My mom found out last week that she'd be having surgery on Monday. It was for carpal tunnel in her left arm, so not a major problem, but surgery is surgery and even the most minor can have complications (hers didn't but you don't know that ahead of time). My dad could not take off work Monday because the Germans were coming to town. I should probably explain that...

My dad works for an international company that trains commercial airline pilots. He is one of the technicians that maintains the flight simulators and is also the FAA coordinator for his plant. This means that he is responsible for knowing all the government's laws and regulations and ensuring that all the simulators at his company meet the requirements. Since his company is international, they have pilots from other countries come in and use the sims and Dad also has to make sure the sims meet the laws and regulations of all the other countries. The inspectors from Germany are in town this week and next week, testing everything to make sure the plant is compliant with the German regs.

... so like I said, Dad couldn't take off work Monday because the Germans were coming to town. My sister took Mom in for her surgery and got her home and took care of her until Dad got home from work and all that. Everyone knew she'd be perfectly capable of taking care of Mom, but this didn't stop Dad from having a conniption fit. I believe he was telling my mom things like "But I'm supposed to be there for you! It's my job to take care of you!" Poor guy.

Needless to say my mom made it through the surgery fine (otherwise this post would have started very differently) but she can't use her left arm / hand for anything for some time since it needs to heal. She's left handed. My brother-in-law's birthday is tomorrow, his present needed to be wrapped tonight, and Mom couldn't do it one handed, especially right handed. Dad can wrap packages quite well. He is very exact and gets tight corners and lines up the paper whenever possible and it is all very nice. He never puts bows or ribbons on packages though. I just thought he didn't want to. Apparently he doesn't know how. My mom called me while he was trying to do this so I could hear her trying to explain to him how to take the ribbon and wrap it around one direction, cross it at the bottom, and bring it up the other direction to tie it on the top. He was having all kinds of problems and didn't cut enough ribbon to make pretty curlicues out of the ribbon and I don't know what all. I just know it was hilarious listening to Mom try to explain and Dad try to do and I've decided my parents are awesome.

Further proof my parents are awesome but in a completely different way: my mom called me on Friday (which was her birthday actually). She told me to go to the store and buy a Wii and a Wii Fit because she couldn't find any in stock in her area. I asked who needed a Wii and she said "You do." To which I naturally said, "Wait, what?" Apparently she decided since I was complaining about not being able to get out and go hiking and things like that because of the unusually large quantities of snow we've been getting, I needed a Wii Fit so I could be active inside. She told me to put it on their credit card that I have. So I did. Except I only got the Wii not the Wii Fit because I can't find one around here (between Christmas and Valentine's, the stores are cleaned out and Nintendo is out of stock, too, I think). But I have some other games that get me moving and I'm having a blast with it and I'll get a Fit as soon as a store around here gets some.

Dear Microsoft Word,

I love your spell check, grammar check, and auto correct functions. Truly, I do. You save me from looking completely stupid and correct all my minor typos. I appreciate the work you do, even though I'm smart enough to know that I can't rely on you 100% of the time. You are fantastic at catching when I didn’t type a real word, but you aren't so skilled in determining if I typed the right word. That's OK. We each know what we can and can't do and work together well.

Unfortunately, when I'm working on my dissertation you drive me insane! I know this isn't your fault. You are a twentieth-, now twenty-first-, century product and take for granted standard spelling and grammar rules. Unfortunately I am asking you to deal with quotes from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents. English (not to mention the other languages with which I deal) was not yet standardized at that point. When I type sentences such as, "The Justices off the Paice, and Capts off the militia in King's County came, and promised to doe all their endeavours to keep the people in quietnesse and defend the country against the comon ennemy and resolved to sett out a centry att Conny Island to keep a continuell watch to looke out at sea," I know you think there are about fifty errors there and want to correct them all, but please don't. Sometimes when you auto correct, you are "fixing" something that isn't actually broken and all your red and green squiggly lines are rather distracting. I know I could just turn off these features, but then I'd have typos and errors galore in my original text. I'd really love it if we could compromise here and have you be your usual efficient and helpful self when I'm typing my own words and just back off when I'm quoting from my sources. I know this is asking a lot of you and may not be possible, but please do let me know if you think we can make this work.

Thanks,
Rachael

Teaser:

36	51	88	102

Notes:

• No hotlinking!
• Comments and credit would be most appreciated. To give credit, copy and paste the following into the comment section when uploading the userpic: Made by <lj user="bratty_jedi">
• If an icon number is followed by an asterisk, that means I used someone else's texture in it. Please check the bottom of the entry for the texture maker. My computers had meltdowns in December and I lost a lot of stuff, including my notes on where the textures came from. I’m going to try to recreate the info and give credit where it is due when I can.
• Icons are arranged by episode but may not be in chronological order within an episode.
• With some of the older ones, the images look a bit grainier now than they did on my old computer. My new computer seems to be able to handle all aspects of this better so I could redo them all, but that sounds too time consuming. I'd rather do it on a case-by-case basis so if there is one you like but it seems too grainy, let me know and I'll try to redo it and fix it.
• I’ve started on season 2, but it will probably be a while before I’m finished. If you have any requests from season 2, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
• I’m still working on a mood theme as well but it will be months before it is done.

( Hogan’s Heroes Season 1 Icons )

After a year and a half of just working on my dissertation (and not getting anywhere), I have to work for my money this semester. I'm a Teaching Assistant for a Global History class. For this particular class, this means sitting through lectures every Monday and Wednesday and about 1/3 of the Fridays of the semester. The other 2/3 of the Fridays, I have to lead discussion sections. Each discussion section has about 12 students in it and I have four of them, all back-to-back. Needless to say, by the end of the day on those Fridays, I will be exhausted. Since it is the same material for all discussions, there is only one set of prep, but talking about it all four times in a row is going to be so draining. The first discussion section is this Friday and I'm not looking forward to it. We're discussing firearms and nomads in China, Russia, and the Mid East in the 1300s to 1500s. Care to guess how much a colonial American historian like me has studied this?

In addition to leading the discussion sections, I have to do all the grading for my approximately 50 students. This will be five two-page papers, two worksheets, and three tests per student. According to the people who have TAed this class before, it is the grading that is the worst part. They say it is extremely time consuming and you are lucky if you can get it all done in 60 hours and you won't get anything done on your dissertation all semester. This just isn't acceptable to me. I'm going to try very hard to be on campus all day Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and get all the class stuff done on those days, work on the dissertation Tuesdays, Thursdays, and one weekend day each week, and have the other weekend day free for things like groceries, laundry, and just maybe fun. We'll see if this works out. I'm also hoping that on weeks when I don't have as much grading I'll be able to use the time on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to start prepping a syllabus for the class I'll be teaching in the fall. If I can get some work done on that now, then I'll be able to focus on the dissertation all summer rather than dividing the summer between class prep and dissertation, which would be nice.

A few other quick tidbits before I leave you to go about your day (or go to bed or whatever depending on what time it is where you are when you see this):

• I wanted to get both seasons of the Monkees on DVD. I could find season 2, but after much internet searching I could only find season 1 online for $150-$200. I finally tracked down a copy at a store in Houston. Unfortunately it was on the wrong side of Houston and about 30 miles from my parents'. They spent their Saturday morning this past weekend making the 60 mile round trip just to get me season 1 of the Monkees. Aren't they cool?


• I really want to learn to play the harmonica. There is a possibility I could do it through the school, but I think I'd have to wait 'til the fall to start and I don't want to do that so I'm looking for other options.


• I'm trying to use Windows Live Sync to keep my two computers in sync so I don't have to manually move files or remember which copy was the most recently updated or whatever. It worked beautifully when I first set it up when I had both computers at home. I want to keep one laptop on campus, but the firewall on the campus wifi network is causing problems. Sometimes the sync can go through and sometimes it is blocked. I'm still hopeful I can get this to work, but we'll see.


• Apparently my sister's brother-in-law, Kyle, has started dating a woman he knows from work. I might make a full post about this later, but for now I'll just say I think everyone is treating Kyle pretty shittily over this just because the woman happens to be black (I think this is the real problem for most of the people involved) and the mother of four (everyone claims this and their fears of the way society would treat an interracial couple rather than their own underlying race prejudices are the reasons they have problems but the actions don't match the words and I don't see the deal breaker problem even if what they are saying is true).

I haven't posted in... forever. I've been so busy, some good but mostly stress! ( Here's a quick rundown of the past month or so. )
So that's my month in a rather large nut shell. I hope everyone else survived the end of 2009 and is surviving 2010 thus far.

I know I've posted this photo multiple times before (most recently in the post immediately before this one) and the story that goes with it, but there is now a part two that I've got to share. ( Here's part one for those who have either never heard it or forgotten it. )



Flash forward twenty some odd years… It has been somewhere in the vicinity of two decades since I've had unwrapped presents from Santa under the tree or in my stocking. Everything is now from people and therefore wrapped. This year when I went out to the living room Christmas morning, there was one unwrapped present sitting under the tree in front of the stack of wrapped gifts. Santa brought me my glo-worm this year. It is a new one, not the exact same one I had in the 1980s, but that's OK because I still have the old original one. This one still glows when I squeeze its tummy and is still a bedtime one so it plays lullabies and that makes it perfect. Obviously Santa is awesome, if a bit late, and my parents are always awesome and love me. And that's all that matters.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a photo of me and the new glo-worm yet. We're now out in west Texas visiting my grandparents and the glo-worm is back in Houston so I'll have to add a photo when we go back to Houston. Consider this a place holder.

mrstater tagged me for a meme. Wow, it's been ages since I've done one of these. It has been so long, I feel like doing two so I'm also stealing an email forward from a friend and posting it as a meme. How's about that?

( Meme the first: Generic from Mrstater )

( Meme the second: Holiday from Lady_Katvic via email )

I suppose I should tag people. Feel free to do either meme, both, or neither.
bratanimus, cuteej4, ladybracknell, littlepixiechic, sandykidd, train_lindz, wildmagelet, and insert your name here if you want to do this!

I'm going to be sending out my holiday cards in the next week or week-and-a-half. If you want a card, let me know. If I've sent you one for the past couple of years and you haven't moved, I'll just send you one again even if you don't comment. If you've moved or haven't received a card in the past but would like one this year, leave a comment with your address. All comments to this post are screened and I won't unscreen them so only you and I will see your comment with your address.

There is usually no light on my front door at night, which makes it rather difficult to get the key in the door. There is a motion sensor light on the house, but it points out at the driveway and the brightness doesn't reach to the door. There is a light I could leave on for the porch, but this requires remembering to switch it on before I leave and it wastes power so I just don't bother with it. I have a little flashlight thing on my keychain that I typically use. I push the button on it, it emits a blue glow, and I can see to get the key in the lock so everyone is happy. Of course, I have to detach it from the keyring so I can have it in one hand with the light aimed at the lock and the key in the other hand or else it doesn't work. Sometimes I think this is more trouble than it is worth so I'll try getting the key in the lock without it, and I think I've succeeded once. The rest of the time I give up and take off the light and use it. Last night I was struggling to get in and decided I needed the light or I was never going to make it. I had a few things in my hand, including my cell phone, and started juggling them around so I could get the light. I literally suddenly said out loud "Wait! That's what they invented cell phones for!" and then hit the power button to make the cell phone screen glow and used that light to get the key in the door.

So my iPhone is apparently a $199 flashlight. By the way, I checked and yes, there is in fact an app for that. You pick color and brightness and when you click the app, it makes your screen glow to match your settings. In addition to lighting up the darkness, it is apparently useful for audience members desiring something to wave in the air at concerts that don't allow lighters. I think I'll just stick with using any old screen glow.

The only real purpose of this post is that I want to show off the new userpic I made for times when I am pissed off at somebody or something. Is it not awesome?

To give the post more substance than "Look at my userpic!" I shall also share the news that I got my annual calendar from the nuclear power plant down the road. The purpose of the calendar is to inform me that I live close to a nuclear power plant and in the event of a disaster, I should follow a specific evacuation plan and blah blah blah. Realistically, I should just accept that I live close to a nuclear power plant and in the event of a disaster, I'm dead and there is no hope for me. This year's calendar has pictures of pretty lighthouses.

Howdy! I've been terrible about updating lately even though I check LJ all the time and have no excuse for not posting. I guess I just don't feel like I have much of anything to say. Or maybe it is the Facebook thing. If I post something as a short status post there, what's te point in doing a longer write up of the same thing for over here? Of course, I have quite a few flisters who aren't my friends on facebook and I can go into more detail here so I really should try to post here more often. Here's the top three things that happened this week.

(1) I've had a Palm LifeDrive handheld computer for about five years now. When I got it, it was cutting edge technology. But that was about five years ago and the poor thing has been dying for some time. I first started thinking about replacing it when I got Office 2007 because it was so old that Outlook 2007 wouldn't sync with it so I couldn't sync my calendars and contacts anymore. But I held on to it and just manually double entered everything I really needed on both the laptop and the handheld. Then the battery started having issues, mostly consisting of not being able to hold a charge for longer than about 2 hours. On Thursday it was royally acting up and I decided that I had had enough. I went to a couple different stores, played around with a few different models on different networks, and called my mom and told her I was seriously considering buying an iPhone. I had to discuss it all with her because my parents still pay my cell phone bill and me getting an iPhone will add $30 a month to the bill. I feel badly doing that, but no one makes good stand-alone PDAs/handhelds anymore. Everything is smart phones and that requires the extra data plan. I desperately needed something, so Mom okayed the increase in the bill, I went back to the AT&T store and bought a 16GB 3GS iPhone. I've spent the past few days playing with my new toy and it is awesome and I am very quickly falling in love. The whole internet access even when not on a wifi network thing is awesome but will take some getting used to. For example, the email I received while shopping in Walmart notifying me that my Grandpa had created a facebook and added me as a friend was a bit odd and left me wondering just how badly I really need to be connected to the world at all times since I think that could have waited until I got home. Of course, this hasn't stopped me from adding free apps for checking facebook and MLIA and hasn't stopped me from using them when out and about.

(2) I got a call on Thursday that a part I needed for my motorcycle was in at the bike shop. My state inspection sticker expired at the end of October but when I tried to get it inspected I found out that the brake light was only coming on when I hit the foot (rear tire) brake, not the hand (front tire) brake. As long as I always hit both brakes, this wouldn't actually be hazardous to me on the road, but of course there is the chance that I'd forget and only use the hand brake and I certainly couldn't pass the state inspection without that working. After a delay caused by a misunderstanding, the bike shop finally ordered the part I needed to fix that and I went over on Friday for them to put it on. I park the motorcycle in a shed in the back of my rental house and drive through the yard to the driveway. I forgot that it rained Thursday evening and went around the side of the house too quickly for wet ground. The back wheel lost traction in the mud and slipped sideways so the bike and I hit the ground. I ended up with mud all over my pants and jacket, mud all over the bike, and a decent scrape up the inside of one of my legs. No major bleeding and no broken bones, so certainly nothing to get excited about, though the scrape is a bit tender to the touch and required five Tweety bandaids to cover it (yes, all bikers use Looney Tunes bandaids to cover their injuries or at least they should). After getting myself cleaned up a bit, I went to the shop as planned but had problems shifting gears all the way over. On most modern motorcycles, you shift with your left foot and the shift pattern goes first, neutral, second, third, fourth, fifth. Neutral is kind of a half step between first and second so from first you jerk it softly to go into neutral or harder to go directly into second. I was not only going to neutral every time, but I sometimes couldn't get it past neutral to second until after jerking it as hard as I could two or three times. I told the mechanic that I'd wiped out in the mud that morning (he looked at the dirt all over one side of my bike and said "Boy, you sure did!") and asked him to look to see if I'd done any damage in addition to putting on the brake light switch and doing the state inspection. He played with it a bit and said he felt what I was talking about with the shifter but he couldn't find anything wrong in terms of a loose part or a bent rod or anything so hopefully it would just work itself out. I think it was a little bit easier coming home than it had been on the way over so he might be right.

(3) I have leaves in my yard. Lots and lots of leaves. I've been working on raking them for a couple of weeks now, with breaks for days of nothing but rain. I had everything raked into piles once, but then it rained before I could get the leaves bagged and the rain caused more leaves to fall. I finally got all but two of my original piles into bags. It took 50 30-gallon leaf bags for that initial round of leaves. I took one load of 10 bags to the county dump this week. They allow you to bring leaves (provided they are in clear plastic bags which I didn't know at first so I had some leaves in black bags and had to transfer them) for free during certain weeks in the fall and then they mulch them and you can get free bags for fertilizer in the spring. They also come around once and will collect any bags that you leave out, but our collection isn't until the second week of December and I've got too many bags to wait. I need to take more over to the dump, but I spent this afternoon raking up more piles. I worked out it for close to four hours and got most of the front yard into 15 or 20 huge piles. I bought 50 more bags at Walmart today and I'm not sure that will be enough to get me through the fall. I had started a jogging program several weeks back, but I haven't gone running in two or three weeks because all the time and energy I'd give to that has been spent raking leaves. The really odd thing is that I kind of enjoy it. I'm sore and tired when I finish, but there is just something so nice about spending hours outside and doing something physical. It is very relaxing and I usually lead such a sedentary lifestyle that the change is refreshing. I've also met several neighbors, mostly thanks to the men in the houses around mine coming over to introduce themselves and make sure I'm ok and to tell me if I need anything or they can help to just holler. It's kind of sweet. One guy driving by today rolled down his window just to tell me that he has lived on this street for eleven years and he doesn't think he has ever seen anyone actually rake my yard because the amount of leaves is so overwhelming and he thinks I'm doing a fantastic job. The other thing I really like about raking is that I can listen to music while doing it. I'm not very good at reading or writing with music on and since that is how I spend most of my time, I don't get to listen to songs as much as I'd like. I'm on a Monkees kick lately and bought all their early albums from iTunes a bit ago and have been listening to that while raking and thoroughly enjoying myself. I need to go on a second round of iTunes shopping to get the rest of their albums, but that will probably have to wait until after my next paycheck. Or maybe after Christmas. I need to switch over to holiday songs soon anyway.

I thought I should let y'all know that I'm doing much better today that I was this time last week. I'm not really sure why, though. Everything that was freaking me out last week and that caused me to have the breakdown is still true and I'm basically in the same place I was then. I'm just not freaking out about it. I think everyone who said maybe I just needed to get the emotions out and vent a bit was right.

I have a meeting with my advisor today. Well, I sort of have a meeting. When I asked him about a meeting he told me when his office hours are and said to drop by. One of his weekly office hours is later today. There is a part of me that wants to put it off and not go in today, but there is no reason to put it off and I just discovered a pretty schnazzy grant, the application for which is due Nov. 13 and I need to talk to the advisor about it so I can't wait or I'll run out of time to get the application done by the due date. I don't think I'm ready to meet with my advisor so the plan was to spend today prepping specifically for the meeting. The problem is when I sit down to do that I can't think of anything I actually need to do to prep, which makes me think we're back to everything just being me freaking out and I'm better off than I think I am, but I'm really not sure.

On a completely different topic, I posted a video on Saturday of pics with narration of the first three days of the Germany trip. Since absolutely no one has commented on that post, I'm wondering if perhaps people had busy weekends and missed it so here's the link to the post in case you didn't catch it the first time around. I don't want to seem like I'm begging for comments or anything so if you don't have time to watch the video or aren't interested or just don't want to comment or whatever, please don't feel like I'm trying to guilt you into it or be passive-aggressive about it or whatever. I was just surprised that no one commented and figured for sure at least one person would have had something to say about it, even if just to make fun of me pronouncing German words with my Texas drawl. :)

Rather than upload pictures and type lots of stuff about them here, and then have to repeat the whole process at Facebook, I'm trying something new to share the photos of the trip to Germany. I bring you video! The sound's not perfect, but I'm figuring things out. This was a lot more fun for me than just uploading the pics, so assuming you guys don't hate this method, I'll probably do it for all the Germany photos.

A while back there was a meme making the rounds of the flist and I wanted to do it but never got around to it (that's been the running theme of the last year or so of my life, I think). I still really want to do it because it looked like fun but I don't feel like searching back through people's posts for the real meme so I'm just doing it based on what I remember.

Post a comment asking me for my top five anything and I'll answer. In the original this was supposed to be top fives related to a fandom such as top five favorite characters from Star Wars or top five favorite Remus/Tonks moments (fanfic or canon) or top five favorite Hogan's Heroes episodes or... you get the idea. I'll not only take questions along those lines but I'm open to anything, top five movie musicals, top five novel genres or sub genres, top five pie flavors, top five hair ties I currently own, top five classes I've ever taken, whatever. I think it is more fun this way. Ask me anything. Be as creative and off the wall as you want. If you can't think of something to ask, pick one of my examples. If you can think of too many things, ask more than one, but no more than five because if I have to stick to top fives so do you!

Here's a rundown of the places we went on what days. Over the next few days (weeks?), I'll try to post more details on each day's excursion along with pictures.

( Itinerary )