Don't Talk About The Rabbits

In the MRI tube. While it was banging away.

Possibly I need to start going to bed earlier.

So I totally blew posting last night. Didn't even try, don't feel that bad about it! I was exhausted and just rolled over and went to sleep. I suspect things will settle down as the new tv season continues, and I decide what to drop/add from the watching lineup? But right now, there is a lot to sort through!

( Sleepy Hollow, ep 2 )

( Agents of SHIELD, or whatever horrifically long name it is) )

( Blacklist )

( Person! of! Interest! )

Today I slept.

Like, sleeping sickness, coma-level sleeping, or something.

I vaguely remember moving from bed to sofa to sleep in different locations for a while.

But that's it.

And it didn't help at all. But tomorrow morning at a disgustingly early hour, I have an appointment to see a woman about back pain. So.

Forgot to post yesterday. I blame the_shoshanna for showing up and being interesting.

And now it is revolting-o'clock on a Saturday and i cannot really sleep because the plumber plus apprentice have arrived (there is always an apprentice, he is a teaching plumber and usually accompanied by a high school student learning the trade for credits) and they are pounding away down there. He has his school teacher lecture mode going.

Still, there is a part of me that went "YAY, THANK GOD, this is the LAST PART OF THE PROJECT." I will be so glad when this is over, the final bills are paid, the heat all worked, and we can burrow in like hibernating animals for the winter, with no workmen in sight.

So, we watched the pilot of Sleepy Hollow last night but I was too tired to think about it much.

( Thoughts on Sleepy Hollow under the cut )

This is our neighbor's cat.



She. Is. Hideous.

Seriously, the picture doesn't even do her justice. SO HOMELY.

She is also the sweetest tempered little beast you ever saw. She loves you so much.

Our cats are terrified of her. We can't determine the reason. I mean, she's easily outclassed by even the smallest of them by 3-4 pounds. But they scream and run for their lives. Surely it is not her looks. I doubt our cats are as shallow as humans! But what do they know that we don't? Gnome has a good 12 pounds on her, and he ran back into the house crying today when she showed up.

She has a collar around her neck that says "If I am out, I am lost". We brought her back home the first half dozen times because of this, but we have stopped, because they clearly aren't even trying to keep her in at this point, and she seems to know where she is perfectly well. We are a bit concerned that she is coming all the way over to our back yard, though. We aren't that close, and sometimes cats take it upon themselves to re-home. And we can't handle a fourth cat. Much less a fourth cat that terrifies our current cats. Plus, sooner or later, despite the fact that we are quite some distance from her place, the guy who owns her would notice. (And, frankly, he is unbelievably sleezy and the other reason we stopped taking her home was to avoid contact with his roaming eyeballs).

We tell her "Go home!" and she just purrs and purrs and head butts us with her INCREDIBLY UGLY HEAD.

One last (probably) kitchen post!

Everyone has something that goes wrong for them in a renovation. My hatred of the brackets we installed to support the kitchen counter was pretty all encompassing. So, we researched various possible fixes while we took a little time off, because we really, really, REALLY needed to not have the house crawling with contractors for a while.

Today my main contractor came back, to do a few remaining small things (the biggest thing left is a heating issue, but it could not be tackled until these small things were taken care of), and included in that list were the brackets:

The original brackets, as posted on day whatever:



So that's them unstained. And to be fair, when stained, they are much less noticeable. A closeup of them, stained:



Ugly style, sticky outie, ughly.

New Brackets!







These are black metal, and a huge improvement. Much cleaner, and better for sitting at in terms of leg room.

It's not completely perfect, because we had to work it in a way that covered up the previous installation of brackets. On the short end, where the bracket is shorter than what was there previously, you can see the two screws below it, if you look closely. And, if I could send myself psychic messages in the past, I would still do the hidden brackets, and not have metal down the sides at all.

However, still. SO MUCH BETTER. Also, I'm am happy to have the added bracket in the middle now for additional support, and yet not lose the leg room that another wooden bracket in that location would have cost us.

We also may have figured out the counter stool situation -- the chair liked the most was just a little too tall. My wonderful contractor took it and cut the legs down by two inches (I was not about to try and cut metal) and was even able to get the rubber bits back on the ends. So, now that I know he can do this, successfully, I will get the matching set.

Half my kitchen crap is still in boxes in the basement, but we're getting there!

Book 2! Starts! Friday!

( Trailer with spoilers beneath the cut! )

KORRA!!

Is it just us, over here in FiOS land? Or is dreamwidth just laggy as all hell these days? I had all sorts of plans for reading and posting and stuff I wanted to look up when I got home, but everywhere I try to go takes so long I end up walking away while waiting for the page to load, and then forgetting about it. And when I get back, it's still not damn well there.

And it's been like this for *days*.


So, it's September. And my memory tells me that new TV happens in September, and stuff. And obviously, I know PoI is coming back. And Haven! And, Agents of SHIELD should be arriving! But somewhere along the line, the Tivo, and Roku, and Netflix, and Hulu, and Amazon Prime? (Not all of these are mine! some are mollyamory's) These things have combined so that we really just don't watch that much live tv anymore, or commercials. I have no idea what new and interesting things are on the horizon that I should be paying attention to. Anyone? Bueller? Anything new that I should be sure to not miss?

So, I am a certain number of years old, that probably puts me officially into no longer young territory. Possibly even... middle aged. I have also been, for most of those years, a nail biter. All attempts to stop have pretty much failed horribly due to stress, and weak nails, and STRESS, and what not, I am convinced my nails are sub-par, probably some type of vitamin deficiency, other people's nails don't shred like this, so it probably hasn't even been my fault, if they were normal, it wouldn't matter that I constantly chew on them! Also stress.

We put on all this sparkly glitter polish for Club Vivid this year, and I don't know why, but for some reason, that was what it took to do the trick. Sparkly fucking nail polish. After literally decades of different attempts. By this week, I had nails long enough that I have been repeatedly accidentally stabbing the crap out of myself. Also it's been really goddamn difficult to get the contact lenses in and out. I stabbed myself in the eye last night and went to bed cranky and convinced I would be blind by morning. How do people cope with having nails? They seem dangerous! Since I don't actually know what I am doing, and have zero nail-maintenance skills, and since I have something coming up where I actually need to look put together, I decided to take the unprecedented step of getting a manicure for the first time in my life.

I went in thinking "I will explain to them that I have no idea what I am doing here and might as well be on another planet and they will understand" but this never happened, because they were very busily efficient and also, there was something of a language barrier. Still, they directed me right over to the racks and racks nail polish. I stood there a while until they gave up on me coming back, and came over to help. I was like "SOMETHING NEUTRAL PLEASE" so they picked out a nice pale colored one for me.

So then there was cleaning of nails with some type of agent. And some gunk on the cuticles, followed by soaking the cuticles, and then cutting the hell out of the cuticles. She asked if I wanted to keep the length of the nails, and I was like "you can cut them back a little, I type," but I admit, I was mainly thinking that a small bit back would be good, so I could stop accidentally gouging bits of flesh out with them. Instead, I ended up with nails just as short as they usually are with the biting. Oh well. They will grow back stronger and better this time, perhps?

Then there were layers and layers of stuff. We started with some type of bonding agent. Then another layer of something completely unknown, and clear. I think it might have been a strengthening thingummy? Next, two layers of nail polish on one hand, and three on the other. (I have a problematic thumb nail on one hand, the result of slamming it in a door two years ago. Nothing I have tried has fixed it, and she was pretty determined to try and hide the damage, since it looks like I'm mutating). Finally, two layers of lacquer. By the time we were done, I was like "Will I be able to lift my fingers, under the weight of all these layers?" But instead, they seem lighter and smoother than my half-assed efforts with a bottle I bought shortly after Vividcon in my attempts to extend the non-biting process.

In between all the layers were TINY HAND HEAT LAMPS that you stick your hand into, like a suntan tanning bed! Or possibly some tiny hand rotisserie devised by aliens to lure us into sticking our hands inside them willingly? And also tiny little fans! (the ones that go around and around not the ones that read fan fiction). And then, as I thought we must be done... LOTION. I was like "AAAGH, LADY, my arms are HAIRY and you really don't have to..." but she took me too much by surprise, and I did not actually say this. But that was weird, I had no idea that was involved in something I consider to be mostly about the nails.

So now I have these nails that are all slick and even and shiny, and also blunt. Weird, I had no idea that professionally done nails were so squared off at the top, I had thought they were all roundish, and stuff? I can't seem to stop touching them. I, uh, hope I get over that soon.

The other new thing we tried tonight -- Margaritas, the restaurant. I had read online a post by someone who compared it favorably to On the Border, which happens to be a favorite of ours. Worth a shot! we decided. Except no, really, it wasn't. Pretty much awful all the way around. Queso more like melted velveeta, steak fajitas as unflavored and as bland as anything I had ever eaten, even the rice was pretty awful, which takes some kind of extraordinarily special lack of talent, really. And it was more expensive than OTB?? Possibly that's because the Town is a slightly more upscale one, but good lord, it was certainly not better food worth the money. I couldn't make it more than halfway through before just giving up.

So we got sundaes after to help recover from the experience.

Don't go there. It was baaaad.