wombat1138 | Entries tagged with whinge

1. Decide to finally heed the "clean me" light on the range hood and remove washable filter screens for cleaning.

2. Promptly drop one filter behind the stove.

3. Attempt to fish out with extendable magnetic probe-- no result; can't even tell where the filter has ended up.

4. Attempt to probe behind stove with wooden dowel. Accidentally drop dowel as well.

5. Realize that the storage drawer beneath the oven can probably be pulled out for access. Successfully(!) pull out drawer without major trauma.

6. Observe filter and dowel companionably resting against wall behind stove. Also observe that the drawer gap is not large enough to tilt the filter out from the bottom for retrieval, and that the filter appears to have no ferromagnetic components. (The other one was already cycling through the dishwasher, which was why I didn't cross-check that earlier.)

...so at this point, I guess I'll wait for the rest of the day until the wombat-consort gets home from work, and maybe then I can try to use kitchen tongs to lift up the bottom of the wooden dowel until he can grab it from the top of the stove again. (The stove is probably too heavy for him to move by himself, and I'm not terribly useful in appliance-moving assistance right now.) I guess if I were really clever, I could try fastening the bottom of the dowel to the filter-- maybe by reaching a piece of packing tape onto them with the tongs?-- so it would pull the filter up at the same time. However, I have probably considerably overextended my Cleverness Allowance already :b

Watched a fansub of Shin Kyoto Hen.

That was... heartbreakingly terrible. Not the fansub per se, the OVA itself.

Oh, all of the basic technical elements-- voicework, animation, music-- are very nice. But this thing has no dramatic pacing at all. It would be completely incomprehensible to anyone who isn't already familiar with the series, and sometimes I had trouble following what the heck was going on even though I know what's happening. It's not even a Cliffnotes version of the Kyoto Arc; it's more like a random clips version.

I can't believe this is what they're releasing after such a long gap in the franchise, when you'd think much the current aim would be to bring in new audience members with no previous exposure to the plot or characters.

(Also, Misao's pet pigeon made me scream in terror because Hatoful Boyfriend.)

I think the one thing I'll really enjoy remembering about this is a brief image of a Jizo statue with a red pinwheel and some purple irises in front of it. It was pretty, and a reminder of the first OVA.

Went shopping for bras at Target today. I hate shopping for bras. Most of the year, I can get away with wearing shelf-bra camisoles and layering something loose on top, but the weather has cooled down enough to invoke my tighter-fitting long-sleeved tops as an underlayer for variously felted wool sweaters.

I seem to've gone up a band size relative to most previous bras, at least wrt the brand I ended up with this time.

I was somehow both entertained and disgusted that current bra philosophy seems to assume that everyone wants to be a certain forcibly averaged cup size. A-cups? You will be saddled with mighty foam artillery shells! C-cups? Stuff yourself into this minimizer!

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I keep meaning to call up the sleep clinic for a new appointment, but somehow haven't been able to make myself do it. Part of my resistance is the sense that for the moment, all I really need is a new harness for the nasal pillow headgear-- I keep waking up because the elastic has loosened up and the mask is hissing from a leak around my face, so I take it off and pass out again. Which may not be a complete explanation for why I've been groggy and oversleeping, but it's a good bet.

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Vignette from last week: I am putting away DVDs (again). Two little girls are off to the side somewhere. One of them says to the other, "That lady looks like a vampire!" Their mom instantly shushes them. It didn't occur to me until some hours later: were they talking about me? I was wearing mostly black, but it had little flowers on it...

Vignette and retrospective analysis from today--

Context: I am continuing the weeks-long project of goosing the entire nonfiction section down the shelves to space things out between what had formerly been widely scattered empty/overcrowded shelves. This involves brute-force transfer of every single book at least once, depending on how much tweaking I do at the shelf cutoffs for Dewey logistics. A bank of computers is nearby.

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...oookay, GRRM wasn't kidding when he originally said this book would be the other half of AFFC.

I can't even summon the indignation to stay awake. The travelogues are literally putting me to sleep. I've been gradually picking my way through the book for the past two days, and I just keep getting struck down by nap attacks of "oh god not more travelogues".

ISTR a publisher's comment on Usenet that one quick way to gauge a manuscript's quality when slushpile-wading is to flip through the pages and get a rough idea of the ratio of narrative passages to dialogue. The idea seemed to be finding the sweet spot that was neither too much description or too much dialogue.

I'm not sure what the perfect ratio was supposed to be, but this isn't it. Especially when the narration keeps making me pass out from boredom.

Have more or less settled into the routine of my bonus volunteering gig at the main city library once a week, in addition to the two afternoons at a smaller local branch. They've been talking for years about getting online sales set up, but it never went anywhere until this summer. Now I've got a two-hour midday shift listing books on Amazon at the mother ship.

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...and now one of the cats is sneezing.

It's disturbing enough to wake up from a nap with the view of Spot in this LJ icon. It's even more disturbing when it sneezes straight into your face.

Origami update: Finally nailed the single-sheet octants. Yay.

I shall now revert to flooping over from Martian Death Flu. Or at least Martian Extreme Annoyance Flu, which is now embarking on its second week. My energy level wasn't directly affected in the usual flu sudden-onset hit-by-a-truck way, but it's been gradually wearing down from all the coughing and sniffling. I just did a half-sized laundry load this morning that consisted almost entirely of goopy handkerchiefs :b

OTOH, the goopy half-leaf I snipped off my miraculously-not-dead aloe plant (almost all plants die under my attempted care) really does seem to be helping the chapped nose more than lip balm or petroleun jelly did. And nasal irrigation is also extremely effective at intervals, though I really have to remember not to use iodized salt ow.

( and other lost objects )

Update-- ...increasingly inevitable but still dreadful conclusion: I think I'm going to have to muck out my bead zone to find those gadgets. It already looks like an explosion in a bead factory back there.

At least it might give me additional incentive to Get Rid Of Unused Beads. I'm on the verge of shovelling unsorted handfuls into a flat-rate box.

Further update-- after excavating most of the bead zone, finally found the gadgets near the lamp base, all nearly tucked into an unlabelled white cardboard box of the same type as the zillion other unlabelled white cardboard boxes stacked about. Now I need to stuff all of the beads back into the bead zone.

The flurry of activity incited the cats into leaping about, careening into random piles/boxes, and knocking them over. While trying to pick my way over there to examine the carnage, I tripped over an open container of beads and confettied them all over the carpet.

I'd better shove everything back into some semblance of order within the next few hours, or the wombat-consort is going to implode when he gets home. He was so happy this morning that I'd sorted through the unopened mail, old magazines, and sundry other stuff on the dining-room table.

Cats: your local agents of entropy, contributing daily to the eventual heat-death of the universe.

I finally finished the Okami Waterspout necklace I've been thrashing at for *weeks*, including both numerous unsuccessful preliminary designs and last-~~minute~~week tweaks to what should've been a minor detail. Gah. Now I will have to put it away until I stop hating it on principle.

Probably as a reaction, I finally managed to whip out another set of five magatama necklaces based on the traditional Asian elements, each with eight small agate magatama and sundry glass beads.

Pix later, probably-- now I have to get to the post office to mail stuff.

Have been wrestling all week with an experimental festoon necklace pattern... actually, to make things even more abject, I've tried *three* festoon patterns in a row, and none of them have turned out well. Ironically, some of my earlier attempts from months ago were definitely better-shaped (the pic up here, frex). I'm deteriorating :b The real problem is getting the curvature right for both the main necklace strand and the down-dipping festoony bits.

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(Not really a little jig of despair; more like a slow waltz of apathy. How do you set goals when your only goals are to *have* goals?)

They have so many things I do not want,
And yet it's not as if I have my own
Things that would take their place. The telephone
Rings to itself; the unsaid elephant
Fills up the room as unread papers count
The days to weeks, the trees to empty bone.

I have nothing to say to them, nor words
That I could say it with: pluperfect hope
Without a present tense, an isotope
On Xeno's path of lives half-lived. Absurd
To linger there, better to move forward--
But I've no address on my envelope.