Regina Noctis

But I thought this one was kinda cool.

Stolen from .

And this is the meme:

1. Take your LJ username and replace each letter with the corresponding number (A=1, B=2, etc…).
2. Add all of the numbers together to create a kind of super number.
3. Add the digits of the number together.
4. Find the post of this number in your LJ. If you don’t have that many posts, add the digits together again.
5. Take the digit you noted in step 3, and count that many words into the post.
6. Use the resulting word in a google image search, and select a picture from the first page and post the results.

I was slept through the last one, but another quake just hit a couple minutes ago. We’re so far from the epicenter that it for us, it was a little bit like being on a boat sailing calm waters. Just a bit of rolling movement that made things sway here. We’ve got a guessing game going about where it was centered and how big a quake it was. The most logical guess is that it was an aftershock of the last quake, and probably a little less strong. Not a significant drop in strength, certainly, or we wouldn’t have felt anything this far away. The worst that happened here was that I heard something in the storage room fall over.

Hope it was weaker than we’re guessing, and that there are no injuries at the epicenter.

I headed into Bakersfield for my morning class, and noticed that the street approaching the college was not packed with cars parked along the curb. As I was pulling in, I saw that the parking lot was nearly empty. And then I noticed the yellow tape across the parking lot entrance, with a green sign hanging from it. “The campus has been closed. All day classes cancelled. Classes will resume at 4pm.” No explanation for why the campus was closed.

So I took the opportunity to run a couple errands, and then made the hour-ish drive home.

But my curiosity is up. I wonder why the campus was closed today. It’s going to drive me nuts until I find out.

But this gives me an opportunity to share this PhotoShopped image I finished up last night. With thanks to for sending me the picture of himself and for his patience. This one took a while.

I wonder whether the professor at my evening class will know what was up today. Though I’m going to call ahead this time, to make sure that the campus actually does re-open at 4pm. No sense driving out and back again if whatever closed the campus today is still going on tonight.

The psychotic cousin is at the manic end of this cycle, which means he’s talking nonstop. He barely pauses for breath, it goes on for hours, and it’s almost always verbally abusive. It’s exhausting, but in some ways better than the other end of his cycle, when he goes silent, sullen, brooding, angry, and you can feel that violence is often just a breath away.

Since he was in a talking mood, Grandma tried to talk to him about what he’s done to the house exterior and his bedroom. She pointed out the amount of money she’ll have to spend in order to get everything put back to normal.

“At least you didn’t have to pay for the custom paint job in the first place. You couldn’t afford that kind of work. It’s dope.”

I think he needs to learn that just because it was done by a dope doesn’t mean that it is dope.

My uncle John came over to visit this afternoon. He does that periodically. He’s a CO at the state prison not too far from here.

He asked about cousin John, and we told him about the house painting incident, and that John is now demanding $200 from Grandma for the “fine work” he’s done, and that if she wants it put back to normal, she’ll have to pay him another $200.

I think I mentioned that John had left one part of the wall its normal yellow color, and on that he painted what looked to me like 18, with a 7 diagonally under that. The one is much smaller than the 8 or the 7, which means if you look at the three numbers across the bottom, it’s on a diagonal, rather than two numbers side by side and one below. And it turns out that 18 and 7 don’t mean anything to uncle John, but 187 does. 187 is the penal code for murder.

Paranoia, anyone?

Now I’m even more on the alert than I was when it was just weird housepainting and unproven but suspected drug use. I’m off to sharpen the blade I keep within reach of my bed.

Well, the stuff my cousin did to the house looks even worse in the daylight. The exterior of the house where he decided to paint it looks horrible, and there are purple paint spots all over the back patio and the back stairs leading into the house. It’s a dark but ugly shade of purple, and it will be difficult to cover over with the pale yellow that my grandmother likes for the house exterior.

And then there’s the godawful interior of his room. Grandma wants to get that painted over too, but it’s unlikely we’ll be able to do that as long as John is living here. Mom pointed that out to her, and it’s a part of the reason that she came to regret that she prevented Mom from calling the cops last night.

It may or may not be a good thing that I slept in the house last night. When I got home from class last night, he’d been in here. And he was in here sometime last night after I was in the house, too. I haven’t found anything missing… yet… but I also haven’t had much opportunity to look, since I’ve been studying most of the day for our first test in art history tomorrow.

The major, obvious things are still here, like the two cameras, the computers, the TV, VCR, and PS2. I’ll need to check the jewelry and other small items later, when I’ve got more time to sift through it all.

There is some good stuff, in spite of all of this. We critiqued photos for the first assignment last night, and the instructor (who can be a bit of a bastard sometimes) actually said nothing but good things about mine.

And the Vampire Bible arrived this morning. So as soon as I’m less swamped with studying, taking pictures for the next two assignments, and my non-school projects, I can read and laugh. I skimmed a little, and got a good giggle out of some of the things related to the communion ritual they describe.

I’ve already got one roll exposed and processed for the second assignment, and have already done a contact sheet for it. It looks like I can get three or four prints off of it that will make the instructor happy. More photo shooting to happen this weekend, as well.

While I was at my evening class, John painted part of the exterior of grandma’s house dark purple. Except one spot on the wall he was painting, where he painted 18, and then diagonally below that, 7.

I got home in the middle of the fight with him about it.

He went storming off. Mom and I suspect he went out and bought more of his drug of choice.

While he was gone, the three of us went out to look at the damage more closely. That’s when we noticed that he has (badly) painted the interior walls of his room hot pink, and all the woodwork has been (badly) spraypainted black. In almost all cases, he didn’t even bother to try and mask the godawful Pepto Bismol walls, so there are long strips where the black goes onto the wall, splatters around it, or drips down the wall. He has even sprayed the wall heater in his room black, which should make some horrible fumes this winter. If it doesn’t catch fire and burn the house down instead.

My grandmother announced at that point that she was sorry she prevented my mother from calling the cops tonight. And she has said that the next thing he does, no matter how minor, we’re calling the cops and having him taken away.

Since she has backed out of that before, I’ll believe it when I see it.

This deciding to paint a random section of something has Mom worried. The last time he got frighteningly violent, before I had to move down here, he’d begun the episode by painting a section of the black wrought-iron fence around the swimming pool. He painted it silver for most of one section, and then stopped.

Mom’s worried now. Particularly about me, since my room is out away from the house, and the door won’t even shut properly, much less lock. So, to calm her fears, I’m crashing in her room tonight. Not that I really expect to sleep. Every time one of these things happens, I find it impossible to sleep for a while. I can’t until I crash and burn. A combination of paranoia and stress-related insomnia.

Particularly bad, since I’m just starting to get over a flu. One of those bouts of virus where, more than anything else, it makes you feel overwhelmingly exhausted, weak, and shakey. Not much headache or even very much of a fever. I was a little warmer than usual, but it wasn’t a bad fever. Just exhaustion like an irresistable undertow, dragging me down no matter how hard I fought it.

John is back from where ever he went now. Since he wasn’t gone for very long, Mom and I suspect he was buying more drugs. We have no proof, of course. But it certainly would fit the pattern he’s exhibiting right now…

Which means that things will only get worse from here, until Grandma can finally accept that he needs to be taken away. It generally happens just before he gets actively, physically violent with the people here… but not always. That was proved to us when she refused to have the cops taken away, even when he assaulted Mom.

It’s going to be rough around here for a while.

And no, Drew, this does not mean that it’s a good opportunity for what you think of as a wake-up call. I know that you had a rough life growing up, and while you’ve done some huge adjusting for which you have every right to be proud, once in a great while some form of your social skills can come up lacking. In all honesty, what you said last time felt extremely abusive, and would have done so even if I had not been upset. If you really think I don’t recognize the dangers of John being here, then you also haven’t really read all the times I’ve talked about how dangerous it is. So last time felt condescending as well. I’ve given you the benefit of the doubt here, that it was just badly phrased and not meant to sound abusive. That’s what that last chance thing is about… the recognition that you might have made a mistake or I might have been hypersensitive. Last, because it’s also a recognition that I have limited tolerance for that sort of mistake, and that a mistake of that magnitude repeated often enough stops being a mistake and is abuse. But I would greatly appreciate avoiding a repeat. I’m sorry if this is all too blunt, and if that was never your intent (as I recall you stated it wasn’t.) If it makes it easer, write the bluntness off to me being a bitch, and stressed as hell. But please also consider the request under the bluntness.

‘Tis Talk Like a Pirate Day! If ye’re too lubberly t’ join, I give ye scurvy dogs th’ Pirate Translator. Have yer mug o’ grog an’ let th’ translator do th’ work for ye.

Now I be goin’ t’ keelhaul me cousin. Arrrrrrrrrr!

I found two more black widows in here tonight, and decided that there were entirely too many dark spaces, like under the bed, that might hide more widows. So I sprayed anywhere that a widow might be hiding as well as the two I found. Now my room stinks of bug spray, and it’s stuff that always makes me sick in concentrated amounts. Since I’m already not feeling great, I expect this to be a less than wonderful night as I attempt to get some sleep so I can be up in time for classes tomorrow. I’d like to think that I got all of them and that I won’t have to go through this again, but I still have a bedroom door with a huge gap at the bottom. All manner of insects come in under that door, so it’s not like I’ve solved anything here. More can come in under the door, and since we’ve had quite an infestation going on for more than a year, I doubt the killing them off in my room will do all that much. I wish that they’d hurry up and get the new door put on already. There was a door brought over here, but it was crap, an old door from some other house that he’d tried to “salvage” and put off on us for the $200 he got from Mom. And while the guy was checking the fit of it, we found termite damage all through the frame. He figured that  there isn’t enough wood left in the frame to hold a new door. The hinges of the old one are pulling out of the frame as it is. So Mom made him take back the door and get a new one, and told him to replace the frame as well. We’re still waiting. And I’m getting very sick and tired of sharing my living space with the amount of insect life that keeps invading it.

There’s a bunch of other stuff going on that has me pretty well stressed, but it’s more than I want to get into right now. As well as apparently starting to come down with a fever. At least tomorrow is my last day of class for the week. I managed to arrange my schedule so that I only have to go in twice a week. All my classes are Monday and Wednesday. So if I’m getting sick, at least I’ll have a few days of recovery time. Other than the dentist appointment I have this Friday. But since that’s just going to be a couple fillings, I won’t have days of recovery from oral surgery like I did the last couple times I went to the dentist.

Anyhow, well past time to attempt to get some sleep. I have to be up in six hours. Off to try to sleep. I hope I manage to get to sleep sometime soon, rather than two and a half hours before the alarm goes off. That did not make for a good day on Monday.

Meet Scooter. One of the very few cats I’ve ever seen that’s bigger than my Whiskers the Maine Coon Monstrosity. Whiskers may weigh more (around 20 pounds of cat) but Scooter is arguably a good deal longer, even if he only (heh. “Only.”) weighs in at 15 pounds.

Years and years ago (probably about ten of them, matter of fact), when I was living in New Jersey, I belonged to a mailing list discussion group. We talked about mythology, folklore, and supernatural phenomena. One time, and one time only, we got a spam ad for a group calling themselves the Temple of the Vampire. They claimed to be a vampire religion, and also claimed that the religion had existed for thousands of years, being known for most of those centuries (and still known within the Temple) as the Priesthood of Ur. This group had also written The Vampire Bible, which put forth the tenets, practices, rituals, and laws of the Temple of the Vampire.

The spam went on at length about how Vampires (yes, it was always capitalized) were born, not made, and that those of the Blood (yeah, always capital, too) were lost. Some few would be Called, once seeing some reference to the Temple of the Vampire, and these were the lost ones of the Blood. These were people destined to be immortal Vampire Gods once they joined the Temple of the Vampire and practiced the magic and rituals and began to remember what they actually were. The only other thing mentioned about all of this was that true Vampires don’t actually drink blood, and, as a matter of fact, doing so was one of the things that would get you kicked out of the Temple. Instead, they used their magic to feed on the life energy or life force of the mortals around them.

Well, I was called. I was called by extreme amusement and the desire to read their bible and giggle at it. However, I had no money at the time.

They didn’t have much of a website back then. They had what they referred to as a temporary page on AOL which would be taken down after a period of time. They claimed that they periodically did something like this publically in order to find some more lost Vampires of the Blood, and then would take the site down, since the whole existence of Vampires was supposed to be a big secret (shhhhhhhhhhhhh!)

That site did indeed disappear before I ever had money to pick up a Vampire Bible to snicker at. Over they years since, I’ve periodically hit search engines and looked for the Temple of the Vampire. They popped up again somewhere in 98 or 99, this time with a bunch of jewelry for sale as well as the vampire bible. Rings and pendants and amulets for your ritual working and so fellow members of the Temple would known you as another Vampire God without tipping off the mundane mortals. I again didn’t have any money to pick up the Vampire Bible. Then they dropped out of my radar again.

I read something while surfing tonight (don’t even remember what or where at the moment) that made me remember the Temple of the Vampire again. So I Googled around, and sure enough, there they are. They aren’t offering their ritual jewelry and such anymore. I guess the downturn in the economy even made things hard for the Vampire Gods, too. They do, however, still have the Vampire Bible. And since I have a very small amount of money left (enough to cover the cost of the book, and one or two more tanks of gas for my car) I finally broke down and bought the thing.

Expect giggling to commence in a few days or so. Whenever the thing gets here.

Betavote: What if the world could vote in the upcoming US elections?

Stolen from MonkeyFilter

Amusing me in particular…

as prom queen (should I help you with your makeup, Locke?)
as a gang member. What’s she gonna do, take her crew and forcefully pray over people? I could just see her on a street corner, furtively taking money in exchange for Bibles…
as a quarterback. Thin, graceful man meets onrushing flesh wall, gets bent in sixteen physically impossible directions at once. Or else scares the offensive linemen away with one full-throated diatribe as he gets fed up and has a moment all over the field. Also, just imagine someone with his brains trying to even explain a play to the dumb jocks.

Whiskers is alive!

He finally came home a few hours ago. After a phone call woke me, I went into the house, and Mom told me that he’d come home. He’s in the middle of an asthma attack, and is currently hiding under her bed as he often does when he’s in the house and sick. Before he got under the bed, Mom dosed him with one of his two asthma medications, and so far, while it’s not stopping the asthma attack, it is preventing it from getting any worse.

Stress is often a big contributor to starting or worsening an asthma attack for him, and it stresses him out to be dragged from under the bed. So we are waiting to see if he’ll come out on his own, and then we’ll give him the other med.

I am just weak with relief.

We’re not entirely out of the woods, since tomorrow is a holiday and the vet won’t be open. Hopefully, the medication will keep things from getting dangerously bad until the vet opens on Tuesday and we can get him there for the heavy-duty asthma shots. But now that he’s home, and Mom is keeping him shut in her room to prevent a repeat, things are better than they were last night. We can medicate him, and as a last resort in the event of this attack taking a turn for the worse, we can drive him to the emergency vet in Bakersfield. This is a last resort, however, because car trips stress Whiskers out immensely, and the one time that Mom took him to the emergency vet, he was worse when he got home than before he went.

Thank you to everyone who had words of comfort and advice. I was too hurt, angry, and depressed then to tell you how much I appreciated it. But I want you to know, now, that even just those brief comments did help and that they meant a lot to me.

Whiskers isn’t home yet. It’s after ten. He has never been gone this long since he got sick. Never.

He has to have suffocated out there, somewhere.

Those fucking brats. Those shitty, snotty, worthless, useless, inconsiderate, selfish, stupid fucking brats killed our cat.

Update, 3:03 am, Sunday, September 5

Whiskers has still not shown up. I attempted to sleep, and was too upset to get to sleep. I wandered into the house to get a drink of water, and checked around. No sign of him.

Becky, who used to be such a close friend and still affirms all the time that she misses both Mom and me and loves us and wouldn’t want anything to upset us has seemingly ignored my attempts to contact her.

My grandmother, before she went to bed, got pissed off at me for being unhappy with the kids and John doing this to Whiskers.

When in contact with my mother, I’ve been shoving my own feelings aside as much as I can to be there for her. I haven’t pushed myself on her, just been there for her when she needed me to be. She has cried on my shoulder and wanted to be held a little bit for comfort. And then she abruptly changed and told me to leave her alone, as if I was forcing unwanted attention and attempts at comfort on her. Her I forgive, because I know how upset she is. When I’m shut up in my room where I can mourn and cry over this freely, I’m just as upset. For that moment when she did that, it hurt. But I understand she’s upset, and she’s forgiven without even having to say anything about it.

The rest of them, I don’t forgive. Not now, not ever.

They can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned.

On top of this non-family incident this morning that had me pissed off, there has been family-related stuff today that has me on the warpath too.

Cousin John brought three of the four kids over for the weekend. This coincided with Whiskers hitting an asthma attack, as it has every single time he has brought the kids over for the last several months. All of them then leave the door open, and the cat gets out. This always happens when Mom is planning to take the cat to the vet for a new shot of his asthma medication, because the asthma attack has progressed to the point where it is necessary and he could die without it. These shots last about three weeks, sometimes longer. And John waits until my mother mentions to him that the cat is hitting the bad time and can’t be let out before he brings the kids over. He knows what’s going to happen. It’s happened ever time for the last several months. The kids leave the door open (which John himself does all the time.) This way, he can spread the blame among several people for who let the cat out when he’s getting sick. He then sits there and gloats as it gets later and later in the day, and Mom and I get more and more worried. If Whiskers gets hit hard enough by the asthma while he’s out, he could wind up in a position where he isn’t getting enough oxygen to get back home. The longer he’s gone, the more it seems that this is what’s happening, and he’s out there dying and we have no way to find him and save him. Both Mom and I have gone wandering around the neighborhood trying to find him, and we can’t.

Not only is John gloating, but he has convinced the kids that it’s a funny thing. They sit there and giggle as Whiskers stays gone, and laugh when/if he finally does come home with his sides heaving in an attempt to get enough air to live. They have also now taken to lying about the door being left open. They are claiming (because I wasn’t there to defend myself when the conversation took place) that I was the one who left the door standing open. I never leave doors open, for one. For two, at the time Whiskers disappeared, I was asleep.

I have put in a call to Becky, to talk to her about her kids. I intend to make clear to her exactly what John is doing, and tell her that if she cannot exert some influence on their behaviour, the kids are not welcome to come here.

And meanwhile, Whiskers is still gone. We haven’t even been able to give him any of the small pill doses of his medication in order to ameliorate at least some of the asthma attack. He has now missed three pills. The vet isn’t open on Sunday, and Monday is a holiday, so thanks to the kids, the soonest we can get him to the vet will be Tuesday. There is no emergency vet in Delano for us to take him to. If this attack is bad enough that the pills are next to no help… as has been the case for the last two years or so… then he could very well die before we have the opportunity to get him help. All of which is assuming he even makes it back today.

Mom is in tears in her room. She can barely talk And as I was on my way to my room in order to call Becky (got her voicemail and left a message) I could hear the kids laughing about the cat being out there, somewhere, sick and possibly dying. It took all my self-control not to walk over there and slap every one of them.

Angry. Angry, angry, angry. Homocidal, even.

Not the cousin this time, either. Though he’s done some things in the last few days that would certainly warrant the anger.

Baseball bat plus head would make such a lovely crunch.

Nothing makes me quite so desirous of causing some physical mayhem as someone abusing someone dear to me.

Must find a constructive direction for all this angry energy.

Sleep? What’s that?

Be prepared with mental insulin.

It’s a wonder I didn’t go into sugar shock. I didn’t just look at that, I went through all the pictures on the site.

Tonight, they’re interfering with getting to my night class.

I’ve been averaging three or four hours of sleep a night for, well, I’m not sure how many nights now. I’ve lost the ability to count that high for the moment.

I’ve been driving to and from school and haven’t missed, or even been late, to any classes in spite of it. But tonight it’s finally catching up with me. I came home to attempt to nap through the time I have between classes. After all, I get out of my morning class at 12:30, and the night class isn’t until 6:30.

But I was also behind in my reading, since I was unable to get two of my text books until yesterday. And one of the things I needed to do before class tonight was read the chapter on how to develop negatives. That’s what we were going to be doing tonight.

Doing the reading was long and painful. I was so unable to concentrate, and so dizzy and nauseated from exhaustion (under extremes of sleep dep, the world revolves slowly toward the right and makes me ill) that I had to read everything five or six times before it would resemble English. All of which means that I got no nap in.

I’m now even more dizzy and sick than when I first got home. This is the point at which I know I have gone so far into sleep deprivation that I’m no longer safe to drive.

And I’m angry about this. I want to go to class. I want to see how to develop negatives, and develop the first roll of film that I completed while shooting for the first assignment that we’re doing. I want to see how the pictures came out, dammit! But there’s no way I can make that drive. I might risk it, if it was inside Delano that I had to go. That would be a ten minute trip, tops. But this is close to an hour each direction. That’s too much room for error or falling asleep at the wheel.

Mom’s friends with the Daleys, who run the photography studio here in town. The eldest Daley, Nick, she has known for forty years. She’s going to go and talk to them, and see if they’ll be willing to give me instruction on developing black and white negatives before my next class, to cover this gap. That will be a huge help, if they’re willing. But I still wish that I were going to class tonight. I very nearly tried to wheedle Mom into giving me a lift to class and picking me up when it’s over. I know it wouldn’t work, so I restrained myself. But I want to go!

Though all of this does show a positive change for me. I have never been one of those who wants to go to school. In the pat, every day that I’d get up and have school ahead of me, I’d have to fight down the bad voice that would try to come up with reasons why I should miss that day and just go next time. I wasn’t able to fight that off the first time I went to college, which is the reason that I managed to get myself kicked out. The first couple of days of college this time around, I had to fight with that voice again. I succeeded in overriding it, no matter how reasonable it tried to sound. And this week, I haven’t had that happen at all. This week has been the first time in my memory that I have gotten up and actively wanted to go. When Mom found out this morning how exhausted I was, I even had to argue her down because she didn’t want me to go. How’s that for a switch?

I’m trying to think about this new and positive thing, this step forward that shows clearly how effective all my efforts to conquer my inner demons has worked. I want to concentrate on that right now and not how disappointed and unhappy I am that I’m too deprived of sleep to be able to drive to campus tonight. Looking at the positive is something else I do too little of, and while it’s not as destructive an inner demon as the voice-that-tries-to-reason-me-out-of-classes-and-work, it’s still damaging and quite insidious. It feeds some of the others, the why-should-I-bother-it’ll-never-work-out demon in particular.

Okay. I’m going to attempt to accept that this is the situation, dwelling on it will not change it, and I will make it up, rather than be angry, unhappy, and disappointed. Uphill battle at the moment, but I’m going to make the attempt and I damn well will win.

Wish me luck.