As you are probably aware from the postings of other Boston-area LJers, we had a bit of snow yesterday and overnight into today. We actually achieved OFFICIAL blizzard status late last night (defined as "3+ hours of sustained 35 mph winds and 1/4 mile visibility") which, as the Weather Channel people never ceased telling us, is the first time Boston has had a REAL blizzard since the infamous one of 1978. We did not, in fact, beat that snow total record. However, we did have a 76 mph gust at Logan Airport last night, and a category 1 hurricane is 74 mph (sustained, granted), so well-played, nature.

I took a bunch of "before", "during", and "after" pics. You can click through and see any of them larger.

( Many snowy pics below! )

Neighbors trying to dig out their entire driveway by hand. Mind you, the winds are still VERY strong. I then noticed that one of them (right) had, halfway through, gone and fetched a lawn chair, and just gave up.



I agree, neighbor. I'm not even going OUT there to clear off my car until tomorrow.

It's a year in review!

Do you know how long it's been since I posted? Wow. I also see that I failed to post last year, which would be bad, in that I usually forget what I did for New Years from year to year.  Except I can remember that last year I went t my_tallest's party so I could meet his then-new boyfriend, and that was fun!

This year I did NOT party, because I got really hideously sick from food-poisoning the night before, and continued feeling icky all yesterday.  So I sat at home and cautiously ate bland things, caught up on Tumblr after a week away, and just barely remembered to turn on the TV in time to see the ball drop.  *FWEEEEE*!!!  (that's a virtual party-favor thing that you blow into and it unrolls... what the hell ARE those called?)

It also feels like I didn't DO a whole hell of a lot this past year.  I really have to think back to figure out where the year went.

The best part of the year has to have been the saw-whet owl banding, I think.  I moved up from recording volunteer to actually extracting owls from nets and then doing the banding and measurements, which took me from doing it once a week to 4 or 5 nights a week.  So that really killed off October and November.  And yet, it's still pretty rewarding.

Hmm.  I should go back through my photos and see if I can post a "one photo a month" meme or something.  Maybe for tomorrow.

I also feel like I did very little art, which is kind of distressing.  Or at least it feels that way.  I think I did about 20 pieces, if I'm being generous in the counting... and oh yeah, a 6-page graphic story, which probably accounts for the other lack of production.  It took me 9 months to do that, and it hanging over me was probably part of the reason for other lack of production.  (5-6 weeks to do, if I counted up the actual time spent.)

If you're interested, you can see it here; it was a prize for someone in an ElfQuest fan group I'm in; it's not canonical, and is perhaps a bit "inside baseball" in terms of the story, but there it is.

I guess the other thing that killed me this year was that the first part of the year was still spent doing entries for the ElfQuest Fan Art calendar; normally that would have been completed long before New Years, but the nature of the project (producing pages for 3 weekly calendars) made it bleed into 2012, and I did about 5 pin-up montages of canon ElfQuest characters for it:

http://fav.me/d54aqal
http://fav.me/d4kpwrc
http://fav.me/d54apft
http://fav.me/d54aom8
http://fav.me/d54aoyn

I also did an entry for the EQFA 2013 calendar, which they ended up selecting for April; again, canonical (the theme was "every picture tells a story", to do a 1-page comic that would convey any kind of story we wanted), and it can be seen here.

And that's about it!  Off to contemplate what I feel safe eating for dinner...

Yesterday on my drive home, it was sleeting. Which, fair enough. But this morning as I commuted, I could see some cars -- not many, but really, too many -- with about an inch of SNOW on the roofs and hoods. In Belmont, MA. Which is outside of Cambridge. WHICH IS NOT THE FROZEN NORTH.

Also, on the radio as I woke up this morning, they advised me that there is a Winter Storm Watch (or Warning, I can never tell those apart) for my area this weekend, although it may just involve rain in the actual city area.

NO, OCTOBER. JUST, NO.


p.s. keep an eye on your local PBS schedule for Nature during the week of Nov. 16th, which I hear is when they may be showing "My Life as a Turkey", which looks to be just adorable.

http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/portrait_of_an_adoption/2010/11/anti-bullying-starts-in-first-grade.html

Visit the above link. Despair just a little. First-grade girl loves Star Wars, picks out SW-themed back-to-school stuff. Starts getting teased about it by boys who claim that "Star Wars is a boy thing". In tears, girl begins to want to conform to avoid teasing. Her mother writes this thoughtful article -- and encourages fellow female Star Wars fans to post comments in support that Katie can read.

Dammit. Yes.

STAR WARS IS A BOY THING???? OH HELL NO.

I am not fucking going back in time to 1978 to tell myself and all my girlfriends on the playground that no, we shouldn't be playing Star Wars during every recess, fighting over who gets to be which character, including girls playing the boy characters and droids and aliens (I always got to be Han *buffs nails* but possibly only because my friend really liked Luke better). I am not fucking going back in time to stop myself from enacting lightsaber fights with my cousins on the beach with Wiffle-Ball bats. Fuck no.

I don't know how much it will help. I feel for the kid. I was "different" in school, I got teased, and I coped in whatever ways I coped. I don't remember actually trying to conform, although I do sort of remember getting the message to withdraw and hide who I was a bit more. (Not so much "maybe if I wear pink and be girly, I'll be accepted", and more "maybe if I lie low they won't have so much ammunition".) But to be honest I think I was just the kind of combative "well, fuck 'em" child who did my own thing, regardless. I can't tell this young kid to just... do that. I don't know what her situation is like. I don't know what schools are like today. (Maybe there were just more tomboy girls around in 1978, to judge by the number of my fellow playmates. But the boys were still often poopyheads.) In the end, she has to go to school with THEM and live with them, not with us. But maybe it will do her some good to hear about other girls who are into geeky things. Maybe she really doesn't have any others around her in her school.

p.s. it does require registration to leave a comment, unfortunately. But you can go to the following to leave comments without having to register:

http://www.epbot.com/2010/11/geek-girls-activate.html

Hey, folks who read my LJ who also know telepresence!

He just asked me to write a quick update to say that if anyone has been trying to get in touch with him for anything over the past few days, he's been offline. He's in the hospital -- he's fine, but they're running various tests, which take for-ev-er, so he's stuck in there until tomorrow at least. And his iPhone battery has long since died. So he can't access the web at all. All he has is hospital food and daytime TV -- feel for him.

So, that's the deal. Pass the word on to anyone who might need it.

I know, I'm hell at updating. But, as you can tell from my writing this, I came through the surgery fine. (Except for the nerve block not working to actually block the pain, and except for the Percocet making me ill.) Massive, massive thanks to elishavah, and also to veejane, for all the help they've been giving me. I apologize for not being good about replying to comments, I really appreciate everyone's well wishes.

Yesterday was the 11th day after the surgery, so I went in for my postop checkup. Everything looks good! The cast finally came off (and this had been the most annoying cast, yet). I now have a very small plastic brace that goes on with Velcro straps, which I can take off to shower (!!!!!!) and to do my exercises. The incision is big, but healing well; the skin is already pretty much closed over. The whole arm and hand is a bit achey, and feels vulnerable because it isn't so well protected. The bone won't actually be healed for another four weeks, but because the plate is holding it together, I can start on rehabilitating everything.

The weirdest part is that I am supposed to now be doing all kinds of exercises to get a hand and the wrist back in shape, and it's very strange to have nothing at all on the arm, and to be trying to tell it to do things, and it's not be able to do them. I know that will come in time, as I work on it.

Below the cut, my x-rays, so you can see the plate and all the screws.

( Pictures this way! )

Short version: fell on ice this morning. Broke wrist. Right, of course. Already irked with one-handed typing. :P

Updates later. Apologies in advance if I'm slow replying to anything.

Let's get the non-sucky part out of the way first: went to see Eddie Izzard on Wed. night, w00t! (with editswlonghair and vampyrusgirl, thanks to whom I was even able to pounce on what may have been the LAST TICKET on an impulse on Tues. night.) It was fantastic, and I recommend the show to everyone. Also, Eddie was just SMOKING HOT. (Not so much with the transvestism; jeans, black tshirt, black cutaway tails-coat with red silk lining; I hear he had on black eyeliner, but from the cheap seats, who can tell?) Also, I was totally charmed by the parts of his routine that consisted of him coming across some stream-of-consciousness point, and resulted in him pulling out his iPhone, calling up Wikipedia, looking up the thing, and reading it to the audience. I know this doesn't sound hilarious, but it was.

As for the rest...

Ehn. I'm still coughing. I'm tired all the time, and I have verrrrrrry little motivation. I was all jittery last night and I didn't know why. I'm extremely crankypants and feel very snappish and irritable, and while that's often a sign of PMS, it can't be, so. MEH.

AND THEN.

So as I'm getting off the bus, I mis-time standing up and the bus moving, and I fall on my ass and bruise my legs and arm. :P

AND THEN.

I walk over to my car and open the door, and say to myself, "why is there glass all over the seat?"

I had to do an entire circuit of the car before finding that it was the back window that was smashed in. :( :( :( I stood there -- IN THE RAIN -- for several moments staring at it, and thinking, what the hell? There's nothing visible back there except for two boxes of cat-litter, which are still there, and they haven't been moved, so it's not like someone riffled through the back looking for valuables.

So then I put my seat forward to get at the paper towels to brush the glass off my seat, and I find... a golf-ball in the little net pocket on the back of my seat, along with the paper towels. Yes, I *was* parked along a main road that happens to run alongside a country-club.

So I drove up to the country-club -- more glass tinkling off into the back with every bump -- and went inside to find out what their policy might be with regard to their patrons chipping their shots and breaking car windows. And indeed it turns out that they have a Standard Procedure for this, so that worked out fine, and I got their card, and the number of the glass place that does work for them and will supposedly come to me and just charge it to them. *sigh* I really hope they work on a Sat. and that they have a Mini Cooper back window with heating element in stock.

And then I stood there in the COLD and the RAIN (well, not in the rain, but under the veranda) waiting for AAA to come, because it struck me that driving with chunks of the window liable to fall out at any moment was probably unsafe, and if I tried to break it all out myself, first, I had nowhere to put the stuff, and second, if I cut myself, I would be the biggest moron in the world. It took them nearly an hour to come. telepresence and then raqs kindly talked to me -- or allowed me to talk at them -- until then.

Now I have a big piece of cardboard over my back window, and some plastic garbage bags sort of draped over the outside to try to keep out any more rain tonight, and THIS IS NOT THE FRIDAY NIGHT I WAS WANTING TO HAVE.

And my back hurts, and all the energy that I left work with, that I was going to apply to any number of things since I had a late lunch and didn't need to eat right when I got home, is all gone, and I'm hungry now. And my legs hurt.

The end.

Yes, I went to the gym again! Also, I went on Thursday, I just forgot to post about it.

On Thursday, I discovered two things. One: weeknights around 6pm is when EVERYONE goes to the gym, apparently. That was the most crowded I had ever seen it. But thanks to them having a skillion of each type of machine I use, I never had to wait to get on one. Score! Two: huh! Cute guys go to the gym! I know, this shouldn't be news. It just struck me, that's all. And you get to talk to them! Or, to be accurate, you get to say things like, "Give me a second to wipe this[ piece of equipment] down, and it's all yours", and they'll respond with things like, "Sure, thanks." ... Yeah, I know, that's pathetic. Still, baby steps.



I also need to provide this pictorial proof of the occasional cat detente that happens at my house. This pic was taken at about 2am on Jan 1st, when I finally came to bed to find that the cats had given up and gotten there before me. (It was cold.) I have no idea who was there first and who got there second. It's just that normally you cannot measure the distance between the two of them on the bed in single-digit inches. They were *really* cold. I heartlessly evicted both of them so I could get in bed. Emily did come back to lie down near me.