The Dangerous Existence of Madame Lee

We finally got a new monitor. Truly, this is glorious.

More stuff later.

Goddamn monitor is playing normal (FOR NOW). Huh. It probably still needs to be replaced, though.

+ Still no working computer at home. God DAMN it. I have asked the lolmom to call several times (I would do it myself, but that's when I'm at work), but she falls asleep and I feel bad about bugging her.

+ I now have a phone at work, which means I may be getting calls. This is all very exciting.

+ Have more or less decided to go to EvilleCon, but think I'll pay at the door as I don't think the site is trustworthy as far as security issues go. (Actually the site looks a total hatchet job, but hey, a local con. w00t.)

+ Apparently, I have rogue wisdom teeth on my left side. I am pretty sure that this is not tooth decay, which I think would be gradual pain that got worse over time. Usually I've had more trouble on my left side. This is being-perfectly-fine until BAM my wisdom teeth decided to bother me on Friday night, and I could not sleep thanks to the pain so I had to go out and buy Tylenol. (And yes, for me, it does have to be acetaminophen. I don't even know why they're allowed to market ibuprofen as a pain reliever. It doesn't do dick even at prescription levels. I might as well leave my teeth alone and suffer loudly and bitchily.) I am okay right now (the last time I had any was 10:30 last night before I went to bed), but if this doesn't abate in a week I guess I'm going to the dentist. I hope to God this isn't a case of teeth-impacted-in-bone, because that is the last thing I want to dick with.

+ Watched The Wind and the Lion with lolmom last night; also, made muffins with coconut milk and dried cranberries. Another nutritionally complete meal turned out by yours truly!

So I'm back now. Actually, I was back yesterday when AT&T came out to fix the Internets while I was at work, but didn't feel like LJing then due to the throes of irrational paranoia et al and would likely have bitten someone's head off. (Irrational paranoia isn't ended, but has been greatly reduced; I am unlikely to bite anyone's head off unless they piss me off. Then all bets are off.)

Things that have happened (exciting and not):
+ I am attempting to fix my life. Again.
+ At some point between the last time I weighed myself (sometime in the spring) and last Sunday, I apparently dropped ten pounds. Experts speculate that I may have done nothing whatsoever to deserve this, but hey, I'm not complaining.
+ I have started to clean my room on the grounds that since I'm likely stuck in this shitpit for a while, my room might as well look like someplace where a teenaged girl with ADHD a grown-ass woman lives. I haven't been at it very long but it is already a vast improvement.
+ In the process thereof, I found that Callice apparently let herself into my bedroom on a regular basis and peed on a huge amount of things. I knew that she occasionally got in there, and that because I often didn't know she was there, I occasionally shut her in there and she occasionally peed on things as a result. Apparently, she was in there and peeing on things a lot more often than I thought. I now have huge piles of laundry that may or may not be completely ruined. My cat keeps on giving. (On the off chance you're just tuning in to the long-running, if not terribly popular, Wang Xi-feng Show, as I know a couple of you are: Callice was my last cat. She died in September.)
+ I found my Russian dictionary (the good one, not the Langenshit one) and was pleased, as I had been wondering what the Russian word for "seahorse" was. It's morskoi konyok, which unfortunately does not lend itself well to adorable nicknames for the adorable duokinneas, who will have to remain a plain old regular Angloglot seahorse.
+ I failed to find my elementary Russian textbooks, which I assume are somewhere in the bowels of my room. I know I did not sell them, because foreign language books are unsaleable at IU. AWESOME JOB l33.
+ Our tomatoes are turning red and yellow. (Yeah, we grow yellow tomatoes.)
+ I fucked up my federal income taxes, apparently. I received a refund check last week, and (true to form) a couple of days later a letter followed which informed me that I was too entitled to a refund because I miscalculated my tax burden. No complaints.
+ forgottensanity! I received your package the day before yesterday! You will be pleased to know that I have not yet opened the present. (O HAI WUT IZ TIHS THING CALLD RESTRAINT.)
+ On the off chance you wanted to talk to me on AIM, which means this next is mostly for galhea, work schedules and pavement-pounding unfortunately mean I am not going to be on too often in the next few days. I'll try but no promises, k?
+ So glad to be back.

At the end of last week, the lolmom happily skipped into the living room to watch television, only to find that the digital display asked her to PLEASE WAIT. After twenty minutes of waiting, there was still no television. Oddly, the TV set in the den works properly, which has been a source of annoyance to me because the lolmom wants to talk. When I am reading or on the computer, I do not want to talk other than in monosyllables and tend to say things like, "I'm trying to read," or "Please don't interrupt me while I'm giggling at Throne of Blood vs. Yakety Sax for the umpteenth time". Fortunately, she works nights so I can watch all the Int0rbuttz pr0n I want while she's gone.

So the lolmom called Hindsight Cable, where the phone monkeys gave her the runaround while she patiently explained that she could not call in every time something was wrong because she gets home at 6:30 in the morning when their offices are not open, and then goes to sleep. Finally, they told her (on Monday) that they'd have someone out today, so she was without her cathode-rayed friend for about a week. Apparently, we needed a smaller box, which is now lying against my TV that I only use to watch movies, and I don't know what we're going to do when we finally finish painting the guest room (project begun in 2008, never finished, and I may take matters into my own hands. I have threatened to paint it a magnificent crimson, which made the lolmom go DDDDD: because she is opposed to color).

The point of all this is twofold.
1.) Hindsight has consistently failed to impress with their mad skillz.
2.) duokinneas, is there any way you can book a flight so I can be all OMG TALYN WILL NEED A PLACE TO SLEEP WHEN SHE'S HERE??? Because that would probably get us a finished guest room AND a caulked bathtub. :D It's okay if you cancel the flight after the house is improved!

The good:
+ I was afraid that something might happen, but it didn't, and it has been conclusively proven as of this morning that this thing did not happen.
+ I have been in a pretty good mood lately.
+ Lolmom has been a baking fool and we're having tea for dinner, with little sandwiches and muffins and so on and omg so good. :9
+ I have a short tomorrow and then I'm off Tuesday. SQUEE.
+ DEATH SLOTH.
+ We finally had RoofMan come look at the porch roof, and it turns out it's not going to be as hefty to fix as we thought. OMG YOU GUYS WE MAY ACTUALLY BE ABLE TO USE THE PORCH AGAIN. :D

The bad:
+ I still have to go to work tomorrow.
+ My cell phone seems to have breathed its last. Further bulletins as events warrant. AT&T had best replace it or at least let me keep my number et al, or there will be some SRS BSNS all up in southern Indiana. So, uh, I may not be Twittering all that much. Still, I have it pretty good if this is the worst of my problems--ultimately, it's a low-grade pain in the ass. [EDIT: Finally got it to turn on. In my infinite wisdom, I let the battery run down. Duhurr, l33. Phone is charging now.]
+ I'm still bleeding. Hopefully my next round of Depo--this Friday--will put a stop to that, or at least encourage it to end.

So now we have a dialtone on the main house line AND the Int0rbuttz. What the hell. So I spent a bazillion years being given the runaround by AT&T's phone monkeys for no reason. Fuck my life, y'all.

Nothing went right on Sunday. I slept until about 11:30 in the morning (after going to bed at 8 last night), because retail hours are fucking with my circadian rhythms. The computer was (and remains) borked, though less borked than it was earlier; I know we've been living on borrowed time with this thing, but I wish to God it would hold out long enough to let me get back on my feet and buy my own. (It's actually not the computer proper; we're having Monitor Issues, and essentially if I want to see anything at all I have to blow it up to 400x600 resolution. RETRO MANIA! aeromancy, I suppose this too is part of your evil plot?)

The lolmom was going to go to the store so we can get more food on account of she got paid, but on her way she stopped to mail some bills and accidentally dropped the grocery list in the mailbox with the bills. Needless to say, it was not possible to fish it out, and I had to reconstitute the entire grocery list. I am proud of her for actually remembering several of the items thereon.

I then discovered that the University in its infinite wisdom has now moved all of the back issues of Iskra, which I was going to translate for the lulz, and they seem to now be in the Lilly which means I need to provide three kinds of photo ID, a full retinal scan, and a note from the lolmom merely in order to caress them with my burning, myopic eyes. I understand the purpose here, which is to protect them since Iskra has been out of print for about a hundred years and the print run was limited and a lot of copies got destroyed for obvious reasons. Still, I wish they could protect them in a manner which causes less inconvenience for me personally. LEE: CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE.

(For the four people who don't know, Iskra was an underground Communist newspaper in the days when the Communist Party was still called the Russian Social-Democratic Party, and it was printed out of Geneva in Switzerland because there one could be relatively sure of being beyond the long arm of the Okhrana, the Tsar's secret police. Eventually, of course, the Party split right down the middle which resulted in V.I. Lenin taking his toys and going home, but not before making rude noises at Georgi Plekhanov. This was actually more complicated than it sounds, but I won't bore you unless you indicate a desire to be bored. On account of the University has most of the issues and Iskra ties in with several of my historical interests and I require a constant feed of lulz lest I get bored and burn something, and I sortakinda know Russian in the most rudimentary sense of that phrase, I would like to translate it. THERE IS NEVER ENOUGH COMMUNISM.)

I am proud of me for not putting my fist through the wall.

On the up side, the University library contains about twenty-some-odd years' worth of The Boys' Own Paper, a delightful reminder of a simpler time and place when men were men &c., in the days before subtext ruled the earth. It does not, unfortunately, have a complete run; it stops in about 1903 and resumes for a little while in the early '30s, so the issues leading up to and during the Great War aren't there. My new goal in life is to find old issues of Boys' Own and buy them up, with the intention of bequeathing the lulz to the University libraries in the event that anybody else finds them at all amusing.

So. I have interviews in Evansville tomorrow and Friday, and I'm going to Bloomington on Thursday. My existence is pastede on yey.