Mary Kay

11:29 am: Interstitial Arts Foundation Auction
Guys! There are wonderful things up for auction to raise money for the Interstitial Arts Foundation. New stuff goes up every day; auctions end every day. I'm doing some Christmas shopping there. (Beats the mall! Especially this weekend.)

One of the items currently up is one of Laramie Sasseville's art bookmarks. I got one of these in another charity auction and it's so gorgeous I use it as house jewelry rather than a bookmark. It's wrapped around one of the newel posts on the stairway so that it's one of the first things you see when you come in my house!

I have also just bid on this skirt which is gorgeous and size adjustable, either by you or the original maker.

And here I go cutting me own throat, the piece I most want is Freddie Baer's necklace. The bidding ON THIS PIECE ends at 5:11 pm today, but I don't know what time zone that's in.

There is so much wonderful stuff up. Kate Schaefer's cocktail hat - Kate's hats are really wonderful and she's offered a donation to match the size of the winning bid. Which is currently only $52 - do you have *any* idea what you'd pay for a hat like that in some chi-chi store? That really cool bracelet with the moon. Some beautiful earrings.

Dudes - GO SHOPPING!

07:21 pm: Rollin', rollin', rollin'
Oh, er. I keep forgetting to mention. We'll be in Portland for Orycon, arriving sometime in the early afternoon on Friday.

In other travel news, as a result of LaserMotive winning that challenge, Jordin has been invited to speak at a conference in Luxembourg. We have 2 days in Brussels, then 3 in Luxembourg and then a day after the conference as yet undetermined. I'm happy to hear recommendations from people on things to do/see and places to eat. Since the conference is paying for our hotel in Luxembourg (!), we've splurged on a nice hotel in central Brussels. We're already planning on the Magritte museum, the cocoa museum, and the Christmas Market there. Haven't made any plans yet for the stay in Luxembourg because I have no idea what the schedule will be like.

03:52 pm: Shiny!
Teh anhedonia is pretty thick on the ground around here these days, but I had a lovely lunch at Place Pigalle. A nice wander through the Market and came home to find this had arrived. Well, since I got the matte purple, shiny isn't maybe apropos, but it's making me smile. It only took 11 months to find just the right case...

05:03 pm: Speaking of Criminal Minds
Check this out. http://criminalmacros.blogspot.com/
I particularly like the Wanna make out? one. They're all pretty good, but damn, they need more Garcia.

03:31 pm: Woot!
In an interview, Paget Brewster (Emily) jokes about a Criminal MInds spin-off, "“We’re calling it ‘Criminal Minds: Caliente.’ Like it’s going to be in Miami and everyone’s going to be 22 and super hot,” she says."

OMG, OMG. A Criminal Minds/Dexter crossover ep! Woo!

06:28 pm: Tea!
I've just ordered tea samples from 2 online suppliers. It's one of the things I do when the winter closes in. Except for the Korakundah Estate tea, these are all 1 ounce samples. From Upton tea we have

Sacher Blend
New England Harvest Blend
Pai Mu Tan "Grapefruit"

From Chado Tea I have

Wild Monkey Marsala
Kenilworth Estate Kandy OP
Keemun Mao Feng
Rooibos Campfire
Korakundah Estate Organic FOP

If you followed the links, you'll note that all of them except the Pai Mu Tan are black teas, with added flavors. I actively dislike oolong and I'm sort of 'meh' about green teas. (If anyone has a truly excellent green tea to suggest, I'd be happy to hear about it.) The Pai Mu Tan is a white tea with grapefruit flavoring added. I'm just starting to learn about white tea. The tea house down the street has a white chai that I really like.

I like flavored teas. High quality teas with mostly natural flavorings that is. Some of the cheap artificially flavored things are really awful. I'm a sucker for chais of all sorts. Chado has a lot of them and I have all of theirs I think. As I believe I mentioned before, though, I like my chais without milk and sugar. I'm a real sucker for anything flavored with spices and for most citrus fruit flavorings. I'm currently drinking my first pot of the Upton New England Harvest Blend. It's a bit of a disappointment because none of the apple, cinnamon, almond, or vanilla flavors are coming through very much. I'll try it again with a longer steeping time perhaps.

I think that next I'm going to try the Sacher tea. It's got a blend of Darjeeling and Ceylon as the base for the flavor and Darjeeling is my very favorite tea. Of course, tea is a highly context dependent thing and my mood may be for something completely different.

Tea at the Queen Mary Tea Room with matociquala and friend this past summer introduced me to Nilgiri tea which I really really liked. I've bought a couple since then and when ahead and ordered 4 ounces of the Korakundah Estate as I was pretty sure I'd like it. FOP, by the way, is flowery orange pekoe, which is a black tea leaf grade. It's an Indian tea.

The Keemun is a China tea and relatively recent developed as teas go. It's supposed to be fruity and flowery and slightly sweet. I ordered the sample but even if I like it am unlikely to order more. This particular Keemun is supposed to be one of the very best and retails for about $95 per pound! Unless I really really like it!

The Kenilworth is a Ceylon tea which I don't think I've tried before this just looked like a good one.

And really, who could resist a tea with Wild Monkey in the name, esp. when it's supposed to taste of marsala!

What kinds of tea do you like best? What are you drinking now?

ETA: Oh, I forgot about the rooibos. Obviously not a black tea either. I haven't tried rooibos before and I decided it was time I did.

12:38 am: Uncommon Sense
Bruce Schneier has an excellent article on security theatre and its follies and what to do instead. One excellent paragraph

Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we're doing the terrorists' job for them.

I wish that could be injected whole into the brains of our political establishment.

03:56 am: Cool Video from Contest
If you go here you can see a cool video of our first climb. The actual climb begins at about 4:15 and hits the top @ 4 minutes later.

01:17 am: Still Not Dead
The day after my last post, I headed off to San Jose, in the company of nisi_la for The World Fantasy Convention. It was a nice con with lots of excellent looking books. I specify looking because, well, I've read several of the stories in Eclipse 3 and a couple in Lovecraft Unbound, and I'm kinda underwhelmed. Mildly liked the Bear/Monette story in LU, but spotted the big surprise early. I'd like to read more in that universe though. (HP Lovecraft meets Alice in Wonderland) I've started Niccola Griffith's story "It Takes Two" in E3 and it's looking promising. I'm beginning to wonder if it's possible to sell the kind of stories I want to write, i.e., the kind I want to read which don't seem to be making the anthologies much these days. Have put down the Poe tribute anthology somewhere and can't find it because the house is a pit.

The weather in San Jose was wonderful, sunny and warm but not too hot. The bakery on the hotel's other tower was wonderful. Saw and talked to interesting people and only had to have dinner on my own once. Dinner Sunday night with klages, nisi_la, and madrobins was beyond excellent as was dancing in the fountain afterward.

After the con I drove down to the area around Edwards Air Force Base for the power beaming part of the Space Elevator Competition, a NASA Centennial Challenge. We didn't win the top prize, though we came closer than anyone else, but we did win the second tier prize, $900,000. That is, the LaserMotive team won it, we'll get a big share of it though. (Nearly enough to pay of the 2nd mortgage which helped finance this!) You can read more about it here and here if you like. That last entry has pictures, including one of Jordin and Tom with the big cardboard check. (Rumour is we get the real one in January.)

Then I drove back up to SFO to catch my flight home. It's nice to be home, but the place is a pit. Also, I'm piteously behind on all my con and Interfictions work. I thought I'd get it done this past week because it involved lots of hurry up and wait time, but getting a connection proved to be problematic.

So the backlog of stuff to do, the messy house, and the cold rainy Seattle weather are all conspiring to make me want to crawl back in bed and stay there. I saw the doctor again today, and the meds are still not helping enough. However, we're upping my light consumption and seeing if that helps. I sure hope so. Being depressed is so boring and I'm being excessively irritable this time 'round.

I'm sitting here drinking my favorite tea from my favorite mug (A smallish white one bearing the legend, "My next husband will be normal," but feeling pretty darn blah. Which is just ridiculous. Esp. since I also had a great lunch at my favorite lunch place.

Catch you later

06:04 pm: Nausea Rising
I swear, if I ever give up being a political/news junkie it will all be down to Joe Lieberman. I realize he's actually a fully owned subsidiary of the insurance companies who own most of Connecticut, but can't you guys do *something* to get rid of him?

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/revenge-by-digby-ah-it-was-so.html

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/joe_lieberman_full_blown_wingnut/

He's been all over Olbermann and Maddow tonight too, and I keep having to hit my mute button. Not only can I not bear to listen to him, I can even stand to hear other people talking about him. It sometimes get overwhelmingly attractive to fantasize about what I might do if diagnosed with a terminal disease...

06:46 pm: AKICILJ
So, I'm looking for suggestions, preferably short stories, of stories told from the point of view of a mythological beast, i.e., unicorn, dragon, gryphon, whatever. Thank you!

07:57 pm: Whew!
Immediately after my post about how I was writing and this cool writing alarm on my phone to make me remember it, I, of course, quit writing. Ok, I've been sick. Nasty URI that leaves one exhausted and wrung out. It's all Jordin's fault. He had it first. Well, of the humans. Two of cats also appear to have also had a cold during this period. Lots of violent sneezing, mild temperature, warm dry nose. Circe first and then Miles. They appear to be over it. Every time I think I am, I go out to do something and then collapse.

However, I am sitting in Remedy Teas, as is usual on Thursday afternoon, and have written 300 words on a REALLY HARD story for Deathless Pose. It's actually combining 2 of the themes and is digging into my history with my mother. You can see how that might be tricky.

I've had a couple of appointments with my Psych. The first time we upped the Cymbalta to 80mg (from 60) and that doesn't seem to have helped much. The suicidal ideation is gone but all other symptoms present and accounted for. So we've upped the dosage to 100mg to see what happens. We've also talked about some of my other issues and general emotional makeup. At the end of the first session a couple weeks ago, he gave me his Diagnostic Manual and asked me to read the signs/symptoms of Schizoid Personality Disorder and tell him which of them applied to me. I didn't think most of the did, but there were enough to make me uneasy. So I went home and did more research, in the course of which I discovered Avoidant Personality Disorder. Holy Shit! Somebody's been looking inside my head!

So I brought this up and we discussed it some. He says it's actually a good thing as it is much easier to deal with than the other. I asked if it was caused by the pretty much constant rejection in the first half of my life. That, he says, and possibly genetics as well. The prescription for dealing with it? Practice being with people more. I point out that I do that a *lot* at cons - where I pretty much feel safe -- and he says that I need to do it at home. Where I do, pretty much, spend most of my time solitary. So, all you Seattlites, up for movies or shopping or tea or lunch or something? I am, in fact, heading down to Steamcon tomorrow afternoon to see what's up so if you see me there, talk to me ok?

I've felt pretty good today, physically. It's been up and down otherwise. As I left the doctor's office I saw a woman standing on a corner where I was stopped at a light. She had dyed her hair the same brilliant yellows and oranges as autumn leaves. It was gorgeous and made me smiley. I stuck my head out the window and told her it was great hair.

Finally, I just socialized with nisi_la. We had tea and cookies and then went out to dinner together. (Life is uncertain; eat dessert first.) It was fun & relaxed.

03:40 pm: Man, This is Weird!
It's been a bit of a strange year for Jordin. This guy and this guy are both colleagues/professional acquaintances of his. Stew Nozette is the one who got up VIP tickets for the shuttle launch in 1992. Andrew Pakhomov and Jordin have worked together for years putting on the ISBEP conferences. I've met them both. This is just really strange.

06:51 pm: Squee!
I am currently horizontal on the couch. One cat is lying between my legs using her right paw to wash her face. Another cat is curled up near my feet licking her belly. The third cat is in the chair next to the courch industriously cleaning his left forepaw. Heh. Lucky lucky me.

05:16 pm: Attention King County voters!
Forward from email

A big mistake by the King County Elections office is causing huge numbers of King County voters to overlook I-1033 on their ballots. I-1033 is Tim Eyman's latest effort to slash funding for schools, health care, and other public services.

Make sure you don't miss it! I-1033 is on the bottom, left-hand corner of the first page, underneath the instructions, where it's very easy to overlook.

The key to beating I-1033 is a big no vote in King County and Seattle -- where voters are strongly opposed. But thousands of King County voters are overlooking I-1033 on their ballots, even when they want to vote No.

Please forward this message to your friends and family members! This election is going to be incredibly close. We can't afford to have any No voters overlooking I-1033 on the ballot. We appreciate your help getting the word out about this confusion.


Thanks for your help,

Erik and the entire staff at Fuse

04:28 pm: Urk
Someone on one of the Criminal Minds fanfic communities is doing a fic in 5 parts based on the 5 stages of death. Today's installment was Depression and started out with this quote

What we call despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope. ~ George Eliot

That made my heart hurt and my eyes fill up with tears.

05:50 pm: A Confession
I drink tea and lots of it. Mostly iced tea, but once the weather gets nippy, hot tea too. I am a convert to using an electric kettle and fresh boiling water and that part of the tea ritual. Where I part from most recommended tea brewing prescriptions is steeping time. I usually only brew for half the recommended time. In part, this is because I am a wimpy American, but it's also in part that I don't add milk to my tea. Or sugar. Only occasionally lemon. I'm a great fan of chai style teas, but I don't add milk and sugar to them either. I'm just weird that way. So if I'm not adding milk and sugar steeping black tea for 3 minutes makes something too powerful and astringent for me to drink.

This is not helped by the fact that I have a dry mouth problem. The tannins and acids don't get washed away by saliva so their effect is heightened. (Paradoxically, one of the reasons I drink a lot of tea is that its astringency is good for washing away the sugar from sweet things that I don't make enough saliva to take care of.)

So there you have it. I brew my white teas for 2 minutes, my green teas for 1.5-2 minutes, my black teas for 1.5 minutes. I up those times a little if I'm making a big pot, but usually I'm just brewing enough for my immediate consumption. Sometimes I cut the black to 1 minute.

Whew, what a load off my mind. Now I don't have to worry about someone accidentally finding out I'm a tea heretic.

09:23 pm: Do 5 Things Make a Post?
1. So the trip to the eye doctor went well today. This was a follow up because at the exam last month he said the pressure in my eyes was higher than he liked. However, the pressure was lower today, though still the high end of normal, and my field of vision test was excellent. So probably not glaucoma. But I need to have those tests every year at the very least.

2. Well, the Space Elevator Contest is officially scheduled (again). This time for the week of Nov. 2. So it looks like I'll need to change my tickets to fly down to SoCal immediately after World Fantasy.

3. I needed to pick up some household stuff at Target and I kept wandering around the store knowing I was forgetting something but not able to pull up what it was. Halfway home I remembered I needed the special Bio-Bags to line the compost pail. Sigh.

4. Am reading Ariel by Steven R. Boyett because it was enthusiastically recommended by everybody and her GRD. A little over halfway through and I have to say, I'm enjoying it.

5. Didn't sleep well again last night so here I am, 9:30 on Friday evening deciding it's late enough to go to bed. Getting old sucks. Yes, not as bad as the alternative, but still.

02:41 pm: Updatage
So I've been to the psych and we're upping my med from 60mg to 80mg/day of Cymbalta. Since it comes in 20mg caps, this just means adding an additional capsule to the 60mg dose. I go again in 2 weeks. I trust y'all will let me know if I seem to be developing any (unusual for me) weirdness.

I also just want to say that I love living in a time and place (Cap Hill in Seattle) where same sex couples feel safe enough to flirt, hold hands, and touch in public. Watching two men flirt with each other is so endearing.

04:03 pm: Huh
So I have an appointment tomorrow with my psych. Picked up prescription refills from the pharmacy. Where, mirable dictu, there was no line!

Drove to Chase and while looking for check I had to deposit, found the additional prescription I'd meant to talk to the pharmacy about. The people in Chase were friendly and helpful. It was a Pay Pal withdrawal which had done it. Interesting as PP is not supposed to do that - they're supposed to charge the credit card if there isn't enough money in the checking acct. And I always change the payment form to credit card anyway. Chase had also charged me $34 (!) because the account was not brought up to a plus balance by the end of the business day. Which they waived when I explained I'd gotten the notice yesterday but this was the first time I'd been able to get in. Still have to deal with PP, but that went well! I didn't even have to cry. They really must have kept the WaMu people!

Back to the pharmacy where there was still no line! My pain med is a bit unusual and this Walgreen's, the one 5 blocks from my house, doesn't carry it. I've been getting it filled at another, larger one. However, they will order it and keep it in stock for me. Ordering it can take up to 2 weeks (!) but I knew that so I asked them just after I got a refill so they've got more than 3 weeks to do it. No problem they say!

Dropped into the Hopvine for a sandwich. The chutney on said sandwich turned out to be way too hot for me to eat (I R a total chili pepper wimp). I hadn't thought to ask - chutney is usually sweet isn't it? I ate most of the turkey and the side salad, but they still gave me a substantial discount without me even asking! Why don't I go there for lunch more often? It's a kind of limited menu, but it's good and they're always really nice when I'm in there.

So here I am sitting at Remedy Tea eating a chocolate pepper cookie and drinking white tea chai feeling well more than 1/2 inch from tears. What the heck is going on around here!?! >Looks around suspiciously.< You'd think somebody wanted me to feel good or something.

If I don't wilt from lack of sleep (ok, 3 1/2 hrs between 7am and 10:30am) it looks good for class tonight. Last week, the teacher critiqued my fairy tale as too modern and not fitting several FT conventions. And suggested I work at re-writing it more traditionally. How to do that came to me in a blinding flash while I was brushing my teeth this morning so I think I'll go work on that.