The Dangerous Existence of Madame Lee

I just haven't had a lot to report lately, to be honest, though I've been cooking most of this week (I did a rainbow vegetable stir-fry on Tuesday, and tonight I made turkey kielbasa with sweet cooked purple cabbage. Tomorrow, we dine on chicken enchiladas. (For those of you who might be interested, there's a food blog, though I'll continue to talk about things I cook here.)

Finally finished The Great Sea by David Abulafia. I will almost always buy history sight unseen, on the grounds that it's history and therefore must be good, but this was really interesting; it's a history of the Mediterranean and the cultural, politial, and economic interactions that took place around it. The ancient world stuff wasn't unfamiliar to me, though I admit Magna Graecia hasn't been my study, but a lot of the later chapters were eye-opening - I knew Russia really, really wanted a warm-water port (sometimes with disastrous results), but I didn't know there had been shenanigans as far south as the Mediterranean. Anyway, I'm glad I bought it and plan to mine the bibliography indefinitely.

Also, somebody stop me before I obsess again. The good news is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of source material in English.

Somehow, I managed to churn out a bit of story before I fell asleep last night. This is on The Project I Don't Like, Why Am I Writing It, but I figure if I plow ahead I could turn it into a project I like better.

And, you know, that's really it, other than the we've-stopped-the-overtime-for-now thing. (I'm not holding my breath, though!)

Good things:

+ My performance was rly good last month, so I actually got to have incentive pay on this check :D I am forcing myself to put the extra money into savings, on top of what I usually put in there anyway, but hey. My boss says I've shown quite a bit of improvement (I was struggling with a few things earlier, so I'm glad my efforts are paying off, literally and figuratively).

+ My federal and state tax returns have been accepted (I e-filed). I don't know if this just means they went through okay, or if it's more along the lines of "okay you were poor in 2010, plz accept refund". If e-file is correct, I can expect a refund. I am torn between putting that in savings vs. putting it towards my MasterCard (it wouldn't knock out the ENTIRE balance, but it would leave me with a much smaller debt there, and I would really like to get this monkey off my back). I tend to be pretty conservative so it's probably going into savings.

+ We have delicious leftovers. I made asparagus-and-salmon spring rolls over the weekend, and last night lolmom was home early (she went to some job thing in Louisville) so we made chickpea-and-avocado tacos. Tomorrow night, I definitely see some reverse-engineered asparagus salad in our future. Also, the new Cooking Light came and there is a picture of shrimp Cobb salad on the cover and I need to eat that nau plz.

+ X-chan is coming to visit for Easter! She wants us to color and hide eggs for her. (This was one of her favorite things about Easter as a kid, and lolmom had to get more and more savvy as we aged.) The bitch of this is that we have to plan a real meal, though, for various reasons; Mom wants a cake, which I am all in favor of, but we kind of need to see what X-chan wants. Worst-case scenario? OH NOES, DELICIOUS FRUIT SALAD!

+ I don't think I remembered how much I love classics--I mean, I know I do, obviously, but sometimes it kind of gets pushed to the back--and I just finished the Iliad (again, I re-read it every year, IT NEVER GETS OLD U GAIZ) and I might be talking about Homer in here because Greek epic poetry makes me happy and so do Homer and the Trojan War. Oh my God you guys this is so vital to me, for fuckin' srs.

+ My package full of jewelry came. (This sounds really extravagant until you consider that it was more at costume jewelry, but hey.) Pictures to follow, eventually.

+ Hot guy is profile-stalking me on OKStupid. Possibly he's just laughing at my venomous harpyness, which is fine by me, but hey! Something pleasant to look at! (Unfortunately a lot of the women who profile-stalk me are looking for threesomes and I have a rather snippy note in there to the effect that Madame Lee don't play that. Tragically, no lesbian couples have ever approached me about their threesome fantasy. Also as a parenthetical aside I think I might be a happier person if I would just, you know, stop being so repressed about my queerness. And maybe say Hi to girls once in a while.)

+ Mmm. Talenti Gelato's pistachio ice cream, so good. (They also make the only chocolate ice cream I actually like.)

Minor-league annoyances:
( After the jump so you can ignore them, because seriously if these are my worst problems I'm doing pretty well )

All in all: l33 up, circumstances down. Peace.

1.) I was going to blog about this when it actually happened, which is way too long ago (couple-three weeks), but it's too lolarious not to share, so here.

Overheard in the breakroom:
ICS guy whose name I forget: Yeah, so between that and Darth Lamer there...
Inventory Girl: Darth Lamer?
ICS Guy: Yeah. Didn't you ever see Star Wars?
Inventory Girl: Well, yeah, but I don't remember the characters.
ICS Guy: But you know who Darth Vader is, right?
Inventory Girl: ...He's the villain, right?
ICS Guy: Yeah, but what was his role in the movie?
Inventory Girl: Uhhhh...
ICS Guy: He was over the Death Star, remember? Like, he was the...[significant pause]...general manager of the Death Star.
Inventory Girl: Ohhhh! [laughs as the cunning reference sinks in]

Yeah, so now every time I see our weedy little faggot of a GM, I think of him as Darth Lamer. Half the store thinks he's an idiot anyway, a belief which is amply justified, so what else is new.


2.) I say this with the best will in the world, I really do, but men can be the goddamn stupidest people sometimes. (So can women, but it's a different kind of the goddamn stupids.) Male flist excepted, except when y'all have the goddamn stupids. Not that I should have expected a whole lot else from life on these Internets, but seriously, just because I have a cunt doesn't mean you get to see or touch it. (And the guys who have gotten to see and/or touch it didn't get that way by going OHAI WANA HAV S3X at me, so, y'know, there's something to be said for patience and subtlety. As for women, we don't usually operate that way and the ones who do are nobody I would want to see or touch my cunt.)

Fortunately, I find this shit more lolarious than angry-making.

It's now technically the 2nd, but what the hell. I plan to write in this thing more often than I now do. (I may also comment on other people's LJs more often than I now do! SHOCKING!) Whether I produce anything worth reading remains, as ever, up in the air.

I actually don't really have any New Year's resolutions this year, which is kind of a first for me; I usually at least have "remain unsexy nonsmoker" and "read x number of books" going for me, and they're generally pretty serviceable. Amazing things accomplished today include such highlights as walking for a mile, cleaning out the front seat of my car (yeah, trying to break things down into small and unthreatening chunks, also it's below freezing out and I don't want to spend any more time outside than I have to), and learning to cast on. (duokinneas: The octopus sweater sees you. It is coming for you in the night.) I have all the hand-eye coordination of one of those eyeless fish that lives in caves (several of which are native to my fine home state) and the fine motor skills of an arthritic sloth (with apologies to James Lileks), so I felt some trepidation. I think I may have to supplement my how-to book with YouTube. Ultimately, I did manage to get a few stitches on the needle, because I tend to view these things as EPIC BATTLES OF WILL OMG wherein a ball of purple yarn is my evil archnemesis and I must prove that I am not dumber than it is, but I think I need more practice. I envy people with any kind of manual dexterity.

...Long paragraph is long.

Oh, and I have a 43 Things account, on the off chance anybody else has one and wants to follow my gorfy progress.

Also: I made a sweet potato pudding cake for the lolmom. Unfortunately, I failed at planning properly and apparently also ignored the bit where it has to sit in the fridge for like 3 hours, so we wound up not having it as the coda to our delicious New Year's meal of kielbasa and sauerkraut. (Pork and cooked cabbage on New Year's Day is traditional in my family.) However, it does smell good and may convince me to like sweet potatoes, at least when mixed with rum and sugar. I am not ordinarily a fan. (Regular potatoes are damn good eating. Hello, I am a Slav. I am also of Irish descent.)

I'm reading The Old-Time Maori by Makereti (Maggie Papakura), which is awesome; as Paul Diamond points out, at the time it was written (late '20s/early '30s), anthropology was a fairly new discipline and anthropology about one's own in-group was even more uncommon. I'm sure there's something I want to say about Makereti's being both female and Maori and negotiating culture and so on, but it just really escapes me and I'm not feeling very articulate at the moment. All I know is, it brings me big joy in brainmeats and it makes me excited and I want to write something. (Hello, n0v3l.)

So. Happy New Year. :D

[EDIT: I just noticed that I haven't used my Maori tag in almost a year. This calls for some serious remediation.]

I really should get off my ass and go out pounding the pavement. But you know, I did that yesterday and I'd like some time off for today, especially since I'm off tomorrow and I'm probably going to be too busy during the rest of the week. I would like to figure out some way to stave off the guilt later on, though.

It's been more or less grey and gloomy; on the plus side, the irises are starting to bloom, so the backyard is a vast expanse of green with dots of red and purple here and there (the tulips are up as well, and I think so are the hyacinths, but they may be starting to wilt).

We've been cooking more, which is one of the better consequences of recent events, and about the only thing that doesn't ttly suck ass. The lolmom's making rye bread; we're having zucchini quiche for dinner tonight, and last night we had SHELLS STUFFED WITH SPINACH AND CHEESE FUCK YES. This is fair enough since we're probably living on leftovers for the rest of this week.

H wrote and showered me with some of his insecurities, which I guess is fair enough. I'm constantly being told that not many people are like me.

(imperfectkatoru): Sorry about the other night. I'd forgotten that AIM was set up to turn on automatically when one logs on the Int0rbuttz, so didn't tell Mom, which is what happened there.)

Also, congratulations to dethorats! You're a REAL adult now! XD

I am kind of in a chatty mood lately, or at least a little more prosocial than I usually am, so maybe there will be some LJ posts that aren't goddamn Twitter entries. Also, I may be more with the social networking and interaction and whatnot. (This inevitably leads into my apologizing to everybody I've got friended on my neglected Goodreads account, because TTL BOOKSPAM BBY.) We'll see. I've had a powerful RP itch lately.