kungfuwaynewho | Entries tagged with whaaambulance

Ugh! Why are they discontinuing the only Apple product I like!

Soooo, if you haven't heard, they are discontinuing the iPod Classic. This is a disaster. I have a ton of music, and I want to put all my music on my device, because I may not know what I want to listen to on any given day. Some days it's classical - and some days it's a specific kind of classical. Or it might be soundtracks, or new music, or music from high school and college, or oldies, or classic rock, or WHO KNOWS. I NEED ALL THESE OPTIONS AVAILABLE AT ALL TIMES.

I also like not having to charge my device every day/every other day.

I also like just being able to use a scroll wheel, instead of having to actually look at my device, unlock a screen, go through apps and programs, etc.

I JUST WANT A REGULAR IPOD THAT JUST PLAYS MUSIC AND DOES NOTHING ELSE.

I mean, I have an iPod Classic, but it's about six years old, and who knows. Anything could happen. I could drop it tomorrow. It could freeze and I might not be able to reboot it. I could spill coffee on it. (That has the greatest likelihood.) The little port for the plug-in might get a little bent thing in it or something. ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN.

So I needed to buy another one. But it's not available to just buy online because reasons, and my local stores don't have any available, so I just bought one to pick up in-store at a Target like an hour away and it says my order went through but I will not believe it until I get my confirmation "your item is ready to pick up!" email and even then I will need to have it in my hands.

Just.

I hate you, Apple.

ETA: UGH I JUST GOT AN EMAIL THAT IT'S NOT AVAILABLE AT THAT LOCATION. CHANGING MY PICK-UP LOCATION. SO HELP ME GOD.

ETA 2: Okay it's available and ready for pick up at the other location, which is even farther away. Blessings on that Target's family, blessings on that Target's cow.

Ugh, this week. For almost two months, I've been fighting off an ear infection. My ear would start to close up, or it would start to get sore, and I would up my Vit C and take some decongestant, and things would go back to normal for 3-5 days, then the cycle would begin again. Last week, it became clear that the battle was over. It was like there was some sentient ear infection imp living in my ear, determined that I would get an ear infection, damn it! Tuesday the ear was completely closed, and really started to hurt, so I called and made a doctor's appointment. By the time I saw my doctor the next day, the swelling had begun.

For those of you who are lucky enough to have never had a severe ear infection, the swelling is the best part, really. My neck, where the Eustachian tube starts; the ear canal; behind the ear itself. By Wednesday night, the side of my head was so swollen that I couldn't chew, I could hardly open my mouth, and it hurt to smile and even swallow.

And then the pain, oh, the pain. I'm not even exaggerating when I say that Wednesday and Thursday was in the top three worst pain I've ever had in my life. Thank GOD, my doctor gave me ~*~hyrdocodone. But even that was really only effective for about two hours. I was supposed to take one every 6-8 hours, but those two days, if I made it 4 hours, I was very proud of myself. (It was so bad Wednesday night that at one point I was actually hoping that my eardrum would rupture just so the pressure would relent.)

By Saturday afternoon, the swelling and most of the pain was finally gone, but as of today, the stupid thing is STILL closed up, and it's achy and tender. I have this horrible premonition that I'm going to finish out this round of antibiotics, and then it's going to go nuclear again. Siiiiiigh.

It was kind of embarrassing, when I googled home remedies, that everything I read was like "your baby probably has an ear infection if she's tugging on her ear and crying!" It's just sort of undignified to get an ear infection as an adult, let alone one that's bad enough that I ended up calling in sick to work three days in a row. Blergh.

Ugh, I've been so bad about posting and reading my flist in the past few months, which is to say, I basically have been doing neither. I haven't been posting because I pretty much have nothing to post about - I work, and then I work, and then I write, and sometimes I do laundry and clean house. I occasionally eat. And it's not like I had been slacking off all year to find myself with my back against the wall come screenplay submission season; I have been writing steadily and consistently since September on the two scripts I'm submitting this year. But this always happens anyway, and it's a particularly bad one this year.

I am really, really happy with the script I wrote this year, though. Definitely the most polished first draft I've ever put together. One of those where once I got the idea, the main plot was just there, ready to go. There was some work on details and the nuts and bolts of scene building, but I didn't have to futz about with "oh how should this end" and "all right, I have a story, now what's the character arc and theme?" So that was exciting.

I'm trying to get a revision done on a script I wrote last year; I didn't finish it in time for the first two competitions, and I'm very doubtful I'll get it done for Nicholl on May 1 (considering I'm on page 21, ahahaha). But I should definitely have it done for AFF on June 1, and considering that's always been the competition I've done best at, that's what I'm primarily worried about.

So I'm going to start trying as best I can to catch up on like a three month backlog of flist; if you find a cascade of comments from me, that's why. (And if you don't, that doesn't necessarily mean I didn't read, but just that I may have become overwhelmed in trying to comment on everything.) I missssssss you guys, though. I've felt very isolated lately, because obviously I haven't been really able to go out and do stuff with IRL friends, either. Once a week I've been going out to eat with some friends from my writer's group, and that's kinda been my social lifeline.

(Sadly, one thing I've really, really missed is having the time to write fanfic. I have all these stories in my head, but no time to write them down. As soon as I'm past June 1, I'm definitely going to set aside a certain amount of time a week to write just for myself, just for fun, because whhaaaa.)

To add something of substance to this post: the first clip from the new season of Arrested Development! I'm so excited I can hardly stand it.

Whew, I made it through the month of May. That was the fifth May since I started doing the annual screenplay contest/festival extravaganza, and I think it may have been the most work and the most stressful. (The very first May, my last semester in grad school, may still take the cake, though, since I was doing all of that on top of my master's thesis. That was right before most contests switched to online entries, and I will never forget finding out the post office closed at 4:30 instead of 5:00 like I thought, and having to literally sprint across campus to get my script postmarked on time. And since it was May in Austin, it was totally like four thousand degrees that afternoon, too.) I continued to do revisions after getting the thing done at the beginning of the month. Then finally got my ass in gear to do the revisions on my TV pilot, which ended up entailing a lot more work and rewriting than I had originally guessed.

So I finished all of that Tuesday the 29th. The last major deadline was June the 1st. Instead of just submitting and being done with it, I decided that since I had three days, that was totally enough time to bang out a Game of Thrones spec script. (It wasn't.) (I did it anyway.) Then I got to work the kick-off summer reading weekend immediately following, and got a new project on my second job, and, and, and. Well. Let's just say that I'm still really fucking tired, pals.

I'm finding myself still sort of not feeling the whole internet thing right now, though. Not sure why. I think some of it is that I've come to associate the internet with feelings of guilt over not writing and being productive; I'm sure that will sort itself out soon.

Um. This post is really boring. Have some icons!

Preview:

( Community, Parks and Rec, Farscape, BSG, and individual assorted others. )

Today was pretty much the epitome of them, so I won't bore anyone with the details. I've spent a lot of time musing on the difficulties of communicating in a 100% text environment, along with the conflicting urges of "apologize again to make things better" and "yell back even louder to be the one who wins." Will likely just leave it at a stalemate.

LIMS motto: Make the exact same icon as everyone else, and you will succeed. (Yes, being voted out this early did hurt my feelings for real, and yes, I am bitter about it.)

Also, re: writing 10 pages a day for a solid week? So far we're at 4 pages over 2 days, so suffice it to say that's probably not going to happen, hee. It didn't help that I struggled for a solid hour on how to write a single scene and came up with the brilliant solution of "that scene sucks just don't write it."

Of course, it doesn't help that after working an eight-hour day, I come home to work some more. Being able to work at home and in my jammies notwithstanding, a second job is still a second job. I definitely need the money, but boo, today is not the day.

To end on a less woe-emo note, Fiona Apple is playing in Kansas City, MO on July, 17. My sister has already said she won't go with me, so now I'm trying to find someone else to go. But if I don't? Gonna see her by myself, because Fiona is queen. I'm already pre-excited about the concert.

Also, I got three compliments on my nails today and one on my hair, so that made me feel marginally better. :)

Now to eat some Easter candy while I make dinner, eat my dinner while I do twenty minutes of internet things, then back to work.

I was working on three icons last night for two different LIMS. I was spending a lot of time on them. I had done many many stages of background creation, coloring, textures, etc. I Photoshopped for about an hour before I got too tired to work and decided to go to bed. I just left Photoshop open, and it didn't occur to me to save the PSDs.

I didn't have time to get on the computer this morning.

Came home from work, made dinner, reading flist, la dee da, I will finish those icons. Wait. Photoshop isn't open.

COMPUTER INSTALLED UPDATES ON ITS OWN AND RESTARTED. ALL LOST.

When the least stressful part of your day is finishing up Christmas shopping, then your day is stressful. Ostensibly I have the day off, because I'm working this weekend, which means I work seven straight days and my next day off is Christmas Eve. ~*~*~ Things that are stressing me out:

My sister and I are buying a house. We're smack in the middle of the paperwork/inspection/mortgage process.
We are having our big family holiday get-together tomorrow. I have to clean.
I decided to make presents for co-workers and am nowhere near done and I don't know when I'll finish?
Applying for a freelance job for extra money so I can afford, like, the internet and nice food in my new house IF I EVER GET TO MOVE IN THIS IS STARTING TO FEEL LIKE AN IMPOSSIBILITY.
Family dra-llama.

Anywho, if you basically don't see me for awhile, that's why. Cheers, babies!

The Orphan Queen: 46054 words --> Daily Total: 1243 words
Some Passing Shadow: 8 pages --> Daily Total: 2 pages

I don't know how much I'll get done today because I have a headache and feel like crap. Ah well.

Ugh, I am seriously embarrassed by that horrible emo post from yesterday. Can we all just pretend it never happened? Awesome.

Today is a perfectionary day wrt weather. Lower 60s, overcast, drizzly. It's already October in my heart, you guys! To that end, I'm starting to think of my Halloween plans. Isn't Halloween the best? I need to secure permission to wear a witch's hat or something similar at work that day, since I'll be working. (Sadfaces forever.) I don't know if my little sister is going to be trick-or-treating this year; I've quite enjoyed driving her and her friends around the last few years. I just ferry them from one place to the next, chill in my car with a scary book, and collect candy tolls. Unbeatable.

I'm thinking of setting up a Halloween/Autumn music sharing post in a week or so. There's always a ton of them around for Christmas music, but I've never seen one for Halloween, and I have a surprisingly large amount of Halloween music. As one does.

One of the things I did go ahead and buy this weekend, because it's depressing to be on vacation and have zero souvenirs whatsoever, is a cast iron skillet. I've always wanted one, and after thinking about it, I decided to go for it. The first thing I am going to make is pineapple upside down cake, probably tomorrow since I work till 9 tonight - it should be prodigious.

I've been trying to get some landcomm challenges out of the way. I made this Luther wallpaper yesterday for a gift-giving challenge, and I am very proud of it. (Why am I only able to make good graphics for gifts and non-voting challenges? Seriously.) I'm...not sure if I'm going to be able to get to the

scifiland Big Bang, though. I should have been working it all along, but somehow, out of nowhere, I didn't. And it's due the same day as the

het_bigbang, and I'll be cutting it close just to get that done. (Where has all the tiiiiiime gone?!) Anyway, you'd think then that I'd be working really hard on those, but no, I spent like two hours doing online jigsaw puzzles yesterday. Productive uses of free time FTW!

It was bad enough that I had to work this weekend, and instead of getting the traditional three-day Labor Day weekend, I only got Monday off. But the BPU was out digging something or other, who knows, at the end of my street, and managed to cut the phone line, which meant my house was also without phone or internet this weekend. And of course no one could come out and fix it yesterday.

It's kind of sad how many things I can't manage to get done without the internet. "Let's go to the movies! Oh, no internet. How will we know the times? We could call...nah, let's just sit around and watch Martha Stewart." "That looks like a good recipe! We should make it. What do we need for seven minute icing? Oh, no internet. We could get a cookbook...nah, I think I remember from the show." "Let's go look at houses! Which houses? Oh, no internet. We could...shit, we're gonna have to drag the laptop to McDonald's and look."

Total pain in the ass.

(We found two great houses yesterday, but one is likely out of our price range, and the other is apparently going to public auction today, and I highly doubt we would be able to pay cash. Le sigh.)

I work all day today, then girls' night at Applebee's tonight, then tomorrow I just work 5-9, since I worked Sunday. Except I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow afternoon, and I'm going to find out if I need surgery on my wrist or not, so I'm definitely not looking forward to that. But then Thursday-Tuesday I'm taking a mini-vacation, and I'm pretty excited about that! Unless I've just had surgery on my wrist, in which case, that will suck.

Seriously though, if the internet's not back up tonight, I might die.

I hate when I'm trying to find pictures of an actor and all I can find is an official website. OFFICIAL WEBSITES ARE LAME. Why don't you have a fansite, actor? I want access to EVERY PICTURE OF YOU EVER TAKEN.

Grr argh how am I supposed to recast Battlestar Galactica dealing with this kind of nonsense.

Everyone's invited - even and especially those who haven't looked at a single word of my screenplay. Because the first thing anyone looks at is the title, and it will help shape preconceptions, make you decide if you want to read or not, etc.

What you need to know: it's a vampire movie set in 18th century Romania. It's more about creepy and atmosphere than it is about shocks and gore. So I've got some ideas, and if you want to throw something in the pot, please do so. Because I am horrible at coming up with titles and it is now T-minus one month and I'm starting to freak out.

( Ideas for Titles. )