Random List of the Week

1.) It's raining, but not yet pouring. Apart from wiping rain off my glasses, this is an awesome thing.

2.) I discovered there are electrical outlets on the balcony in the building where M teaches her last class. Since I necessarily have time to kill during that period, this now means I can sit outside and watch the rain while I update the shop and talk to any friends who happen to be online.

3.) A particular student in one of my classes threw a fit because she decided that a neighboring student's laptop's fingerprint ID check was recording secret films of her. She stormed out. After a long silence, someone else in the class suggested we pass the hat to buy the "perpetrator" a nice present.

4.) I have a D'Anjou pear and an Aero bar. Both are tasty.

5.) My high school friend A, who is deployed on the front lines in Afghanistan, emailed to let everyone know he's alive and celebrate his weekly shower.

6.) M has health insurance again. We found out last week, though she's had it since October. Without revealing details, we've needed it. Now, the university never bothered to tell us she had it or submit her paperwork, but that's a whole nother story.

7.) I have discovered this awesome webcomic called Something Positive. I've been reading through the archives all week. It's a very intelligent, dry work -- think Peanuts with late-twenties characters who drink a lot to fuel their biting verbal wit. It has touching moments, and a tendency to batter the emotions every three months or so, but it's worth it, and hilarious. The story so far will be pretty clear from the cast page.

8.) My Bio 40 professor's favorite phrase: "Patience at once!"

9.) I'm almost done with my custom-order forms for a consignment line.

10.) And I have one more commission to finish up tonight, which makes me break even nicely for the month. I think this may be the first time.

ETA: Oh, and I almost forgot!

11.) There's a rock album based on Tolkien's Silmarillion. It's by Blind Guardian and it's called "Nightfall in Middle-Earth." It's not bad. Not groundbreaking, not Metallica, but not bad. I really like the voices they cast as Sauron and Morgoth, and the singer who does Maeglin's part is pretty good too. I've been listening to it pretty much nonstop.

Limited-Edition Donator Jewelry

Until further notice, to encourage donations to disaster relief in Haiti:

With your jewelry purchase, I will send a free pair of crystal earrings OR a multicolored freshwater pearl bracelet if, in the Notes to Seller section, you pledge to donate ten dollars to the Red Cross or Doctors without Borders.

This jewelry is limited-edition -- there will be as many pieces as people who pledge to donate with their purchase. There's no other way to get these pieces!

I'll provide pictures of your options as soon as I get the first pieces made and photographed.

There will be no extra shipping and you can get your choice of the pieces with ANY purchase -- even a five-dollar pair of earrings qualifies -- provided you make that donation.

Ends and Means

I've noticed my posts often seem to trail off rather than actually ending.  To hopefully break myself of this, I challenged myself to compose a bunch of different endings to blog posts.  I came up with the following:

"So I learned that I should be more careful of my companions if I wish to avoid being eaten."

"I'll never do that again unless my need for a block of beeswax is really pressing."

"So that's how you solve the problem of a component requiring a half-millimeter bead size, and I shall call it the Liverwurst Method."

"In this way, though Marx's model breaks down under thoughtful scrutiny with the mores and values of the twenty-first century in mind, it would be a disservice to a great thinker to say that Das Kapital is anything but a landmark of social science."

"Parakeet dive-bombs toddler.  Tune in at eleven for the evening news."

"I'm glad we've solved the aardvark problem.  Onward to tackle the zombie defenses!"

...

I don't think I'm very good at this, guys.

Special Offer ... ish

Type the code "Haiti" in the Notes to Seller section anytime this month and I'll donate 30% of my proceeds to Haitian disaster relief. I am ... a bit disturbed, so. Um. Yeah, that's it.

Back on the chain gang

First day back in classes after the New Year. Am currently in the Physics lecture hall for Biology 40: Diseases in History. Class sounds very cool. This lecture hall, on the other hand ... well.

Let's begin with the fact that you enter it at the back, and the tops of the slide projector screens are then about level with your toes. You're looking straight ahead ... at the ceiling. From this non-Euclidean plane your eyes skate down ... and down ... and down. The floors and ceiling are dirty ivory; the walls are an odd eggshell iron-grey. It's generally mop-water colored.

If you laid a ruler along the tops of the long lab-style desks, you'd get a 45-degree angle. This room is nauseating already, and you haven't even started to descend the stairs. When you do begin to descend, you will notice that the stairs alternate: two slightly shorter than the average human stride, and then one slightly longer. You will wonder how many have died here.

As you try to enter a row, you will notice an odd proportion. A six-foot person, seated, will find that the previous row's table is level with the back of their head -- but the rows are scaled such that the passage behind an occupied stool is roughly a foot wide (narrower in the top two rows, probably to make room for the rather degrading corral that constitutes handicapped seating). Me? I literally cannot get through a row. I just swiveled five tiny Asian girls fully 90-degree turns trying to get to an empty seat. I can't decide which is better -- this, or the theater-seating halls where my hips don't quite fit into the seat.

I'm a size twenty. This is four inches larger than the U.S. average. And I don't fit in UCR's lecture halls.

Gaaaah.