Blogsolidation!

So I have decided to tidy up and update my online presence a bit, as I’ve spent the past several years sort of wallowing in neglected blogs. I haven’t decided yet whether to fold this site into one of my others, and given that my old Vox blog and a Blogspot outing were previously folded into this one, poor old Twitchery is just not very organized at the moment anyway.
What Will Happen:

Some cleanup. Things will be tagged. Things may be edited. Posts may be deleted, not because I am some sneaky person who wants to Destroy The Historical Record Of Who I Was, but because they seem especially pointless or outdated.

What May Happen:

There may be a note in the next few weeks that this blog has been folded into another (probably my even more strenuously neglected Poor Man’s Lois Lane site) and will shortly be pining for the fjords.
At any rate, stay tuned..

Helga

I have a spider living in my driver’s side mirror.

She (thanks to Charlotte’s Web, I tend to assume spiders are female) is ugly, brown, and very industrious. When she draws her legs up to her body, the entire assemblage looks like a very small head of Cthulhu.

She is also tenacious: when I first discovered her on Monday night, I took the car on the interstate in an attempt to shake her off. What I ended up doing was taking my spider on a lovely night tour of my city.

I had planned to squash her the next morning, but she was still in the mirror, hadn’t completely covered my door in web, and, most importantly, would make a real mess on any shoe employed for the task. So instead she gets to be called Helga, and I get to feel imaginary bites all over myself every time I look at her or think about her too much.

In Which I Gain A Spine…Then Rant About It Being Broken

Note: While I could provide pictures, I’m not going to, because my object is not to shame anyone: this is an ongoing problem I have with buying used books online.

Dear Bookseller,

I just received my package from you, and I must admit I’m very concerned for your welfare. This book’s condition was listed as “Very Good.” There may even have been some talk about “minor edge wear.” These words, combined with the condition of the book on its arrival, suggest several possibilities:

1. You have recently been through some sort of apocalypse which affects your judgement of such things—maybe the condition of this book, as opposed to the garden ruined by that rain of toads, is indeed “Very Good.”
2. The fancy super-sealed packaging emitted fumes, causing you to hallucinate that this was not, in fact, a creased and spine-cracked travesty of a paperback.
3. You are totally, totally evil.

I’m not averse to a little work on these things, really: I know I’m demanding. My paperbacks are going to be clear-Contact-papered, after all, and sometimes buying a used book means that I take a Sharpie or some paint and touch up little spots here and there before I preserve it.

I preserve it because, in my cockeyed optimism, I assume it will be good.

You sent me this copy of this novel because you, in your cockeyed optimism, assumed that I was either apathetic, mentally blunted, or visually impaired. I’m no more whipping out a Sharpie for this than I am performing CPR on the mummy of Ramses II, and for exactly the same reason.

…I didn’t punt it off my balcony in a rage, either, though, so there is that.

Am I going to mention some of this in my review? Let’s just say the chances are “Very Good.”

Well, This Could Be a Problem…

This winter, I’ve tried to be proactive about that zombie state this time of year always seems to cause in me: I bought a SAD light and a space heater for my office, decorated for Christmas, tried to think of fun things to do in snow rather than just yelling at it out my window like Kirk in Wrath of Khan, and generally gave it my best effort. And a lot of these things have helped, especially the light.

Until today, when I realized that I’ve been much more energetic the past few days than I have lately. The difference isn’t temperature at work, or sunshine (real or false): it’s the temperature outside. Yes, just like my indoor cat floofs up for winter even though it never goes below 65º in his immediate environment, I apparently perk up when the temperature I don’t even spend most of my day in goes up. How the heck can I be proactive about that?

A Conversation That Didn’t Happen

You have a fishie!
Yes. Adorable, isn’t he?

 

What’s his name?

Um…

You named him Jack McKoi, didn’t you?

…Yes?

How ridiculous. Fish don’t even have eyebrows!

Not…Ready!!! (Or Back The #$@! Off, Jack Frost)

I am not ready for summer to be over, and having it end with two days of rain, mist, cold, and general Sherlock-Holmes-out-on-a-fall-evening weather seems particularly cruel.

I can never get warm at work anyway (to the point that mentioning this to any older female relative leads to cries of “THYROID!!!;” given the family history they may have a point, but my weight is fine and my hair remains insanely thick), and it’s much worse when I can’t even sit in a warm car at lunchtime. Now if only I could show this to anyone who wanders by and wonders why I am wearing a sweater and a jacket, using another sweater as a lap rug, and typing in fingerless gloves…

Lookin’ Voxy In Here!

In the wake of Vox’s closing, little Twitchery has stretched her jaws and swallowed my entire Villa Grammatica Vox blog.

Also, I may need to lay off the David Attenborough documentaries.

You Lie!

Hah! No, it’s not going to be topical, sorry.

I have wanted to change my name since…ever, basically, and finally took the plunge and altered my middle name this summer, after years of hearing people tell me it was going to be an unholy nuisance and hundreds of dollars of expense. So far:

$47- name change
$4- cost of parking near courthouse
$0- new SS card
$0- new bank cards
$0- new credit cards
$22- the DMV whole shebang (license, title and registration), and they said the title didn’t have to be reprinted
$25- ordering happy little postcard announcements from Moo.com

By far the biggest nuisance has been 1) Finding the Social Security office, which relocated from the time of initial research to the time of applying for a new card; 2) Answering the people who say “You…changed your middle name?” (I changed it to Alexandra, and have been referring to this process as establishing my AlDentity.)

I suppose my point is, without the internet, I’d still be believing all the friends and family who didn’t want to learn a new name. ALWAYS look things up, people.

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I Am Alarmed

I finally gave in and bought this alarm clock (though not at this price!) after Old Faithful let me down again last week. I hope I like it, and hope it stays around as long as the old one.*

*Which is going to live in the closet. I seem to have some separation issues.

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Quick Hits

As all the blog seems to have gone out of me lately, a few things I found interesting:

• The “space bat”–In the wake of the Natasha Richardson tragedy, this story about a bat spotted clinging to the space shuttle (but never seen getting the hell off it) was like a depressing little cherry on a pie made of suck.
• From CrunchGear, a story on the coolest business cards ever.
• And a top 10 list from Wired that I found vaguely sexist, if only because I’m an even bigger geek than many of the guys I know.

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