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 )

Whenever I'm sick, I always want to do the same thing: curl up in bed or on the couch and watch old Gene Kelly musicals. Other musicals will work if necessary, but Gene Kelly ones are the best. He tells stories with his dancing better than anyone else I can think of and pulls off some of the craziest stuff always while making it look graceful and effortless and he always just looks so gosh darn happy while dancing it makes me smile. To share my Gene Kelly cure, I bring a YouTube video. This isn't one of his better known movies (I haven't seen it all the way through) but the man essentially does ballet and tap dances in roller skates in this clip and that just blows my mind.

I got back Friday night / Saturday morning (plane landed just before midnight). I had planned to post on Saturday with a quick overview of all the places we went and then make posts over the next few days with more details and pics (assuming I actually got around to it since my post plans often fall through). Instead, I got off the plane with some kind of bug and spent most of the day Saturday vegging on the couch with no energy to do anything. I figured Sunday would be better. Instead, I went to bed at 7:30 Saturday night, got up for about half an hour at 11:30 Sunday morning (long enough to take my temperature which was 100.0, call Mom, and drink some orange juice and eat a toaster strudel), woke up for five minutes here and there, and then woke up for real at 8:00 Monday morning. So I basically slept for 35 out of 36 hours and I still feel like crap. I was not up to driving but a couple of friends got me to the student health center and back home today. There I was told I don't have swine flu, or any other kind of flu, so I'm on my own and should just rest until whatever virus I do have works its way through my system. Goody. I figure before I fall back asleep for possibly another 36 hours, I should at least let y'all know I'm back. I'll post about Germany when I'm feeling better, but for now I'll ay it was loads of fun and I at least managed to wait until I got back to get sick.

To two of the most amazing women and awesomest friends ever:



Happy Birthday,
mrstater and
godricgal


Lisa and Kate, you really are both amazing and I'm glad to have you in my life. I haven't been around a much as I'd like the last year or so and I'll try to work on that. I know I'm a day early with the birthday wishes for you, Kate, but since I leave on Friday tomorrow is a laundry and packing day and I'm afraid I'll forget.



In other news, here's the list of books I'm planning to take with me:

Lolita
Vanity Fair
Master and Margarita
Beowulf
Don Quixote

Anyone want to make a last minute argument for something I have to read and should take instead of one of those?

I'm trying to pick a few books to grab from the library to take with me to Germany for reading on the flights and the like. I'll take any suggestions of things you think I might like but in particular I'm interested in

(1) Things that are long and dense so that I can take as few books as possible but make them last as long as possible

(2) "Classics" that are particular favorites of the flist but that I haven't gotten around to reading yet

(3) Anything frequently banned or challenged or that seems somewhat subversive because I kind of like the idea of taking contraband reading materials across international borders and because the American Library Association's annual Banned Book Week is 27 Sept. to 3 Oct. this year which includes five days I'll be in Germany and the day I fly back.

I have about 50,000 pictures I've been meaning to size, upload, and post. Someday I might get to them all. Today is decidedly not that day. Here's the full To Do list:

(1) Pictures from Disney World trip last September (oops)
(2) Pictures of new house, including deer in the back yard
(3) Pictures from New York City trip

It doesn't look like much, but each of those vacations have thousands of photos that I have to sort through and pick the ones I want to post before I can even get to the resizing and uploading. *Sigh* I love digital cameras but like everything else high tech in my life sometimes I wonder if the hassles equal the benefits.

While you are waiting for me to eventually get around to the big picspams, here's a mini pic spam. I leave in just under two weeks for two weeks in Germany (I foresee another thousands of photos item for the picspam to do list). The reason for the trip is that a family friend is getting married there the weekend in the middle of the trip. I went dress shopping and found two dresses that I love. I'm going to take them both and decide which to wear there, once I get a better feel for how dressy everyone else will be.( Here there be dresses. On Rachael! )

Apparently President Obama is giving a brief speech encouraging kids to stay in school that will be broadcast to classrooms on Tuesday. Some people are not happy about this.

“The thing that concerned me most about it was it seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child,” said Brett Curtiss, an engineer from Pearland, Tex., who said he would keep his three children home. “I don’t want our schools turned over to some socialist movement."
Source: New York Times

There's worse stuff than that in the article, but I had to post that bit because I graduated from Pearland High School. I weep.

In other news, you can see high res pictures of Neil Gaiman's library here. OMG! I want to move into his basement so badly now. Or just steal all the books, but then I wouldn't have any place to put them all, let alone someplace as super cool as his basement library, so we'd better just stick to me moving into his basement.

I was kind of upset in both my last posts and nobody commented on either so I guess y'all don't like mopey Rachael. I'll try to keep this one more positive. Here's the random happier stuff that's been going on lately.

- I have two roommates all settled in. They've begun paying rent and bills (yay money coming in for once!) and we've signed the lease and everything is good. They are both first year MBA students and are completely swamped with school work. They are in classes all morning, have team projects that they work on most afternoons, and then have homework all night. Kim does her homework at home and comes home for lunch so I see her sometimes in passing, but Rajiv works at the library and at coffee shops so I never see him.

- Tomorrow is the Welcome Picnic for the history department. we do it every year and all the grad students and faculty are invited. We're having it at my house. The roommates are fine with it so I just have to hope the neighbors don't throw a hissy fit. Parking is going to be the only issue. Unless it rains, which it might, in which case there won't be any cars because no one will come. :(

- I finally got the lawn mowed today. It has been probably 8 to 10 weeks since it was done so it desperately needed it. I had a guy come out last week to give me an estimate. He was supposed to do it Monday and never showed. Then he called Tuesday and said he'd sent an employee to do it and the employee (1) never bothered to show and (2) didn't bother to tell the owner that he hadn't done it until Tuesday afternoon. So the guy said he'd come do it himself Wednesday. He didn't show so I called him at 4:45 and he said he was finishing another yard and then would be right over and still planned to do it. He still never showed so this morning I called someone else who said he'd do it this afternoon then I called the first guy and told him not to come. The second guy came when he said he would and did a lovely job so it is all lovely for the picnic.

- Libby is in town! Libby is a good friend of mine. She is from London and was an MA student my first year here and was in the program for a few years then quit because she decided academe wasn't what she wanted to do with her life. She is now teaching at the secondary level back in England so it is pretty rare that I get to see her but she is in the states for a bit this summer and I've seen her a few times in the past couple of weeks. It has been fantastic.

- There are deer that live in my neighborhood. Some of them are in my backyard almost every night. I got some chairs and little tables for the patio and I'll set out back and read and watch the deer. I'm really loving it. I've identified at least six different deer, including two little ones, but there might be more. The one downside to the deer in the backyard is that I've taken to keeping my motorcycle in a shed in the back and I have to be very careful coming around the side of the house. I'm pretty sure the deer, the motorcycle and I would none of us be happy if we were to collide and that almost happened once before I realized they were here.

- I gave in and got a twitter account. I post little bits every now and then but mostly I got it because I wanted to follow Neil Gaiman's tweets more easily. I've been on a Gaiman kick, reading / rereading a lot of his stuff (including finally reading the entire Sandman collection which was AMAZING!!), and he posts some excellent stuff on twitter and I was tired of just checking it every few days and figured an account of my own would make it all easier. So of course a few days after I sign up for an account he announces that he is going completely offline for a week. Don't I have fantastic timing? Oh well, he'll be back with his awesome tweets eventually.

- Three weeks from tomorrow I leave for two weeks in Germany with the family and I'm starting to get excited. I've got to get some dissertation work done before I leave so I'm trying not to think about it and get too excited since then I won't be able to concentrate, but I am getting kind of excited anyway. The reason for the trip is a friend's wedding but obviously we're staying for longer than just the wedding and turning it into a real vacation.

Uh... that's all I can think of for now. I've been really busy lately, though looking back it doesn't feel like I've accomplished all that much for how busy I've been. I guess moving, getting a new school year going as president of the student organization, and all that kind of stuff take up more time than I realized.

I got a call from the landlord's agent. She said that the potential roommate's credit check came back with problems, mostly 12 to 15 late payments. She said that the landlord has neither approved nor denied him at this point but wanted my opinion since I'd be the one stuck covering for him on rent and all bills. I said I was very leery of putting myself in that kind of a situation but that I would need to talk with the other roommate who was not home at the moment. That was around 5:00 and it is now 9:00, the roommate still isn't home, and I'm tired and kind of want to take a shower and get into bed because I've been going to bed ridiculously early the past few nights since I think I'm still recovering from NYC. When we last exchanged emails, the potential roommate said he would like to move in on Thursday or possibly Friday if he was approved which means possibly, oh, tomorrow. If he isn't going to be able to move in, I've got to let him know NOW and I've got to get moving once again on finding someone else. How long should I wait for the current roommate to get home to discuss this with her before making a unilateral decision and sending emails to him and other potential roommates?

EDIT: The current roommate got home. She had a phone number for the potential roommate so I called him. He said that he doesn't understand what is going on and knows of no problem with his credit. I gave him the number for the landlord's people and he is going to call in the morning. If he can straighten it out with them and it turns out to be some kind of error, fine. If not, I'm not willing to risk having to pay someone else's rent and bills so I'll have to try to get someone else. In either case, a decision will have to be made tomorrow because I don't have time to dicker.

Things you might want to know:

(1) I'm back in Williamsburg, safe and sound.

(2) I had a fantastic time in New York City, but I ran myself ragged and am overjoyed to be back home. I'm sorry I was completely AWOL from LJ for most of the month. I promise posts about my trip, with picspams, in the near future.

(3) I am so glad to be done with my roommates in NYC. One was almost never there and was really nice when she was there. The other two spent most evenings on their cell phones very loudly arguing with their boyfriends. Schnazzy.

(4) I have one roommate at the house here in Williamsburg. She moved in while I was gone and seems really nice. It is looking like the third roommate will be a guy. He came to look at the house Saturday before I got back, but the current roommate said he seems like a good guy and his emails make him seem like a good guy. He's submitted a credit check to the landlord so if he is approved he's moving in at the end of the week.

(5) My last post was about the fantabulous Harry Potter Stufepy cupcake I had in NYC. Unfortunately, never did find out what the fourth Harry Potter themed cupcake was so that shall always be a mystery. I did go to the same bakery about once a week and had the Caramel Apple, Bad Boy (I think that was the name), and Blueberry Cobbler cupcakes. Caramel Apple was spice cake with apple filling and vanilla frosting and was my favorite. Bad Boy was chocolate cake with vanilla filling and frosting. Blueberry Cobbler was white cake with blueberry filling, vanilla frosting, and strudel stuff on top.

Things I'd like to know:

(1) How am I going to get through all the documents I now have in anything under, oh, twenty years?

(2) I had a dream the other night. At least, I think I ahd a dream. I woke up in the middle of the night with this idea in my head that must have been a scene from a dream and I thought, "Hey, that would make a fantastic Remus/Tonks story. I should turn on a light and write down this fantastic idea since I haven't felt like writing fic in ages and this could jump start me." That thought was followed by, "No, I'm too tired and this is way too vivid for me to forget it." Why didn't I get up and write it down and what was it that I dreamed?

(3) How much would it cost me to get the entire run of Sandman and is there anyway to get it cheaper than retail?

(4) Somewhat related, is it wrong that I'm seriously considering signing up for Twitter primarily so I can more easily keep up with the awesomeness that is Neil Gaiman and his tweets? I check his feed every day or two already, but I think having my own account would make it all easier. I know sandykidd has a twitter account. Does anyone else on the Flist?

(5) Since I was rather AWOL from LJ while I was in NYC (gotta love initialisms), did I miss anything important or interesting? I tried to check in and read posts even if I didn't have time to comment or post myself, but I'm sure I missed some stuff. Anything you want to share?

One of my summer roommates told me that there was a Crumbs bakery just down the street from us and that I have to go. Crumbs is one of those fancy cupcake places, the kind that celebrities are photographed entering or leaving and when the photos appear in some trashy magazine with a brief description of the place those of us in the real world scratch out heads and ask "Five dollars for a cupcake? Really?" My roommate swore the cupcakes were fantastic and actually a pretty good deal because they are huge so she always cuts hers in half and gets two desserts out of it. She also told me that right now they have four special Harry Potter themed cupcakes in honor of the movie so I decided I had to check it out.

When I went this evening, they only had two of the special Harry Potter cupcakes left. My roommate had told me about one of them, one that was not in stock this evening, so only one of the four remains a mystery. The one my roommate described is supposedly called the Half-Blood and is half white cake and half red velvet cake (blood, I guess) with some kind of filling and vanilla frosting. One of the ones in stock this evening was the Gryffindor. It was a vanilla cupcake with vanilla frosting and red and gold sprinkles around the edges. It seemed too tame. If I'm going to get a gourmet cupcake, I want it to be something special. I was debating the blueberry cobbler (I love me some blueberry!) or the Boston Creme, but then I saw the other Harry Potter special cupcake that was in stock. It was called Stupefy, a name I assume must be ironic as the cupcake in question seemed designed solely to make one bounce off walls. This was a rather ordinary vanilla cake with vanilla frosting, but on top of that frosting was sprinkles, mini chocolate chips, mini M&Ms, toffee bits, and as the gentleman serving me put it, "I'm really not sure what else; whatever they had in stock and wanted to throw on top." Don't believe me? See for yourself:



As if that weren't enough, this behemoth was filled with chocolate buttercream.



I took my roommate's advice and only ate half of this gigantic cupcake (it is at least four inches wide) and I think that may have been about twice what I should have had. These cupcakes could easily be three or four desserts and it was only $3.75 so my five dollars was a bit of an over-estimate. It was definitely worth it and I'll have to try at least one more flavor before I leave. While it will be at least a few days before I go back to buy another cupcake (I still have half of the Stupefy after all) I'll try to swing by tomorrow to find out what the fourth Harry Potter special cupcake is.