Thrihyrne

This has only happened one other time to me, while watching "Ugly Betty" and a suit I'd bought at The Limited in the spring of '92 appeared on an episode. It happened again, today! I was giving "Big Love" a try, mostly to look at Chloe Sevigny, and the second time she's on screen, she was wearing a shirt that I own!!.

Exhibits!
A) Chloe


B) Me


Freaky. I had to show Evan too, of course. :D And it's not like it's some well-known brand, which makes it even more bizarre; I think I found mine at a T.J. Maxx in Nashville years ago. Carlie's Court is the brand on the tag. How about that, eh?

I've been regularly engaging in positive visualizations and affirmations, something I've been referencing in recent posts. My affirmations tend to focus on three specific areas: my health and happiness; fulfilling work with meaningful compensation; my life with evannichols. The visualizations range around in those areas as well, though in the past two weeks I'd found that something in particular kept cropping up: I wanted to treat myself to a maple iced doughnut. But every time I was in a grocery store, either their bakery didn't have them, or it was around 6 o'clock in the evening and I didn't think they'd be fresh. I'd even admitted to evannichols about this desire and had decided that after I received my first paycheck for my current assignment, I'd treat myself to a bus ride down 82nd to an actual Krispy Kreme location and get a couple with coffee and write a letter or work on a story or something.

Yesterday, the universe manifested itself such that I was at the company where I have a multi-week assignment in the morning (which is unusual in and of itself due to me sharing a computer with a part-time graphics employee) when a maple doughnut (actually, a maple log!) came to me at my cubicle. I kid you not. There's a new Controller there, and he'd brought 2 boxes of doughnuts and some o.j. to a couple of meetings but hadn't had a lot of takers. So he came by the marketing suite and there it was: one lone maple iced selection of doughy goodness. Which I ate and thoroughly enjoyed.

I've now decided that with as effective a message to the Universe like that, I will take it upon myself to think much more about evannichols winning the lottery. ♥

I don't often write about my own cooking. I've tended to joke about my eating habits, but the truth is that I eat quite healthfully, and even with some variety. Tonight I made something absolutely scrumptious after a Trader Joe's trip. I'd had a stir fry in mind, and I put in some frozen breaded chicken pieces (that had an orange ginger sauce in the bag, but I'll save the sauce), tofu, zucchini, and once I thought the chicken was mostly cooked, I put in about half of a small jar of a Trader Joe's Thai green curry simmering sauce. OMG! So, so yummy!! And easy to make.

I bought a crappy backpack for $5 at a drug store when I first was with Jen in Eugene. Well, it's falling apart. After much research, I turned to eBay and have ended up with a lovely, supposedly previously used plaid Jansport backpack for $5.99 and some shipping. The people selling it live in West Linn, OR, about 15 miles to the south of me, and when I asked, they agreed to knock a couple of bucks off the shipping. So now I have a backpack that's cloth with a sturdy bottom and I don't think the zipper pulls will be coming off anytime soon. Yay!

On the bus ride home, I happened to sit next to a young woman typing away on her little computer pad thingie (looked like it should have been a reading thing like a Kindle, but she was typing on it). I couldn't resist looking at what she was writing and was stunned to see the title: "How to Date A Millionaire." She was writing different numbered things to do, presumably. I had to really shake my head at that. Wonder who she thinks her future market might be…

And I seem to somehow have injured or pulled a muscle going up the right front of my foot to my shin, definitely hurting worse when I lift my fourth and pinkie toes than my big toe. I cannot for the life of me figure out how on earth I hurt that muscle. Hopefully it'll be less sore tomorrow.

To all those who have sent holiday cards, thank you so much! I'll be sending out something more in the depths of above-the-equator winter, I suspect. Oh, and The Hobbit trailer! I finally get a film CHOCK FULL OF DWARVES. HEAVEN. I'M SO HAPPY!!!! :D :D :D :D :D

So last night I was standing and glanced at what turned out to be a blanket, but at that initial glance it appeared to have a head and I nearly shit myself. Then later I was watching a movie and kept glancing over to the right and could have sworn a woman was implied in the far corner. This happened several times. It got more malevolent (I've felt a malevolency in the room and Julia and I saged it to clear it out) when I was typing later and something tan seemed to jump right next to me— again, totally startled, but then kept typing. It happened again. Then later I continued typing and a faint finger poked my ass which was on the edge of the chair. At that point, I went upstairs and slept with Julia in her bed.

This morning I sat closer in on my chair when I felt two fingers tap (2nd finger, 3rd finger, 2nd, 3rd) on the cushion behind me. I freaked. And more so when I ignored the tap and out of the corner of my eye saw something orange-ish wrapping lightning-fast toward my stomach. I told Julia about it, but she really didn't believe me. Hallucinations can indeed be a symptom of alcohol detox, after all, and I've had 4 1/2 hours of sleep. She said to ignore it.

I had a doctor's appointment this morning and while walking to the bus, I thought, "How do you deal with fear? You embrace it." So I made my plans on the bus and actually realized I was pissed off, and would go into the middle of my room and tell it to "fucking go somewhere else." While at my appointment both my physician and the mental health person who was called to see me after I told them about it clearly felt it was a hallucination.

Well… by the time I got home later today I, too, was convinced it was a hallucination and told my brain to do something better. By then I'd been sober 84 hours and there's no way I'm still detoxing. Well, I got my fabulous high-speed internet and later sat down with some celebratory cookie dough to eat with a spoon. It moved the spoon a little bit, as well as part of the wrapper. The thing is still here. It made little creeping motions on my cardigan and jeans, and a kind of light buzzing on my skin, though that's not a superb description. The cord to my headphones seems to be a particularly fun thing for it to play with, though it doesn't make big motions, just small ones. But it also is making the lamp cord move a little bit, and the psychological part caught me a couple times when I turned to look at the blanket and when my blinds caught my eye. And it can change the temperature— unfortunately, to cold. I breathed hotly at it and have spent a goodly amount of time telling it to go the fuck away because it's annoying. But I'm not frightened anymore; I'm kind of fascinated, in a way. I washed dishes in the kitchen and it made faint cat noises when there were none. I checked several times, trust me. And now I've discovered it can make Sam the cat's purring sound, which I find offensive. It's imitating him! I mean, the sound was loud enough that I looked immediately at my bed and expected to find him there, but the bed was empty.

Any advice as how to eradicate this tee-tiny… entity? singularity? I'm going to do some online research. I'm ANNOYED. Especially since Julia just came home and she can't hear it nor see the cord movements. She says she only has good energy around her- I suppose implying that I have other. :P Or maybe I'm just sensitive.

Where's a Ghostbusters icon when you need it?! I do think it's kind of funny that it's gently kneading the floor by my feet and purring like a cat. Maybe I have an otherworldly crushee that wants to be a cat. :)

edit: it (Imp, perhaps?) has now come up to the chair- first to my left side, and I literally shooed it. Stan's not around, so I'm doing to see if it tries to knead my lap. This is so bizarre.

Yesterday: a woman jogging (at a slow pace, granted) and chatting on her phone.

I guess I'd thought there were still a few things that a person would do which wouldn't involve talking or texting on the phone, and jogging was one of them. Apparently not.

I've finished the cardigan for persephone100, modeled below. I just need to buy buttons for it, as well as for the striped cardigan that I finished for myself several weeks ago. I also have started on the knitted skirt, also ( below the cut )

The other thing that met my eyes this morning is this:


My mom spilled an entire mug of coffee in her laptop a couple of days ago. It was a rough day, to be sure. But once it all dried out, turns out it worked— but the keyboard was a stuck mess, even though she drinks her coffee black. She demanded strongly requested that my stepdad take it apart and clean it while she's on her last summer trip up in Maine. Gamely he's at it, and this was how it looked minus the board part that he was cleaning. Now he's reassembling and there are a few of the little pads that go under the keys that have gone missing, so instead of it being a "fun" project, now it's about to get really damn frustrating. I don't envy him in his task. I'm also especially grateful for my desktop this morning!

Happy Friday, all!

I just uploaded "A Place Like Tomorrow" over at The Quidditch Pitch. In looking at the stories with the highest hits on them, I was stunned to discover that it's my nonfiction paper on Harry Potter crossovers which, by far, has been looked at the most, with (unless somehow the count is off, but this is what it says!) a read count of 5404. I'm really, really surprised by that.

So then I got curious. Now some stories I've had there for years, others are new, but I was interested in the others in the top five of read counts. They are:
2) Fling Wide the Whirlwind (Ron/Harry)- 2208
3) Crown of Rope (Ron/Draco)- 1345
4) Dabbling in Harry's Desires (Harry/Ron/Justin Finch-Fletchley)(??!)- 683
5) Eternal Summer Gilds Them Yet (Ron/Harry)- 654

I think this does show that the archive's readership has become less slash-oriented over time. It's also an archive that is age monitored, so my adult stories aren't available to just anybody, while the crossover paper is, as well as Eternal Summer Gilds Them Yet. But those statistics were intriguing. So of course I went over to skyehawke just to see what the top five hits are over there- and a hit doesn't mean the person actually read the whole thing, but hey. Curiosity and all that.

1) Fling Wide the Whirlwind (Ron/Harry)- 2364
2) Never Break the Chain (Ron/Harry)- 2199
3) Like Wine Through Water (Ron/Draco)- 1962
4) A Private Oratory (Harry/Draco; yes, you read that right; it's the only H/D I have)- 1845
5) Magic Immunity (Ron/Draco)- 1647

And the fewest hits in my HP selections (not including what I posted today)- well, they're the newer ones. Of things that have been around, it's All Is Hallowed, my very first HP story. LOLOLOL. Songfic. Perhaps if I took that out of the description...

According to sitemeter, which I have at my website, pretty consistently the top three entry pages for people coming to my website are my adult HP page, the general HP page, and the front page. Not a lot of people searching for Wraeththu (sigh), though some use my Tolkien rec page as a jump-off point, and somebody recently was at my Swordspoint drabbles page, which is nice.

I'm hooked. I admit it; I became a fan of doing laundry in 7th grade solely because my mom said I could watch MTV if -- and only if -- I was folding laundry. Some of these literal remakes are genius and show just how awful some of the original videos were. This one, of Billy Idol's White Wedding, I have to embed. In fall of '83, I was the last one in my household to go to school. My sister and brother went off, and my mom went off to grad school. Once I had the house to myself, I would illicitly turn on MTV and then call my then-best friend, Kelly Killingsworth, with whom I shared a birthday, when this video came on.

Yes, it's Thev trivia. And the literal remakes are glorious camp. Any others born around 1970 or thereabouts... welcome to parodies of our early adolescence.