Heard around the office:

Bush will be calling for the Draft to start in June.

That’s frightening.

I am the only person I know who has fallen asleep and dreamed… recipes. I have invented recipes in my sleep. Quite good ones, too.

So now I’m hungry for something I dreamed when I dozed off while reading. I’m considering a trip to the grocery store right now to pick up the ingredients. I fell asleep during my “dinnertime” of 1 in the morning. So now I’m very hungry, and for something very specific. A dish I dreamed.

The problem is, by the time I’d finish shopping for and cooking it, it’d be too late to eat it. I’d need to get to sleep so I could get up bright and early tomorrow afternoon for work.

In the meantime, just so I’ll remember it (not that I’ve had any problem in the past remembering recipes from dreams) I’ll just list the ingredients here. That will be enough to spark the memory of the rest.

boneless skinless chicken breasts
cream cheese
shelled, chopped walnuts
fresh rosemary
cayenne
garlic
plain breadcrumbs
butter
olive oil
1 egg
milk
salt
pepper

New Orleans-style yellow rice to accompany (maybe, the jury’s still out on that)
light salad

OR, the OTHER recipe…

pork tenderloin
fresh sage
fresh thyme
garlic
white wine
flour
yellow onions
carrots
butter
olive oil
salt
pepper
chicken or vegetable broth
fresh spinach

Slices of good, crusty bread (maybe sourdough) to accompany

Now, after those rather inspiring dreams…

Off to Denny’s (o joy, o rapture *sigh*) to get something to eat before I decide I’m hungry enough that the keyboard looks tasty. Denny’s is at least marginally more nutritious than my keyboard.

…but I’m getting pretty addicted to going out to karaoke after work. The co-workers I have been going with were addicted almost from the start.

I’ll admit I had a good time with it. As long as I was sitting at the table, watching everyone else perform, and sometimes singing along where I sat. When I let them talk me into getting up and singing too, it ceased being fun. The old stagefright that bordered on a panic attack was still there, and still as virulent as before.

But, in my usual way, I decided that if it was something that scared me that much, it was something I needed to face down. So I kept on getting up to sing. I was usually so nervous and shaky that I couldn’t have found the right key with a map, a compass, and a guide. It wasn’t fun. It was work, and difficult work at that.

The last two times I went, that changed. The panic has begun to recede. There’s still enough adrenalin to put a little bit of a tremor in my hands when I’m holding the mike. But still, I’ve begun to relax. My throat isn’t so tight that it throws me hopelessly off-pitch.

Finally, after these months, it’s become fun.

So, tonight, when we got done early at work, I found myself grumbling that it wasn’t Thursday or Friday so we could go over to the Creekside. And chances are, I’m not going to be heading to the Creekside at all this week. This is the last week of the month. Hell week. And the fact that it has started out at a crawl makes me that much more afraid of what the last couple nights are going to be like. Especially since I’ve seen the pile of work that the funding crew has had these last few workdays.

Dammit, I wanna go sing! I don’t want to have to wait for Sunday night.

I think I might have to investigate other karaoke bars. See if I can find some that are on other days of the week. If I want to, I can go to Creekside Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and then the Daybreak on Sunday. So that only leaves Monday through Wednesday to cover.

And I suppose I could blame Sara and Virginia for convincing me to go to the Creekside. But instead, I’ll blame . She was the first one to ever talk me into getting up to karaoke. She placed the first chink in the I-ain’t-doing-this armor.

All your fault, Carol. :p

Anyone got a spare $6,000,000.00?

OMFG, I so fucking WANT!!!!!

I need to win the lottery. Like RIGHT NOW.

I will now obsess. And I do mean obsess.

A few weeks back, our troublemaking Mr. Spann was teasing poor Aide. So I told her that I’d bring in my silly string and she could shoot him in the back of the head sometime when he wasn’t expecting it. He overheard me say it, though, so I have been biding my time.

It’s been long enough. I’m sure he’s forgotten by now. It’s been a month, or thereabout.

So, I must remember to pack the glow-in-the-dark silly string in my purse in the morning, along with the two oversized, super-deluxe party poppers I picked up, so and I can sneak up on the other side of Darian’s cubicle. I figure that we can trigger those over the wall, and then run for it. And while he’s looking to see who attacked him with paper streamers and confetti, Aide will have a clear shot at him with the silly string.

Revenge is a dish best served silly. :D

Time for me to go off and attempt sleep. I did succeed, in a way, last time. I managed to get to sleep… just never long enough for it to be any kind of restful sleep. I woke up every single hour from the time I turned out the lights to try and sleep until the time my alarm went off. I’m guessing tonight will be more of the same. But at least it’s giving me enough rest that I can drive myself to and from work, and do my job fairly efficiently when I’m there. I just feel miserable in the process. And the sleep dep is just enough to remove the (admittedly tiny) barriers and inhibitions against doing silly stuff in public.

I can’t wait for the weather to get warmer. Then I can embarrass my co-worker by running through the sprinklers during our fifteen minute break again. Her suggestion, originally, since the air conditioner wasn’t working and the constant running of the machines had heated the office up to the eighties (maybe even a bit higher than the eighties.) But she chickened out, even though it would have helped her to cool off, because she was too afraid of looking silly or stupid in front of people. I don’t think that she was expecting me to agree at all, much less agree enthusiastically. So, since she chickened out right at the edge of the sprinklers’ range, I made her hold my glasses and I ran through the sprinklers. I even managed to find a puddle to splash through.

Then we got back up to the office at the end of our break, and she was too embarrassed to even walk in the same door as me. Her loss. I had fun, and I was no longer broiling up there in that oven of an office we work in.

And of course, running through the sprinklers now has the added bonus of embarrassing someone when I do it. Makes it all the more appealing.

mentioned, in a comment on an earlier post, going to a playground in a park in the middle of the night to play on the swings. I haven’t done that in ages. Now I really, really want to. I think I’m going to have to arrange a late-night trip to a playground soon. Maybe I’ll see if I can talk some friends into it. If it’s a warm enough night, we can throw in water guns and really make a night of it. Woohoo!

Here I am, still awake. Still feeling like I won’t be able to sleep, still feeling that wired insomniac feeling. So, it’s highly unlikely that I will get any sleep at all tonight. I’m now at sixty-three hours and counting on that two hours I got. I hope to Goddess that this stops here and now. I do not want to experience 240 hours with no sleep. Not ever again. Once in a lifetime is more than enough.

I need to try and get some sleep. I can keep the pace up without sleep for only so long before I reach the point of too far gone to drive or work. And I can’t call out from work. Between sprained ankle and the illness I caught at work, I’ve already missed three days of work this month alone. This is bad when working for a company that only gives six paid sick days a year, and yells at you if you actually use all six in a year. I had my raise denied me after I’d used exactly six sick days in one year’s time. I was told that this was “excessive absenteeism.” And I was told that if it continued, I’d lose my job. So sleep is a necessity. Calling out sick again already is not an option. And I will probably still be okay to drive when I head to work, even if I get no sleep tonight, as long as I force myself to stay alert, rather than relax while driving. I can do it. I’ve had to push myself that far before. I was still driving myself around on the 10th day of that 240-hour jag. The last day was when it truly got bad, though. I was hallucinating by then, and wound up sitting at a stop sign for half an hour, waiting for the nonexistent circus to go by.

If sleep doesn’t come tonight and the nights after, I’ll just have to try and hold on, concentrate and stay alert while driving and working. Hold on until the weekend, drive myself to and from work, do my job, and hope that the crash will come over the weekend. I have slept as much as three days straight after a bad insomnia jag. This is something else that I can’t afford to do during the work week. Somehow, if the crash and burn is going to be so intense that it lasts multiple days, I have to hold it off until the weekend.

And I know, I can feel it, that all of this would go away if I just quit trying to quit. It’s the stress of dumping the addiction that is lighting up my sleep disorders like a Christmas tree. I can feel it. Every single one is active. They’re active in the kind of all-consuming, intense way that I have only experienced twice before, one of those times being that awful ten-day jag.

I want a smoke. I want a smoke so I can sleep.

But so far, I’m still resisting the urge, despite the fact that the only sleep I’ve gotten in more than 60 hours was the two-hour nap I got on Sunday afternoon. The last full night’s sleep was the one I woke up from on Saturday.

If things start getting so bad that this lack of sleep won’t go away and it’s starting to affect my work and my ability to drive to work, I may try bumming a smoke from someone, just to try and get a night’s sleep. I may have decided to quit because I can’t afford to keep paying for cigarettes. But I can afford to lose my job even less.

This isn’t going to happen right away, even now. I still haven’t completely proven, past my stubborn streak, that the lack of sleep will last beyond my ability to keep myself on the job when it comes to driving and processing escrow. I will not allow even the defeat of a single cigarette unless it really is a choice between breaking the quit thing or losing my job. I’ll keep fighting this until the last minute. And maybe, I’ll win. I wish I had a way to predict when the crash will happen. Then I wouldn’t have to just force my way through it to find out if it’s going to last too long for me to be able to cope or not. I wouldn’t have to put up with feeling miserable tired and yet wide awake and wired at the same time. It’s a special brand of torture that only a fellow insomniac would know.

So, now I’m off to lie in bed, and run again through the various tricks I’ve picked up over the years to try and get around my sleep disorders. I don’t have as much trouble sleeping as I once did, because these tricks do work pretty often. But there are times when, really, they are hopeless. And there’s a way that the insomnia jag feels that makes me know that it is hopeless. This is one of those. Despite that, I have to try. Because maybe, I can find a way to trigger the crash and burn now, and get back to abnormal.

My personality is rated 32.What is yours?

Others see you as fresh, lively, charming, amusing, practical, and always interesting; someone who’s constantly in the center of attention, but sufficiently well-balanced not to let it go to their head. They also see you as kind, considerate, and understanding; someone who’ll always cheer them up and help them out.

Meant to do this the first time I used one of the pics I picked up for new lj icons.

Since there are now three times I’ve used them, I guess better late than never, no?

So, yeah, thanks to Mata for the images of Little Goth Girl.

I couldn’t resist using them, after watching all the Little Goth Girl animations on The Other Side. LGG is my new hero!

Now, off to not sleep. Wheeeeeeeee!

Quitting smoking is not doing my sleep disorders any good.

I’ve gotten two hours of sleep in the last 42. And I’m not tired at all. Not in the slightest. I feel like I just woke up from a ten hour sleep… which is how I have felt since about an hour after I gave up trying to sleep today. That first hour, I felt miserable tired but couldn’t sleep and knew it. Since then, I’ve been completely bouncing-off-the-walls wired. There was a hint that I might get tired about two and a half hours ago, but then that went away within thirty minutes. And here I am, still wide awake. At this point, since will be getting me up at 11, and it would take time for me to fall asleep even assuming that I wasn’t going through an insomnia jag, I would be looking at maybe 5 hours of sleep. If I was lucky and fell asleep quickly, which I don’t generally do. It’s normally an hour or two before I’ve completely ramped down from wide-awake to sleep.

I wish that Locke and were able to be up with me. This is the kind of wired that wants company. Other people who can run around like lunatics in the middle of the night, too. Who don’t mind suddenly getting in the car and heading off to an all-night grocery store to play peek-a-boo with the people trying to restock. (Have you ever done that in an all-night store? Hit one that you don’t normally ever go to, so it doesn’t really matter. And peek around the aisles at people doing restock. Most of ‘em will be disturbed. But there are some nutcases on the crew who’ll play games back. They’re fun.) Have an aerobics class to the muzak over the loudspeakers over in the frozen food aisle. Tango down the stationary aisle. And then get the hell out of Dodge before they can call you in 5150.

At the very least, I want to go buy Jell-O for a stranger. Anonymously.

Dammit. Thwarted in my sleep-dep mission to spread a little surreality and chaos.

*grumble*

I’ve heard it all tonight.

From the conversation in the kitchen, apparently has discovered his calling.

Lockehart the Fluffer..

:D

*goes into hiding*

(And no, Locke, going in and making changes to someone else’s journal is not cool. ;p )

Have yourselves a marvelous time! But of course you will, SMV parties have always been fabulous. Hehe

And for and as two of the boithday goils… Have a beautiful, amazing, decadent, and magical night tonight, my dears. *hugs* to you both. Have a drink or six for me. I’ll be here at home, waiting for ’s train to get in… it’s already approaching two hours late, and counting. Wheeee!

I’ll be there, in spirit. ;)

The things I do cause I’m broke.

Like decide that the amount of money I would normally spend on smokes can go somewhere else.

That’s right folks, I’m trying to quit again. This time, not for someone else, so when that someone else is no longer an influence in my life, I go right back to smoking.

It’s been about 36 hours now since I smoked my last smoke. The faintest hint of tickling is starting in my throat and lungs, so I should be coughing a lot starting sometime soonish.

Which probably means I should do something about getting some sleep now, while I can fall asleep without spending fifteen minutes hacking up a lung.

Besides, once I’m asleep, I won’t sit here obsessing on having a smoke. Being on the computer’s hard. It’s one of the times I normally smoke. I can (and have) gone hours or even days without missing the fact that I wasn’t smoking… but I didn’t spend any time on the computer or on the phone, both of which I associate heavily with smoking. And I was thoroughly distracted around lunch and dinner time, the other two times I would otherwise have been missing the smoke.

So, I can either avoid all those things, or I can learn to cope with using them without my traditional chainsmoking. So far, coping isn’t working too well. I’m so tense from obsessing on cigarettes and craving nicotine that my shoulders are attempting to meld with my ears.

Oh well. I did say sleep, didn’t I? If I can get there around the obsessing. Besides, I’m not any less tense after rambling here than I was when I started.

I’m going to be such a bitch to be around this weekend. Poor .

Icon War

Little Goth Girl and the Robot”

Sick. No work. Headache. Dizzy. Nausea. Coughing. Go fall over now.

*crash*

Once upon a century, I was informed that I wasn’t actually a straight woman, I was a gay man trapped in a woman’s body. Since I’d pretty much been raised around Gay Mojo (as my roommate called it) a friend of mine decided that I’d absorbed so much gay culture, especially gay male culture, that I had to be a gay man trapped in a woman’s body by now.

Another of my friends (well, ex-friend these days) at first argued against this. Then, one day, walked in to pick me up from the place I was visiting, and found me sitting on a bed that was done up in purple sheets, with purple paintings on the walls, and wearing the same shades of purple myself. It had been purely unintentional on my part, but it settled things for him. His opinion was that only someone with a strong inner Queen would dress to match the decor.

All of that has not been helped by the fact that, if I spend enough time around Gay Mojo, I tend to start picking up some of the mannerisms without thinking about it. Especially if I’m around some fairly flamboyant queens.

Since the sort of Gay Mojo I’ve been around lately has primarily been bi girls and lesbians, I haven’t been doing that. It only really seems to happen if I’m around a bunch of nellie queens.

For the last two days, I’ve been catching myself about to react or gesture like some of my favorite fags. It’s only taken three trips to a gay bar for karaoke to start to give the habits back to me. Let me tell you, some of the guys there are just kinda normal guys. They like guys, but they aren’t flamboyant, nellie queens. But a lot of them are queens in all their flaming glory. And being around that much Gay Mojo once a week is rubbing off.

It’s no big deal, just a good giggle, if the habits hit while I’m at home. But I’m not sure how my co-workers (some of whom are fairly homophobic) would deal with the sudden incarnation of Christophine the Female Fag. And I caught myself just before the Gay Mojo hit three times while at work tonight.

And hell, let’s face it, if I was a guy, I’d probably be one of the biggest nellie queens anyone ever saw. I’ve had 34 years of being steeped in queendom to pick up all the best nellie ways of acting and reacting.

I didn’t catch all the moments, tonight. There was one that got by before I realized it, and I wound up doing the Classic Queen Snap at one of my co-workers. He looked at me a little strangely, but since I’m accepted at being one of the strange kids at work, he then shrugged and went on with life. Of course, he’s also not one of the homophobic ones, either. Just as well. I’ve had a hard enough time restraining my usual reaction of rip-off-the-head-of-the-homophobic-asshole as it is.

Must fight the Gay Mojo. Must… resist…

*snap snap snap*

Aaaargh

This stuff is red. It looks like my scalp is bleeding. I can’t wait for the dye to come out so I can see exactly how vibrant a red it is.

Preparation work for the rapidly-becoming-infamous Sunday Family Dinner is done. The pork tenderloin is rubbed in herbs and marinating, awaiting the time that I braise it in garlic, onions, and apple cider.

It’s going to be a very busy day. I’ll be getting up earlier than I want to, earlier than I normally do for work. There is hair-dying to be done, a BayCon meeting to attend, family dinner to be cooked, and karaoke to sing. I wish that I was more tired than I am. I haven’t been managing to fall asleep before seven or eight in the morning for the last two weeks. I’m going to be pretty short on sleep, especially since I spent most of Saturday catching up on all the sleep I was short from the way the week went.

Hopefully, I’ll manage not to be too grumpy at the meeting. Not that my participation in these things ever really amounts to much. There isn’t just a whole lot expected of me until closer to convention time.

And I need to start looking for the rest of my staff again. I had a full staff, but one of my Kinkajous moved on to something else, so I’m down one. Not that it’s a huge issue. I could really run reg with one fewer than I had. It just means that we’ll be a little more rushed if things heat up (and they always heat up on Saturday night) and I’ll only be sending one person off to play for a little while rather than two when it’s slow.

is my second this year. Who knows, he might even succeed at convincing me to go off and play for an hour when it’s slow. Usually, I’m not comfortable with going any further away than the doors out to the boffer wars, since I’m head of night reg and I tend to be a little too responsible about the position. I did manage to delegate to my second some last year, though not as much as I could have. And when I was out having a smoke break, she handled the crises that came up just fine. This is something I need to work on. It’s not like reg is going to blow up if I go dance a little or something. And maybe if I tell myself that often enough, I’ll manage to get it through my thick head.

And this year, there won’t be that obnoxious, egocentric little pain-in-the-ass special guest of honor to gripe about the parties until they get shut down just in time for me to get done with my reg shift.

Well, rambling here about nonsense that I don’t even care that much about at the moment is not helping me wind down enough to get some sleep, so I’ll shut up now. Maybe reading will do the trick.

Your Livejournal Analasys

Your Livejournal’s Age

According to the information you provided, your Livejournal was created on 2000-12-11, meaning that your journal has been around for 760 days. What does this mean?

You are something of a dinosaur on Livejournal, having been around for over 2 years. You might even have one of those early adopter accounts. You probably joined Livejournal long before most of your friends, long before it was as popular as it was today. As a result, you are something of an icon in the community, and more than likely well known. Don’t let it get to your head, or are you already bashing those poor newbies?

Your Livejournal Friends

Now let’s talk about your friends list. You indicated that you have 49 LJ friends.
A good, considerable number of friends. This list probably represents a spectrum of both your good close friends as well as a number of passing acquaintances. A few of them might be folks you met through LJ, or simply journals that you found interesting, as well as adding random people back who added you at some point in the past. A fairly reasonable friends list.

You also have been listed as a friend by 52 users.
You have quite a few people watching your list, and have become pretty popular. You are well established in the time you’ve had your journal, and now it looks like you’ve established yourself pretty well. Probably got around in a few of them Livejournal groups, probably have a lot of addbacks from your own friends list. How many of these people really know you, however?

Finally in this category, you have a friends to friends-of ratio of 0.94230769230769.
This is an average ratio, meaning you have nearly (or maybe exactly) the same number of friends as people who have listed you as a friend. There’s a good chance you add back everyone who has added you, and only add people who haven’t added you if they are a good friend and chances are they’ll be adding you back anyway.

Your Posting Habits

You have indicated that to date, you have made 880 entries into your Livejournal. This gives us an average post rate of 1.1578947368421 posts per day.
By updating your journal at least once a day, and from time to time even twice, you view your journal as something of a news outlet for your life. You almost never miss an opportunity to keep your journal appraised of what’s been going on in your life. You probably also post the occasional silly webquiz or something like that to flesh things out. In short, you make good use of your Livejournal

Your Commenting Habits

According to your information, you have posted 981 comments and have received 1445 of them over the lifetime of your journal. Let’s see what this information can mean.

First of all, this indicates that you have been getting an average of 1.6420454545455 comments for every Livejournal entry that you make.
You can expect roughly one comment per post, sometimes more, although chances are you have entries every now and then that spark discussion, with gaps of no-comments in between. You make a fairly decent effort to incite commenting on your posts, and try to keep your journal fresh and interesting enough that people feel the need to respond to what you have to say.

A more fair measure of how many comments you get might be your average number of comments per post per friend, which is 0.033511131725417. This may seem low to you, especially if you have lots of friends.

The final statistic is the ratio of your comments to comments you get. Your ratio is 0.67889273356401. The higher the ratio, the more talkative you are compared to your friends, comment-wise.

That’s it for now! Perhaps there was something insightful in this analasys, and perhaps you learned absolutely nothing. Feel free to post your results on your own Livejournal, and invite your friends to take the Livejournal Analasys today!

I just found out that someone’s cooking for me and tonight, rather then me doing the cooking as per the norm. I love it when someone cooks for me. I’m usually the cook, so it makes me feel special when someone else wants to.

It’s one of the things I used to love about having as a roommate. He shared the cooking duties with me. And he is very, very good at it. He is one of only three people that I will freely admit cook some things better than I do. His spaghetti sauce… good Goddess, it’s amazing sauce.

After eating Wolfie’s spaghetti once, I informed that if he didn’t ask that man to marry him, I would.

I had it all planned out. I was going to get down on one knee, take Wolfie’s hand, and say, “Wolfie, will you please marry my best friend?” Which, of course, is not what anyone thought I’d meant by “Ask that man to marry you, or I will!” Hehe

I’ve been missing Wolfie’s singing, too.

Between that and the awful, deep hole that not having Sylvan around has left in my life, it’s very obvious I need to head up to Seattle very soon. I hope I can pin them down and make them discuss dates with me this weekend. I need to get my vacation request in so vacation time can be approved. Everyone in the office has already turned theirs in, even though they were just handed out four days ago. Everyone but me. And no one’s vacation time gets approved until they’re all in. So the entire office is less than pleased with me. But I need to coordinate with people, and haven’t been able to get responses out of them. Aaargh.

When Dionne said that she needed it back ASAP, I knew that she meant quickly, but I thought I’d have time to contact the people who I need to make arrangements with. It was at least slightly more relaxed last year. Though it still had to be planning my vacation time for the entire rest of the year, and that’s something I hate. It’s difficult to make plans in January for something in October, or whatever. And things come up that I wish I could use my vacation time for… but I’m already locked into whatever I set up in January, when I didn’t know about such-and-such a show or something.

Pain in the ass.

I opened up the cupboard in the kitchen, with the intention of getting out a plate to put my chicken Kiev on. Big mistake. The dishes are taking lessons from the coatrack.

One of the coffee cups from ’s set of dishes demonstrated how well it’s been learning its lessons, too.

The Kamikaze coffee cup dived off of its shelf above my head. I caught a flash of movement above me and jerked backward, just in time. It missed me, hit the counter with a loud curse that sounded amazingly like ceramic ringing on Formica, then made a second suicide leap at me, this time intent on at least maiming me if it couldn’t knock me cold. I got my foot out of the way, and the Kamikaze cup smacked gracelessly into the floor, and then ran away across the kitchen to attempt to hide behind the refrigerator and plot its next attack. Unfortunately for it, it was too large to fit into the gap. So, I picked it up and examined it. It not only had not shattered, it hadn’t cracked or so much as chipped in its Kamikaze suicide run to take me out. I shook my head at it and put it back on its shelf, pushed well back from the edge, where it is probably even now plotting, perhaps in conjunction with the coatrack.

Inanimate objects are out to get me.

This time, was the victim.

I was in my room, getting ready to go to sleep as she got ready to head to work. Typical morning. Then there was a crash in the living room. I ran out to find out what was going on. Dev had taken her coat off of the coatrack, turned and walked to the end of the couch. The coatrack bided its time, looking innocent, until she thought she was safe, and then leaped forward to begin its senseless killing spree… and missed. It wound up sprawled full-length on the floor, having just missed her with its dive. Its Ninja throwing hats even missed their mark, landing in a pile on the floor next to her. Its many Jackets of Smothering and Shawls of Entanglement were pinned uselessly to the floor.

It was so embarrassed by its utter failure, it just lay there without moving. And cooperated when Dev and I picked it back up, stood it in its corner, and put everything back on it.

Though I’d better be careful when I leave for work. It has probably recovered from the embarrassment of its complete miss, and angrier than ever. I don’t need it taking that extra anger out on me!