Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Jared's 21st

Today is Jared's 21st birthday. Everyone be sure to wish him a happy, special, wonderful day celebrating when he came into the world.

I know I will.

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Hobo beatdown!

I have had a very disturbing experience.

In the Wii version of the Godfather game, one occasionally comes upon the odd impoverished transient, commonly known as the "hobo," on the streets of 1940s New York. I am fascinated by these creatures in their natural habitat, and make a point of addressing them when I encounter them. This usually results in my unintentionally giving them money, but that's okay, I am amused enough by their presence to not mind so much being separated from my cash.

But despite my being a friend to hobokind, they have turned against me. I went into an alleyway and came upon a gang of hobos loitering there. I was planning on seeing if they had anything useful to sell me, such as guns or dynamite, but instead, completely unprovoked, they turned on me and attacked me! I was the recipient of a hobo beatdown! One of them even had a lead pipe. :-( I was forced to slaughter all four of them with a few quick blasts of my trusty .38 Special, but I was very scarred by the experience. I thought I could commune with the hobos, but apparently they are vicious beasts that can turn on you at any moment.


Thirty-three years

Yesterday my parents celebrated their thirty-third anniversary. They amaze me, my mom and dad. They are as different as night and day, but they love each other, and they somehow work. They make me smile. I love my parents.

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Gangsters on Christmas Eve!


So I decided that Godfather: The Game is a Hanukkah present, and I may play it since it is already Hanukkah. I know, I'm weak. But the game is fantastic. I like the controls on the Wii so much better, though I'm enough out of practice with the controller that I'm still not very good at remembering where all the appropriate buttons are. But it makes the driving sections so much easier, and I'm getting better at shooting a lot faster. I made my guy look like Robert De Niro, complete with mole, and he's dressed very sharply in a charcoal pinstripe shirt and a black fedora with a gray band.

As a side note, Jared finally sent me the reference photos Ernest took of him in order to paint his Victorian gentleman portrait. I love them, they're so elegant and he looks very handsome.

I shall soon be helping prepare Christmas Eve dinner. For the Roberts family, that means prime rib, lobster bisque, artichokes in butter sauce, plus a few other things depending on what we feel like. I am to be sous-chef. Not that I'm going to be making prime rib or anything with lobster on my own anytime soon, sorry, frequent dinner guests, but it'll be fun.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Vegetarian cooking


I need to acquire more vegetarian dishes for my cooking repertoire. I confess I'm the kind of carnivore that usually feel satisfied with a dinner unless there's some kind of meat in it, so usually when I cook the main course is some kind of flesh. But I've been wanting to have vegetarian friends like Matt and Ernest over for a dinner where they weren't limited to side dishes, so that means expanding into atypical territory. I know a broccoli and a vegetable soup, and eggplant Parmesan, but that's about it. I know Jared was recently at a vegan dinner that had some recipes he admired, so I could try to learn those. Perhaps this break I'll look into it. It will at least make it easier to make kosher dinners.

Godfather for the Wii


Jared's Christmas present to me arrived-- a copy of Godfather: The Game for the Wii. My sweetie knows me so well. I'm so excited for it I'm tempted to open and play it before Christmas. Maybe I could count it as a Hanukkah present and open it tonight for the third night? I've played the PC game and enjoyed it very much. I recently lent it to Jared, and now he's very into it. But I prefer console games to computer ones, so I'm delighted it's out for the Wii.

Why must Christmas still be two days away?

Monday, December 22, 2008

Useless scarves


Have you ever seen someone wearing a trenchcoat or something similar with their scarf under the collar of the coat rather than inside it? I've noticed this phenomenon fairly frequently recently, and I don't get it. How can a scarf keep you warm when it's not actually touching your neck? Is it just purely decorative there? That's nice, I guess, but wouldn't it be equally decorative if worn in a way that would also keep you warm?

I'm at home now, curled up in bed. It took almost seven hours to get here and I was fairly carsick, and I'm only just now losing the headache. I was working on coming up with technobabble component piece names for the Paranoia larp, and names for characters. The naming conventions are a three-piece hyphenate. The first part is your given name, usually one syllable, then the first letter of the color of your clearence level, then another one-syllable word to indicate what facility you were spawned in. It's best when it's some sort of pun on a real word. Like, one of the red-level characters is named Hum-R-Us, pronounced 'humorous.' Red  names are pretty easy. I'm trying to come up with I for infrared and Y for yellow. I like them best when the word actually includes the sound of the letter in it-- like Par-I-Ah. Y words or phrases are hard, though. The best I've come up with is Hot-Y-Erd.

Topped!


I thought I wouldn't be able to think of another anniversary present for Jared that was as cool as the pocket watch I got him last year. It was so perfect because of the White Rabbit connection, and 'cause he thinks they're cool. But I have proven myself wrong and found something awesome. He's going to love it. I hope so, anyway. 'Cause I love him. :-)

Winter break at home

Packing up and getting ready to head home. Casey went to pick up his friend in Boston who will be catching a ride in our car. I am cleaning up the room and putting fresh sheets on the bed so I can come back to everything just right.

I am planning on spending this break accomplishing things. I am going to watch what I eat and work out. I am going to work on my various larp projects, specifically Oz, my next solo piece, Men of Respect with Jared, and the Paranoia game with Bernie, Mac, and Joe. I am going to learn to cook more dishes. I am going to take proper care of my skin. I might even start looking for a post-graduation job.

This is a tall order, and will take discipline to not just be a lazy-ass, as is my inclination. But I have faith in myself.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Casey getting in


So, because the snow continues to pound down, Casey and I are still unable to go home for Christmas. He just got back to the States from his time abroad, and we were supposed to drive back to Pennsylvania in my car yesterday, but the snow was just too damn bad, and continues to be so. He's coming over to Elsinore today to hang out for the day and then spend the night. Hopefully we'll have a group of people over to play games and keep entertained, and then have first night of Hanukkah dinner courtesy of Dave. I'm going to learn how to light the menorah, that'll be nice.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Am I really that domestic?


I just hung my spare tension bar in the side of my closet and slung all my scarves over it. They are now elegantly displayed and eassily accessible. I am absurdly pleased with myself, as I tend to be when I accomplish little feats of domestic genius.

Speaking of my domesticity, I had a little dinner at Elsinore the other night. Bernie and I made my mother's meatloaf, which came out beautifully, with baked potatoes, peas, carrots, and asparagus. I came to a strange realization during the course of making that dinner. I was joking with [info]morethings5*about my domestic inclinations, calling myself a fifties housewife at heart. I make that joke fairly frequently lately, given how much I care about keeping the house clean, how I wish I had more time to perfect my cooking skills, how I have caught myself literally vaccuuming in pearls. Christ, I was in WIlliams-Sonoma the other day gushing over glassware, declaring that I must immediately get married so I can register for lovely things from there. I would be good, I declared to Kindness, at doing the housewife thing.

I joke about it, but I never actually think about it-- about what that would be, what that would be like, actually doing the housewife thing. I thought about it, thought about it seriously for probably the first time in my life. And I found something kind of surprising. I... think I might actually be able to do it.

I don't mind cleaning, and I never seem to have the time to keep things as clean as I'd like them to be. I feel really comfortable and satisfied when everything is neat and scrubbed and made t look nice. I love cooking, another thing I never seem to have enough time for, and would love to be able to seriously improve my skills in the kitchen. I enjoy running errands because I like having the time for solitary contemplation while wandering around town. I'd also always have time to do the personal stuff that gets pushed aside by my other responsibilities-- I could get on schedules for all the things that get away from me, like working out. And the kind of work I want to do, writing, isn't easy to get a day job for. I could focus on my writing without worrying about relying on it. And if I were to have children, I don't really like the idea of them never seeing me and being raised by strangers.

This realization shocked me. I'd never considered not working before; I'd always assumed I'd do the career woman thing and try to balance domestic life with that. I was actually kind of disturbed. Would I actually be content with my biggest responsibility being housework? Don't I want more than that? What kind of feminist are you?

But then I stopped again. Isn't feminism about choice? Isn't it about women doing what they want to do, whatever that is, and nobody gets to tell them what that should be? If that would actually make me happy, because it would let me focus on the stuff I really want to do, is there anything wrong with that? It's not like I couldn't write and would have to give up the work that means the most to me. Why should intellectual pursuits only be valid if you're getting money for them?

In my family, women working or not working was never a big deal either way. The men have always been the primary breadwinners, . My grandmothers worked a little, not much. My mother is an art teacher who worked off and on for most of my life. When my brother and I were small, she quit work to stay home with us to raise us herself, and returned to work once we were school-aged. Her career was thrown off track when her mother developed Alzheimer's and required constant attention. Again, she wanted to take care of her family herself, and that took her out of the workforce for about five years. Since then it was difficult to get back in, so at the moment, she isn't working. But she still does her art, and probably more than she was able to when she was teaching.

It kind of bothered me that I was thinking that way. And yet, at the same time, I wasn't really bothered, and it bothered me that I felt like I should be bothered. It doesn't really come to anything, this is just thinking out loud, but it's strange to me.
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