When Incompetence Pays Off

I just re-installed my OS in order to fix some obnoxious glitches on my computer. Before I did this, I saved all my important files to blank CDs. When I put the first disc into the computer (this disc being the one I put most of the really important things onto), I discovered that I had failed to fully close the session, meaning my computer couldn't read the disc at all.

FUCK.

That was all I could think. I was screwed. Then.... I started restoring my iTunes library (backed up to a million blank DVDs) and realised my computer was running out of space. That didn't seem right! So, that's when I discovered that I hadn't deleted or even replaced all the old information on my computer. It just happened to get pushed into the "Windows.old" folder instead of the new "Windows" one. I did a little digging, and found every single file I thought I had just lost.

GLORIOUS!

So... I guess the moral of the story is that when things look like they've gone wrong because you were being an idiot (like me), just hold out a little longer before getting upset. Chances are your idiocy will be found elsewhere in a way that actually helps you.

Or something.

Because I'm Lame

Bwahahahahaha!

Thank you Jason!

From: http://www.smbc-comics.com/

I'm Awesome(ly Nerdy)!

So... the other day, there was a random reference to Pokemon by James. This reminded me of how I used to collect Pokemon cards when I was in middle school and then again not long after I started at University. Tonight, I looked over and saw the cabinet in which I have stored these items for the past couple years, taking them out to reminisce over every so often.

So I opened it and started giggling, looking at all that filled it. I had forgotten just how much I enjoy these little things in my life. I started pulling things out, looking through my toys one sort at a time. I started with my Pokemon cards. I have a rather large binder filled with them. I have a couple long cardboard boxes filled with more. I have a couple decks that I had built in individual cases. I have more just stashed around that didn't fit anywhere else. What I had nearly forgotten about, however, were my "special" Pokemon cards. Well, they're special to me. I once saw on eBay, an unopened box of 1st Edition base set cards... wait for it ...in German! I bought it and had more fun opening those booster packs than I had ever had in the past! I now have almost the entire base set in German but for a few cards that happened to not be in that box. Additionally, I had purchased a couple starter decks in German... both from the Fossil set.

To continue, I next took a quick peek at my old Magic cards. I don't have many, but it gave me a good laugh at how I got many of them. You see, I had a Swamp deck back in my day. I didn't have many cards and wanted to make my deck better, so I went around to my brothers and step brother to see if they wanted to give me any. My step brother, in particular, was very helpful. He had a bunch scattered in his desk drawer. Of course, it turned out that he used to stash is illicit green smoking substances (XD) in that drawer. So I ended up with a ton of cards that smelled strongly of marijuana. Cracked me up.

Anyways, so then it was time to look through my Harry Potter TCG cards. I have a binder filled with some from each set I have (my old 'Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion' binder with a Potterpuff image on the cover). In addition, I have a two player starter set, an old box from the Diagon Alley set, my own deck (Quidditch and Potions headed by Oliver Wood), and a slew of unopened booster packs!

I have officially decided that I will not yet open these booster packs but wait until one of two things: either LeakyCon or when James comes to visit (hopefully with Christie in tow for the weekend!). Either way, it will be so much more fun with friends who are as crazy about HP fun as I am and I'm already excited!

So the whole time I was going through these things of mine, I kept thinking to myself, "I'm awesome! I love this stuff! How can that not be awesome!?"

If you'd like to look at many more pictures of these things, check out the album here!

Working Out

Follow-up on yesterday's post:

Things have worked through. Took about 20 hours longer than it should have, but it's fine.

ps. I forgot how much I like the song "Snape vs. Snape" by MoM until it just turned up on my iTunes on shuffle. XD

Uncertainty

If I don't hear back in the next day, I think it's too late.

It isn't worth the heartache of going through it again and again. I am trying. I am putting forth the effort and getting no response. I haven't officially decided yet, but I think I know where this is leading. I love the people as individuals, but as "co-workers" of a sort, there is a lot of trouble. They say that communication is most important of all things, but they are failing at that game now. Feel like I'm being shut out.

Don't want to lose friends over this, but I fear that I might.

Sorry for the vagueness. Don't want to give any details until I know what will be happening.

Funny Story Time, Kiddies!

After Cannibal was over on Saturday night, I was down in the performance area talking to friends of mine who just saw the show. Then some random guy walks up who looks almost vaguely familiar. He starts talking to me, excitedly proclaiming, "See? I did end up making it!" and other such phrases that made me think, "Do I know this guy and just forget who he is?" So I continue talking to him a bit asking how he liked the show, etc. And then he goes, "Your name is Dinah, right?" I laughed and said it was wondering how I was going to get out of the situation where I had no idea who this person was in the first place. At which point he says, "You probably don't remember my name, do you?" I explained that I am terrible at names and I'm sorry and blah, blah, blah... the usual.

It turns out, after a little more discussion, that I met him in the stairwell down to the U Bar one night when I was drunk (and don't remember meeting him) and I must have told him about Cannibal and apparently gave him a hug.

Yeah... good times... ?

My guess is it happened the night I went out with Janae, because no other night did I wander down there following enough Jager to make me at least a bit forgetful of the events ending the evening.

A Beautiful Day on the Horizon

So, to start off... last night was the opening of Cannibal: The Musical. It went very well! Lots of fun, went out to the only local pub afterwards. Didn't have anything to drink as I was driving home right afterwards, but it was nice to hang out with everyone from the show for a bit. And to not have the annoying kids in the show around. :D

When I got home, it as about 1:30 and I realised that it was morning in the UK and I wasn't quite tired and James deserved a shot at chatting at me when I was dead exhausted. Ended up talking for a few hours and it was lovely. Woke up exhausted around 10:15 this morning, but today will be great anyway!

So.... onto the day I'm looking forward to now! To begin with, I'm still house sitting for my mum, which means I have probably the best view in the city. The day is so clear I can see the Buttes (the world's smallest mountain range) straight out the window. Rarely is the air so clear and the mini-mountain range so crisp in appearance. I just wish I had a camera to take a picture and show you. Alas, I do not at this time. :(

However, sometime soon, I will be going over to my cousin's for my family's Fourth Annual Wine and Brewfest. Basically, everyone brings some kind of six pack - a beer that is uncommon, interesting, or just something they'd like to try - and we spend the day together drinking and having a good time. Yeah. My family is freaking awesome. Adam and Mary started this new tradition and it is definitely a good one!

Of course, I have to run the show tonight, so can't drink too much. And the fact I have to drive over there is another thing. At least the show is late night and I can wait until I'm perfectly cogent to do any driving and tech running.

After the show, we'll all be heading over to Tony's birthday party, which should prove to be particularly entertaining! It will be good to see everyone again and have a good time. I don't know if I'll be drinking much there, as I'll still be driving myself about. But if I do, I'm sure I can crash if necessary. I doubt I will, but I'm sure it's available.

Anyways, off to start my day!

Things You Know You Want to Do...

1. At lunch time, sit in your parked car with sunglasses on and point a hair dryer at passing cars. See if they slow down.

2. Page yourself over the intercom. Don't disguise your voice.

3. Every time someone asks you to do something, ask if they want fries with that.

4. Put your garbage can on your desk and label it "in"

5. Put decaf in the coffee maker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has gotten over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.

6. In the memo field of all your checks, write "for sexual favors."

7. Finish all your sentences with "in accordance with the prophecy."

8. Dont use any punctuation marks

9. As often as possible, skip rather than walk.

10. Ask people what sex they are. Laugh hysterically after they answer.

11. Specify that your drive-through order is "to go."

12. Sing along at the opera.

13. Go to a poetry recital and ask why the poems don't rhyme.

14. Put mosquito netting around your work area. Play a tape of jungle sounds all day.

15. Five days in advance, tell your friends you can't attend their party because you're not in the mood.

16. Have your coworkers address you by your wrestling name, Rock Hard Kim.

17. When the money comes out the ATM, scream "I won!", "I won!" "3rd time this week!!!!!"

18. When leaving the zoo, start running towards the parking lot, yelling "run for your lives, they're loose!!"

19. Tell your children over dinner. "due to the economy, we are going to have to let one of you go."

Rawr

I don't really have much in the way of anything to say, but I felt like getting a good old fashioned rawr out there.
Image from this site.

A Nice Day

I nearly forgot to write this blog! I told James I would, so I feel obligated to now. XD

So today has been interesting, but is ending quite nicely. It started with the lovely ability to sleep in for nearly an extra hour complete. That alone should have been enough to make my day glorious! However, not long after I got to work, Greg started IMing me and, when I explained that my weekend is jam-packed and he explained that he was trying to organize a surprise weekend visit with me, he got angry. What it all comes down to is I was so angry at him that I was literally shaking at my desk. I went on Twitter and asked James to come online and talk to me because I just needed to talk to someone I actually enjoy talking to.

After a bit of ranting and raving to the ever patient James, I stopped shaking, I felt a bit better, and I was actually able to form a coherent thought. So James... you are the only reason my day ended up fine in the end. Huzzah!

After lunch, I got a chance to get to know one of my co-workers better and discovered she's quite a lot of fun to chat with. She called me over at one point later to help her with a piece of a project that was really just causing her a massive headache. Took about 20-30 minutes, but was a lot of fun, once we got it figured out.

From there, I got to check on my grandma's cats, pick up some food at Trader Joe's, and head to my mum's home. Laundry took place while I got my bath ready... and let me tell you... I now understand why people love bubble baths so very much! It was just like in a movie when you see the woman in the bath with bubbles so thick she might as well be fully clothed under all the white. Except it was me and it was real. I learned something important for my future bath adventures.... have a glass of cold water nearby!

So now I'm silky smooth, eating delicious vegetable lasagna from TJ's, typing up this silly account.

But oh! I can't believe I forgot to mention this sooner! Earlier today, my friend Chelsea and I were walking out to the coffee truck that parks outside our work building a few mornings each week. I accidentally caught a snail with my shoe and broke it's shell. It was still alive, so I put it among some foliage to hopefully recover. Within an hour of this, Felicia Day happened to post this to her Twitter: "Seeing lots of snails in LA lately. I know people hate them, especially gardeners, but I don’t. Fairies use them as mounts after all. "

My friend @replied to Felicia saying: "I love snails (because they are mounts for fairies :)) but my friend accidentally broke one’s shell as we were getting coffee " And, once I saw this, I sent another @reply to Felicia explaining, "I would like to mention (as @[my friend]’s friend) that it was an accident and I moved it to safety so it could try and recover!"

Chelsea and I started giggling about it because it amused us. But the story doesn't end there! Apparently, Felicia got so many hilarious @replies that she wanted to post a number of them in her blog. Chelsea and I are among them and are some of the first mentioned! Absolutely hilarious!

"I guess having over 300,000 followers on Twitter can be a good and bad thing. The bad is I can’t possibly follow or know each and every person who follows me, but the good is that when I get so many insanely smart and wonderful responses to things I tweet. I would love to RT (ReTweet) them all and share them on my Twitter feed, but sometimes I get so many awesome responses I can’t give credit where credit is due. So I decided, based on a Twitter I did this morning, to share some of my favorites."

So... if you'd like to see this post, check it here. We're @caliclia and @WrockDinahSaur

Cannibal: The Musical

So I'm doing some tech for a show called "Cannibal: The Musical"... Freaking hilarious. Tonight was the first time we had any actual tech. I'm running the follow spot. But let me tell you... it is the jankiest form of follow spot that I can possibly imagine.

To begin with, it's not actually a spot light. It sticks, it gets very hot and has no handle, and the aiming is freaking awkward as hell! Oh... and I haven't even mentioned the best part. There is some kind of giant power thingy with a huge, extremely noisy dial that turns the light on and off. I have to do that every time the light goes on or off... and some cues are pretty fast, meaning it's even louder. We're going to try and WD-40 it tomorrow, but we really don't know if it'll even make a difference. Bah!

But the show is really coming together and should be a blast. We open on Friday night! Yay!

Okay, now I really just need to get some sleep. :P

Thought of the Day

In the words of Andy Scott and Trevor Griffin, "Love is like oxygen."

Shit. It's true. "You get too much, you get too high. Not enough and you're gonna die." Currently searching for that middle ground. Good luck to me!

And yes... I am quoting cheesy glam rock from the '70s. Get over it. :D

(That's the band off to the right, by the way... The Sweet. How can you not love them when they used to wear outfits like that?? I mean, for reals! )

Thanks to Wikipedia for the picture.

A Wild Night

Okay.... so last night was freaking awesome. Janae made it here not long before 10pm, so it was easy and fine to just head out pretty much right away. I had given much thought to where I would take her because it was her first time going out drinking since turning 21 earlier this week. The way I saw it... I had to give her a true Chico experience, so to the U Bar it was. For those who read this and don't live in Chico (which I think is everyone, actually), the U Bar is something of a dive, but one that's actually pretty decent. The drinks are cheap, but not terrible. So it works out well in the end.

Anyways, we started at the U Bar, I had been waning more and more all day, so I started the night with a Jager Blaster followed immediately by a Long Island. Janae decided to stick with fruity cocktails and got some kind of strawberry drink. Then I saw a friend of mine, so we sat with him and his other friend and chatted a bit. After finishing our drinks, we decided it was time to move on. We went to Panama's, but it was particularly lame, busy, and smoky all at once, so we just left and headed to Duffy's where Janae had another cocktail and we had a good time chatting. Then, to keep up with the Chico spirit, we went by the Bear. It's not a very fun place to go at night, I find... but I felt like it was part of the experience. It was just waters for us there and then we left and hit Normal St. because it is right around the corner from the Bear. By chance I ran into some old friends I hadn't seen in many, many months and that's when the night got particularly interesting.

Heidi and her boyfriend started buying me more and more drinks. And all of them had Jager. I had a Jager Bomb (like the Blaster, but pre-combined) and a half followed by a Red-Headed Slut (or something like that... I don't really remember the name because by then I was pretty well inebriated). At this point, I ran into Matty and when Heidi and Anthony decided to head to Panama's, Janae and I joined with Matty in tow. At Panama's we just had a couple glasses of water and did a good bit of dancing.

And now that I'm typing all this up, it sounds pretty lame. But we had a great time. Janae and I came home, had some more water, and put on Mr. and Mrs. Smith to fall asleep to. My bladder woke me around 5am and the Janae's stomach woke her just after. It took a couple hours for Janae to be better again, but she got a little more sleep and ate a bit of toast (my personal stomach quencher) and headed back up to Redding.

Apparently, when we got back from the bars, I did a little bit of Facebook updating and wall posting. Awesome. XD

A Brief Interlude

So I just wanted to put in a brief little interlude from the nonsense going through my head. I'm going out tonight with Janae and it's going to be tons of fun. She's coming down from Redding right now and we'll be going out and having a rad time.

So in celebration, I wanted to post something joyful and adorable all at the same time. I present to you... lolcat #2!



see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Inebriated Ramblings

This post is made while I'm a little in the drink. To be precise, I've had half a bottle of wine to myself and that's about it. I actually made a vlog for my youtube channel, but for some unknown reason, it won't upload. Honestly, that's probably for the best.

I am a pretty ridiculous vlogger, even in the soberest of moments. So not having to inflict my friends upon the torture of seeing me vlog while inebriated is probably a good thing. Of course, blogging while inebriated isn't much better, but at least you can't see my face.

Why that makes a difference, I really don't know. But the fact that you can't see the expressions I'm making is pretty significant.

I drank half a bottle of wine tonight. So forgive any spelling or grammatical errors I make. I don't think I'm making any, but I might be making a shitload.

The big question: why is Dinah drinking tonight? Answer: because she feels truly and completely alone for the first time in a long time. I believe that being even just a bit inebriated is a great way of learning how people actually feel about certain things. I know it's when I feel most honest. Without realising it, I am more honest (which is seriously saying something) when I have had a few than when I'm stone sober.

Huzzah to that..... or something.

Anyway, it's late - I've been drinking - and now I need to sleep. I hope you enjoyed these inebriated ramblings.

Skipping Ahead

So remember that post a bit ago about wanting to skip ahead and get to the happy ending of my life? Well, I've been thinking about that a lot recently. Sure, it sounds nice in theory, but when it comes down to it... that's not what I want or need right now. It's true, I can think of at least one person who is pretty much exactly who I would love to have in my life 'til death do us part. But that's not what I need right now. I think I still need the freedom of being a woman of sense and independence.

Looking ahead to the me of 5 years from now, that person looks even more appealing to my sensibilities. And by then I may just be ready for more. I don't want to miss my middle, as Lorelai Gilmore would put it. I see the beginning, I see the ending I could have... and as much as I want to jump forward in time and just have it... I don't want to miss my story, my middle.

The important part isn't the result, it's the journey that takes us there. So I guess it's time for me to just live it up, go with the flow, and have a good time with my life. No more fucking around and feeling sorry for myself because things aren't turning out as well as I had hoped. No more being shitty at keeping up with people and wallowing pitiably because I don't seem to have anyone around anymore.

Yes, there are rough times. Yes, I have always gotten through them as well as I could. And now it's time to just freaking get over it.

Life - here I come.

And the sad part is I can't even bring myself to end that statement with an exclamation point.

Taking a little trip...

So..... I'm planning on going to Mars. Their flights are all booked right now, but hopefully I can catch one of those ones in 214 days they mentioned on the site.