cleverly disguised as a responsible adult

Work pretty much sucks right now. For a more detailed rant, there will be a f-locked post later this evening. We lock because we care...and because we don't want to be a topic at the next Staff Meeting. It is not good to get on the Evil Overlady's bad side.

Instead, we focus on the happy. In no particular order, here are Ten Good Things About Today.

1. My ankle is not seriously injured. Huzzah! I spent yesterday on the couch with an ice pack and a book. It is a little stiff today, but not nearly so bad as yesterday. And by "not nearly so bad" I mean "I was able to run 3.35 miles at the gym and then hike around the dog park with the greyhound without any twinging or feeling of attempted limb secession".
   
   
2. I have the cutest dog in existence. She still won't jump into the back of the Buick, but she's figured out that the back seat is really just a couch and she doesn't even have to stand up to see out the window. She got Dog Food Soup for dinner (so that I can be relatively sure that she's getting enough water after running around in the muggy evening) and she's considering working up the energy to actually chew on her new ostrich bone. Her life is so rough.
   
   
3. We went to the Farmers' Market and Trader Joe's on Saturday and brought back a whole lot of healthy, fresh, and wonderful food. Fresh edamame, spicy cheese bread, and a pile of zucchini bread later (bought zucchini for cheap, made a lot of bread) and I was an exceptionally happy Sabine on Saturday.
   
   
4. My darling, wonderful husband who might not totally understand, but absolutely respects that I need Time To Myself if I'm going to remain sane. Even when he's not entirely looking forward to his weekly Night Of Manly Gaming, he still goes so that I can have the evening to be however quiet or musical I wish it.
   
   
5. Books. Books are made of awesome. Even though Dan Abnett couldn't write a happy ending if his life depended on it, I still liked Ravenor Rogue a whole hell of a lot. I really, really like those characters. It was a good ending to the series, even if it wasn't necessarily a good ending for, well, any of the characters involved.
   
   
6. I have the three-quarter shimmy figured out for a reasonably fast tempo with flat feet. I can't keep it going for more than a couple measures at the same tempo when I'm either on my toes or walking in a pattern more complicated than forward-and-back. The practice is paying off, though, as it's starting to sink into my "alligator brain" and I don't have to think about exactly what I'm doing, just that I want to do it.
   
   
7. I have some really awesome friends who seem to keep liking me no matter what. That's pretty amazing to consider. Wow.
   
   
8. While my body image is still not what you might consider "good", it's definitely improving. Some of the blame for that is from Downwood constantly telling me I'm gorgeous, some of it is from Miss Mona telling me that it's okay to be tall with amazingly long limbs, and some of it is finally internalizing what I've been saying for a long time: I have a TOTALLY DIFFERENT body plan than my mother and THAT'S OKAY. Seriously, if you've seen her, you know the woman is a twig. Me, I got my father's German peasant stock background and have things like hips and cleavage - things that just don't exist on her body plan. I've also got six inches on the woman, which is going to make me weigh just a little bit more than she does.
   
   At any rate, my working out and my dance classes are making me feel healthier. I know I won't get back to how skinny I was a couple of years ago, but since I can afford things like food now, I think I might be okay with it. I still detest how I carry every. excess. ounce. smack on the low front of my stomach (Empire waistlines are DEAD OUT), but my ass is getting more defined, my legs are awesome, and I've NEVER looked so good in a strappy tank top.
   
   
9. If I get off my ass one of these next couple weekends, I'll put in the work to get another certification and the bonus that goes with it. I think I might get some new BPAL. It's been a while since I had any new sniffy stuff. I should really put up my list of Get These Imps Away From Me and the LE bottles that Just Didn't Work. Hm. Maybe soon.
   
   
10. Jelly Belly jelly beans come in all sorts of marvelous flavors and can be purchased at the new Super Target that's very close to my house.

EDIT: Also, I have all the ingredients for the amazing coconut scones, I have brand new boxes of Tazo Calm and Stash Green & White Fusion at work, bananas remain delicious, my chiropractor's box of Free Samples of Biofreeze remains endless, and Amazon delivered unto me some Pearls Before Swine, the new Jasper Fforde book, and my very own copy of The Blue Girl.

Work's been kicking me up one side and down the other. Three of my customers have become very demanding, the fourth is acting like they're wanting to get things going on their installation again, and a customer that I'm covering while their primary is out is blithely ignoring the first part of "if this absolutely can't wait for him to get back, email Sabine" and they're sending every little thing my way. So I'm a little stressed out and have barely enough time to breathe while I'm at work. This is not real fun.

Things that make life pretty good anyway, in no particular order:

1. Good music - Jack Johnson's In Between Dreams, Great Big Sea's Rant and Roar, and Seanan McGuire's (cadhla) Stars Fall Home have been on continuous repeat for the past week and have kept me from killing people. My office mate finally got an office of his own, so I can use speakers instead of headphones. My favorite songs off of these three CDs are, in order, "Better Together", "Ordinary Day", and "Take Advantage of Me". Anyone who can guess why can have a cookie.
   
   
2. Good books - I recently finished Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson. It was recommended to me by the same Borders employee who told me to read Game of Throne. This book is incredibly rich - you're dropped into the middle of the story and instantly immersed into a world saturated with detail. I totally recommend this book and am pretty excited that there are more books in the series.
   
   I'm about 100 pages from the end of the third Gaunt's Ghosts book, Necropolis. Dan Abnett is a hell of a storyteller and I love his characters, but it's not a great feeling to have been reading for the last 2.5 hour plane ride and wonder whether the anti-aircraft artillery will be shooting your plane down as it descends in Mad-town. I also began reading The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss yesterday afternoon. Holy crap. Good book. Seriously good book. I wish that I didn't have a huge pile of sewing to do because I really, really want to know what happens next.
   
   I also got Downwood, Bex, and Asmoduce all hooked on the Dresden Files and we sent Val home last night with the first one. Mwahaha! I will spread the bibliophile crack to whomever I can!
   
   
3. Hot Boy TV - Supernatural rocks. We watched more of season 1 yesterday. Thankfully, those episodes weren't nearly so scary as "Asylum". I'm okay with the nasties when I'm pretty certain that they're not going to be coming after me - it's when I fall within the monsters' preferred victim demographic that I start jumping at shadows.
   
   
4. This is pretty darn shiny
   
   
5. Faire starts on Saturday!! I'm way behind on my sewing, but I think I can get the pants, frogs, and hat done for Asmoduce by the weekend. My new kirtle can wait (oh, drat, I'll just have to wear my pretty blue dress again. phooey), Downwood's other shirt can wait (he only got two new ones already from my mad sewing spree), and I can wait to make my pirate shirts since I haven't figured out the jacket at all yet.
   
   Does anyone out there have an Embellish Knit tool? I got one to make cording for the frogs and it worked great for a while, but now it's refusing to turn correctly. I think that I just need to get some WD-40 in it, but Downwood's counseling restraint and says I should get a second opinion from someone else who has one.
   
   
6. My greyhound is adorable and loves me no matter how bad of a day I'm having.
   
   
7. I suppose my husband loves me as much, but he's not nearly so cute as Rain. He's more useful around the house and a better conversationalist than she is, so I guess I'll keep him.
   
   
8. Dance class started again last week! And I'm in the Continuing level instead of Beginner! Yay! And since Mona took me aside in last week's class to remind me how to stand up straight, I'm back to making a conscious effort to keep my ribcage up off my low abs and quit trying to pretend like I'm shorter than I really am.
   
   Bonus: it makes my rack look fabulous. Who knew?
   
   
9. Big Fish Games came up with a new Minesweeper-ish game called Gemsweeper. I think I've played too much of it over the last week, though I cut back once I started dreaming about the game.
   
   
10. I have the best friends EVER.
    
    
11. Though my fake-history!muse has totally abandoned me for parts unknown, Downwood and I have pretty much finished fleshing out the world for the game I'm planning on running. I have a couple more things to try to get straight in my head (gods? magic? what, now?), then I'll be making a massive post with game premise, character concept guidelines, and theoretical schedule. Honestly, the night I run will be determined by what night I have dance class. It also won't start until August, so no worries.
    
    
12. I've been going to the gym more frequently than before. I also got Suhaila's Stretch and Tone DVD. It's still kicking my ass, but my legs are definitely improving in strength and flexibility. I can't tell if I'm losing any of my belly flab yet, but Downwood says I'm looking better in my face and neck, so that's a bonus. Also, the TA for class last week has about the same about of tummy rolls as I do and she looked great while dancing, so I think I'm probably okay. Now to just try to shake the lingering notion that I'm horribly overweight and shouldn't be allowed out of the house or be allowed to eat again unless I spend two to three hours on the treadmill every day (Thanks, Mom!)
    
    Yay for therapy. Seriously. Yay.
    
    
13. There are some webcomics that made me laugh, but since those are on my home machine, I'll wait to post 'em until later.
    

Work is still keeping me busy enough to do only work things during the 9-11 hours that I'm here.  I kind of miss Gchat, LJ, and Dead Awaken, but I'm coping. 

Why so busy?  We found a major problem at my Favorite Customer, so I've been helping/hand-holding our other tech through the process of calming down the customer and fixing the problem.  I got a MASSIVE influx of emails yesterday afternoon when I finally notified the rest of the company about the problem, how to diagnose it, and how to fix it.  So far, I've done a very good job of hanging on to my patience when getting the same question over and over and over and over and over and then sending out an update.  My team lead and my People In Charge of Project know that I'm doing a good job, too, so that makes things a little easier.

This past weekend was a very angry one at Casa de Downwood et al.  Most of the hugely negative fallout from it is over, but since none was actively directed at folks inside the house, it's not too surprising that it's blowing over fairly quickly.  Suffice it to say, things could be better, but I'm not going to complain with how they are now.

The dog is back to her usual self.  She will go up to anyone to try to convince them that she's a neglected greyhound who never gets any love, no pettin's, no treats, and no attention.  She'll make you believe that we never feed her or buy her new toys.  Won't you please give her some love? *big, brown puppy eyes*heavy sigh*

Tuesday was the first lesson of my second beginners' class with Mona.  She knows my name now, which means it's easier for her to tell me what I'm doing wrong.  I think this is a very good thing.  She'll either pull me out of my bad habits or beat them out of me.  Either way, I'm happy with that.  I got scolded for poor foot position twice and for not having good posture.  (Anyone who's seen me in person would know that that last comment makes a whole hell of a lot of sense.)  Mona came over and lifted my rib cage about an inch out of my lower back.  My back muscles are complaining about being in different places over the last few days, but I've made a conscious effort to sit and stand taller than I have in years. 

And that screech you just heard was my mother somehow realizing that Someone Else finally showed me how to actually stand straight and be proud of this extra height.

Over the weekend I got hit upside the head by gaming plotbunnies.  Downwood's helping me develop the world a little more before I throw the door open for players.  Heck, I don't even know what system I'm going to use yet...though it won't be the homebrewed kludge of MageExaltednWoD, that's for damn sure.  With some luck and planning, I'm hoping for a game with overtones of Song of Ice and Fire.  We'll see how it shapes up.

Otherwise, I'm still crocheting a blanket for my brand new step-neice, fuzzy hats for donation, and a sweater with instructions that make absolutely no sense.  I'm madly cleaning my house and procrastinating the hard parts of some new minis.  Life, though throwing curve balls at me, still pretty much rocks.

In a somewhat bulleted as my attention span is rivaling that of an average chipmunk.

• Many thanks to suibhne_geilt for pointing out the MapMyRun site. It pulls in the Google map for an area, then you can plot points on it to figure out how far you go on a run. I've mapped out a new walking route for Rain and me to try out this afternoon. Glee!
  
• I am a slacker friend, else I would have posted many happy birthday wishes for revrb yesterday. Mea culpa, my friend. Maybe next year I'll get to blame you being in China for the belatedness of my good tidings?
  
• My mom, the wonder accountant, managed to get Downwood and me a full order of magnitude more back on our taxes than we'd guessed! Also, though I didn't have my 1099 in my hand, I was only off by $0.59 in my estimate of how much interest I'd accumulated in 2006. Booyah.
  
• We drove down to my parents' place on Saturday, hit Mom's office for tax preparation and drinks and snacks with her coworkers, went to church, watched the NCAA wrestling championships (not quite as pretty as 300, but I'd forgotten how much fun watching wrestling is), and chilled out.
  
• Sunday we hiked around Lake Geode and took Rain along. She had a ball tromping through the leaves and seeing critters skittering around. After lunch, Downwood and I headed back to Madison, laden with much dead deer. Mmm...venison...
  
• The trip back was exceptionally exciting. Downwood had to slam on the brakes to not rear-end the person ahead of us on the interstate who had just done the same thing. When he did this, Rain flew forward and smacked her head on the windshield and her chest into the console. I gathered all 70 lb of greyhound into my lap, though her tush was kind of perched on the soda bottles in between our seats. We took the very next exit and spent some time walking around to make sure that no one was hurt. Very luckily, the only casualty was one of the air vents on the dash that got a little cracked - everyone else was fine.
  
• Yesterday morning, Downwood had a 7 am dentist appointment and I had meeting at 7:50 at work. I said, "Don't lock the door" as I took Rain out at 6:50. I got back into the house at 8 when our landlord people showed up with the keys (our neighbors are nice and called the pager for me since I had neither keys nor cellphone). That inauspicious start combined poorly with the stomach ooginess that started sometime Sunday night, so I took half a sick day and then worked from home for the afternoon.
  
• Today work has been busy. I completed my part on a couple of projects, have met my goals well in advance of my expectations, figured out some tricky bits of code, and have generally had a productive day. I'm kind of proud of all that I've accomplished thus far. My list of things to do has actually shrunk for once and it's not because I went through and did all the easy things!
  
• Tonight, Ms vlammers is coming to my house. She'll be spending the next couple of days looking for grad student housing in the Mad-town area so that she can start at the UW Real Soon Now. Glee!
  
• I decided that I'm going to take another intro belly dance course to make sure that I've mastered the basics. I've had seven/eight years to drill wrong movements into myself, so trying to make that up in six weeks isn't going to work so well. I'm very excited about the upcoming course, though I already know I'm going to be missing at least one or two of the eight weeks. This makes me sad, as I dearly love dancing.
  
• My sewing/craft room needs cleaning. I can't exactly see the floor in there anymore. It might be time for me to throw out my various notebooks and class manuals from undergrad and grad school. Since I have no idea when or in what field I'll be returning to academia, it doesn't make much sense to keep this much paper around.
  
• Actually, my house in general needs to be cleaned. In lieu of any house elves showing up, I should probably start work on that soon. I might wait until after my back isn't trying to secede from the rest of my body, though. That sounds like a better plan. Yay for chiropractors and giant bottles of Advil!

Thankfully, my weekend is not yet over.  Thanks to the magic of paid vacation, I'm staying home tomorrow.  This will be a very good thing for me, my customers, my coworkers, and my friends.  I was getting much too close to burnout to be doing anyone any good at my desk.  Though, I've been writing some very "creative" code, so it's not totally a bad thing.

I think I'll go out tomorrow and take some pictures of the snow.  Primarily, I'd like to digitally capture the wall of snow at the end of our minuscule parking lot.  It's taller and wider than I am and about twice as long.  It's a really impressive pile of snow.  Luckily, downwood and I didn't have to move all of it by ourselves.  This morning we dug out George enough to get him out - the Jeep didn't really require any shoveling at all.  Then we waited about eight hours for our neighbor's buddy-who-has-a-plow-on-his-truck to come by and do the rest of the work for us.  So long as they don't start blasting bad techno and throwing keggers in the back yard (like our last neighbors), I think these people can stay.

Over the last two days, I've crocheted five hats for afghans for Afghans.  The Madison Area Crochet Guild has decided to make a point of making blankets or hats or mittens or scarves or anything we can come up with for charity.  Hats are easy, Smiley's Yarn is cheap, and I lack the ability to sit still.  I'm kind of tired of hats now, so I'm moving on to scarves and, maybe, mittens.  When I work through my yarn stash, I'll let myself make a skirt, shawl, and sweater that I've decided I would like.

For now, I plan to have another cup of tea and enjoy the rest of my weekend.  With some luck, I'll have something worthwhile to post tomorrow.  I keep meaning to sit down and put wit, wisdom, and snark into this LJ, but real life keeps distracting me.   I'd just like to say....ooh! shiny!

So far Lush's American Cream is winning the head-to-head competition with Jungle and Veganese for Best Lush Conditioner for Sabine's hair.  It performs beautifully with New!Hair, Soak and Float, and Rehab.  It has an amazing vanilla fragrance that actually sticks to my hair for most of the morning.  Jungle has a yummier scent, but doesn't stick at all.  I like the lemon of Veganese, but it's just not making me as much of a pretty, pretty princess as American Cream.

OPI's I'm Not Really A Waitress might just be the perfect shade of red for me.  It's got enough blue that it doesn't make my skin look cadaverous and the shine is downright gorgeous.  Now, if I could just get a bottle of the same top coat as the salon, maybe I'd be able to keep paint on my nails for more than 30 hours without chipping it.  Because nothing says "class" like bright nail polish with several large chunks missing.

I'm not sure what my dentist did to one of my upper molars, but it can't have been good for the tooth.  For the last month or so, it's been getting steadily more uncomfortable.  He mentioned that it might need a root canal back in October, but I managed to squeak by without one.  I have an appointment on March something and I'll know more about it then.  Stupid teeth.

I got a couple of inches hacked off of my hair on Sunday.  It hadn't had scissors touch it in...probably almost two years.  There were a TON of split ends that needed removed.  It looks and feels better now.  I'm still planning on donating it when it gets long enough that I'll still be able to have chin/shoulder length hair after they take the 10" they need for the wig.  I figure that being set back by four months isn't that big of a deal, especially when it'll be better quality in the end.  Downwood also got his hair cut and left a small Pomeranian worth of hair behind.  It was really impressive.

If Lush made a shower jelly with the same cinnamon/clove scent as the Marathon bubble bar, Christmas Kisses bubble bar, or the Wiccy Magic Muscles massage bar, I would be a gleeful Sabine.  Instead, I've been using the (discontinued) Spank Me With Saplings and the Woosh shower jellies.  Both are very good at quick wake-ups and Woosh has the same potent calming agents in shower jelly form as it does in temple balm form.  The Woosh combines really nicely with the Cordelia perfume from BPAL.  It is very similar to one of my longtime favorites - Arcana - but where Arcana is an herbalist's scent, Cordelia is a wise woman: same base notes, but somehow richer and more feminine.

Speaking of BPAL, I have a box of imps I'm going to be looking to unload in the not-too-distant future.  When I've gone through my stash, I'll post the list.  I have some 5 ml bottles of LE scents that I'm going to put on eBay.

I finished re-reading de Lint's Dreams Underfoot collection last week, so I started up with the Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks for the bus to staff meeting yesterday and the gym today.  I am woefully unprepared for the eventual zombie invasion.  I need to start scouting land and gear to build my eventual sanctum.  In the event that the zombies never arise, I will have my Evil Genius base well underway.  I don't really see a downside to this plan.

A couple weeks ago, I started running a very different type of game.  I took the concept of the Letter Game and ran with it.  The results are very surprising in that "jump up and down for joy" sort of way.  th_lttr_gm is the community where the various stories are getting posted as they're being written.  It's way too much fun, even if I'm about to hunt down my Alice!muse and threaten her with extreme bodily harm until she tells me exactly what happened in the mine.  Yes, I sound crazy.  No, I don't care.

Also, oatmeal with walnuts, applesauce, cinnamon, and maple syrup makes for a very good dinner, especially with a glass of milk and a mug of Stash's Decaf Pumpkin Spice tea.  It makes for many happy sighs and mutterings of how good life is.

So I kind of made a bet with myself that I'd be able to post daily throughout December. I have 11 minutes left to make good on that bet.

Today I went grocery shopping but forgot to get bootlaces and parchment paper. I did remember paintbrushes and snowman tins, so tomorrow won't be a total writeoff with store hopping.

George needs a bath: hopefully tomorrow will be warm enough again that I can send one of the menfolk to take care of it.

We picked up our wedding album this afternoon. Holy crap. We had the absolute best photographer EVER!! This book is sooo pretty. Mmm...pretty pictures! And, since we have all 750+ pictures on a DVD, we'll be able to post some of them tomorrow. Yay pictures!

And I'm about to turn into a pumpkin, so good night!

A weekend in a nutshell is much better than a weekend in the nuthouse. I think. Though, I guess it really depends on what kind of nut you find surrounding you. It it's a pecan, I recommend staying. If it's a cashew, head for the looney bin.

Anyway, here are the highlights from the weekend and from today:

• Though it was nice getting out of town a little early on Friday, I'm not convinced that early mornings are my friend. Getting to work at 7 is one thing, getting there at 6 is an entirely different matter. It kind of sucked because I was leaving a lot of work undone when I left at 4, but staying until done would have meant 7 or 8, so I gave up.
  
• The drive down was, thankfully, uneventful. We made it to my parents' house safely and raided the fridge when we got there. I was tired enough that I didn't want to go down to the high school's homecoming football game, so we curled up on the couch with our books: Post Captain for him and Fragile Things for me. Mom and Bob got home and we caught up on gossip, life stuff, and Mom started trying to stress me out about the wedding.
  
• On Saturday morning, Mom and Bob headed out to be all civic-minded and pick up trash in the ditches. I slept in a bit, showered, read my book, and considered making something appley out of the 5-gallon Bucket Of Apple Doom. At some point in here, I managed to head over to fredericks.com and spend some money. cabell, the head's-up was very much appreciated...and I'm sure Downwood will thank you in about 6 weeks.
  
• We ended up making a couple of apple cakes and a really big pan of apple crisp. I consider this a warmup for next weekend after Downwood and I go to the orchard. I lurve baking with apples. Mmm...
  
• While Mom and I were cooking, Bob and Downwood were out shooting at things and being all manly in the woods. No, I didn't ask for details. No, I don't want any details volunteered. There are things that I do not need to know.
  
• Mom's quest to make me as stressed out as her was slightly derailed by the arrival of my sister. I had to give her the books and treats that I've collected for her and she gave me a book, too. I now have a copy of Runny Babbit to go with my other Shel Silverstein books. lilith_13 rocks.
  
• I ended up going back to fredericks.com to buy a few more things. See, Mom was complaining about not being able to fill out the top that our stepbrother picked out for her to wear. He'd said that it'd work fine with a good push-up bra. Sis and I agreed, so when her back was turned, we hit the internet. I expect to get a call from her in the next 7 days or so asking about the lingerie that showed up at her door. I plan to claim that I had my identity stolen, but wasn't that nice of them to get her a present? I think this will work well.
  
• The afternoon was spent with my sister, football, and a pitcher of margaritas. After a couple glasses of tequila and beer (Don't ask.) we headed to church. Oddly enough, the readings, the music, and the sermon were all about marriage and how to succeed at it. No, it wasn't a "sign". It just kind of happened that way. Really. Yes, I'm going to stick to that story.
  
• After church, we headed to this little hole-in-the-wall bar. This is the kind of place that I grew up going to with my stepfather. The greasy, smoky dive in the middle of nowhere that just happens to have Fucking Amazing Food. This one is in a town that does not exist on the map of Iowa, but had the best fried chicken that I've EVER had. It was just as much of a religious experience as Mass. The ONE THING that would have made it better was a better beer. Miller Lite is just not that tasty - I don't care that it's cheap and plentiful. (Yes, the kegs at our reception are going to be good beer. I can't believe you even asked that.)
  
• We got home at the end of the first quarter of the Iowa State-Nebraska football game. Yay for watching our beloved Cyclones on national TV! I'm just going to leave that there. Yes, I will remember the joy of getting to watch my team and not the heartbreak and frustration of watching the refs screw them over and then the entire team snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. No, I'm not bitter. Nope, not me.
  
• Sunday morning Bob made biscuits and sausage gravy. After this, Mom, Sis, and I went to get my wedding dress fitted. The seamstress's house was absolutely beautiful. My dress is beautiful. Unfortunately, I haven't been running nearly enough lately. Dammit. It fit in February, but not yesterday. Mom latched onto this and I have not heard anything else from her since. (Though, she's not bitching about anything else, so I think I'll keep it.) I do have to go find new shoes, though. Preferably, something with a negative heel. I'm too tall - the dress is barely long enough when I'm in bare feet. Still, even without getting zipped all the way, I had a perfect hourglass figure and looked...wow. I love that dress.
  
• The Bears game...I'm not so much certain that we can call it a "game" as a "schooling". Downwood was much pleased by this.
  
• The trip home was also uneventful, and made more fun by some reading and a lot of talking. Someday, we may run out of things to say to each other. I hope that day is years and years away.
  
• My To Do list for wedding stuff actually seems somewhat manageable, which is a nice change from the AAAAHHHHHHHHH that it was before. My To Do list at work keeps growing and I've been called twice at home tonight by people needing my opinion on what they're doing. I feel important! Or, it could be a sign that I need to share what I'm doing with more people so that the knowledge is easier to find.
  
• My exercise routine has just been increased to much more aerobic activity. I think that I'm going to be fine with the dress, and if I can get back to where I was last summer, I'll be much happier with the Me In The Mirror.
  
• I did a little game planning this weekend. Got some ideas bouncing around of ways to drop mountains on people. If only good things happened to them, it wouldn't be interesting, would it? This led to the side effect of wanting to actually write up the back story, which led to the following exchange.
  
  Me: I can write in first person. I can write pure dialog. Hell, I can even write fairly well in second person. This third person crap? Absolutely impossible.
  Downwood: No, you can do this. Just start typing and you'll get into it. It doesn't matter if you have to totally rewrite the first chapter. It's okay to have to try again.
  Me: I can try again? Okay, I'll just apply that bit of wisdom to this whole wedding thing. Gee, suddenly I feel a lot better knowing that I can just erase it and start again when I feel like I've gotten better at marriage.
  Him: Touche.

There's not much to report from my general direction lately. I've been working fairly long hours, which tends to leave me brain-dead and exhausted in the evenings. Granted, I've made sure to take breaks in the middle of the day to do things like check LJ, write a bit of plot, and read some webcomics, but 11-hour days take their toll after a while.

I've started doing Pilates in the morning and evening again. I've been feeling physically icky lately and decided to do something to change it, rather than just complaining to Downwood. Oh, I'm still complaining, but I'm also eating better and getting some exercise in. I need to find a way to get to the gym to do some actual weights and running, but the stretching, bending, and isometrics are making me feel like I'm accomplishing something.

Gaming is going well. I'm currently in two games and running one. I'm prepping a character history for a new game and have been hearing rumors of another one starting. It's entertaining and relaxing to get to play make-believe for a couple hours a week, and it's something that helps keep me relatively sane.

The wedding plans are getting close to As Done As Possible. There's a small pile of invitations that still need to go out, I need to find a makeup and hair team, we both need measured for our spiffy duds, and there's a medium-long list of people who need call-backs before the big day. We're down to weeks instead of months. Weeks. Yikes. Yay!

I've been branching back out into other crafts than painting lately. I have a mini sitting on my palette that's all base-coated, but not highlighted or shaded at all. I'm not sure that it's going to work out like I want it to, but it will definitly be interesting to try. Now that it's getting colder out, I've pulled my crochet hook and yarn out of the closet. I love making scarves, even when the pattern is insanely complicated, but will end up with a very, very warm scarf. I hope to have some pictures of the new garb that I made. The bodice turned out especially well and I'm very proud of the pieces as a whole.

In about an hour, I leave on a business trip. I'm heading to Norfolk, Virginia, to do some training and reassuring of our customer that (1) I know what I'm doing, (2) all hope is not lost, and (3) they don't need to yell and shout in order to get attention. I'm back home on Friday evening, so that makes me very happy. I approve of short trips that don't involve either 12-hour shifts or weekend days at work.

I'm going to grab my lunch out of the fridge so that I don't have to eat airport food. I'm not looking forward to having to check a bag, but I really wanted to bring along toothpaste. It's the little things in life, ya know?

Today I:

• Finished the base for the mini I almost finished yesterday. It is beauteous and impressive.
• Began and finished The Fourth Bear. This book rocks! I giggled a lot and am mightily impressed with Fforde's storytelling...as usual.
• Repainted my fingernails and toenails in preparation for the bridal shower tomorrow. Shoot me.
• Gave my dog lots of attention.
• Killed a dragon with Downwood.
• Made a pretty darn good dinner out of mediocre leftovers.
• Packaged up a ton of bbq'd pork for the freezer to be thawed and fed to guests in November.
• Slept in.
• Had a pretty darn good day, all things considered.