Ardath Rekha

And now we (in Cleveland) have Anthony Sowell.

Argh.

Body count is up to ten and rising. And this is the part that really freaks me out: I just saw pictures of his house and it's identical to the house in a nightmare I had two years ago about a serial killer.

Yeah, I really did not need that fun little touch.

So a while ago I noticed that my upper left bicuspid felt a little weird. This was a tooth that, a decade ago, required a root canal. I knew I needed to get it checked but a lack of time or money meant that I put it off (although I knew I shouldn't because postponing medical care of any kind is always A Very Bad Idea). But given how tight my schedule was and how many other things I had to budget for, I kinda hoped it could wait. And for a while, it did.

( Then, last night, while I was having a pre-bed snack, I felt this CRACK! as I was chewing... )

Does anybody know who did the cover of "Scary Monsters" that played during FlashForward this week? Because it's the most awesome version of the song I've ever heard and I desperately want it, but I can't find a credit for it anywhere.

Edit: Okay, the cover is by Sea Wolf, and currently isn't available for purchase, more's the pity. But at least now I know! TY Artemis! Your Google Fu is nothing short of amazing. :D

First, HAPPY BIRTHDAY BIE!!! Hope you've been having a great one! :D

Second, I am likely to be out until sometime after 10ish. I forgot to mention this sooner, and I'm leaving in about half an hour. I am...

...well, I'm going to see a performance in Playhouse Square tonight. As... uh... a theater critic. I have... uh... press passes.

I am not quite sure what to make of this. I apparently am press. o.O

...Given that I'm not even in the Journalism program, this comes as something of a shock to me, clearly. XD

Should be home later!

Probably only a handful of you (if that) had info on my LibraryThing account. I just changed my screen name there from "ArdathRekha" to "AtomicFluffchick." The reason: There are people in RL, who don't know my pen name (and whom I don't want to tell my pen name) that I would like to be able to link to my LibraryThing. The new name is one I've used in both contexts, RL and pen-name, so it works in both cases.

I still only have maybe a third of my books loaded in. It's a neat way to keep track of things, though. :)

So I have two really fascinating birds in my backyard lately, and I've been spending a lot of time observing them whenever I can.

The first one is a bluejay we've named Pericles. He's youngish, possibly from this year's first clutch or last year's last clutch, and he's completely infatuated with manipulating his voice in as many ways as possible. We've heard him in the yard for a while, because from the beginning he loved to yell at the top of his lungs about everything. It wasn't long before he began imitating sounds around him, learning hawk calls, crow calls, and the like. And then he discovered us.

I was outside when he flew down to sit on the garage gutter. He looked at me, struck a pose, and belted out a hawk call...and then tilted his head as though saying, "so how was that? Convincing?" Striking another pose, he let loose a variation of it and then gave me a "how was that one?" headtilt. He followed this up with crow calls and something that might have been a mockingbird warble (a jay mocking a mockingbird, yes).

This was a few weeks ago. Since then, he's expanded his repertoire and performed for both my father and me. And generally hung around the yard making all kinds of wacky noises. Today, I caught him experimenting with acoustics. We have a metal awning over our patio (right outside of my window; rain is very loud) and he decided to use it as a tool for manipulating his voice. He was playing with echoes by calling from inside it in various places. It was wild.

I really love this bird. Hopefully I can get a video recording of him soon.

The second fascinating bird in our yard is... a parakeet.

We were hearing parakeet calls for about the last two, maybe three weeks, and figuring maybe Pericles was making them after listening in on someone's pet through a window. But the other day, we saw the actual bird. It's a yellow-and-green, so I'm provisionally naming it Chartreuse. It seems to be hanging out with the sparrows, which makes sense since it's a seed-eater, too, and they know where all the good seeds are this time of year. We're a little worried about how it's going to deal with a Cleveland winter, except that my father looked up information on that and apparently Chicago has feral parakeet colonies. O.O But we're going to be keeping an eye out for it. It let me get within a foot of it before it decided I was being too friendly, but I don't think it felt at all threatened by me, so hopefully we'll see more of it soon.

Aside from that, I live in the land of all-school-all-the-time. Seventeen credit-hours of courses, virtually all of them "Writing Across the Curriculum" courses which means papers out the wazoo. My media criticism course is particularly cool because we've been going to see live theater performances as a requirement for the course. I've seen Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Fiddler on the Roof so far, and they were awesome, first-rate performances. I need to keep doing that even after the live theater module is over, because it was brilliant stuff. But insert the usual "Ardath's head may explode this semester" disclaimer here because my teachers are as demanding as ever. XD

Patrick Swayze dies at age 57.

This immediately made me think of one of my favorite Mystery Science Theater songs... which now leaves me feeling a little choked up when I listen to it.

( MST3K has a Patrick Swayze Christmas, under the cut. )

Happy 09:09:09 on 09-09-09! :D

I wonder who was born right now.

I now have my acyclovir, and a referral from the uni doctor to see a rheumatologist. Since only 1% of shingles sufferers have the kinds of multiple-outbreak manifestations I have, she thinks that my arthritis might be triggering them, so I've finally gotten authorization for insurance-approved testing to determine if we're right about it being PA. At last, huzzah! I definitely have some kind, given what's been going on with both of my little fingers for the last several weeks.

I also got my first (and long-coveted) down comforter today, and it's now on my bed just waiting for me to get under it and hide from the 47-degree low we're hitting tonight. That's going to be very cool -- er, warm, I mean, uh... awesome? -- too.

Still setting things up on my new computer, but I'm loving it quite madly and especially loving my new monitor/tv. There will be much fun ahead with it!

Still have a lot of reorganizing to do in my room, but I'm getting there, slowly. And today my mother bought the vacuum cleaner to end all vacuum cleaners. We're going to go on a cleaning rampage. We have it all planned out. THE DUST BUNNY CARNAGE WILL BE EPIC! For God's sake, don't tell PETA.

I still feel a bit bleh, big surprise. I probably will for the next few days. But things are getting a bit better, I think.

So around midday yesterday I started feeling quite normal again, and contemplated posting a short "never mind!" post about the shingles. Heh. Last night as I was getting ready for bed, I spotted the first blisters. I so have it again.

Student Health can't squeeze me in until the middle of my second class, so I'm attending my first one, then going over there, and then getting my pills and curling up for a while. I should probably also see about some of my other ailments but the hell with it. One thing at a time. I'll make a non-emergency appointment for those.

I'm on campus but wishing I was curled up in bed. This thing also gives me very strong flu symptoms for a day or two, once it really hits... not the sore throat or any of that stuff, but the fatigue, chills, aches, etc. I can't recall if it gave me a fever last time but I remember feeling like I had one.

BLARGH. I want to be sleeping RIGHT NOW.

Room is partway cleaned. I even washed the floor. I just have a ton of organizing and sorting to do. And a TV/monitor to set up, but that'll happen this weekend. In the meantime...

-- Must get a locker at the rec center tomorrow and load it up with my gym stuff. And uuuuse it lots.
-- Must read part one of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography for tomorrow. *groan*
-- Must write a tentative rough draft of my first paper for Media Criticism. For tomorrow. *groan*
-- Must pay attention to the funky feeling in the back of my throat, because I usually do get sick shortly after school starts back up and all the "other kids" bring their new germs around. I wonder if I can get H1N1 out of the way before midterms? That would be awesome.
-- Must see whether or not the bluejays in the neighborhood really think my alarm clock is making bluejay distress calls. And must figure out a way to reassure them if they do, because I'd be sad if they decided I was evil.
-- Must talk to the honors department about whether it's a problem that my honors advisor went out of town without notice for the next few days, and thus can't sign any of my paperwork for contract courses (or my independent study plan!)
-- Must arrange to take the GRE. Soon.
-- Must sleep. Eventually. IT'S FOR THE WEAK, DUDE.
*FLOP!*

1. Lafayette is made of awesome. Go Lafayette!
2. My two favorite couples in the series are a tie between Jessica/Hoyt and Arlene/Terry.
3. I think part of this is because Hoyt is the nicest guy on the planet and Terry's a close second.
4. May I plz acquire godlike powarz rite nao so I can kill Maryann?
5. And so I can make Godric miiiiiiine?
6. OMG GODRIC, OMG. *FLAILS*
7. Eric, I don't know whether to bitchslap you or cuddle you up.
8. HAY REVEREND, LOVE THE BINDI. ;)
9. HAY SARAH, THE FLUFFY KITTENS ARE FAR AWAY FROM WHERE YOU ARE. :P
10. Poor Andy, reduced to letting naked men into his motel room... *snicker*

Did I forget anything? XD

The good news: My data is safe. The Best Buy guys (who are made of awesome and have my love forever) will have it all backed up to a portable drive that I can access as of tomorrow.

The bad news: My laptop's motherboard is friiiiied. So the laptop is shipping out to the factory for repairs (it's not only under the Best Buy service plan but also under factory warranty because I bought it on August 30th... so it almost but not quite survived to the end of that).

I will probably see my laptop again in, oh, say, three weeks.

In the meantime I will spend approximately the next week or two hobbled, using my elderly desktop, and then I'll get a new desktop to handle my heavy programs so that I can stop murdering laptops in under a year apiece. Seriously, I've now killed two laptops in two years; I need to rethink this. (In my defense, each time it was the hardware that failed, but it's a strike against me that the failures were all undoubtedly caused by the super-heavy usage I gave the machines.)

So, uh... yeah... I'm back on the elderly desktop for the next two weeks. We'll see what happens after that, exactly.

Last night, my laptop screen began doing a weird flicker with some wiggles and other oddities. I didn't like the look of it, so I saved everything, told everybody I had to restart, and shut down the computer. It proceeded to stall, freeze up, post a bizarre error message that made no sense, and eventually had to have the shut-down forced. I was able to boot up in safe mode and things LOOKED okay, so I decided I'd do a regular restart and back up my computer just to be safe.

Only that was the last time I was able to start it up. It now turns on, and immediately turns back off, only to repeat that precise cycle.

It's going to Best Buy asap for repairs. Hopefully it won't be too hard to fix. If it needs a great deal of care, hopefully they can at least give me access to my hard drive in the meantime so I can deactivate my important program licenses and back up my documents and media. I'd fallen a little behind on doing that, which is not good.

Although there's a part of me that's feeling very fretful about it, I know it's not as bad as it feels. I'd completely backed up the hard drive relatively recently (I'll have to check when) because I got fed up with some malfunctions and decided to wipe the drive and reinstall everything. So only things since then will be at all affected. I'll probably lose a bunch of chat logs, some email (most of which exists on Gmail's servers anyway) and some downloads.

Well, and some writing files I was working on, and a complex spreadsheet I'd built. That part will be really irksome, but I don't have any reason to believe that the hard drive is the problem; it looked like some kind of freaky hardware/circuitry error. Still. The fact is that even if I do lose some or all of that content, I can replace/reconstitute most of the important stuff.

The fifteen pages of "Magnetic Nowhere" script I wrote on Friday will be lost, but... I know what I wrote. Hell, it's getting to the point where I'm eating, sleeping, and breathing these characters and their dramas, so I can rewrite it in fairly short order, I suspect, and probably even better than the first draft.

So... deep breaths... and soon I go off to Best Buy. Not immediately, though; this would happen on my parents' anniversary so it has to wait until after the anniversary lunch we're having. But I've gotten myself into a frame of mind where I no longer feel like throwing things and kicking my heels against the floor, so that's good.

And I've decided to just bite the damn bullet and (once the semester is underway) buy a bloody desktop again. I'm on my ancient one right now and, while there are lots of things about it that annoy me, I have to admit that it's handled my brand of heavy overusage better than any laptop made since 2003.

Not only do they allow rapists to lurk in their parking garage, if one points a gun at your head, threatens your small children, and rapes you, they'll claim it's your fault.

Yeah, never gonna feel safe in one of those places again. Plus, totally disgusted by their conduct.

I... try not to post political statements in my journal because honestly, I hate reading them, myself. But I'm really bothered by a repeated attitude I've been seeing, all over the place. It's an attitude that crops up over and over and over in a variety of contexts, too: "What's good for me is clearly good for everybody."

And every time I see someone taking that approach to something, I want to bitchslap them for being a complete idiot.

This time, what triggered that instinct in me was a discussion about vegetarianism vs. eating meat.

( Just because it works for you, doesn't mean it works for everybody. )

Twitter, Facebook, and LJ all went down because of a coordinated DDOS. And apparently a political writer was the target. They also joe-jobbed him. Cool to finally have a name for that practice; someone did it to me a few years ago. (The email address in question is still unusable but I'm not surrendering it.)

Guess that explains that!