helen-louise's journal

On Saturday I had to work all day, then Richard & I went to BiFest in the evening. This turned out to be something of a mistake. It was good, because I finally got to meet earwigmc, but bad because I realised within about 3 minutes of getting there that I was too tired to enjoy it. I'm an extrovert, in the gaining energy from being around people sense, and it takes a lot to make me over-peopled - but there were too many people I didn't know or even recognise. Just couldn't cope, so I spent the whole time I was there hiding out in the Back Room. Poor Richard, who's a natural introvert and quite seriously so, was so overwhelmed he actually left and went for a long walk instead. Blah. Sorry if you tried to be friendly and I was behaving like a deer caught in headlights :/

Yesterday I was supposed to be going to the Natural History Museum to go dinosaur hunting, but my severe spoon shortage caught up with me. So instead the Tim & Peter came here and I watched Tim play Dragon Quest for several hours while I recategorised Sims outfits. The reason I needed to do this is that a not insignificant number of my downloaded outfits are broken and show up in stupid categories - like, for example, dresses that show up not only in Everyday and Formal wear, but also in Athletic, Nightwear, Swimwear and Underwear. It drives me nuts that people tag their stuff incorrectly - especially because I've made clothes myself and know how trivial it is to get right. There isn't really any excuse for not doing it properly, as a) BodyShop comes in the same language options as the game itself, so all the functions will be explained in your own language, and b) the icons are pictorial anyway, and surely you have to be pretty daft to click the "swimsuit" picture for a dress?! Bah!

Got some real-life house ordering stuff done too, but I won't go into that because it was tedious enough having to do it in the first place without spending time writing about it as well :) I only post about housekeeping if I'm feeling down and need reminding that I got useful stuff done with the day. Today I managed to book a doctor's appointment. Somehow, despite my GP being harder to get hold of than, er, a very slippery thing, I've succeeded in getting an appointment for next Tuesday. Yes, I rock.

Richard is doing some insanely geeky stuff here that I would tell you about if only I understood it. Currently, he appears to be prodding a circuit board with a multimeter. He seems to have got himself a new "job" reprogramming paintball guns, and at least one of his firmware upgrades has been accepted by the manufacturer as the new official standard. I understand EPROM, PIC, pins, high and low, and that's about it. If anyone cares, I might be able to prod him for more details.

My gallstones are being evil little buggers at the moment. I'm hoping this means that the gallstone-dissolving medicine is working, and they're getting smaller and rattling around more. Blah.

Today I made a creation out of tofu and maple syrup. It is allegedly a "cheesecake". I, personally, think it looked a lot more edible before it was baked, but never mind, eh? (I also ate some of the raw slop, and it was quite nice - would've been lovely chilled). I won't know what it's like as a baked cheesecake for ages, because it has to cool down enough for me to be able to put it in the fridge, and then it has to chill down to dessert temperature. And Alexa has just said "butterbug maple ambrosia" to me on irc, and I'm laughing my head off at the reference.

Johari/Nohari: Just so you know, I haven't been doing them for anyone. Not because I don't love you, but because I entirely suck at picking the n "best" of anything, in just about any context. (I can do things like pick my n favourite bands/ albums/ video games of RIGHT NOW, but ask me for a lifetime list, and I'll ask you for a couple of weeks to get it together). Alexa was the first person to post a list who I knew well enough to comment, and I spent about half an hour looking, and just couldn't get it down to 6 adjectives. I could pick out the ones that were completely the opposite of her ("religious", f'rex), but there were at least 12 which all applied equally. So I just went "meh" at the whole thing.

Note that I would, much, much, rather do it by Multi-ballot Antivote, where I could vote for the 6 adjectives that were least like someone. That's easy.

Working again tomorrow. Won't get to Picocon. Sux0rs. Want this week to be over now, please, so I can get some sleep!

I went to bed at midnight last night and slept until nearly 3pm. I woke up briefly at 8am as that's when my "take pills" alarm went off - it was freezing in the house, so I staggered downstairs to put the heating on, but apart from that it was a continuous zonk-out. Remember I said you don't get enough sleep in hospital? The last night I was in, I'd had all the needles removed from my arms, and I only had to take pills - but nonetheless, I wasn't allowed to go to sleep until 11pm and got woken up at 6am. I can't function on 7 hours sleep normally, let alone when I'm ill...

Had a bunch of extremely bizarre dreams last night, including:
1) a dream featuring Richard & I having an argument about the amount of smoke in a restaurant, running up lots of stairs with candlelit alcoves, and ending up in a beautiful roof garden, where we had soup and salad.
2) a dream where I was re-landscaping a distant railway station to have wheelchair access up to a 30 foot wooden statue of Nelson Mandela that was on the hill next to the station. This was the only reason why anyone would want to visit said station, as there was nothing else there.
3) going to Seattle to find the recipe for the cinnamon-and-chocolate-chip cookies that I'd eaten at alt.polycon 7 in 1995 (?!)
4) picking up a certain ex there and reconnecting over a long walk in a strange countryside that was sort-of based on the area around my primary school, only not quite.
5) buying a flute (musical instrument), and having the choice between different grades of flute, that were all the same in terms of the number of notes they had, but grade 1 flutes were thin-tubed and needed little effort to blow, while grade 6 flutes were two inches in diameter and needed a huge amount of puff to make music with.
6) an excellent dream in which artremis and I were going around a strange town buying badge-making materials and ordering some custom-made t-shirts. Except after I'd made the design and emailed the gif to them, it turned out the minimum order was 100. So I distracted the assistants then shoplifted £4-worth of crappy vests. (WTF?)
7) being a police officer telling off some kids for skateboarding over gravel and telling them instead to skateboard on the crazy golf course.
8) being a champion skateboarder who could fly.
9) going with x_mass and alexa_robinson on the train somewhere, except we had to keep going backwards and forwards, and had to use fake tickets because we couldn't afford real ones.
10) picking up a cute girl in the process, and wanting to have HOTT SEXX with her until it turned out that she had a heart defect and couldn't. Then she disappeared.
11) lost in a cobble-stoned town where I didn't speak the language or have a map, I eventually found a shop that sold china, and went in there to see if I could colour-match my Ikea plates with matching mugs. (This actually has basis in reality - we have some gorgeous purple plates that we're trying to find mugs for).
12) going into some kind of bad fanfic Harry Potter universe, where external authors could randomly rub out or change things as we were experiencing them.
13) reorganising my freezer with the help of Marks & Spencer and someone I used to be at secondary school with. Also, putting frozen soy mince into Jiffy bags(?) labelled "SOYA MINCE" before stuffing them into the drawer.
14) trying to persuade Harry & Ron that they shouldn't enter a music competition with a Jackson 5 impersonator when they'd only just started writing music, but Ron kept flushing himself down the toilet.
15) flying to a strange island where there were many monkeys and trees with bananas, oranges and pears.

This entire dream sequence was like one huge dream where one theme merged into the next, but 3-6 were definitely the best bits.