Summer Black-Out Challenge, Day 2

Decided to go simpler for day two of Summer Black-Out Challenge. All the accessories of yesterday were fun, but it was kind of a lot to wear all at once. But I still wanted a rich color. So today we are PURPLE.



Ruched purple sleeveless blouse
Sweet Dreams jeans
Silver-set amber necklace
Amber drop earrings
Brown wedge sandals
Hair in two buns



Same jewelry as yesterday, but I really like how the bright amber compliments the bold colors of both today's purple and yesterday's turquoise. God, this is a terrible picture, but the best of about sixty even worse ones. I photograph so badly. I swear I didn't look like this in the mirror today. :-P

No black shoes encourages me to wear more fun ones like today's. I love these shoes so much I have to share them.



I bought these for my Bastet costume for Festival of the Larps '07. I've just about worn them to death, but they still look really cute.

And that is a considerably less awful picture than the previous one. Don't you hate it when your feet come out better than your face? :-P

Labor Wars approaches!

Just finished my last (I think) assigned bits of writing for The Labor Wars. As I checked them off my to do list, I felt a rush of excitement. This is so close to happening! We've got this brand-new game almost ready to go! I got to be part of a huge new writing project with people I really like and whose work I really respect! Yay! Less than two weeks to go.

The intervening time is looking to be busy. Bernie's brother Joe will be coming to visit, and I really want to hang out with him, but the schedule for the time he's in town is still very up in the air. I know he wants to run a couple of tabletop games while he's here (and I certainly wouldn't mind him finishing off the last session of Burn Notice he was so awesome in) but that's a lot of gaming in a fairly short space of time, and I'm not certain what we'll have time and players to do. I'm pretty much free all of that time if I need to be, but I really like knowing ahead of time how to arrange my schedule.

Summer Black-Out Challenge, Day 1

Today marks the first day of my Summer Black-Out 2010 week. That is, in case you missed my introductory post, where I challenge myself to not wear any black at all for an entire week in an effort to enjoy some summer colors. And for the hell of it, to document it on the blog.

I was going to go with a white blouse today, but I decided that was a pussy way to start off a week that's supposed to be about color. So today I wear BLUE. Oh so very much BRIGHT TURQUOISE BLUE.



Textured turquoise button-neck shirt, hand-me-down from Mom
Blue varicolor scarf
Skinny turquoise scarf for belt
Sweet Dreams jeans
Silver-set amber necklace
Amber drop earrings

Why is it so tough to take a full-length picture of yourself in a mirror without covering up your face?



Hello, face. Nice to see you again. Wish I'd thought to get my earrings in the shot, but at least you can sort of see the necklace, the only non-blue in a SEA OF OVERWHELMING TURQUOISE. 

Porkstravaganza

I have had some lovely dinner parties, but this one I just had was especially fun and successful. I had decided to take advantage of the only good part of not having Jared or Bernie around, getting to cook trayf. So I wanted to throw on some pork for myself and some friends I thought would appreciate it. My first thought was chops, because there is nothing like a good brined pork chop, but I always do chops when I serve pork, and there were to be so many guests that I'd have to cook them in several batches. Seemed like a pain. I could do a roast, which would have been delicious and fed lots of people eaily, but the preparation was so simple I thought I would challenge myself instead. So, recalling a diinner out wiith Jared and in_water_writ* from several years ago, I decided to try my hand at stuffing a tenderloin. I carefully butterflied an eight-pound loin (cut in half to fit in the pan), stuffed it with a mixture of cornbread, onion, celery, and chicken broth, rolled it up, and secured it with butcher's twine and wooden skewers. Carefully sticking it through with my probe thermometer, I cooked the bugger to temperature-- since starting to do that, my meat has come out of the oven a lot better. Accompanied by baked sweet potatoes and a side salad of mesclun, pecans, red pepper, and red onion dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, I am pleased to report that every diner present had an enjoyable meal.

Jack never approved of journaling

I have always been bemused by C.S. Lewis's oft-mentioned dislike of the practice of journaling. Despite so frequently denigrating it, he actually did it quite often, and some of his most powerful self-reflective works (A Grief Observed, for example) were technically composed by journaling. But seemed to view it as a sort of self-indulgence, a practice that encouraged excessive focus on the self.

I think he was so sensitive toward anything that so encouraged because he already recognized a strong tendency towards it in himself. One of the things I most admire about Lewis and have always worked to emulate was his ruthlessly accurate understanding of his own nature. But the unfortunate companion to the truly self-aware is often some degree of self-absorption. God knows it's certainly dogged me in my own efforts. It takes a great deal of time thinking about you to arrive at real personal understanding, and all that time is necessarily precluded from regard for other things, such as other people, or important efforts, or God. I believe it is in criticism of this that Lewis makes his stance-- he was not about to approve of anything that drove him even further into his failing.

I don't really agree; I think journaling is a very positive thing. I like that it encourages me to produce writing, which in turn improves my writing. I think it helps us work through problems, clarfying thoughts, developing points, and cope with our pain. I also believe that the achievement of true self-awareness is worth some time spent in excessive self-absportion; remembering to attend to the external can always be yet worked towards. And you'll notice that even though Lewis disapproved of the pursuit he did it anyway-- because it helped him clarify, develop, cope. We have some of his powerful personal works because he did it anyway.

But I know what he means. He was so ruthlessly fair, so clear-eyed for both the hard edge against and the compassion for the human plight. He articulated both "Who am I, that it is so wrong that I should suffer?" and "I am such that my suffering does signify." He was so full of that burning contradiction, so strange and yet so critical, of the everything and the nothing of our state, unafraid to at once accept the burden and claim the significance. He kept cutting, no matter how painful, until he exposed truth.

I don't always reach the same conclusions as Lewis. I don't always have the same experiences or viewpoints. But he speaks to me because he cuts himself with all the same blades I do.

Style Challenge: Summer Black-Out 2010

So I read a style sometimes blog called Already Pretty, which I like for it's theoretical style advice and applaud for its positive body image outlook (even if I don't always necessarily agree with its approach on that front.) The writer has issued an interesting personal challenge to herself-- could she not wear any black clothing at all for two entire summer months and rely solely on more vibrant colors to create interesting, seasonally-appropriate looks? She calls it her "Summer Black-Out 2010 Challenge," and exhorted her readers to give it a try as well, not for the entirety of June and July, but just for the week of Monday, June 7th to Monday, June 14th.

Now I love my neutrals, especially black. Black looks good against my pale skin, and being a goth deep down in the depths of my tormented soul, it is a color that suits my tastes. But I depend an awful lot on it as a standby when I can't think of anything else, so it might be a fun challenge to cut it out entirely as an option. I certainly couldn't go two whole months without it, but a week could be interesting. So I thought what the hell, I'll give it a try. From the 7th to the 14th, expect to see me trying to creatively work around including any black in my outfits.



We could all use a little more color in our lives. :-)

And until then, I will be wearing ALL MY BLACK.

Two weeks until Labor Wars!

At last the hives have abated. The antihistimine I took seemed to clear things up within a few hours, and I managed to actually not rend every last shred of dermis from my body in the interim. Here's hoping this is the end of it. In the meantime I'm going to be avoiding acorn squash, just to be on the safe side.

Yesterday was a very good day. Yesterday marked the first day I fully incorporated every step of my new summer self-care routine, including genuine intense exercise, proper nutrition, proper hydration, and skin care. My not feeling so great emotionally lately has led to my not taking very good care of myself, which leads to my not feeling so great physically, which in turn makes me feel worse emotionally. This is my effort to end that cycle, and though it's certainly going to require a lot of work on my part to break out of this inertia I've been buried in, I felt pretty damn good after accomplishing it yesterday. One day at a time, I suppose.

Had an excellent Labor Wars meeting last night. We are down to the final two weeks or so before the game debuts, and we are, in my opinion, in very good shape. We finalized a few more public pieces of information last night, as well as figured out some important mechanics, made both an in-game and out-of-game schedule, and made some plans for the dinner that we'll be serving Saturday night. I always wanted to put on a game that had a dinner served within it! I am excited to help emp42ress* with the cooking. I feel like we're in a really good place with where we are with this game, so I have every hope that the inaugural run will go well.

Missing someone

There's lots of nice stuff about being alone.

I can cook thick center-cut pork chops, cool jumbo shrimp, or creamy sea-fresh scallops, in as much butter as I want.

I don't have to clean up or around someone else's stuff cluttering up my room.

I don't have to make sure anyone else gets up in the morning.

I don't have to wait around for anyone who's running late.

I don't have to worry about taking anyone else's schedule into account.

I can go to bed as early as I want.

...

I'd rather someone be here anyway.

Wretched hives of scum and villainy

I have hives. Wait, no, that's not right. I don't just "have hives." I have all the hives. Every hive, that ever hove, in all the world, I have somewhere on my body right now.

Sunday morning I woke up with a scattering of them on my thighs. They were kind of itchy but not too bad, so I just kind of forgot about them. But around the time we were cooking dinner, they just started to spread everywhere. At bedtime Jared gave me an antihistimine and I slathered myself in anti-itch lotion, which helped me fall asleep. In the morning on Monday I was hive-free, and thought that was the end of it. But by Tuesday afternoon they exploded all over me again, and they persist now even on Wednesday morning. They itch like crazy, and it's really tough to not just tear all my skin off trying to scratch.

I'm not the kind of person who often gets hives, especially not covering the entirety of my body, so I'm a wee bit concerned that something is off here. I stopped by the drugstore on my way to work this morning to buy more antihistimine and took one just now, so hopefully that will eventually put an end to it. If this keeps up, people tell me I should see a doctor. Well, I've been meaning to anyway, if not for this reason, so I guess that's something pushing me to get it done.

I am trying to trace the source, though most cases of hives are idiopathic so I probably don't have much of a shot. I recently used different laundry detergent (people moving out of their dorms donated various kinds to Elsinore), but I've done several loads already before now with no ill effects. I switched to a new shampoo, but again I'd used it a few times by the point of the first outbreak, and I certainly haven't used it between the first and the second one. The only other possibility I can think of is the acorn squash we made for Sunday dinner. Though I didn't handle the squash much during the preparation, I did a little, and it was around cooking time when I first noticed the hives getting bad. They really exploded during the meal when I was actually eating it. And then I was fine on Monday when I didn't have any of it, but when I finished off the leftovers yesterday they resurged with a vengeance.

So maybe that's it. That still doesn't explain the scattering of hives I woke up with Sunday morning, way before I'd had anything to do with the squash, and I've had acorn squash before with no allergic reaction, so I don't know. I just want to know what the hell to avoid, because I look like a tomato patch over here. A tomato patch being eating alive by stinging insects. :-P

All alone for now

Jared is back home in Chicago now. I drove him to the airport yesterday morning, then spent most of the rest of the day not doing much beyond a few random chores and hanging around feeling slightly mopey. I know we've spent three previous summers separated before, and I do honestly believe the downtime will be good for him, but it's always tough to spend the time apart. Ah, well, it'll be okay.

We now officially have blendedchaitea* as a roommate. She moved in successfully on Sunday and I believe is settling in well. The house went on a massive Target run after she arrived and we replaced a lot of necessary items in the communal spaces. Then we had a nice big dinner together, planned by Jared and I and prepared by everyone working together. I feel more comfortable and optimistic about my living situation than I have in a long time. I like and feel like I will get along with all the people I'm living with and will be living with, which may take a great deal of stress out of my daily life. Certainly could use that.

Today I begin my exercise plan. All this week Jared and I made an effort to walk places rather than drive, which was giving us around two miles a day. Not a bad start, but I'm going to need something more intense if I want to get in shape and get rid of this little gut I'm getting. So in addition to making an effort to walk more, I want to add a daily routine that goes at least a half an hour a day. Let's see if I can muster the discipline.