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The first thought I had when I saw the Weapon of Doom was, “A sundial?” Then I looked again and thought, “A gigantic jar opener?” Then Kelson said, “Hey, that’s Fray’s weapon!” and I noticed the blade. (Finally.)

So, if it’s there, and findable pretty fast (since I assume Caleb could shove, if not toss, those barrels aside pretty handily in a minute or less), why hasn’t Caleb gone down and gotten it? Why hasn’t he at least tried to wield it, even if the prophecy says he isn’t supposed to? One explanation: it has the power to hurt evil. (Yes, Great Axe of Hurt Evil (+15, +18). Moving on.) He can’t touch it without getting his First-endowed power weakened, and the First, far from being able to wield it, can’t even go near it without getting seriously damaged. More to the point, if this is the case, this thing can beat Caleb (to a bloody pulp–please!), and insofar as the First can be injured, the axe can do it. All that needs to be done is to disperse the First or break its projection mechanism.

Day 45. Would like to see Jasmine and Caleb on Celebrity Deathmatch. Apocalypse update: still coming along.

Still no Slayer army.

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So I caught some kind of bug at the right time last week to have it really fully hit me on Saturday evening, while watching X2. I’d already been having the sinus pressure and sore throat, so I had my box of Kleenex with me, and I had fun timing my nose-blowing during explosion scenes. I slept 14 hours that night (getting up at 1:30 the next day) and lounged around doing nothing much yesterday, and decided I was well enough to come to work today. Well, in trying to rip off two packets of DayQuil, I ripped into the plastic of a third and had to take both pills. Normally, I only take one. Can we say “medicine head?” It’s supposed to have worn off by now, but I’m still a little spacey.

I was coming back from the bathroom and the receptionist asked, as I was punching in my door code, “How’re you feeling?” I don’t remember what I said, because her next line was:

“Is there any chance you could be pregnant?”

That about knocked me flat. I wanted to say, “WHAAAAAT???”, but settled for “Absolutely none,” and went in. I’m still trying to figure out how a stuffy head, sore throat, cough, body aches, and tendency to sneeze can be caused by pregnancy. Of course, the people in this office have tried to pin all sorts of my physical ailments on pregnancy. I don’t know what they find so cool about the idea, but I’m getting a little tired of it. Thing is, if I say so, they’ll just say, “You’re really irritable. Is there any chance you might be pregnant?”

Grrrrr.

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I used to like choir. Once upon a time, it was fun and entertaining and I enjoyed going. That time is not now.

For the first part of this semester, we were hammering away at Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, so that 9 of us could go sing it in Hawaii. And while that was all fun and shiny, the fact that we still had a little more than a month of class left was problematic. Our director does have a point that the choir needs to be visible and give more concerts so that we get some of the precious little money to be had around the community-college scene. However, the way she’s decided to be visible is really getting some of us steamed.

Simply put, the music she’s having us do is CRAP. We got ELEVEN new pieces the practice after the Mozart concert, and fully half of them are the type that need twice the time we’ve got and half the accompanying repertoire. Since then, we’ve received two more pieces, one of which was a shock because I actually knew it and the other of which was a shock because it was actually pretty. That brings the total of good songs to what, four? Not counting the piece she hand-picked a group to do and ended up with me anyway when one of them walked. (I’m still snickering about that one.) Add to this the fact that we have yet to hear most of these all the way through and correct. How are we supposed to work toward doing these songs well if we don’t know what they’re supposed to sound like?

Two things I don’t think she realizes:

1. We have lives. We have jobs. We have commitments that are not choir and that, frankly, come first. And when we have a goal of six hours of practice outside of class set for us by someone who is demonstrating that she doesn’t give a shit about our lives, those of us who can’t meet it aren’t going to bother trying.

2. People all around the world are more likely to do a thing when they enjoy it. And for adults to be told, in relation to an activity they ostensibly do for recreation, that they must do it a certain way whether they like it or not is NOT conducive to cooperation or to adaptation.

What I’m really hoping for is that when everybody’s gotten there tomorrow night, she asks if we’ve practiced the six hours and dismisses everybody who admits to not having done it. And if that happens, what I hope is that over half the choir is dismissed and that it’s the good half.

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About a year ago, I decided that my little universe needed its timeline cemented. I’d already adjusted it several times, and it was getting hard to keep straight. So rather than have to redo it yet again, I decided to do it right, and figure it out by generations rather than arbitrary dates. From the beginning.

I wrote a good chunk of my info down on paper before realizing that making corrections was going to be a royal bitch. And it needed corrections. So, after an abortive attempt at organizing things in a plain old text file, I started looking online. First I checked out timeline programs, none of which were really suited to my purpose. One that I downloaded would only work for dates in or after 1900–not wonderful when you’re dealing with years ranging from 191 to 730. But I did get a lead on what would actually help me here: genealogy programs.

The one I found is simple, inexpensive, and capable of exporting data to the majority of other programs out there. However, there are three main features that I find inconvenient for my purposes. I don’t anticipate that any future versions will allow you to change the calendar the program uses, but that’s what my text file is used for now. And not allowing same-sex marriages probably wouldn’t cause too many problems in the real world, much, but it’s kind of important in my world. The most annoying bit is the way it deals with children out of wedlock. They show up in a descendant tree, but if the parent whose family you’re looking at later married, the child will show up as being from that marriage. If you do an ancestor tree, the later marriage doesn’t show up at all unless you have it in Verbose mode, which is a pain because then everybody has their marriage information listed, making it very redundant and cluttered because just about everybody on the tree is listed twice.

In the interest of finding something I could customize the bejesus out of, I went DL’ing earlier this week. The open-source program looked promising, but since I can’t program and I don’t feel like sharing my data with Kelson yet, I ditched it. The other one I got is great fun to play with, and (drumroll) it allows same-sex marriages! I don’t know if it’ll give some kind of fatal error trying to save a file with that in, because the demo doesn’t let you save, but I’m willing to risk it. Even though if you tell it to display information for the parents of a child of one partner, it’s anybody’s guess whether it’ll back up to the biological parents or the married couple. It’s also very good about children out of wedlock; one of the standard display formats shows all unions by default.

But the original program might be even better if I figure out how to use ResEdit without trashing my computer. The manual says you can create new types of events and links between people. Can we say “Alternate Marriage” event link?

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Yesterday was a complete Monday, and Kelson and I decided that since we needed to go to the market, we’d split up and he’d grab food at the Pick Up Stix in the same shopping center. As I was looking at yogurt, he came into the store and reported that they’d changed their menu yet again and the Buddha’s Feast (mixed veggies) that I’d wanted was now labeled a “Veggie Saute,” but otherwise had still seemed all right to get. Okay, fine. We finished our shopping and went home.

Come to find, when I opened the carton, that not only had the name changed but also the contents. I’d been expecting the old ingredient list, which to the best of my memory included baby corn, eggplant, and snow peas. None of that here. Just a lot of carrots and zucchini, with a handful of bean sprouts, a couple of mushrooms, and a sprig or two of broccoli. Not even any onions or peppers.

Then I found the meat. Not just one piece, either. Three pieces of beef and one of chicken. And it wasn’t stray chicken from Kelson’s dinner, since his was dyed brown with soy sauce and this was lily-white. So they managed to bring in bits from not just one but two dishes that weren’t even in our order! I have never been so happy not to be a strict vegetarian (or Hindu).

This is still very bad news. If a place that does kung pao is this careless about cleaning their utensils, we can’t eat there anymore. Not that it’s worth it anymore since they’ve been systematically getting rid of everything we really like. I didn’t often get the Black Bean Shrimp (aka Double Indemnity Delite), but it was nice to know that if I needed a fix, I could get it. Not anymore.

Nasty letters, here we come. And if you know anybody with the potential to be affected by this kind of sloppiness, you might want to tell them too, if they don’t already know.

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On the rare occasion that I answer an email, my “about” fields indicate that I am Brown Ajah, of the Salidar faction. In recent weeks I have come to realize that I may have jumped the gun on my designation. Salidar I may be, but as yet I think Accepted is a more accurate term.

One of the women whose work I handle has made an annoying habit of checking up on what I’m doing (and not doing) on a very regular basis. Like every time I’m not at my desk. I understand that she has a professional stake in what I get done, but there’s a practical limit to the amount of work you can require of someone and expect them to complete it when you want it and how you want it. If you have a standard way in which things are done, that’s good. If you trust the person to do things in that way, that’s even better. Unfortunately, any time there’s any deviation from the standard, I have to get confirmation that what I’m doing is appropriate. Which, when she’s not here, is a bitch.

However big a bitch this job can be, it’s infinitely better than the job I had that gave me damane syndrome. Everything had to be done exactly the same way every time, not because of any legal requirements I could ascertain but because my supervisor found it easier to nitpick that way. I was supposed to proofread, but I wasn’t allowed to correct about half of the mistakes that were the most common. I was pressured to go faster, but if a report came back to me more than once, she’d say, “You know, you can take your time.” If something I’d done was returned to her for further correction by her superior, she’d make a production of it and have me change it just to make her point, and blame me if it didn’t get done on time. And perfect wasn’t good enough. If I went more than a few days with no mistakes, she’d find something I “really had to watch” and explain for five minutes why it was vitally important that I always do it, apparently not realizing that the world had failed to end in the last few weeks that I hadn’t known to do it. In the three months I worked there, I had maybe five days that I didn’t get criticized, and received maybe three positive comments on my work, two of those on the first day. I know there had to be three because about a month and a half in, she said something positive and I caught myself being unreasonably happy to have earned her favor. It was pretty chilling to realize that she was training me in more ways than one.

Here, on the other hand, they pay for me to go to class, like the food I bring, let me wear jeans on Fridays and carry my Swiss Army knife, and appreciate things like henna, magnetic poetry, Dilbert, and paper laundry. And they pay better. So nyah to the cube-kennels.

And I’m asking for a Great Serpent ring for my birthday.

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I went into the lunchroom a bit ago and saw that someone had tied a very large rubber band around two chairs for no apparent reason. So I decided to give them something to think about: I went back to my desk, cut out several articles of miniature paper clothing, and taped them over the rubber band between the two chairs. Let them try to figure out who did it.

******

About ten minutes after posting, my phone rang. The nifty little text console said “INTERCOM FROM KELLY.”

“Hello.”

“Did you leave your little paper dolly clothes in the lunchroom?”

“I dunno. Did I?”

“Well, it just seemed like something you’d do.”

Damn, I’m getting predictable.

******

At lunch I found out who hung the rubber band in the first place. She walked in while everybody else was remarking on how the clothes culprit must have too much time on their hands. And it turns out I’m definitely getting a reputation for this sort of thing, even not having done it often (or much at all really). Two other people had me pegged before I confessed. Fortunately, everybody I talked to thought it was funny.