Rejects' "It Ends Tonight" is doing enthusiastic air-microphone lip-synching with one-handed guitar flailing.  Rock on, kid.

So, in sum, YAY HOCKEY.