I wrote a letter to the owner of Personal Threads that I'll be mailing off Monday, and I felt it should be shared. It explains why I won't be shopping there any longer. I'm not organizing a boycott, and I'm not trying to influence anyone on the topic; like I say in the letter, I simply feel like everyone deserves to have information to make decisions for themselves, particularly when money is changing hands.

Read the letter here.

I do the resolution thing some years, and not others. This year? Is an on-year.

1. No fast food, as in drive-through cardboard lies.
2. Work on something creative every day, barring self-evaluation that contraindicates. (Fancy way of letting myself off the hook if I'm sick or in need of recharging.)

I have some other things I want to work on, but that will do for resolutions.

Happy 2010!

Location:Omaha, NE

Expect a real-true post in the next day or so, but I've also set up my Tumblr as a syndicated account here - so if you feel like following that, it's at speraritumblr. Enjoy.

When I was growing up, I read voraciously. I'm not talking like, book-a-week reading. A day I didn't read a book, start-to-finish, was a very strange day. I often read two. My teachers gave me dirty looks for bringing 1,000-page Stephen King novels to class in fifth grade, but it was mostly because they thought the covers would scare the other kids.

I think all of this petered out sometime around my junior year in high school, in which the great excursion to India happened - lots of stuff to do, so I read far less. When I got home, the internet was there. I was still reading, mind, but I was reading a lot on the internet. Still, I'd put down a book a week most weeks.

It's when I got into college that my book-reading truly died. Since summer of 2004 (when I started taking classes), I think I read, on average, perhaps a book every three months. I'm not counting stuff I read for classes or jobs (physics isn't a very literature-heavy degree, though). Even as it was happening, I regretted the slow death of my reading habit, and promised myself I'd get back into it once I wasn't trying to go to school, teach, have another job, and possibly a social life.

This brings me to today, a scant thirteen days until 2009. I've decided I want to tackle a reading goal this year - one fiction and one non-fiction book per week, for a total of 104 books in 2009. I have a few books already on my reading lists. For example, rustycoon loaned me a copy of James P. Hogan's The Two Moons, containing both Inherit the Earth and The Gentle Giants of Ganymede - I've read the first, and need to read the second. Also, my copy of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver will finally get read. (I'm starting that one now-ish though. If you have to ask me why, you haven't tried reading it yourself.)

Because I want to remain sane, I'm going to place a few restrictions on each category. Novels nearing the 1,000 page mark may be considered two novels, as may novels which persistently draw comparison to stuff by authors with a penchant for discursive or excessively layered style like Umberto Eco or Thomas Pynchon. (Actually, I may try to see if I can get through Foucault's Pendulum at some point.) Non-fiction works that get too much past 500 pages might likewise be given an extra week. I mean, there's no point to reading stuff I don't give the time of day.

Anyway, all of that is a long-winded way of asking: what should I read? Pick a handful of fiction and non-fiction books you believe I'd enjoy, and leave them in the comments.

The Macbook is indeed dead, meaning that I am less than two weeks from my first real chance at doing NaNoWriMo with, as my most viable portable writing instrument, a semi-functional (as in, the video adapter doesn't work with the OS, so the screen has interlacing and flickering issues) Sylvania g Netbook with a painfully small keyboard. I'm pondering an Alphasmart Neo, but it's seriously difficult for me to contemplate throwing money at more tech to solve only a tiny sliver of my problem. (On the other hand, the Neo solves that sliver pretty nicely, and is both cheap normally and on sale right now.)

I'm typing this on the Netbook, meanwhile; I haven't found my glasses, which went missing about a month ago, so the 7" screen is wearing on my eyes. It doesn't help that I'm nearing that bless-ed time of the month, and Sam and I had a lengthy, tearful exchange earlier involving (what else?) housework. I can hardly see the letters, and that means it's basically a bust. At least for tonight.

The evil and fail that was the shattering of the Macbook LCD has... been righted. Not entirely, and that will happen, mind, but at least I have something to work on, now.

For those who wonder to themselves, "How the eff did she let that happen?" (which is probably a few at least, since I was too PO'd to talk much about it at the time), I will tell you: through a moment of utter klutziness and unfortunate timing/placement so unimaginable that I had not in fact imagined it until several hours after the event itself. Early the day of the fail, I leaned over to put something in the trash. My laptop bag shoulder strap had gotten wrapped around one of the casters on my office chair somehow, and this combined with the lean meant my chair toppled (rather painfully for me, I might add). It didn't register at the time that I fell on my laptop bag; no, that didn't hit until a full five minutes after I saw the gigantic maze of cracks all over my lovely LCD.

I immediately googled around to find out how much these things cost to fix, and proceeded to have a heart attack over the many forum posts suggesting that Apple charges about $900 to replace an LCD. Cue several phone calls to Apple, then their local retail store, then a visit: yep. Well, almost. $807. To replace one part of a computer I paid $1000 for. Uhm, no thanks.

(There was also a momentary spark of hope when - and yes, this sounds perverse - Sam got in a car accident which shattered the screen of his laptop, the Macbook Pro for his job. I thought our homeowner's had an annual, not incident, deductible, so Sam's misfortune could have at least meant we got something out of the money we shovel toward our house insurance. And also, P.S. Sam is fine, along with everyone else involved in the accident.)

Anyway, so after reading about replacing your own LCD, I troll around ebay looking for used LCDs. I get sniped three timed, and said EFF THAT.

So I started looking into subnotebooks. Turns out the Sylvania g Netbook was ultra-cheap, and also pretty functional in terms of specs - $299 for a 7-inch 1.2gHz machine with 1gb RAM, 30gb HDD, built-in webcam and card reader, wifi, and so on. It's tiny, light, and I'm perfectly comfortable typing on it.

So I bought one, but the bundled OS (gOS) is ass. (I've joked with Sam that the 'g' stands for 'ghetto-ass lack of standard UNIX commands'.) It was an extra-special pain in the ass getting it fixed and transitioned over to regular (rather than dumbed-down) Ubuntu. (I did have to hand it over to Sam for a ridonkulous bit of trouble trying to get it to boot from USB.)

Aaaaaanyway. Long story short, it's up, running, and Oh, goodness! It's happy. Here's how it's decked out at the moment:



Which is perfectly workable for me.

My short review: lots of complaints on the net about the following:
1. wireless not working right with WEP
2. small keyboard
3. tiiiiiiiiny little touchpad with sensitivity jacked to 11 by default
4. small screen

But I use WPA2 on my wireless network, so I've had no trouble getting my wireless to connect. I've similarly had no trouble typing or reading on the screen. I had some trouble with the touchpad initially, but once I killed down the sensitivity a bit, it works fine. PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR $299 JEEZ.

(And now that I feel like I've channeled Dinosaur Comix, I can sleep. G'night!)

In the hugely ongoing project that is getting rid of a ton of stuff we have that we don't use, I'm selling a lot of DVDs. I could sell each of these individually on Amazon, and I'll resort to that for any I don't sell to friends, but it's easier to list as a bunch. (Plus, Amazon fee avoidance.)

Some of these are movies we thought we'd like and didn't. Some are movies that we like just fine, but can't figure out why we bought them instead of renting them when we'll actually watching them. Some are great movies that, for a variety of reasons, we don't see ourselves watching often enough to justify keeping around. I expect an equal number of, "Why on earth would anyone own that?" and, "Why on earth would anyone part with that?" responses. Tastes are tastes.

I'm selling all of the DVDs here for $5 a pop, or 10 for $45. I'll deliver locally (Omaha) or ship media mail. Add $2 for shipping for 1-3 DVDs; I'll pay for shipping for more than that.

I also have several seasons of TV I'm selling - first season of Charmed, first three seasons of Alias, first season of Dawson's Creek, first five of Gilmore Girls (with Sam's permission - they're his), and seasons 1-9 of Stargate SG-1 (ditto). Those aren't going for $5; make an offer, if you're interested.

Went into work around 7:00 this morning after less than two hours sleep. I'd say that will teach me to give myself more lead time on articles, but I know better. (Jim's Big Ego wrote a song about me. It's called Stress.) Work was good, in a way; although I personally got very little done today, there was a rather intense team conversation (prompted by the civilian boss) that I think may result in more cohesive work amongst my team. It's a damned good thing, as we have a 20 minute brief to reformulate and a 100-150 page report to pull out of the 10,000+ pages of research spread around our desks, all within the next month.

Left work early for ( my appointment at the podiatrist ). I shouldn't have any more troubles with the toe of evil and doom, which is about as good as I can ask for.

When I got home, Sam and I went to dinner. I hadn't eaten anything since I got to work (I keep a box of cereal and a quart of milk there, in case), so I was hungry as hell - I ordered a bowl of soup and what I know is a very, very large serving of meatloaf. After finishing the soup and two bites into my meatloaf, I started to feel acutely ill, so we packed it up and came home, where I spent the evening napping off the certainty that if I remained vertical, I would lose my (lack of) lunch.

This evening, I'm working on preparations for the World of Darkness (old version, Changeling and Mage) game I'm going to be running online. If you're interested, leave a comment - I've only invited about half the people I intend to, but life has been busy. I think we've got a decent idea of how to do the online RPG thing based on the 20+ combined years of playing and running the core group of players has done. I'm actually itching hardcore to get going on soft RP.

Tomorrow, I'm going to write up the results of my senior project experiments I (re-)did Monday instead of going to work, throw together a notional Powerpoint, and package it up to talk to Dr. Wilkins next week. Cross your fingers that he says I've done enough on the experiment side and that I just need to refine the paper and presentation - I've logged a lot of hours in that little lab, and I'd really rather cap it where it is.

Then there's the issue of lab reports from previous semesters - once I have my senior project stuff approved and scheduled for presentation, I can wipe those out, and I'll be on track to graduate on August 15th. Not a moment too soon; I lost patience for the bachelor's degree dog 'n' pony show about a year and a half ago.

And then there's the here-and-there stuff; I'm putting together a chapter for a book, I was invited to visit a couple days of the Master Fine Arts in Writing residency program (thanks to my kick-ass creative writing teacher from last semester), and I'm pondering hopping down to Dragon*Con in Atlanta for Labor Day.

It's going to be a busy month and a half, boys and girls.

June 1: Drove stesla to the airport for his flight to San Francisco.

June 3: Flew to Washington, D.C. for work-related meetings. D.C. is bizarrely under tornado watches while we're there.

June 4: The aforementioned meetings in D.C., and my flight back to Omaha in the evening. The flights were delayed due to lightning at the airport; the weather was nasty indeed.

June 7: Two tornadoes in Millard, a southwest suburb of town; I cowered with Michael in my basement because there were Big Sounds later identified as (1) a tree falling and crashing through my neighbor's fence, and (2) the metal light pole at the end of street (we're second from the end) twisting and snapping. The sirens went off after Michael (champ that he is) helped me through a marathon article-writing session - I'd just asked him to stick around until I was done cleaning the cat-box, which was already downstairs.

June 8: Flight to Los Angeles for a work-related conference. Weather-related delays made our flights hours late because our plane from Omaha to Denver was stuck in Chicago under the same thunderstorm that dropped tornadoes on us.

June 9: Aforementioned conference.

June 10: Flight back to Omaha. We flew United. That was a mistake; the stuck us on the ground in the plane for over an hour before takeoff to fix a flickering cabin light, without any sort of communication about what was going on. When I finally got back (late), I went home and spent an hour on the phone telling United that I do not object to their weather-related flight delays, but rather, the complete lack of communication that resulted in me going many, many hours without an opportunity to eat anything. They sent me a $125 voucher, which I vow to use and then write off United as a bad relative you don't visit unless someone's dying.

June 11: Touch-and-go tornadoes all over town. One (Tornado 6 SE Blenco in the map near the bottom of the page) hit a boy scout camp and killed four kids. I once again cowered in the basement; our house was at the centerpoint of a triangle with vertices at Tornado 6 N Elkhorn, Tornado 3 SW Louisville, and the Council Bluffs dot. My mother and aunt (who has a house very near the Tornado 3 SW Louisville storm) were working halfway between the Greenwood and Louisville tornadoes, and my mother refuses to take appropriate shelter during these storms. stesla was still in San Francisco. Oh, and later, these storms run through Carroll (where I went to high school), and rip the power transformer off my mom's house, uproot a tree, and cause some other electrical damage.

June 14: Picked up stesla from the airport in the evening, followed by rustycoon late at night. Get no sleep whatsoever, really.

June 15: Saw rustycoon off (he was buying our car and driving it back home).

June 18: Sam and I flew to Hartford, CT; drove down to NYC (through thunderstorms) for the three-day rosefox birthday marathon. (Quite pleasant, this bit.)

June 19-21: Aforementioned birthday marathon and NYC sightseeing.

June 22: Departed NYC by car for Boston to meet up with faerieboots and rustycoon; bummed around Harvard Square, mostly, then headed up to Maine. Also through thunderstorm.

June 23-26: Bummed around Maine; the vacationiest of the vacationy bits, really, as very little was pre-planned.

June 26: Drove back down to Hartford, CT for our return flight. Plane was mysteriously delayed due to... uh, maintenance of the unspecified variety. Plane was also very overbooked. They would have given us each hotel plus two free tickets and a guaranteed seat on a flight the following day had we been willing to bump, but I had an important meeting booked at work June 27; I wouldn't have made it back on time.

June 27: ...and that meeting was missed by the other party due to scheduling bits; kind of wish I'd have taken the hotel stay, the tickets, and asked for forgiveness rather than (as it turns out) unnecessary permission. Still, knocked out eight hours of solid work. Was just wrapping up and getting ready to head home when we (me and my colleague Kristen) heard what we thought was someone dragging bags of cans for recycling down the hall. It was loud, obnoxious, and... yes, frightening, because we'd never really heard anything like it before, and I think we both knew it wasn't cans. It was, in fact, nearly golfball-sized hail and horizontal winds gusting outside up to 90mph; we weren't technically in a tornado, but the winds that hit in this storm caused enough damage that we might as well have been. When the storm passed, we left to go to our separate homes, noting the absence of streetlights, the uprooted and busted-up trees, the corners of tin roofing peeled back from a building here and there. Most houses were left standing, which was the good part. For the bad, two kids in Council Bluffs who tried to take shelter from the (very sudden) storm in their car were killed when a tree fell on the car, and more than 125,000 homes in Omaha wound up losing power. We caught a movie (since we had no power), then tooled around, found a little island of power in the dark city and got some food (made difficult by the fact that their credit card processing was down), then went to karaoke to be in the air conditioning. By the time we got home, power had been back at our place for about an hour, meaning we were down for about seven hours - we'll have to do a fridge overhaul.

Overall, this month has been way, way too heavy on two things I'm normally very fond of, travel and storms (though to be fair, I like storms of a less destructive nature much better). I'm rather feeling like sunny days tending my little piece of land for a bit, which is a little odd for me... but not too odd. The garden will appreciate the extra care.

Leaving Maine to drive down to Hartford, return our rental car, then hop on our flight(s) back to Omaha. Do I feel awesome about this? Dudes, and I feel like I can call you that - I'm going back to Omaha.

However, among other things that have been wonderous and awesome on this trip, I have discovered the wonder that is bacon in chocolate. Hence the icon.

See you all on the other side.

I've realized recently (largely due to our visit to NYC for rosefox's birthday party) that a goodish number of people I'd like to keep up with are on LJ and really not much of anywhere else overlapping with me. I've been lurking since May 2002, mostly, which is hard; it's hard to maintain ties to a community in which you're not really a participant.

So I'm back, though basically without much in the way of promises as far as posting regularity (seeing as I really haven't posted to my blog-proper more than here-and-there for the last few years). We'll see how well I can manage to keep up. Because I'm already on information overload, I will likely be limiting my default view quite a bit, and catching up on the rest when I can.

Hi, guys. I mostly lurk on LJ anymore, but I thought I'd drop in on the chance that the omaha_lj doesn't reach someone local that my flist would. Hey, my mom's worth it.

A month or so ago, my mom was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I haven't talked about this much (or really at all) on public fora because honestly, I wasn't sure (and I'm still not sure) what's appropriate to share. She had to have some pretty substantial surgery, and her ongoing treatment is also very substantial. All of this leads to (you guessed it) Very Substantial Medical Expenses (tm), which as I understand it will not be entirely covered by insurance. (We're glad she has insurance, though. You betcha.)

The Marleybone (map/directions), the best damn Irish pub around and favorite haunt of my family, is having a spaghetti dinner today. All proceeds will go to mom's medical fund. There will also be raffles for a golf foursome out at Quarry Oaks Golf Club ($300 value, $10 a chance), one hour of golf lessons with a professional ($50 value, $2 a chance) and gift certificates to Goldberg's Bar & Grill at 132nd & Center ($10 value, 2 chances for $1). The dinner is $8 a plate, which is (at least for me) about on par with going out for slightly-better-than-fast-food for lunch. It's from 1pm to 6pm - come and go as you please. If you're not doing anything else, we'd love to see you there.

Thank you all so very much.

Ick. My feed (sperari) was nasty broken. Sorry. Better now.

Edit: Whoops. If you have my feed on your list and it just spammy-spam-spammed your friends page, apologies!

Just a quick note. If any of you guys are watching this journal, wondering why I never post--well, I've been busy, just not here. moonrose was nice enough to set up a Livejournal account that grabs the feed from my site, so if you're not inclined to hop over there every few days to check it, add sperari to your friends list and you'll see when I update.

Ta!

I've moved, hopefully for the last time.

Find me at sperari.com. Much tweaking to ensue, but I've finally got a my-very-own space.

I think the time has come for me to say goodbye to livejournal as my means of journaling. I'll still be reading all of you, I'll just be taking my thoughts elsewhere.

But you all know where to find me.

Two people I know and care about very much are letting the best things about sex and relationships become the worst things about themselves.

I had more to say when I started. I don't know what happened to it.

My website is back up. A little different. Let me know what you think.

Sam's mom finally sent us our half of the pictures she made us get taken before we moved out here.

( Three largish pics )