fubar with postwar miracles

Oh, hey. Hi.

I don't get over here as much as I'd like to nowadays...I do miss it. Tumblr makes me sad and angry, but since it seems like that's where fandom goes now, I'm trying.

Anyway, here are other places I've been lurking about, if anyone wants to reconnect:

tumblr: windsorblue17 (fandoms I'm following there: Agents of SHIELD; Star Wars; some GW)
twitter: @windsorblue03 (where there's a lot of bitching about politics...)
eljay (occasionally): windsorblue
AO3: windsorblue

That's all I got.

Go get a cocktail, and then please enjoy this annual reminder of how old we're getting:

The boy turned 15 yesterday. Next month he finishes up his freshman year of high school. In six months he can - theoretically - acquire a learner's permit and start driving lessons. He has a (mostly) man-voice, is at least four inches taller than me, and weighs about 125 pounds soaking wet with rocks in his pocket.

According to LJ's new theme (which...I don't know, you guys...I'm not sure I care for it...), I started my LJ account in December of 2002. He was three.

Drink up! :D

io9's March Madness is going on, and the header image on this page might be the slashiest thing I've seen in a long while. :3

Hi, I'm still alive. Very, very tired, but still alive. The magazine project that was at Kickstarter a couple of months ago has funded, and so now there's much work to be done. Much work. So hooray for some extra walking-around money, but wow am I tired. Funny how your well-over-40 self cannot pull off the late nights as well as your 20-something self did. If you're interested in the magazine, please do go check it out!

Now that soccer season has ended at school, the boy has joined the track team and is starting up with a club soccer team (outside of school). There was a parent meeting for the track team last week, and the handout the coach gave us included this phrase: "Most of our athletes will need to consume 2500-4000 calories per day." O.o;; So...I just give the kid a bag of Doritos and a cheesecake for breakfast, then? In all seriousness, though, we have reached the stage where his lunch bag is pretty much just a grocery bag full of food. So glad he's not big on sodas.

New Clone Wars episodes on Netflix this week! Although I suspect that the characters I wanted to see better endings for aren't getting them. :/

Speaking of Netflix - I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I had never really sat down and watched the whole thing - just a few episodes here and there. So now I'm trying to do the whole thing. I'm a few episodes into S5, and I know there's about to be horrible senseless trauma, because I am a human person who participates in geek culture, and therefore has a decent outline of the plot going in. Pretty sure it's still going to be horrible and senseless, though, since Gilles and Joyce are kind of my ship for this show. I'm probably responding a lot more to the adult characters because I'm watching it from a parent point-of-view. All that said, though, I'd like to state that I deeply dislike Angel, and it's probably because my inner mother-of-teenager is going "What? Him? NO. NO, I FORBID IT. YOU CAN DO SO MUCH BETTER."

See? Tired.

tl/dr: Hi, I'm still alive.

Okay look, Sleepy Hollow. Just admit that you're an alternate Fringe universe where all the parts of Walter's personality meld into a giant mass of terrifying awesome.

(In other words, I'm going to need a bit more time to process the season finale.)

I've been freelancing for a small tabletop gaming company lately, and they are currently running a Kickstarter campaign to launch a bi-monthly magazine that will feature new science fiction and a pull-out tabletop game in every issue. The Kickstarter campaign is here.

If this thing takes off, we'll be taking ongoing submissions for stories and art. Mostly hard sci-fi or speculative fiction - submission guidelines are here.

(I will have no say in what gets published, story-wise, but I thought some of you guys would be interested in taking a look!)

I think I have mentioned here before that I went to a teeny tiny high school that was mostly populated with kids who were equal parts smart and socially inept. Of course, the older we got, the harder we tried to not be socially inept, but being smooth and cool in public is a hard skill to learn.

Our school was too small for athletics, so it wasn't like we had rivals or anything like that, but our campus was just a few blocks from the campus of a regular public high school called El Modena. When some of us became old enough to drive, we started venturing out in groups after school. Most of the time we ended up at the Swenson's Ice Cream place down the street. For a time, it seemed like every time we went to Swenson's, we'd encounter some kids from El Modena, and I'm pretty sure they could smell awkwardness on us and there were rude words exchanged often. Not to say we ever got into any physical fights, but there were words pretty regularly, and I distinctly remember feeling like they saw right through us - like they knew we were weird kids from that weird school, like it was obvious we were not anywhere near as cool and smooth in public as we were pretending to be, and they were damn well going to put us in our place.

The point to all this is that the Frosh/Soph soccer team the boy is on played El Modena this afternoon. Final score: Brea-Olinda: 5, El Modena: 1.

It was deeply satisfying to see my son's team kick El Modena's asses. Deeply.

The wreath is hung on the door, but I forgot to change out the orange and purple Halloween lights for the blue and white ones. >.>;;

The tree is up, but one little bit of a light strand doesn't work. I could have spent more time futzing with it, but got distracted by something else and there we are.

The presents are wrapped and the stockings filled, now that I got everyone to go the hell to bed and let Santa mom do her work. Starbuck has found this quite confusing, as there are obviously things in a stocking that are intended for her - none of us two-legs have ever shown an interest in candy-cane shaped rawhides, that's for damn sure - and she can't have them yet. She keeps sniffing hopefully at the stockings, and I keep telling her that Santa says she has to wait until tomorrow. I think my dog thinks Santa is a big meanie.

Next year, I say to myself, I will be one of those people who is done shopping by Thanksgiving. (I will not be one of those people.)

(Since the soccer season is now in full swing, the boy has 2+ hours of practice most days and is typically passed out on the couch before his dinner has even started digesting. Tonight - after me poking him about four times to go sleep in his bed already - he said, "I'm waiting up for Santa," to which the beau replied, "You're not waiting up very well".)

Happy holidays, everyone!! Here's to a wonderful new year full of blessings and awesome organizational skills to us all!

We have reached the point in the parent/child relationship where the boy feels comfortable criticizing my driving.

I guess I should be glad he's not a girl, because then my clothes would be up for scrutiny as well.

I know this is a bit last month, but I wanted to post about something involving creativity as an act, rather than a parenting philosophy. So! Want to see the fake sword I made for Halloween? The theme for my friend's Halloween party this year was Dungeons and Dragons.

( pictures below, still kind of a work in progress even though Halloween has come and gone )

So that's that. My next bout of creativity will involve window treatments. Yay?

The boy has taken to creating a little teenager nest on the couch (or, as long-time readers may remember it, The Couch). The nest generally consists of a couple of blankets, the larger of the couch pillows, his laptop (tuned incessantly to YouTube), laptop charger, phone and phone charger, teevee remotes, a bottle of water, game controllers, game headphones, computer headphones, perhaps his backpack with some textbooks and homework scattered about, dirty plates and/or empty food wrappers, dirty socks, a hoodie, a gaming magazine or two, and on rare occasion, a book. Bear in mind, this couch is huge. It can comfortably seat six adults and/or sleep two adults and a decent-sized dog. Or, one teenager and all of his crap.

Anyway! So this morning he comes downstairs and crawls into his nest, and as I look over I notice that there's money all over the nest - a few one dollar bills and a bunch of coins. So I ask, "Why is there money all over the couch? Did you have a bunch of strippers over last night?"

"Yeah," he says. "I was really making it rain with those pennies." *pause* "That's probably why they left." *longer pause* "Yeah, that's probably why they left..."

Smartass.

I really should be in bed because I need to be up in like five hours to get the kid to school early so he can get help with his programming homework. But I needed to offload some of this brain buzzing first.

( I know it's stress because my jaw hurts from being clenched )

Okay, I feel better now that I got some of that out. I'll post fannish things next time, because Agents of SHIELD gave me a new OTP this week that I need for someone else to love as much as I do.

Because one of my friends on Facebook reminded me that the "Starbuck and Starbuck at Starbucks" picture was a thing that existed, and joked that it sucked because they had forgotten my dog.

So the boy and his X-Box buddies have started using "PR0N" as a clan tag. I raised an eyebrow at it when it came up, but have pretty much left it alone because I figured if I made a big deal about it, he'd just keep it on there longer, because teenager. Sunday when his friend was over and they were playing on X-Box Live, someone asked what it meant. Much Beavis and Butthead-style giggling ensued.

"Yeah, buddy," says I, all sarcastical-like. "What does 'PR0N' mean?

More teen boy laughing. "Guys, my mom wants to know what it means..."

"Tell her it's Chinese!"

"Yeah, yeah - mom, it's Chinese. You wouldn't understand."

"Chinese, huh..." says I. "That's funny, because according to the internet, it means 'porn'"

"Uhhhhhh..."

"Look, I don't know how dumb you think I am, but let me assure you, I'm not that dumb."

Tell her it's Chinese...for Christ's sake...doesn't this kid know who I am?

Thing one - knocked a bottle of olive oil off the top of the fridge and onto the kitchen floor this morning whilst trying to get my ass out of the house in something close to a timely manner. Used a vinegar cleaner to mop it up. Kitchen now smells like salad dressing.

Thing two - We have CS5 at work. Illustrator decided about halfway through the day that the file I'd been working on most of last week and part of this morning was no longer to it's liking. I tried restarting Illustrator, closing down every other running program, restarting the computer - no thank you, says Illustrator. I refuse to recognize all this lovely RAM you have available for me to use and will instead taunt you with this error message that you don't have enough RAM. Because I am Illustrator, and I will not be ordered about by the likes of you. I reject your RAM and fail to substitute my own.

So now I have downloaded a trial copy of Illustrator CC on my home machine, and am attempting to open the naughty file just long enough to delete a couple of unneeded layers and re-save it as a CS5 document. Also going to attempt to get a halfway decent jpeg or PDF so's I can have a draft, at least, to show the client at the end of the week. If the thing still won't open on the work machine tomorrow, I may have to break it down smaller files which can be tiled when it comes time to print. Damn you, Illustrator.

Thing three - Tomorrow morning I have to go by the boy's new high school and pick up registration paperwork. I thought I'd registered him online, but apparently that was more of an aspirational thing than I'd realized...? I honestly don't know. All I know is I'm supposed to go pick up a stack of paper which will somehow be applicable to the process. Guess I'll find out tomorrow.

I'm too sober for all this.

Welp, Twitter was being kind of crappy about letting me post pictures on the fly, so. Many images under the cut.

( assorted pics from Comic-Con 2013 )

I didn't get into the SHIELD panel, and I didn't even try to get into Hall H for anything at all. But we did see panels for Person of Interest, Falling Skies, and Revolution. Most of the others I went to were either semi-professional advice panels on design and creative careers or girl geek panels. The boy and his friend pretty much haunted anything gaming-related and were excited about the panels on Assassin's Creed 4 and Watchdogs. And I saw driftingdoll! :D

Goal for next year: train for this like it's a marathon, and then maybe my feet won't hurt so much by the end.

Things I hear my son say while he's gaming, part 73:

"I think my monkey fell off a cliff or something."

...

...

...I don't know, you guys.

I wrote this during the Stanley Cup playoffs and have been too chickenshit to post it. >.>;; Congrats, Blackhawks. We'll get you next year.


( sportsball on ice, then... )

The boy is doing a summer soccer league, put on by the coaches at the high school. It's kind of a warmup/tryout for the freshman team, and from what the coaches have said, as long as the kids show up and do their best, they'll make the team. For the last couple of weeks - and for the next couple - I've been dashing around like a madwoman to get the boy to his games. In fact, I should really be in bed right now because he has games for the next three days and I need to get my ass to work way early so I can leave earlier without there being office drama. But I wanted to say a couple of things about it first.

1. The vast majority of the teams they're playing against are JV teams from other local schools, so the kids they're playing are bigger, faster, and have been part of their teams for at least a year. It's remarkable what a difference that experience makes. There are several kids on the boy's team that he's played with (or against) on rec league teams, so a lot of them know each other, but they're not really a cohesive group yet. And as one would expect, they're getting their asses handed to them fairly regular-like. Last game, the boy got knocked flat on his backside when he was pummeled between two players from the opposing team going for the ball at the same time he was. He's still sore. I'm kind of worried he might have bruised his tailbone. High school soccer is freaking brutal, man.

2. At the beginning and the end of each game, the coach has them do this little chant - "1-2-3-BREA!" Like I said before, the boy has played with a few of these kids before, so I've seen them around since he was 6 or 7. It's damned jarring to hear that chant, because now they all have man voices.

My very first order of BPAL imps arrived today.

Down the rabbit hole I go...

So this evening, the boy was talking about his geometry teacher, and how whenever the answer to a problem they're doing in class is "69", the teacher will say "Maturity check!", and there will be much snickering and whatnot, because junior high. And I laughed and said that was funny, even though I was thinking, welp, I wouldn't pass that maturity check, and I know at least a couple dozen other "adults" who wouldn't, either.

It took me about five minutes before I came to a realization. "Hey, wait a minute," says I. "Since when do you know what 69 means?"

...which earned me one of the more epic teenage eye-rolls I've yet received.

...well, then.


(Side note: The geometry teacher's name is Mr. Johnson. Maturity check!)

(Side note the second: When the boy's father and I were baby Tragic Kingdom employees, there was a ride in Tomorrowland called Mission to Mars. The queue area for Mission to Mars featured audio-animatronic figures in a "Mission Control" scene, and the lead scientist at this Mission Control was an audio-animatronic in a lab coat and a suit named Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson would explain to you about how you were about to fly all the way to Mars and back, and it was therefore very important to the mission that you keep your seat belt fastened even though you weren't actually traveling anywhere. The boy's geometry teacher bears a remarkable resemblance to that audio-animatronic, which his father and I both noticed/commented upon/were slightly alarmed by. All of which makes the idea of him calling out "Maturity check!" in a classroom full of seventh- and eighth-graders all the more bizarre/hilarious.)

The boy is home. Judging from the pictures, a fine time appears to have been had by all. And now he is utterly passed out on the couch.

After a long day of traveling, it's nice to come home and sleep on your own couch.

- Have missed three Tuesdays in a row. I blame a combination of not much to talk about and a surplus of work to do. Also, lazy.

- This deal with Disney owning Star Wars is getting worse all the time. Not happy about the end of The Clone Wars, not happy about Star Wars 1313 never seeing the light of day. Thanks for the reminder, Disney, of why I quit you.

- Speaking of Star Wars, the final four in their March Madness tournament are Yoda vs. R2D2 and Vader vs. Boba Fett. I want to see R2 vs. Vader so badly.

- The boy heads out on a school trip to D.C. this weekend. I wanted to go, but no parents allowed - only school staff are chaperones. :/ Probably for the best - I think half the reason he's excited about going is that he gets the better part of a week away from me, dad, and stepmom. We're ruining his life, don'tcha know. Mostly by existing. Plus, I probably couldn't have afforded a second ticket on this trip. So anyway, he's going. And the beau is taking me out on a date one night while he's gone, like the grown-ups do. :D

That's all I got.

This is Madness - Star Wars March Madness character tournament. I'm tempted to print out copies of the bracket and switch them out with all the college basketball brackets floating around the office.

(3/22, you break my heart - how can one possibly choose between Cad Bane and Hondo Ohnaka?)

I have a nerd confession to make.

( There are whole comms dedicated to this sort of thing )

Missed my Tuesday posting goal again, but I don't actually have anything to say, really.

...

...

...

We're fine, we're all fine here...now...thank you...how are you?

I was plugging away on a whole thing about Star Wars and it's future with Disney, but it was getting long-winded and rambly and could pretty much be summed up thusly:

I have high hopes for new Star Wars content, because for years Disney has been aching to hook little boys in the same way the Disney Princesses have hooked little girls, so I'm optimistic that Disney will be willing to spend the money and time to do Star Wars well. Whether or not this will work to hook little boys is a discussion for another time (it won't), but with that as the goal, it's in Disney's best interests to throw metric shit-tons of money at future Star Wars content to make it as awesome as possible.

That said, now that JJ Abrams has been named to direct the next Star Wars movie, I have but one request of the universe, and that is this:

"Who wins in a bar fight - Han Solo or James T. Kirk?"

Let's get this settled once and for all.

Bah, I missed my Tuesday posting goal yesterday. :/ I was pissed off about work stuff, so it's probably best I didn't make it.

Thing 1: Fringe. The ending. It made me cry about 15 buckets of tears.

( spoilers )

Thing 2: I'm still pissed off about work stuff. I'm attempting to keep my head down and my powder dry, but still pissed off anyway.

I had a Thing 3, but now I'm tired and distracted by the hilarious mental image of Walter being the future savior of strawberry milkshakes.

I had this grand notion that I was going to post something every Tuesday, because what's New Year without a few resolutions that start out well-intentioned and then flame out into the combined abysses (abyssi?) of being overwhelmed by everything in the world and intractable laziness?

Sure, it's technically Wednesday. But I haven't been to bed yet, so still Tuesday. Never mind the other resolution about getting more sleep.

Random things:
- Over the holiday, I learned how to make tamales and hot toddies. Not at the same time, though. Neither one was as complicated as I thought.

- I have also resolved to drink more water. Hot toddies have tea in them, which is mostly water. And the brandy should help me sleep better. Synergy!

- I have also also resolved to work on my credit score this year. Tamales, hot toddies, and more sleep will do nothing to help this along, which is why being a grownup sucks.

That's pretty much it. I...don't really have anything particularly awesome to say. But it's sort of Tuesday, and I am posting something, so now I feel accomplished. \o/

It's been forever since I updated, so.

( cut for rambles )

Happy Thanksgiving to all who are celebrating it! And those who aren't - have some pie anyway, because why not?

And to my friends in the retail industry, be careful out there.

Well, after a long night of debate, bickering and strife, we in this household have come to one unanimous conclusion:

It is monumentally unfair to have a big national election on the same night Halo 4 comes out. I mean, really. Who thought that was a good idea?

There are more voles on Facebook, Horatio, than are dreamt of at ff.net.

Starbuck had to have another mast cell tumor removed today. A very small one - we caught it very early - but still, the second surgery in about 6 months. She's home and dozing. Since this one was on her inner back leg, she's kind of having a rough time moving around. She ate a bit (I had to feed her from the dog food can with a spoon, but she did eat) and drinks some water when I offer it to her (and by offer it, I mean hold the bowl up to her face area), but what she seems to mostly want is someone to curl up next to.

(I had a great-uncle who used to say he hoped to be reincarnated as a dog living in a member of our family's household. We should all be so lucky.)

Stressful week at work, and then this weekend was stressful too, both with the dog, and with the beginning of soccer season. The boy is both playing and refereeing. So he had to be at the field at 8 am to ref, came home long enough to change jerseys and socks, and then back to the field by 10:30 to play. Then home again long enough to grab some water and back out to another field for official opening day pictures. By the time we got home we were sweaty, sunburned, and exhausted. His dad is hanging out at the games he's refereeing for a few weeks, just in case he runs into any crazy parents. This is a relief. For all his faults, I'm pretty sure the boy's dad wouldn't hesitate to stick up for the kid to a parent going nuts over a call.

I'm going to have a nice glass of sangria and then crash. A meme is just what I need right now so I don't have to think.

( our house, in the middle of our street )

I've been sitting on this most of the summer, like a big ol' chicken... >.>;;

( Why do I have to have my memory wiped and you don't? )

Maybe the effed-up spider dream was a portent...since I just found a brown widow in my kitchen.

I smashed it with a sauce pot. >.>;; Sorry, spider admirers. The daddy long-legs and the little brown house spiders usually get scooped it and put outside, but I just couldn't take the chance that Starbuck would find it in the yard and get bitten. She's had allergic reactions to insect bites before. It's not pleasant for any of us.

And now I feel all itchy and like things are crawling on me.

(icon choice because of smashy smashy)

So I signed up for the Twitter. I thought it'd be a good way to keep track of updates to the Comic-con schedule on the fly, but then I realized I could use it to post pictures and updates while I'm there, too!

Also started an account for my 'real name' (?? I don't really like this designation, but you guys know what I mean), so I'll have a search-safe online identity in case I need to start looking for a new job in the near future.

So if you want to follow me over there:
windsorblue03 (geeky fun stuff)
jennlc03 (pretending to be a grown up)

I'm heading out to con this afternoon with the boy and his buddy in tow, and I'll post stuff up to Twitter while we're there! :D

I dreamt last night that there was a spider the size of an inflated balloon in my living room. It crawled around being creepifying for a while, and then squatted in front of the teevee and piddled on the carpet. The realization that I was going to have to clean up giant spider piddle woke me up. Couldn't go back to sleep because I kept feeling like things were crawling on me.

I guess I know what we're talking about in counseling next week. O.o;;

The boy's X-Box headset isn't working right - the speaker appears to be on the fritz, so he can talk to his friends through the thing, but he can't hear them talking back, so he has the sound going through the teevee. All of which means I'm getting quite an earful of the sort of conversation that 13-year-old boys have with each other. At one point, one of the boys was singing a jaunty little tune of his own devising, which went something like this:

Fuck you, suck my dick.
Fuck you, suck my dick.
Fuck you, suck my dick.
Fuck you, suck my dick.

And so on.

So after about three verses of this, I ask the boy, "Do you go to school with this kid? Is he your age?"

"Yeah," says the boy, "But his parents don't speak any English, so that's why he talks like that."

...okay, then. I think he meant, that's why he gets away with talking like that, but whatever. Anyway, after four or five more choruses of the "Fuck you, suck my dick" song, I say to the boy, "If you have to keep asking over and over like that, it's not gonna happen."

The boy cracks up. And then he says into the headset mic, "Dude! My mom can totally hear you!"

There was a moment of silence. And then four boys proceeded to die laughing, while one said, in a chastened voice, "Oh, crap! Sorry, man! Sorry!"

I might be enjoying being the cool mom a little too much. >.>;;

Y-Con is going to be in Long Beach?

End of con dinner will so have to be at Roscoe's!!!

So, is Tony Stark slashable with just about everyone, or what?

(This was the only thing I could think of to say that wasn't remotely spoilery.)

So here's how the last couple of weeks went at my house:

( Hyper dog still hyper, even with a chest full of stitches... )

The good news: stitches came out yesterday. There was rough-housing today. All is right with the world...or at least, the occupants of this house. For now.

1. Why aren't any of you watching Southland? Guh. GUH.

1a. Or Clone Wars, for that matter, but we have had this conversation before. You should be aware, though, that Simon Pegg did the voice of Dengar on last week's episode. Nerdsplosion.

2. For all you talented artists and animators: Kevin Smith is looking for someone to animate his own ultimate nerdsplosion, which of course would be Batman vs. Darth Vader. Of particular interest may be this passage from the post: You decide if they’re wearing pants or not! I believe that decision has been made, sir.

Good news!

Starbuck's tests came back - the surgery took care of all the malignancies, nothing spread into her lymph nodes. She's going to be fine.

\o/

Starbuck had surgery today for two mast cell tumors on her belly. They were pretty small, so I'm hopeful that it will all turn out okay, but we still have to wait until Saturday or Sunday to get her lab results back. She's home, and she's got a scar that she'll be able to tell awesome stories about to the other dogs at the dog park, but since it's on her lower chest/upper belly region, the vet recommended we put her in a t-shirt so she could lie down without aggravating her incision area.

So she's wearing an old Bar Sinister t-shirt of mine. She's not particularly happy about it, and the look on her face when I put it on her suggested that there was a special hell for people who tormented dogs by putting people clothes on them after they've already had a terrible awful no good very bad day. But she is able to lie down and look comfortable, instead of the stiff-legged awkward thing she was doing right after we got home.

I've been joking around for a while that I should make her a Viper pilot cosplay jacket - maybe I should actually get off my ass and do it!

Special. Hell.

Words of wisdom from Silent Bob

One year from now, this moment won’t matter at all.

You will either have what you’re aiming for today or not, but the anxiety you’re currently feeling will subside to the point of irrelevancy.

The stress we invent or foster is not real: It’s literally imagined. Yes, there are and will always be external forces that complicate our day-to-day; but they’re rarely of the life-threatening variety anymore. Now we manufacture mental monsters to keep ourselves from achieving. In this part of the world, we’ve eliminated most of our predators, only to replace them with the beast we’re powerless against: Self Doubt.

Nobody can hold you back in life as much as your own fear that you’ll fail. I’ll save you some time: you will fail. Sometimes spectacularly.

But aggregate enough failures, and sooner or later, you’ve got so much experience that you cannot fail. Then, life becomes a series of seemingly easy breaks. The formula for success is repeated failure. So head into your meeting knowing that, win or lose, you’ve already succeeded today.

There are only 100 steps on the road to success, but the first 99 are fraught with failure. Get by them, however, and you get to the top.

Posting this here because I'm failure-phobic, and I probably ought to re-read these words five times a day for the rest of my natural life.

Looks like my email might have been spambotted...so apologies if anyone's been flooded with ads for dick pills and quick money schemes from me.

I'm going to go take out my aggressions on the garden now...