Discolor Online

Once again Stan! illustrates typos the WotC editors have diligently collected all year. This one is my favorite, those owls are just so cuuuuute.

Not sure what just happened, but it seems that when I started work this morning a shrieking banshee took control of my body and sent me out on rampage. Either that or my brain thinks I've been transported to HBO's Deadwood.

For everyone who told me they were going to call with an update, turn over a manuscript, update their workfile, or "get around" to doing something I asked, GET ON IT. I swear, the next person who blows me off is going to be on the receiving end of a catestrophic melt-down.

For the everyone who feels the need to meddle in our business: guess what, brainiacs, we already thought of that, we are already RUNNING THAT SHOW, so meddle yourself the hell out of it, would you?

For those blessed few of you who have done what you were asked, turned in your work on time, keep your heads down and gone about your business while leaving me to mine, I love you all and you are top of my list. If my undying gratitude isn't enough, I'm sure we can work out some additional perks.

I am not a big fan of Easter. As a secular holiday, it leaves much to be desired. Many other holidays are easy to secularize but Easter, despite fluffy bunnies and chocolate eggs aplenty, Easter is for the Christians.

Growing up Easter was a time to get together with family, usually my mom, my brother, myself and my maternal grandparents. Easter meant a big family dinner where we were allowed to have ham instead of turkey. Since my mother was a lackluster cook, turkey meant choking down dry meat with gravy on the first day and increasingly inedible leftovers for the week. Ham, on the other hand, was hard to screw up and I delighted in its salty goodness at Easter.

Church-going at Easter was something I dreaded. Christmas was about goodness, innocent babes in mangers, angels on high, togetherness and gifts and love and hope. Easter was all about crucifiction, sin, evilness, separation, and death. Easter sermons often made me cry. One of the fathers of a boy in our youth group was enthusiastic in his descriptions of the suffering of the crucified. Perhaps Mel Gibson heard him speak. Oh sure, Jesus rose again and still loved us, but that part of it was always tacked on to the end after a long sermon about the suffering Jesus endured at human hands (my hands). If not for the fact that we were (I was) so irredemably sinful, the precious son of God would not have had to buy back our chance at Heaven through his own blood and pain and suffering...a debt man (I) could never possibly repay.

Well indoctrinated into this philosophy as a child, even now I still feel the shadow of guilt and sickness of spirit pass over me as Easter ticks across my calendar. Meanwhile, my sweet girl remains uninitiated and struggles to understand why Easter is about bunnies and eggs. I long for the day when she's old enough to listen with me to the late, lamented comic genuis of Bill Hicks:

I was over in Australia during Easter, which was interesting. Interesting to note they celebrate Easter the same way we do: commemorating the death and resurrection of Jesus.. by telling our children a giant bunny rabbit left chocolate eggs in the night. Now, I wonder why we're fucked up as a race. Anybody got any clues out there? Where do you get this shit from? Why those two things? Why not goldfish left Lincoln logs in your sock drawer? As long as we're makin' shit up, go hogwild, you know? At least a goldfish with a Lincoln log on its back going across your floor to your sock drawer has a miraculous connotation to it. "Mummy, I woke up today and there was a Lincoln log in me sock drawer!"... "That's the story of Jesus!" Who comes up with this shit? I've read the Bible, I can't find the word 'bunny' or 'chocolate' anywhere in that fuckin' book.

After a full week of computer problems making me want to stick a fork in my own brain, I finally resorted to pulling together parts from three old PCs (yeah, I can't stand to throw away old computer gear, so?) and in the process I found about 200 MP3s of my old that had been lost and abandoned on an old machine.

I'm like a kid at Christmas rediscovering this old collection. Ah, the era when I was collecting songs about drinking! Old punk, oi, ska that otherwise lives only on tape or vinyl! Punk covers of School House Rock!

Chickenshit Conformist, Too Drunk to Fuck, You're Not a Punk, British Disease, Anarchy Burger, Fuck Authority, They Ignore Peaceful Protest, Jawbreaker's excellent Want... that great School House Rock parody from the Simpsons ("Then we can make all sorts of crazy laws!")

I'm an amendment to be
Yes an amendment to be
And I'm hoping that they ratify me
There's a lot of flag burners
Who have got too much freedom
I wanna make it legal for policemen
To beat 'em 'cause there's limits to our liberty
At least I hope and pray that there are
'Cause those liberal freaks go too far

::sigh:: I love this stuff.

Time Magazine quotes Tom DeLay:

I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, one thing God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo to elevate the visibility of what's going on in America. That Americans would be so barbaric as to pull a feeding tube out of a person that is lucid and starve them to death for two weeks. I mean, in America that's going to happen if we don't win this fight.

I'm sorry, in WHAT America does Terri Schiavo represent "a person that is lucid"?

He's right on one thing: withdrawal of sustenance is a brutal and inhumane way to treat the terminally ill, the brain-dead, the irrevocably broken whose only other choice is to linger on the edge of death. If we were half as wonderful and compassionate as half the country thinks we are, we'd allow families to ease the suffering and speed the passing of their loved ones through humane, medically assisted euthanasia.

We treat DOGS better.

Ah, it's nice to be loved, especially when there's lots of crap to filter through.

Being aggressively wooed to consider no less than five different proposals for important future things; it's like industry speed dating. I need to squeeze in at least two more meetings this week and a post-poned conference call.

Cynically amused that some industry players have tried to poach our talent (back off you vultures!) only to be told (by the would-be poachees) that our staff likes working for us just fine, thanks. Maybe being decent people who don't fuck people over will pay off for us after all, bwa ha ha.

My Nicole Anti-Technology Field is still in full effect, however. I've managed to blow up a couple of computers in the last day and two out of three computers are refusing to pull my GR e-mail from the server. AOL may suck for a variety of reasons, but it remains a faithful back-up for me 14 years after first securing my account with them.

Someone who knows how I've been feeling lately, obviously...

I know it's not as if ya'll are hanging on my every word here, nonetheless I do feel bad that I've had nothing to say recently. It's not quite a general malaise. I've been caught in the middle of a dozen different stressful situations, some of which I can't talk about and others of which I just don't want to talk about. I've spent about three of the four weeks of March juggling some intense stuff for Green Ronin and functioning as a single parent while Chris has held down the fort at GTS and made other secret trips to undisclosed locations. We've had health issues, family issues, dealing with general idiot issues, it's been endless and for a lot of it I've just been completely helpless. You can't will the flu or a killing headache to go away, make Fed Ex deliver any faster, or squeeze blood from stones no matter how much you may want to. I don't know how the rest of the world handles it when a friend breaks down literally sobbing on your shoulder, but I absorb tension like a sponge and my bedside manner leaves much to be desired.

There are several things in my life that I want to move on from, but I'm being held hostage by circumstances I have no control over. One of the things that happens when I hit a space like this is that I start to exert control over the things that *do* remain under my control... in this case my house: in the last couple of weeks I was able to do a major clean-up and reorganization of our garage, Kate's room, and the kitchen/livingroom. I've been cleaning the house, mowing the lawn and trimming the trees and bushes, handling a bunch of recycling, cooking to beat hell. I've made several batches of homemade chicken stock and have been stocking the freezer with many prep-ahead meals, pre-chopping ingredients like onions and peppers and otherwise keeping my body busy to fool my mind into letting go of useless spin-cycling.

Last night I went to the farewell bash for our friend Stan! Laughed until I cried to see my daughter join the chorus-line for the karaoke rendition of Meatloaf's Paradise By the Dashboard Light and dancing the Time Warp. It was a bag of mixed emotions; happy for a friend getting a paying job, sad and sorry for myself that yet another one of our swell friends is leaving our circle.

I may not have much of interest to contribute for a while until things settle down.

A Computer Is Also a Screen, Wil Wheaton Discovers

MSNBC - Mount St. Helens emits cloud of ash

Mount St. Helens emits cloud of ash

Nothing like living around some active volcanos to keep things interesting.

My mom called tonight. She was acting very weird, telling me "things" were hurting "that shouldn't be hurting" dodging my questions but wanting to talk, because "I'm the only one she has right now" and begging me to come to Oregon this weekend. She assured me it's not her heart or her back (which has been on the verge of needing surgery) then claimed it must be "some muscle thing." She promised she'll call me tomorrow after talking to her doctor, said I don't need to worry about her dying overnight or anything like that, but I'm really worried anyway. She smokes, she drinks, she's had pre-cancerous skin lesions removed in the past.

Not that I'd rather my mom hadn't called or anything like that, but in our family it's no news is good news. I asked if she's called my grandma and she said no, "she doesn't need this right now," and when I asked about my brother (who lives in the same small town!) she said she sees him about as frequently as she did when he was overseas. I told her I could come down tomorrow if she needed me to, but she put me off... so why call me at 10 o'clock at night, when she's clearly in pain, pleading with me to come down next weekend? My gut just tells me there's bad news brewing.

Today my friends were able to take their sweet little girl home after successful heart surgery on the 23rd. Thanks to everyone who made with the prayers and good vibes on their behalf.

I've written before about my history with headaches. I've been a headache sufferer since approximately the onset of puberty. I'm like the farmer with the leaky roof from that old joke: When asked why he doesn't fix the hole in his roof, the old farmer replies, "Well, when it's rainin' it's too wet to fix it, and when it's dry it's just as good as any man's house." After a lifetime of inadequate insurance and poor experiences with doctors, I've become sadly accustomed to waiting through discomforts and only taking action when faced with prolonged, extended discomfort that crosses into the realm of "really bad."

I have gone through extended periods, many months at a time, where I have no headaches at all or only your typical, run of the mill, mild headaches that are easily relieved. During those periods, I willingly forget about the last "big one" and go about my usual life.

Last night I was awakened from a dead sleep by an intense headache centered, as my headaches often are, around my right eyeball. I've had some really bad, crawl into a dark room and hide headaches in my life, but I can't recall ever having had a headache hit me in the middle of the night and wake me out of a sound sleep. I tried in vain to fall back to sleep for at least an hour, writhing around in the bed hoping for the relief of unconsciousness. In addition to the headache pain, my heart was pounding and I felt what I can only describe as hot chills, a prickly-sweaty kind of feeling. It was awful. Mercifully, I did manage to fall back asleep as the pain abated a bit, but it was such an intense and unpleasant experience, I have to admit that it's in my best interest to make some repairs to my metaphorical roof before the next rainstorm hits.

Over the years I've flirted with the idea of trying an elimination diet to see if I could narrow down some of the triggers for my headaches; a quick googling fingers red wine as a common culprit and I did have quite a bit of wine last night with friends. Stress is, of course, one of many factors that also triggers these headaches and I've always had plenty of that. Since my stress isn't likely to just magically end, I'm going to have adjust my exposure to some of the other triggers if I want to press my advantage.