No entries yesterday.

Sorry. My experiment in vegetarianism was almost derailed by the sudden advent of a case of what I believe to be food poisoning. (There's no such thing as 'stomach flu', and what people call a 'stomach virus' almost inevitably turns out to be some variety of food poisoning, which is caused by bacteria rather than virii.) I didn't have very much to write while my guts were trying to decide if they had enough gumption to evacuate the premises. Right now they're still not quite stable, but thanks to the miracle of bismuth salicylate (Pepto Bismol caplets are wonderful things) they're better than they were before. My eyes still hurt, though - the sure sign that I'm fighting off an infectious disease has always been extreme pain when I try to roll my eyes all the way to the side, or all the way up or down. I'm gonna take it easy today, even though I'm at work, and I'm gonna get my textbook out early tonight to study for tomorrow's exam. I plan on taking the exam and then going straight home - this prof can be really nasty about makeups and refusing to schedule them without an assload of notice - and probably either curling up in bed or popping Deadly China Hero into the DVD drive and wrapping myself in the afghan. (AKA Last Hero in China, I bought it from someone on eBay a few days ago. It should have arrived in my PO box by now. Any movie that involves Jet Li having to dress up in a bright red rooster suit and get into a fight with a firebreathing centipede is all right with me.)

Meanwhile I've got work foo to deal with. I'll be more creative alter, I promise.

Eh.

I'm waiting on the database software to finish something in another window. I can't work with it until the process finishes, so in the meantime, what the hell, there goes another bandwagon I haven't leapt on...

Fifteen things I'm reasonably sure y'all don't know about me.

1. I have been a computer nerd almost as long as it is possible for someone my age to be. My very first computer was a Timex-Sinclair ZX81 - 1K of memory, membrane keyboard, and all. Given that these came out in 1981, and that I was born in the Year of the Tiger, I'm a little surprised I was even able to *type* on anything that small.

2. I once participated in my high school's annual fashion show despite having no sense of fashion whatsoever. The theme was 'A Tribute to Hollywood' that year, and they needed someone tall to wear the Dick Tracy outfit. Which leads into

3. Counting both RL stage experience and online RPG's - and even, to a limited extent, tabletop RPG's - I have probably played as many male parts as females, or more. It began when I was six years old and was asked to play Santa Claus. Apparently I'm quite good at it.

4. I can knit, although I've yet to finish a sweater I started working on in late 2000. (I lost the instructions and only found them again recently.)

5. I have never broken any of my bones, or sprained anything. I have been present at the breaking of other people's bones, though. (Susan slid into third base and screamed, but I tagged her out anyway. I swear, I didn't know.)

6. I once tried a piece of dry dog kibble to see what it tasted like. You know how they say it has real chicken flavour? They lie.

7. I have a pair of asbestos-raddled shoes under my desk at work. I wore them into New York City on September 11th because we didn't have time to stop and get anything at K-Mart instead.

8. The easiest way to make me scream RL is to walk up behind me when I'm deeply involved in something - anything, be it reading, writing, using the computer, watching TV, even cooking - and tap me on the shoulder or otherwise touch me. I don't care how friendly a gesture you mean it to be, where I come from that's generally the prelude to sentences like 'give me all your money'.

9. I signed up for food prep/hospitality management curriculum classes in 1999 in the hopes that Y2K would destroy all the damn computers and I'd be ahead of the game because I'd have a career that didn't depend on the wretched machines. (I said I was a computer nerd. I didn't say I was happy about it. I'm just good at it.)

10. I once put a quarter on a large nickel-iron meteorite at a science museum and felt something move under my hand. I grabbed it quickly and looked at it. Turned out a piece of the meteorite had come loose and fallen off. I didn't quite know how to handle the situation - 'Mr. Curator, this pebble just came off, I swear I didn't mean to hurt your giant space rock, does it help if I contributed a quarter to the museum, can you glue it back on'- so I took the piece home.

11. Aside from a half hour of mild dizziness after chugging my first (and to date, only) serving of mead at a RenFaire, I have never been drunk, nor anywhere close to drunk. I don't plan to be, ever. Sugar/caffeine rush, on the other hand... that I've done, to the point where the crash afterwards left me seeing mostly in shades of grey.

12. I have never seen a Quentin Tarantino movie. Nor have I seen any movies by Kevin Smith. Nor have I seen any of the movies in the Alien series. I haven't seen The Usual Suspects, either, nor Fight Club, nor many of the 'cool' movies of recent years, and for the most part I don't plan to. A great many of my friends seem to think I've seen them. I haven't. I can discuss them reasonably well based on what I've heard about them, that's all.

13. I was yelled at by a genuine New York City crazy person in a church once. It's a long story and it ended with me breaking down in tears while one of the people who worked for that particular church muttering 'the things you see when you don't have a gun', which was actually enough to make me laugh because that was an older woman who, up until that point, I'd thought was totally prim and proper.

14. I believed in Santa Claus until I was ... oh, somewhere in fifth grade. I never even thought to question the possibility, but a friend of mine heard me mention something about asking Santa for stuff I didn't get at my birthday party and told me what the deal was. When I went to my parents with this information, they told me some stuff about the spirit of Santa being the important thing. Since my b-day is several months away from December, I had time to adjust, and it was cool.

15. I was, the last time I checked, violently allergic to most forms of makeup. Hypoallergenic stuff is generally okay, but I haven't bothered buying any, or using any, beyond theatrical greasepaint in years - and that was for clown work. It's just simpler this way.

Today's pulp survival tip is #63: Practice all your disguises and alternate personae extensively before putting them into play.

Wow.

Uncle Sam came through for me today. I filed my taxes electronically about two weeks ago and said 'go on, direct deposit'. The refund hit my account today. I'd been planning on making it into a pair of large credit card payments, so when I heard the numbers, I went to my cards' online bill-paying pages. Card #1 was numbers I pretty much expected, so I just told it how many hundreds and left it at that. Card #2... Card #2 made me blink. I didn't remember having that kind of money available. Then I saw that they'd raised my credit limit on card #2 for the first time in something like two years.

I paid them the same as I'd paid card #1. when I get home, Card #2 is getting thrown into the dark places under my bed. Considering that I don't have an under the bed - I have a platform bed - this will make it very very hard indeed to get at that credit card unless I"m willing to disassemble the entire thing and put it back together. Since that endeavor takes around an hour and a half - I've had to do it before - this should keep me safe from doing anything especially stupid.

I did, however, leave myself some of the refund money. Suncoast Video, here I come.

Just because

I am waiting for our database software to finish something else, I went and dinked around with a few tests.

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