So, a while ago, I finally updated the wf.com front page layout. It had only taken me a year and a half of good intentions to get it done. It unfortunately uses tables for the positioning instead of the currently approved CSS, but that is something I’ll deal with when I have more time.

Not linked from that page, but residing at the domain, I’ve uploaded pictures from our January trip. As anyone going to view them will notice, I started off by attempting to rename the image files to give a hint as to their content. I realized, however, that doing so, unless I had some sort of naming scheme, would cause them to list out of chronological order — which, to me, was more confusing than clicking on something called DCS0134.jpg. The pictures are very weakly culled: I deleted everything that was absolutely unviewable, but there are not a few repetitious or very poor shots still contained among the files.

Among the photos are images of several strange or amusing things we saw during our stay. It appears I did NOT get a picture of the Dwarfslash ornament, which is a real pity.

However:
o If Johnny Depp played Captain Hook…
o Tigger looks WAY too happy.
o … as does Mickey.
o Seriously, what the hell were they thinking with this?
o Who the heck is fake Sirius?
o Strong Bad’s cameo appearance.

Also watched the first Tenipuri musical, which was again, surprisingly good. I’m not sure why I found this so shocking. The Rose of Versailles movie wasn’t really that bad. The more obvious American equivalents — Dora the Explorer Live! or Sesame Street Live! — are usually fairly well done. Except that they tend to take a different route with the costumes: instead of getting an actual person and doing their hair and dressing them up like Dora, they instead make a fuzzy shell and put the person into it, in the Mickey Mouse tradition rather than the Cinderella/Snow White tradition.

Been watching a goodly amount of anime. Nearly caught up on Prince of Tennis again, though I’m growing increasingly frustrated with the delays getting them to the final match against Rikkaidai. Just play the games, dammit!! Filler and character development is great, but there’s something horribly horribly addicting about the tennis.

Live action Sailormoon continues to be surprisingly good. I also took a look at what seems to be a new show, Hit o nerae (Smash Hit) which is the tale of a 25 year old TV producer. Having seen one episode, which was a 12 minute episode, about all I can say is that it so far has intrigued me; pretty much anything with an adult as the main character would.

Need to finish downloading some of the J-dorama I started getting.

Not much useful information school-wise to report, so I will ignore that for the time being.

Now, a brief interlude.

Setting: Bob’s and my (my and Bob’s? Bob’s and mine?) bedroom. We rearranged the furniture. I bring mom up to take a look, and she notices that shelves have been hung. On the shelves are, among other things, 3 naked CLAMP detectives, a stuffed lion, Nagisa, Utako, and a doll with a brown ponytail whose face got wet and thus the red of her mouth ran.

Mom: Oh, you hung shelves up!
Me: Yep, a while ago.
Mom: I see those dolls are still naked.
Me: Yeah…
Mom: And look at that one, that little slut with her smeared lipstick.
Me: Now we know why they’re naked.

I’ve slowly been ramping up to get into this project for school. I still feel rather at sea, and unfortunately this is not a situation which can continue. The problem is a familiar one — I don’t like to go and talk to someone unless I feel I have an idea of what question to ask… except that to figure that out is too difficult and so I put it off and put it off until I feel like augh, I need to have done way more work before I go in and talk to someone… and it’s a vicious cycle.

So, there we are. I am going to email my prof before I leave for school, because it’s been hanging over my head for WEEKS and it shouldn’t have been. Because I am an idiot who gets into these kind of mental games with myself.

I also tend to get distracted by immediate goals at the expense of long term ones. If project Y is due before project Z, I feel boatloads of guilt for working on project Z instead of Y. It’s ridiculous — and I know it is, but that’s just how I’m wired and I can’t get past it just by saying I have.

Most of these issues seem to resolve themselves when the work I’m doing is for money, though.

So, the main issue with my grandmother’s dining room table is that it has no chairs.

Mom has said she’ll buy us some though (woot), so these are the two kinds that are being looked at:

Mission Style, and Queen Anne.

I like both pretty well. Mom does too, though she says that after sitting in both of them she leans towards the Queen Anne ones. Bob hasn’t had a chance to go sit in them and try them out yet.

I was mildly productive today. This is not a huge victory, but it is a victory nevertheless, as so far I have been singularly UNproductive for many many days in a row now.

So I am happy. Happy, dammit.

In other news, Rachael Ray, no matter how nice her cookbooks might be, comes off looking like a complete fool in her series “$40 a day”. For instance, on her Boston episode, she made the brilliant remark (not an exact quote) “Who knew it was so close to the beach!”.

But she just ate a lemon souffle and it made me really HUNGRY.

I <3 souffle.

There’s nothing like endless undercurrents and passive aggressive crap to weary a body. And I am tired.

Tired of school:
Last semester I took too many classes. I do not yet have a satisfactory answer in my head as to why I did this. Part of it is that I consistently underestimate my level of motivation to complete projects — because when discussing an idea, I am as a bit of dandelion fluff: easily lifted to dizzying heights from whence anything seems possible. But I soon drift back to the ground again and find that I’m not really as interested as I thought I was. In any case, I took too many classes. I attempted to rectify the matter by taking fewer classes this semester, but it hasn’t really worked out as I hoped. Having less work has plummetted my ability to produce anything to even lower depths. However, I am going to try and cut out even more in the hope that if I have only ONE thing to do, I’ll have no excuses for not getting it done.

Tired of waiting for people to take charge of their own affairs:
I have been accused of being many things: bossy, controlling and pushy to name a few. And I think those things are true to a certain extent. I am extremely intolerant of waffling. Non-answers to direct questions are liable to get a hostile response. But if a person is asked to make a decision and they do not, they should not be surprised or offended when that decision is made for them. If a person is given charge of a time sensitive project and they do not keep on it, someone else is going to have to pick up their slack. These are not my preferred scenarios! I do not attempt to arrange them, nor do I look forward to them happening. Like most of us, I prefer to work with competant people: people who challenge me, who some fraction of the time make me feel inadequate by reason of their brilliance, who motivate me to work harder so I don’t look bad in comparison to them. Competition of a good natured sort is a key element in group success.

Tired of people who don’t listen:
If I say X to someone, I expect them to hear ‘X’ and remember ‘X’. No one’s memory is perfect, of course. I do not always remember exactly what has transpired and everyone has their own slant on an occurence — eye-witness testimony is not reliable and memory can be manipulated. But it is tiresome to have to explain the same thing over and over again, particularly when it is a thing easily looked up or worse, is a thing you have purposely written down and given to the person in question ON PURPOSE so you won’t have to keep repeating yourself forever. And frankly, there is no excuse whatsoever for remembering things that never happened at all.

However, it is not clear to me how successful and worthwhile it would be to directly address many of these issues that are plaguing me. School, clearly, must be resolved and shall be ASAP. This is my second try at the MS, and I’m not going to quit this time until I have the piece of paper. The others are more tricky. Professionalism doesn’t work in certain situations or with certain kinds of people.

a symptom of all that is wrong in this country.

It’s common wisdom that a funeral home will try to rip you off in the matter of a casket, extras and everything else — whether that reputation is deserved or not, it’s the one that they have. But you’d think a graveyard — one operated BY THE TOWN no less — would be less likely to be run by moneysucking bastards.

You would be wrong.

My uncle offered to purchase a small bench for my grandfather’s grave so that my grandma (who is over 80) would have someplace to sit when she went there. But apparently his grave is in a no bench zone or something and so this plan was scrapped. It would be more upsetting to grandma to have to dig him up and move him somewhere else, therefore no bench.

And now we come to the same issue with a different graveyard. When my mom had to purchase a plot for my dad, she was told she had to purchase two. Which she did, without too much grumbling, though it was rather odd, we thought — to be required to buy two. After, she found out that the area these two plots were in were in some kind of ‘monument free zone’, meaning that one is not permitted to put up stone monuments ie, gravestones that stick up, benches, etc. You must use those flat ones that the grass grows over and you can’t see when it snows instead.

So she continues to find herself plagued by this issue, faced with the choice of leaving everything where it is OR (ha ha) moving everything to another section of the graveyard, where she will be required to purchase FOUR plots and erect a monument that meets the specifications of the graveyard.

Did I mention how much I hate the town of Hampton?