With unspoken insinuation of desire for elaboration

I have cut my hair off. Or a lot of it, anyhow. My housemate said not forewarning people is mean. Who knew?

I have also dyed it as purple as I could reasonably make it. A few pictures - lighting makes it anywhere from "is that pinkish?" to "that's just brown, right?"






I am going to actually make it through today, and thus if you are going to Dragon*Con, you might actually seem me with some vestiges of spoons left. If you are there, and are looking for me, now you know to look for purple instead of red. There, I helped. Totally not trolling now. :P

...so close to time off. Just waiting for this scheduled job to hopefully finish successfully so that I can leave. Time for deep breaths.

I constantly think in the back of my mind somewhat wistfully that I wish I were doing more of certain activities.

Included amongst them:
- walking (though I do generally do this a fair bit when I'm not freezing)
- reading
- composing
- cooking
- planning (and executing (and oh dear, that is such a project management phrase)) social activities
- sewing (mostly costuming)
- visiting people (somewhat local folks, but also farther afield folks whom I do not see often enough)

I am going to try to keep some sort of notation when I'm doing these things, I think. Theoretically a journal is not a bad idea for a place to put it, and heavens knows I'm not using it for too much else...

So in that spirit:
This weekend I cooked my bastardized (vegetarian) version of chilaquiles (which I should make a note to finish more of off in the next couple days before I leave for NY).
I also read Mastiff (by Tamora Pierce) (which I need to give back to Lynne).
Yesterday I did a small amount of composition (for Stranger Ways as we work on our next album - yay :)) that should be possible to flesh out into a complete song... providing we can lyricsify it, which I am the suck at.
And I've done some walking... maybe I should start trying to carry a pedometer with me or something to work out exactly what I'm doing here.

On the less successful front... I tried to rally a bunch of us to go do a dinner out for Restaurant Week and failed abysmally. Comedically. Ridiculously.

Basic summary:
Last week:
Me (to Beth): We should Restaurant Week.
Beth: We should! Haz free times?
Me: Buh? Um. Next Monday, Wednesday or Thursday, possibly?
Beth: Wednesday could work.
Me: OK! *sends email to five people, asking about freeness on Wednesday*
Person 1: I can't do that!
Person 2: Unfortunately, I'm now sick!
Me: Wait, I actually can't do Wednesday either, now!
Beth: And me neither.

All: Uh. Victory?

*headdesk*

So yeah. In the future, I really need to cordon off some Restaurant Week time in advance and actually plan with more than just one possible day available.

...but this is not it.
 
I did, though, want to mention that I made it through Arisia and its two concerts. ( Arisia details )

Oh, and now that Stranger Ways' new album is officially released, allow me to link our bandcamp site for it: http://strangerways.bandcamp.com/album/guilt-angst-fairy-tales

As with everything, I have a hard time not listening for flaws (and I particularly have a hard time listening to my voice), but it's really neat that there's a CD out there that I'm a part of.

So this past Wednesday we moved house. It was a simple move, from downstairs in our house to upstairs. We went from having an apartment on the first floor with one second floor room to an apartment on the second floor with three bedrooms on the third floor.

We thought it was bigger. We did not realise *how much* bigger. We have a totally lovely guest room and hobby room space now, which is really exciting.

Well, okay, we don't have it yet, as it is completely flooded with all our displaced books from every emptied bookshelf and the couple dozen boxes that got dumped in there toward the end of the day when it got to a point of not being able to make it up the second flight of stairs any longer.

Speaking of which, ow. In prior moves, I'd always had my arms and shoulders sore afterward, which, y'know, is a thing, but was livable. This time in addition to those, my legs are completely dead. SO MANY STAIRS. It took us just about five hours worth of purely shifting things up and down stairs. 36 hours later, only now can I *sit down* without wincing, it turns out standing up, though, is a different matter. Also I can now climb stairs, but descending is a bit of an affair. *pathetic*

Anyhow. We're all really happy with the apartment and with the fact that our rude, loud, unfamiliar-with-how-civilization-works former upstairs neighbours are gone. The downstairs folks seem nice, and we're looking forward to having people as neighbours who believe in *discussion* as a method of problem solving, rather than insisting there's no problem, or in response to a request for modification, intentionally modifying the situation *in the opposite direction.*

Whee. Also, y'know, they seem much less likely to start out with issues like having their friends over for a drunken party at 3 AM on a Wednesday. So that's good.

In other fun news, I have a new phone as of yesterday. Same number as before, though. I got a Samsung Infuse. It is kind of largish, but it's thin and light. It's actually sort of like a mini-tablet that happens to also be a phone. Thus far I love it. I can actually *see* things on it. With the old phone, I'd get requests for "what's going on with X" where "X" would be in a screen shot, and at that point, good freaking luck, I have *no idea* what's going on there. I am trying to restrain myself in terms of number of apps I put on this phone. But it's so shiny!

So the long and the short: life is good. Looking forward to unboxing our lives again. Totally looking forward to more shiny phone playtimes. Just wish my calves would stop hurting.