An Excuse to Have a Friends Page

So, for the first time in 13 years, I will have a job. Starting in three days! I have signed the kids up for $2,000 each in summer programs; enrolled the younger in after-school care; and bought a bunch of office clothes.

On the latter there hangs a tale.

On my second trip to Kohl's (the first was for interview clothes), I started with the clearance rack. One shirt I found there was too small and I ordered it online, one was too sleeveless and I spent an hour selecting a sweater to wear with it, and one was just perfect, and I immediately pegged it as my first-day-of-work shirt. It was a good thing it was so perfect, because I didn't want to have to try it on multiple times after seeing how strongly it smelled of fruity lotion or perfume.

Hours later, I made it to the checkout. The checker was befuddled by the lack of tags on one shirt. It was the perfect, stinky shirt. Fortunately, I thought, checkers know what to do in this situation. She looked for the sewn-in tag, but oddly, it had been cut off. It was one of Kohl's house brands, though, Dana Buchman, so she waited for access to the kiosk in the back to look it up.

It wasn't in there.

She called a manager and before I had got very far in trying to find the shirt online, they had declared a mystery item clearance price of $7, and off I went.

I figured it was left over from last season or something, and after dinner I resumed my search, just out of curiosity. How many abstract purple print blouses could there be in the last few years of the Dana Buchman line? Spoiler: loads, but none of them were this one. I waded through so many image search results. Even the listings on ebay did not have this one.

Maybe it is a knockoff (nice quality, though). Maybe it is much older than one year. And upon eventual reflection, almost certainly it did not arrive in that store by a stock delivery.

I'm voting for body lotion, by the way. Mere perfume can't transfer from the shirt, to my hands, to the steering wheel, to my scrubbed-thoroughly hands the next day, to (annoyingly) my nose when I scratched an itch. So I figure somebody wearing a years-old Dana Buchman shirt swapped it in the dressing room for something more current, a tired sales associate hung it up in the clearance rack on day 2 of the weekend sale, and now it's in my living room waiting to be washed... and washed... and washed. And I'm still finding myself wearing this woman's body lotion. (I think my hair is holding on to some of it, and that's not getting washed till Wednesday.)

I've been listening to my old Dead Can Dance albums (on my phone of course) and very curious about what I took to be Persian lyrics in many of the songs. Frustratingly, lyrics sites all had these as "instrumental". I felt surely the original CD liner notes must have had the lyrics. Hey, I have those! I went to my neat shoeboxed stacks of original CD liner notes, alphabetically arranged.

The liner notes are very artistic, tastefully designed, and include lyrics for the small selection of songs which are in English.

Ok. This is not insurmountable. The woman who sings in foreign tongues is Lisa Gerrard. I googled her up and found an interview with a bit of boilerplate bio at the beginning.

It stated "Possessing a deep, spiritual bond with her work, Gerrard sings in a unique personal language that has come to define her earthy yet ethereal style."

So. Pluses: possible conlang? Minuses: no lyrics for me, not now not ever!

I am on the cutting edge of Xubuntu LTS, woohoo!

Note to self: 10.04 was not why your s3fs wouldn't compile. It wanted dev versions of the required packages, is why it wouldn't compile.

The new Xubuntu interface (not Unity), though I already changed the theme and icons:

A couple hundred people in London got to see the first of three new BBC Sherlocks tonight. And they're not talking. Except to say how mindblowingly good it is, better than the best of last season.

!!!

C'mon, people, post some spoilers fer chrissake!

So glad I finally modified my home-grown RSS reader so it can access protected LJ posts! I haven't been reading LJ from LJ for a while. Looking forward to catching back up!

Several years ago, I used to be able to talk to my parents about religion and politics. Now I can't even talk to them about the weather.

(Good thing there's a grandchild to talk about! And genealogy.)

It's been 7 months now of compulsive Animal Collective listening. I have the album I started with, two of their earlier albums, a solo album from one of the members, and some live concert recordings, and I plan to buy more albums as I get to them.

I still get the rush of... serotonin? Some happy relaxing brain chemical, whenever the music starts up, especially that first album. It washes over me like a cool drink of water combined with a warm fuzzy blanket. I listen to an album or two every day.

It feels qualitatively different from other music I would have placed in the same genre. Mere music doesn't fit the same brain-hole that this stuff does. Dissonance, syncopation, barbershop harmony, dance beats, occasionally accented with bleated or yelped vocals. Somehow it works.

I totally like nectarines far more than peaches. This seems like a betrayal of the natural order of things. Aren't peaches supposed to be the end-all and be-all of pitted fruit?

I was tasked with evaluating the feasibility of household emergency preparedness for this event.

Short answer? Preparing for the fabled Atlantic mega-tsunami would be easier. (We wouldn't have to move as far west to avoid that one.)

Longer answers:

1) Move to self-sufficient island nation. Uh, do those exist?
2) Move to politically stable underdeveloped nation. See above...
3) Lobby Congress to force nationwide energy grid to rebuild in a less vulnerable way. Within 3 years.
4) Move west of the Mississippi.
5) Join a survivalist enclave. Probably redundant with 4).
6) Try to become survivalist-in-place. This would buy us some as-yet-undetermined amount of time, before the local lake/stream gets hopelessly fouled and all the deer get eaten. Wouldn't buy us the 4-10 years of systemic collapse the New Scientist site predicts.

Oh well. At least I can stop worrying about the little things.

I've been on Facebook for a week now (if you know me, find me there) and it is such a delirious feeling.

Now, I didn't think I'd enjoy it. At all. I was generally scared of people from my past, thinking surely they remember my weirdness, immaturity, and inappropriate moments.

Further, I was always afraid of the different parts of my life colliding. I was the child who, when running into a schoolmate at the mall, would hide behind my mother because it was so disorienting to see anyone out of their proper context. I always avoided having an online presence that interacted with multiple different parts of my life. I thought different friend-groups were best kept separate.

So, Facebook was scary. But which_chick convinced me, and I signed up.

Now, yes, all different eras of my life are represented there, from people I knew when I was three years old to people I met two years ago. But it's all good! It's better than good! It is (and I think this is the last time I will use this simile) like living everywhere I've ever lived all at the same time. I can find out that the little girl next door, 9 years old when I left, has become an amazing woman. I finally found out what happened to the guy we all had a crush on in high school. But most importantly, I can simply follow along quietly with the people I've lost touch with.

I got my best highschool (and continuing) friend to join. I miss her, and I lose track of even what age her kids are. But now it's like living nextdoor: we don't talk everyday, but when she posts her status, I see her coming and going, and just know what's generally up in her life. That is invaluable. I hope she keeps up with it.

It's been like a dream the past week. I'm just getting used to it now.