Becca Stareyes

I am this close to asking my aunt if I can spend Thanksgiving Break camped out in her sunroom (or the garage) writing and drawing, and be excused from dinner prep and family socializing. Because, despite not doing NaNo, I am feeling overwrought with projects. I did finish my scifibigbang fic (only two weeks after I was supposed to do the rough draft), and am working on my slayers_request fic. The outline looks long, so I might have to go at NaNo rates to get it done in time to edit. Plus, I need to rewatch some anime for yuletide, and I missed MAX entirely*, and gah!

It didn't help that I spent this weekend feeling sick to my stomach sporadically -- tea and quiet time away from the computer seemed to help. And I'm not entirely sure it isn't stress, since it's coming back as I write this. So now I get to spend today doing grading that I meant to do over the weekend -- if I didn't have group therapy, I'd be camping in Borders to avoid the Internets**. And tomorrow there's dinner with the DGS, which I am tempted to skip work before so I can bake and get my kitchen clean enough that I can call in someone to fix my garbage disposal and find out why the sink drains so slowly.

* As much as I love the Anniversary round, I might drop MAX until January just to give myself time to recuperate. And bow out of mrcaex in December as well.

** A lot of the off-campus coffee shops around here have a 'fifteen minutes every hour for free' policy. Their firewalls don't block ssh or ftp programs, though, so I can still remotely work from them, just not use email or my web browser or chat programs.

I haven't done one of these in a while... it's book review time!

( So, in an effort to branch out, I've been trying to read new authors. )

Me: Ugh, my stomach. *emails boss saying she feels like crap and won't be in for group meeting today, then goes to rest*
Nausea: *clears up*
Me: ...

I'm starting to wonder if its some kind of fried food thing. Yesterday I had potato chips and made some fake fried rice -- basically it was rice with veggies and scrambled eggs. Yesterday night, I felt miserable -- hungry one minute and bloatedly full after I ate a normal snack. And today my digestive system is registering its displeasure with me.

(I still have to head out and drop off some anime at the club's business meeting -- we only had the first two discs of one of the shows we show, so that meant buying the rest.)

Comment and I'll give you three fandoms, for which you must answer these:

01: What got you into this fandom in the first place?
02: Do you think you'll stay in this fandom or eventually move on?
03: Favorite episodes/books/movies/etc.?
04: Do you participate in this fandom (fanfiction, graphics, discussions)?
05: Do you think that more people should get into this fandom?

I got Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Vision of Escaflowne from corellianrogue.

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Name a fandom and I'll tell you
- three pairings I love,
- two pairings I consider shipping,
- and one pairing I hate*

* In my case, this will be probably 'dislike' or 'would probably never read unless a good friend and awesome writer wrote or recced it to me'.

So, you can either name fandoms for me to answer questions about shipping, or have me give you fandoms to answer about your involvement.

I'm a bit stir crazy at work. Not that I don't have plenty of stuff to do, but it's the inability to focus. That and I have a lot to do this weekend:

1. Finish my MAX picture.
2. Make sure everything I need done by Dec. 1 is started. That includes my mrcaex and yuletart pictures -- even a sketch would be nice.
3. If my scifibigbang story isn't done tonight (I have 3 scenes left -- a climax and two denouement scenes, and about 4k words to hit the minimum), then it better be done by Sunday. I need a short break before I edit this sucker to let it gel, and it was supposed to be done two weeks ago. I also need to make sure my artist doesn't hate me for this, since I haven't given much direction (which can be good or bad).
4. Make a start on various holiday things. I've finished 1 of 5 gifts that I'm making and have a good start on a second. I also signed up for four holiday exchanges (two Slayers and two general ones).
5. My kitchen and bathroom are starting to get scary. I need to fix this. And also buy food for the week and make some food for the potluck on Tuesday.

I also need to decide if I'm going to go to anime club, go to Ask an Astronomer Live (I'm not on the panel, but I can help field any observational astronomy questions), or stay in and play in the RP event the game I'm in is putting on. This is why I hate events on Saturday nights -- it seems like everything happens then. And all of these run from the same time window -- Ask an Astronomer is from 8 to 9:30, Anime Club is 7 to 10, and the RP event starts at 7.

I am this close to taking next Wednesday as my 'stay home and get crap done' day, since, as far as I know, I don't have any reason to be on campus except for work. Heck, I'm this close to going home and working on non-work stuff just in hopes that it calms my nerves.

( I want a rocketship. Or possibly fic about people in rocketships. )

I stole this from galuxkitty.

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I was all set to spend today cleaning, except then I developed the headache from Hades after going to the grocery store -- the same one that kept me in on Halloween. It's gone now, but it was enough that all I got done was spending the afternoon passed out on my bed asleep*.

Well, and a drabble. Added a new fandom to 'stuff I have written' -- yay for drabbles about book fandoms. (Suddenly you see why I took to Yuletide like a duck to water -- writing for odd fandoms is one of my favorite things to do.)

I am not adapting to the early darkness at all. For an astronomer, I sure hate the dark. No, that's not quite true. I like the dark when it comes on after I eat dinner and can sip my decaffeinated tea and watch the sunset, then go out and look at the stars. Not so much when I come home from work in the dark, or have to wake up before the sun.

* My normal response to pain is OTC painkillers and sleep until they take effect.

Tomorrow work should be busy -- I got a lunch seminar and a meeting with my advisor on 'where I am going with research**', and a lot of paper-writing and stuff.

** Basically, I'm done with one major project, unsure if I should pursue the other one further or just finish and publish, and suspect that I might need a third project to get enough dissertation writing material, but I'm going to ask my advisor. Also mention something someone mentioned to me at DPS about something I brushed over in my talk, and maybe calculating a lower limit on something. (Except I don't know -- or am not sure -- how. Maybe that, plus the F-ring feature thing that I'm helping Matt with, but is low on his priority list, would be enough stuff -- 'cept the F-ring stuff is Matt's project, and I'm just giving him the data from my data set to add to the data he has.)

As in, it thinks doing a Kino's Journey/Slayers fusion fic would be a good idea. Or even a crossover type dealie taking Kino, Hermes and the feeling of Kino's Journey* and bringing it into other settings. Just as kind of a series of one-shot crossovers to play with settings/characters of various series and to write Kino and Hermes.

* If you like thoughtful anime, I recommend this series highly. Basically, the premise is that Kino is a traveler who only stays a few days in each town she visits and Hermes is her motorrad (think motorcycle with AI). A lot of the episodes are stand alones or two-part arcs, and they're very concept oriented. For example, the first episode, Kino visits a town where the inhabitants developed an ability to read each other's minds. As time passed, they discovered that knowing the innermost thoughts of even loved ones was making it impossible to live with them, so they all isolated themselves and used robots to do everything. The one person Kino meets tells her this, then invites her to stay, since she's the first person he's talked to in a while and he wants to live with people who he can't read. It's a very matter-of-fact anime, showing great beauty and kindness, but also great suffering, irrationality, and brutality. (Oh, the ending...) "The world is not beautiful, therefore it is."

I really liked it, because it was... I guess because it wasn't depressing for the sake of angst, but because it was matter of fact, showing the world which was. It's on my list with Haibane Renmei and Mushishi for cerebral anime that I liked from club and want on my shelf.

In English, a queen can be a Queen Regnant (a monarch), a Queen Consort (the wife of a monarch) or a Queen Mother (the mother to the monarch). But a king is always a King Regnant -- the husband of a monarch is a Prince Consort. I don't think the father to the monarch has a title. Then again, reading Wikipedia indicates a lot of it is because Britain -- who tend to be what sets usage of noble titles in the English language, since most English speaking countries either look to Britain for their nobility needs or don't have nobility -- has only had two reigning queens in the current era. Victoria outlived her husband and Elizabeth II is still alive, so that means that 'widower of previous monarch/father to current monarch' has never needed a word, and apparently Victoria couldn't get Parliament to call her husband king since he wasn't British. (Elizabeth II made her husband, Philip, a prince, but not Prince/King Consort.)

Now, the reason I think about this is for fantasy writing -- or non-English-language fanfic*. I mean, if I have a country that didn't have the tradition of men inheriting first, then the courtesy titles for spouses and parents should be consistent with that. So, either one has to go with Queen/King as only meaning a monarch, and Prince(ss) being a term for 'member of monarch's immediate family or direct descendants, who is not the monarch him/herself' -- so you end up with this being the Prince(ss) Consort, former Prince(ss) Consorts/now Prince(ss) Father/Mother, and the 'normal' children, grandchildren, and siblings to the monarch. Or you could have King/Queen be the term for a spouse/widow(er) of a monarch as well as the monarch him/herself. (This would also extend downward -- so a Duke or Duchess could be ruling a Duchy or the spouse of the ruler of the Duchy.)

Or you can just use the male terms as unisex terms, and use the Consort as a title for a spouse. I know for my tweaks to Green Ronin's Blue Rose setting, I'm changing it to drop King/Queen as the title of Aldis, and just go with Sovereign (the name of the office), with the Consort (or Consorts) being any spouses.

* I specify the language since a lot of politeness and titles and stuff translate better figuratively than literally.

Today is a rainy and gray day. But that's not what I'm here to complain about.

So, last night, I finished my first read-through of papers and went to the fabric store and out to dinner. I get home around 6, and go to my computer.

( Rebecca Versus the Computer )

TLDR: Desktop at home is borked. Considering I tried at least a half a dozen time to either restore from backups or reinstall the operating system, with no helpful results, I think my only recourse is to send it to Apple and let them deal with it. (It's two years old, so no longer under warranty, and I don't live near a place that is certified to repair Macs. I could ask at Best Buy, or somewhere, since it's not like I can void the warranty by taking it elsewhere.)

I have the laptop, so I can head home tonight and do something (and get my files off the external drive), but expect me to be slow about everything computer-related in the next couple of days.

* Seriously, the computer is set to backup the disk every hour when I'm at the computer. I even have a program (Time Machine) that remembers the changes I make between backups, and keeps track of it, so I can essentially browse my hard drive as it looked in the past. Reminds me that I should get an external drive for work.

90% confident I won't do NaNo this year. I'm just too drained these last couple of weeks. I might sent a NaNo-esque goal, but something less like a sprint in that I won't need December to recover. Maybe to write every one of the 31_days prompts for a different fandom, or to take a month where I draw every day. In the state I'm in, I'm just not in the condition to do something intensive like NaNo.

In other news, my officemate can't find someone to open the observatory for her lab students. Normally one grad student handles these things, but he's not answering the phone. If he doesn't show up by the time I head to group therapy, I said I'd come by and help. Which will probably mean taking the late bus home and just passing out. I already didn't sleep well, since I feel bad about not doing much for Ben's birthday this weekend, and I'm still trying to work out what to do about the whole holiday thing*, besides to buy my tickets for Boston. (I found out that Shortline offers a special bus from Cornell to Newton over the break, and I can get the T from there to a couple of blocks from my aunt's house.)

* By 'the holiday thing' I mean that Dad wants me to visit Florida with him and Marjorie**, Mom wants me to visit Nebraska with her, my siblings and my friends. Both of them have said it's ultimately my decision. Dad had assumed I'd be in Nebraska for Thanksgiving -- I don't know why, since I don't go home over that break, though I did visit him in Florida once.

** I don't know if the invitation applies to Ben, but Dad is asking Jenn and Matt next year, since he can't put up all four of us in his condo.

So, this week I have the following I would like to do:

-- Finish my drawings for MAX and mrcaex
-- Finish Winry Rockbell, Martian Space Pilot! (a Fullmetal Alchemist AU) for scifibigbang
-- Put together two Halloween costumes. I'm going as the Virgo Cluster as a Museum of the Earth volunteer and as Tetra from Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker for CJAS's Halloween party. I might also repair my Amelia costume for CJAS Costume'd Kareoke on Friday.
-- Clean my apartment.
-- Help with some RPG stuff and get my activity for the Museum event ready.

Work is slow, and the thing I really need to do there (besides grading) is sit down with my adviser and have a 'Let us plan where I go next so I can get my PhD in a timely fashion'. He's out of town for Tuesday and Wednesday, so I could get away with taking that time off for home (and grading) if I finish everything in my office tomorrow.

Next month, I'll haveyuletide and yuletart, doing some art for scifibigbang, and slayers_request. Plus, finishing Christmas gifts and ag_over_18 will probably do a Secret Santa.

I wonder if maybe I should take a break from NaNo and maybe just do something like mekosuchinae is doing -- pledge to write every one of the 31_days prompts, which still gets me writing, but lets me work on other projects. Plus, I have one unfinished NaNo already, that doesn't suck and isn't fanfic. (I have three in total: the one that needs massive editing to salvage (if it can), the fanfic which needs its third part, and the one that really just needs a second half and some editing.)

But, that does kind of make me feel left out, since I really like the NaNo community. I like going to write-ins and such, and it would break my winning streak. But on the other hand, I don't want to win just for the sake of 50,000 words and a cute banner and certificate. I want to turn some of my scribbles into things other people can read. (Well, they can read them now, but it would make me cringe.)

And doing scifibigbang is making me realize that my writing has gotten somewhat more stable -- in that, a lot of my older writing from several years ago doesn't look like it sucks. For a while, I was improving fast enough that reading my old writing was painful. Now it looks like a lot of my drafting skills are stable enough that drafts look good when I re-read them, even years later. Which might mean I need to take more risks and start editing to see if I can improve myself more.

Reading comment threads on:
-- Same-sex marriage on any political site (in this case, 538.com)*
-- Anything relating to feminism/civil rights, unless on a dedicated site
-- PunditKitchen (ICanHazCheezburger's site for news/poltics image macros)
-- Anything relating to vaccination/evolution/chemotheraphy***/the moon landing/Obama's birth/9-11/the Kennedy Assassination...

You know what? I should just stop reading blogs, except for the ones with pictures of puppies and kittens and humorous pastries.

* No, seriously, Willfully-Ignorant One, same-sex marriage will not cause humanity to die out because, believe it or not, gay people have children too. Frankly, even if every gay/bisexual person decided to not reproduce (unlikely -- in fact I'd say that same-sex marriage would be prone to make gay folks more likely to reproduce, because it would protect parental rights of the non-biological parent), there just aren't enough of us to bring the population down to replacement**. After folk have told you this twenty times, while insinuating that you are closeted for assuming that same-sex marriage will cause enough people to have same-sex relationships to alter the birthrate that much, do not move the goalposts to the 'if same-sex marriage is legal, churches will be forced to perform them'. Yes, and I can kick down the door of the local synagogue with any guy from work, and demand they marry us, regardless of not being Jewish (in either ancestry or religion) or ever having been in a synagogue before.

** Current world birth rate is about 2.5 kids per pair of humans. 2.1 kpp is replacement (because it needs to account for people who die in childhood). Gay folks make up somewhere between 2 and 10% of the population -- let's assume 10%. If every gay person stopped reproducing because of same-sex marriage, the birth rate goes down to 2.25. Face it, most human beings are below 3 on the Kinsey scale -- they prefer the opposite sex.

*** Yes, there are folks who seem to believe that cancer can be cured by diet, vitamins, positive thinking and shoving coffee up their rear ends (warning, Wikipedia link), and that chemo is what kills cancer patients.

Well, it appears a lot of my previous health-bitching may have been PMS, though my digestive system is still filing protests.

Anyway, yesterday was a good day. I was running late, so I went out for lunch, and the dessert was enough to keep me from eating a snack at coffee break time. I did some copy-editing on a report that is nominally internal, but that a couple of professors who expressed interest in the project might see. Then hit on a major error in some of the theory that I'll be fixing today, but it makes me feel better, since now the theory and the models give similar answers.

When I got home, sadly I couldn't make chili for dinner, since I discovered that the big pot I couldn't find was hiding in my fridge with month-old soup*, so got to be soaked in bleach before I used it again. So I'll make that tonight. I also got some writing done before I passed out early, and now I feel wide awake, even before I had my tea.

* Well, at least three-weeks old soup, since it was before I left for DPS, so it was made in September sometime.

It's amazing about mood. I mean, thinking back, if I had been in a crappy mood, the bad things (like the soup, or finding that error) would have outweighed the good things (a nice lunch, finally getting sensible answers, writing 1000 words). Hopefully the mood will maintain -- some of it might be the weather. It's doing the Ithaca fall thing where it's nice and sunny and the leaves are all pretty colors, and you know in a couple of days it'll dump rain (possibly snow, or 'wintery mix') on your head.

At this rate, I'll be approaching a NaNo-writing-rate just to get my scifibigbang story done before NaNo starts. A rough draft is due in a week and a half, which gives me 11 days to write 14,000 words. (At least I pegged a story that has a natural length of 25,000 words.)

NaNo Rate: 1,667 words/day
Rate to Finish: 1,260 words/day

(Oh, anyone who likes FMA fanfic and is not having his or her life eaten by NaNo is welcome to beta this -- caitycat said she'd try, but couldn't guarantee timeliness, and I really need it done in the first couple of weeks of November. I can start sending chapters now.)

Also, yay for 1 November falling on a Sunday. It means I can stay up late on Halloween night and start on midnight. My normal NaNo strategy is to get as much of a lead as possible in the first week or so, while I'm still excited and know where I'm going.

Twitter Preacher: “Know God... Know Peace. No God.. No Peace!”

TP's Followers: *retweet*

Twitter software: Huh, a lot of people are saying that. ::automatically picks phrases out, including 'no god':: Better put it on a trending topic.

Chorus (including various and sundry pagans, atheists, troublemakers, and various people just sick of fundamentalist Christians): Hee! Let us play with this. *tweet*

Fundies: What... hey, that's not funny, guys! Damn atheists making 'No God' a trending topic.

Chorus: Guys, you started it. We just picked up the trend and ran with it.

Fundies: *curious mix of death threats and glurge*

Chorus: *botherbotherbotherglee*

Fundies: Twitter, make them stop!

Servers: WTF, this is bad! Red alert, red alert, too much stuff going on!

No God Trending Topic: *suddenly vanishes from the top position*†

Chorus: OMG Censorship!

Fundies: HA! SUCK IT, HERETICS! (Only not, because that would be gay.)


(Sourced from here -- I expect a second act when more blogs get into this, probably within 24 hours of this post going up.)
--

† Friends advanced the position that Twitter might have done this as self-preservation to keep the servers running. I submit this is about the equivalent of tossing water on a fire only to realize some wag filled it with gasoline. If there is one thing that will get internet folks up in arms, it's censorship. Heck, it would have been better just to take down the entire Trending Topics widget for a day, just as sort of an even-handed thing, or even take the server down, in hopes that folks would lose interest if you cut off the instant response.

Not quite a rant, but more a frustration I'm trying to work out.

Dad just emailed me to invite me to spend Christmas and his birthday in Florida with him and Marjorie, my stepmother. Normally I spend Christmas in Nebraska -- Dad lives there, Mom lives there, neither of my siblings have moved out of state, and I still have friends in Lincoln. But Dad and Marjorie have taken to spending winter break in Florida for the weather. Dad apparently thought I did things closer to how we did things as kids -- I'd spend Thanksgiving with one parent, and Christmas with the other, so he offered to pay for my plane ticket down to Florida, assuming I'd see Mom next month.

Well, except I don't feel like flying across the country for a long weekend, so I normally take a bus to Boston and visit my extended family there for the Thanksgiving holidays. So, if I take Dad up on his offer, I save some money, get to see him for Christmas, and get to spend Christmas on the beach. On the other hand, I won't see Mom or my friends -- and probably Jenn and Matt, since my sister both has to deal with spending time with Matt's family and if given a choice between Mom and Dad, will choose Mom. (I don't know about Ben -- he doesn't like having his routine disrupted*, but he also does like seeing Dad, though, unlike me, he sees Dad regularly.)

* And Christmas morning at Mom's is traditional -- normally either we go over Dad's the night before, or for Christmas dinner. Or, more recently, a later weekend.

The only compromise I can come up with is to visit Dad for a week or so for Christmas, and then maybe take a week off for my birthday to visit Nebraska.

I'm home today. Not really intentional but this morning, my lower digestive system decided it was going to gum up the works and make me feel like I was going to have to expel everything from the other end. I'm better now, after spending the better part of 3-4 hours either in the bathroom, curled up feeling sick, or asleep*, but this is part of a long line of annoying minor complaints I've had for the past two weeks.

Though, there is something. I had my yearly blood test last week. Since I'm on anti-anxiety drugs, the psychiatrist wants to make sure any feelings of moodiness, anxiety, depression or lack of energy (not to mention the side effect of feeling sleepy) were due to a busted brain and 15 mg of Lexapro, rather than everything else, I have to get blood drawn yearly. Except the only time this actually happened was when I was first medicated in '07. In between, the lab started testing Vitamin D levels.

Yesterday, I got a call from the nurse noting that my Vitamin D levels were low, and could I please come in next week to consult? I figure this is probably a mix of me not drinking milk and the fact I'm not eating as much fish as I used to. On the other hand, one website says as little as 10 minutes in sunlight should give me enough Vitamin D, assuming my body isn't breaking the parts that make it. Especially considering I have fair skin.

Before then, I hit up google for Vitamin D deficiency in adults. Rickets is what happens in kids, and it's apparently a lot less fun in people who are trying to grow bones than people who just need to maintain them. Adults just start bone softening, and are at increased risk of osteoporosis later on. Also, apparently you get pain from this, and fatigue. It would be really nice if the aches and pains were just from 'crappy diet' and would clear up if I start taking a multivitamin.

Bah, all my bitching about health makes me sound like an old woman. I'm not even thirty yet.

* Sleep is generally how I deal with feeling crummy, unless it's too crummy to sleep.

Dear Immune System,

Quit it. Seriously. I'm sick of days where I feel feverish but am fine, or feel achy, but it's not the flu, and it goes away after an hour or two. Because this makes it hard to plan anything, or know if I should stay home as a preventive strike against seasonal flu/swine flu/mono/cancer/it's-never-lupus/lycanthropy/etc. -- mostly because my co-workers would rather not be sick.

Now I spend an hour of my cleaning time feeling nauseous and wondering if I should bother making my slides for Planetary Lunch Seminar tomorrow. I already held off in making chili in exchange for boring pasta and cheese, because spicy foods and uppity digestive system. On the other hand, it could be nothing, and then I will be cranky. And, if I miss Planetary Lunch when it's nothing -- not to mention a psychologist's appointment and a meeting to plan a Halloween astronomy event -- I will also have to deal with the anxiety levels from screwing up an obligation.

So, seriously. After dinner, I want to be either fine, or obviously sick enough to send an email to everyone I have to talk to on Monday telling them that we will have to reschedule. Or even settling for Monday morning.

Just pick something! At this point, I don't care what as long as a couple of days' bed rest can fix it.

-- Yrs,

Rebecca