The Weekend That Almost Wasn't
I think I've probably mentioned before, my parents have a boat up on Lake Erie. I've been going up there every summer ever since I was a little kid, and the people at our marina up there are kind of like our extended family. However, I haven't gotten to see them as much these past few hours, what with school and varous commitments and all.
So, this weekend I was really looking forward to going up with my parents. They were planning on leaving early Friday evening, since they'd gotten word one of our friends was having a steak cookout at the marina in celebration of selling his house. So by four o'clock, five, they've gotten home from work early, everything's packed up for a weekend at the boat, we're ready to pile in the car.
Grandma calls. She is "not feeling well", she feels sick like she might throw up at any moment, she may or may not have to go to the hospital. Grandma, BTW, is: turning ninety in December, just had a pacemaker put in, and is at the point where she seems to develop a new medical problem every week or so. It doesn't help that when she does feel unwell, she worries about it to the point where of course she's going to make herself feel sicker.
However, when my parents ask if she wants us to stay home just in case, she says oh no, go ahead and go to the Lake.
So we get in the car and leave, and promptly get into a massive traffic jam on account of the weather. Grandma calls again (accidentally dialing the cell when apparantly she wanted the home number), and makes the mistake of mentioning she'll probably check herself into the hospital tomorrow.
Of course we turn around. We didn't even make it out of downtown, but because of the traffic and weather the whole trip probably took almost two hours. My dad was delight the entire time, between the expected angry repetitive rantings on how his life sucks and the racist commentary on East Cleveland and its denizons. *heavy, heavy sarcasm*
At about ten o'clock, Grandma decided she wanted to go in, so Mom and Dad took her to the ER. I picked Mom up at eleven - they still hadn't checked Grandma in. Turns out, they didn't admit her until around two in the morning, with Dad not getting home until three.
Saturday morning Mom and I went up to the Lake, alone, Dad being stuck at home to deal with Grandma.
Up at the Lake, it was mostly cold and later, horrifically windy. But I got to eat really good steak and walk around some and see everyone I missed, as well as get introduced to an adorable new puppy. So it was good times for us, and I was more than satisfied.
Back home, however, Dad was still dealing with Grandma and doctors.
It turned out her sodium was dangerously low, so they put her in the ICU to monitor her. They ran a barrage of tests wanting to make sure everything checked out alright, but the eventual conclusion seems to be that a new blood pressure medication she had just started was messing up her system. Meanwhile, all the "excitement" had gotten to Grandma, and she was evidently pretty frustratingly loopy to deal with. (Patience: not my dad's virtue when it comes to dealing with things that exist in real life and not, say, woodworking or a math problem. Taurus.)
Then on the way driving back from visiting Grandma at the hospital, the muffler fell off of his car. Went in, got in fixed: $400. Kaching!
Then, he found out later that evening that Grandma's two nosy neighbors, upon realizing Grandma hadn't gotten her paper from the mailbox that morning, had worked themselves into a tizzy convinced my grandmother was still inside the house and had broken her hip or something. So, what did they do? Called the fire department. Who broke into the house through the garage, looking for Grandma.
Dad says he's not even going to tell Grandma about that. Her neighbors can explain it to her themselves. As you can imagine, he has Just About Had It.
Other than me barely getting my weekend by the skin of my teeth, not much going on here. Still on the job hunt - I plan on going back up to Legacy tomorrow to chase down some leads I still haven't heard back on. Plus I have some online applications I keep meaning to fill out. And, you know, some other places to look too. I hope.
I finished the last two books of the Gossip Girl series (okay, I'll admit it: some of that ending was surprisingly and therefore plesantly unexpected). I have the first book of both follow-up series lying around here somewhere (It Girl and Gossip Girl: the Carlyles) so I can figure out if I want to continue, eventually, but I'm putting those off for now. I think two GG books in a row is quite enough cotton candy for awhile.
I also started reading Orcs by Stan Nicholls - I'm about 1/3 of the way through it, and really enjoying it so far. It hits just the right note between following the classic expected fantasy world elements and turning said elements right on their heads. The main characters are really great, and everyone else pretty much sucks so you don't feel bad when they inevitably meet bad ends, which with my sense of humor and cynicism being what it is I really love for some reason. Or, IDK, I think I'm just in a really good mindset for a story that's all "fuck religion, fuck industry, humans suck, orcs and dwarves are awesome, lets go bash in some skulls" right about now. I'm not really sure. I don't know, has anyone else read this one? Any thoughts you'd like to share?
I finished rewatching S1 of Dollhouse with machi_neko today, finally, so cross that one off the list. Amazon in its infinite wisdom decided to split my last order up into three seperate packages (really? really, you guys?) but the first one came today and it bore the second volume of Justice League, so something tells me that'll be what I sink my teeth into next.
Also, I figure it's my duty to pass this along, since a lot of you consider yourself members of one fandom or another: courtesy of thedeadparrot and sporkyadrasteia, here's a post outlining why you should not participate in that fanfiction/fandom survey going around. And here's another one, restating, again don't participate.
A snippet from the first post that I think gets the main points in:
"[...]they (unintentionally) made it quite clear that their intent in their project is to talk about human universals -- to use our fannish experience, our erotics and our desires, to reinforce ideas of universal, hard-wired, biological desire.
They are outsiders to fandom. They are outsiders to fanfiction. They are outsiders to slash. And they haven't tried to learn, or to understand, or to think about fannish communities. Instead, they have made assumptions about who we are, about what we read, about what we find hot; they plan to use those to explain what makes women tick, what our brains make us do.
They do not believe that culture mediates our desire at all1; they don't believe that we are shaped by our communities and our experiences; they want to put us into neat, biologically determined boxes[...]
All of those problems are present in the survey itself [...] Reasons include heterosexist language, which presumes that anyone not marked as queer must be straight; the language of the questions about participants' sex, gender, and sexual orientation, which presumes that people are either male or female; and the language of their description of slash, which presumes that there is one definition of slash."
Also, it's been pointed out that the so-called "research" itself is being conducted mighty shoddily, and with what looks like some questionable ethics.
And, apparantly? The end goal is to publish a book that will be entitled "Rule 34: What Netporn Teaches Us About The Brain". So...there's that.
So, this weekend I was really looking forward to going up with my parents. They were planning on leaving early Friday evening, since they'd gotten word one of our friends was having a steak cookout at the marina in celebration of selling his house. So by four o'clock, five, they've gotten home from work early, everything's packed up for a weekend at the boat, we're ready to pile in the car.
Grandma calls. She is "not feeling well", she feels sick like she might throw up at any moment, she may or may not have to go to the hospital. Grandma, BTW, is: turning ninety in December, just had a pacemaker put in, and is at the point where she seems to develop a new medical problem every week or so. It doesn't help that when she does feel unwell, she worries about it to the point where of course she's going to make herself feel sicker.
However, when my parents ask if she wants us to stay home just in case, she says oh no, go ahead and go to the Lake.
So we get in the car and leave, and promptly get into a massive traffic jam on account of the weather. Grandma calls again (accidentally dialing the cell when apparantly she wanted the home number), and makes the mistake of mentioning she'll probably check herself into the hospital tomorrow.
Of course we turn around. We didn't even make it out of downtown, but because of the traffic and weather the whole trip probably took almost two hours. My dad was delight the entire time, between the expected angry repetitive rantings on how his life sucks and the racist commentary on East Cleveland and its denizons. *heavy, heavy sarcasm*
At about ten o'clock, Grandma decided she wanted to go in, so Mom and Dad took her to the ER. I picked Mom up at eleven - they still hadn't checked Grandma in. Turns out, they didn't admit her until around two in the morning, with Dad not getting home until three.
Saturday morning Mom and I went up to the Lake, alone, Dad being stuck at home to deal with Grandma.
Up at the Lake, it was mostly cold and later, horrifically windy. But I got to eat really good steak and walk around some and see everyone I missed, as well as get introduced to an adorable new puppy. So it was good times for us, and I was more than satisfied.
Back home, however, Dad was still dealing with Grandma and doctors.
It turned out her sodium was dangerously low, so they put her in the ICU to monitor her. They ran a barrage of tests wanting to make sure everything checked out alright, but the eventual conclusion seems to be that a new blood pressure medication she had just started was messing up her system. Meanwhile, all the "excitement" had gotten to Grandma, and she was evidently pretty frustratingly loopy to deal with. (Patience: not my dad's virtue when it comes to dealing with things that exist in real life and not, say, woodworking or a math problem. Taurus.)
Then on the way driving back from visiting Grandma at the hospital, the muffler fell off of his car. Went in, got in fixed: $400. Kaching!
Then, he found out later that evening that Grandma's two nosy neighbors, upon realizing Grandma hadn't gotten her paper from the mailbox that morning, had worked themselves into a tizzy convinced my grandmother was still inside the house and had broken her hip or something. So, what did they do? Called the fire department. Who broke into the house through the garage, looking for Grandma.
Dad says he's not even going to tell Grandma about that. Her neighbors can explain it to her themselves. As you can imagine, he has Just About Had It.
Other than me barely getting my weekend by the skin of my teeth, not much going on here. Still on the job hunt - I plan on going back up to Legacy tomorrow to chase down some leads I still haven't heard back on. Plus I have some online applications I keep meaning to fill out. And, you know, some other places to look too. I hope.
I finished the last two books of the Gossip Girl series (okay, I'll admit it: some of that ending was surprisingly and therefore plesantly unexpected). I have the first book of both follow-up series lying around here somewhere (It Girl and Gossip Girl: the Carlyles) so I can figure out if I want to continue, eventually, but I'm putting those off for now. I think two GG books in a row is quite enough cotton candy for awhile.
I also started reading Orcs by Stan Nicholls - I'm about 1/3 of the way through it, and really enjoying it so far. It hits just the right note between following the classic expected fantasy world elements and turning said elements right on their heads. The main characters are really great, and everyone else pretty much sucks so you don't feel bad when they inevitably meet bad ends, which with my sense of humor and cynicism being what it is I really love for some reason. Or, IDK, I think I'm just in a really good mindset for a story that's all "fuck religion, fuck industry, humans suck, orcs and dwarves are awesome, lets go bash in some skulls" right about now. I'm not really sure. I don't know, has anyone else read this one? Any thoughts you'd like to share?
I finished rewatching S1 of Dollhouse with machi_neko today, finally, so cross that one off the list. Amazon in its infinite wisdom decided to split my last order up into three seperate packages (really? really, you guys?) but the first one came today and it bore the second volume of Justice League, so something tells me that'll be what I sink my teeth into next.
Also, I figure it's my duty to pass this along, since a lot of you consider yourself members of one fandom or another: courtesy of thedeadparrot and sporkyadrasteia, here's a post outlining why you should not participate in that fanfiction/fandom survey going around. And here's another one, restating, again don't participate.
A snippet from the first post that I think gets the main points in:
"[...]they (unintentionally) made it quite clear that their intent in their project is to talk about human universals -- to use our fannish experience, our erotics and our desires, to reinforce ideas of universal, hard-wired, biological desire.
They are outsiders to fandom. They are outsiders to fanfiction. They are outsiders to slash. And they haven't tried to learn, or to understand, or to think about fannish communities. Instead, they have made assumptions about who we are, about what we read, about what we find hot; they plan to use those to explain what makes women tick, what our brains make us do.
They do not believe that culture mediates our desire at all1; they don't believe that we are shaped by our communities and our experiences; they want to put us into neat, biologically determined boxes[...]
All of those problems are present in the survey itself [...] Reasons include heterosexist language, which presumes that anyone not marked as queer must be straight; the language of the questions about participants' sex, gender, and sexual orientation, which presumes that people are either male or female; and the language of their description of slash, which presumes that there is one definition of slash."
Also, it's been pointed out that the so-called "research" itself is being conducted mighty shoddily, and with what looks like some questionable ethics.
And, apparantly? The end goal is to publish a book that will be entitled "Rule 34: What Netporn Teaches Us About The Brain". So...there's that.