Through The Ivory Gates

wyomingnot @ 04:26 pm: ( cut for image )

wyomingnot @ 08:55 pm: How can the weekend basically be over already?

Between yesterday with Karita and today with Mom, my house is almost ready for the family Christmas dinner next Saturday. All that's left is the bathroom. Yay! Well, not yay for the bathroom, but... you know.

My camera's battery crapped out this morning, so I can't share the newest socklets. I've managed to lose the camera's charging cable again, so I ordered a funky penguin-shaped battery charger. Hopefully that won't be so easily lost.

Scarves have been bundled up and are ready for the post office tomorrow.

My driveway's almost all melted now. Had temps in the low 40s today. Lots of snow melting, which means tons of mud and less effort to get up the driveway. :)

The new jeans I bought online on Black Friday arrived last week. I took a chance and ordered a pair in size 16. Today they passed the dryer test. YAY. Of course, this means that the pairs I bought in size 18 have to go back. I think I'm okay with that. ;)

Bought the food for the family Christmas dinner. Did that with mom. Was kinda fun grocery shopping with mom.

I've been on-call today. Thankfully haven't had to go in. At this point, there's just one checkpoint left open. When that sucker closes, the phone gets turned off and I go the heck to bed.

wyomingnot @ 08:01 pm: What I've been up to tonight at work.


( cut so as not to break anyone's flist with too-big pics )



Tags: knitting, workworkwork

wyomingnot @ 10:48 pm: driveway update


Since you're all dying to know...

I did make it far enough up the driveway tonight. On essentially the first try.

Essentially because I managed to kill it and had to restart, but I didn't really roll back, so it still should count as being the first try. Hitting the drive faster than usual and in second gear seems to be the answer.

Vaguely related factoid... I have owned only one car with an automatic transmission. That was my first car ('79 Mustang), and it was totalled the day after I bought it.

:)



Tags: you kids get off my lawn!

wyomingnot @ 07:05 pm: randomly


So lately I've been feeling.... chatty. Wanting to talk to people. Not about anything, mostly about nothing.

The problem with this is the fact that my pager and my phone are one and the same. I can't get pages when I'm on the phone. So nattering is right out in the evenings when most people would be available to listen to me.

I keep poking the internet tonight. Well, dw and lj.

I'm reading a really long sg-1 fic, but my lack of attention span is making that slow going.

I'm also knitting. See above about attention span.

I made it up the driveway last night (on the fourth and final attempt. it was going to be the final whether I made it up or not). Well, halfway. Which is where I park most of the time anyhow. I tried chipping away at the packed down stuff this morning. It's a lost cause until it freaking melts. I still dumped some ice melt on it. I figure it's highly unlikely I'll make it up tonight. Whatever.

Right now I desperately want a nap. Or to chitchat. Either way. And neither seems doable right now. :(

wyomingnot @ 11:27 am: Winter - 2, Camille - 0


Winter is kicking my ass so far. Could not get the driveway cleared enough to even bother trying to get the car up. And the car was not fun trying to get out of the spot it was in. It's still in the street, but hopefully it won't be in another big drift when I go to leave for work.

Yeah, it's blowing and drifting out there. I ran the snowthrower and did my two long swaths, and then got energetic and actually cleared the whole bottom third... then I looked up and saw that snow had all blown into the top part. Also, when I say I cleared the bottom third, that's not entirely true. My efforts to get up the driveway last night packed and froze up and I could not dislodge much of the mess.

Oh! I took pictures before I started. ( are you really clicking this? )

Tags: you kids get off my lawn!

wyomingnot @ 10:51 pm: snow sucks, redux


It fucking snowed this evening. I have no idea how much.

Enough to make it impossible to get up my damn driveway.

Car is parked on the street. Hope it's not a "snow emergency", because I live on a snow emergency route and will get ticketed (or possibly towed, I suppose). Hell, hope nobody smashes into it. Streets are not in the best condition and people drive too fast through here.

And tomorrow will be the special fun of digging my car out from the inevitable snowplow mess. And clearing the driveway again to see if I can get up then.

*headdesk*



Tags: you kids get off my lawn!

wyomingnot @ 04:19 pm: my driveway


Please to note the title of my journal-- "An Exercise in Self-Indulgence". How else can you explain sharing pictures of a driveway?

( cut for not-overly-large pics )

It started to rain about the time I was leaving for work (when the pics were taken). I've got my fingers crossed that all that nicely cleared driveway isn't a solid sheet of ice when I get home tonight.

Oh, and randomly... my most recent completed knitting project...
( Read more... )
:)



Tags: you kids get off my lawn!

wyomingnot @ 12:09 pm: Snowy Tuesday


I have no idea what the official accumulation was, but I just cut a couple long swaths through snow that was six inches deep on my driveway.

With the snowthrower I bought last year and never used. :) I'm glad it works. And dingaling me still hadn't removed the pricetag thingy dangling off it (I bought the floor sample). I had to learn a bit about paying attention to where I was going when I managed to do a diagonal across one part of the drive. Oops.

The snow is very pretty, I will admit. But I am not looking forward to driving in it.

And there's snow/sleet mix in the forecast for this afternoon/evening, so it's possible all my driveway work will be for nothing.

*shrug*



Tags: you kids get off my lawn!

wyomingnot @ 11:26 am: snow sucks


Who knew that depression would change my attitude about snow and winter in general? I sure didn't.

I just spent entirely too long outside clearing my too-fucking-long driveway and then my car...

I have a detached garage. It sits at the back of the property, so it's a little walk from the door. And spiders live there when the weather isn't bad, so normally I don't use the garage. But this time of year, it's in my best interest to deal with the walk and just park inside. Especially if I'm not paying attention to the weather. I swear the crap was thicker on the car than it was on the driveway.

And we didn't even get that much snow, but there was frozen crap underneath, so it was a pain to clear. And really, my driveway's not all that clear. I probably should have used more ice melt. I may regret that when I come home tonight.

All the snow can just stop. We don't need any snow this winter. Or any frozen precipitation, period.



Tags: you kids get off my lawn!

ngaio @ 01:15 pm: Today
So I'm not carrying a stone baby. Which is good. ... OK, so it's not like I was expecting to be told I was carrying a stone baby but it was an ultrasound and I had weird thoughts/dreams last night and then freaked Allegra out in the car. In fact the answer is that my insides are fine and dandy. Which I am happy about. But at the same time it'd be nice if there was something small wrong which could be fixed and solve the problem you know? Or at least give me ammunition for my 'please just remove my womb' argument.

There's this t-shirt I want making. When my dept. were out on Thursday I was slapping my boss (Wizard) upside the head every time he got too loud so we didn't get chucked out of the restaurant. And then was sitting with my hands in boxercise guard position threatening to hit him. I forgot that Wizard used to teach martial arts and can kill you with his pinky finger, and he told me my guard position was wrong and corrected it. So I'm there with my right hand in the right place and my left hand in the right place and him going 'and your elbow has to be close in to your side' whereupon I looked down and uttered the immortal words: 'I have topographical issues' ... so now I really want a t-shirt, possibly scoop necked, which says 'topographical issues' on it!

Thank you phoebesmum, ruric, and llaras for the snowflakes. I'm now really wanting shortbread but luckily we've not got any in the house so that's OK.

It's raining. But the birds have discovered the feeders so I'm happy.

ngaio @ 05:35 pm: Cards
So I managed to actually send cards to everyone who answered my poll (technically I've actually just written them, tomorrow I'll send them!) though not the possibly planned parcels (I'll do those in the new year).

So - if you didn't answer the poll and would like a card, please let me know. Comments here are screened or you can email me at ngaio dot wimsey at gmail dot com

ngaio @ 05:32 pm: Wow
I have been, for me, amazingly productive this weekend.

I have:

Washed and refilled the bird-feeders, including mixing suet and meal worms (ew!) into the seed for some proper winter food for the birds.
Rehung said bird-feeders. Hopefully the birds will find them again soon.
Put all my clean clothing away (which could be a problem when the next lot of washing dries as I'm out of hangers).
Had my lip, chin and eyebrows waxed
Reduced my open tabs down from around 30 to my usual 8
Washed up (I'll admit, I don't normally do this, Henry does, but I was feeling virtuous!)
Watched Mansour Bahrami my sexy Iranian tennis playing boyfriend 'perform' at the Albert Hall (OK, that's not productive per se but oh boy was it fun!)
Visited fandom-colleague (with Allegra and Dylan) and introduced him to the world of fanvids, and watched The Plan and a few bits of BSG ephemera and now I really need to watch the whole thing (I stopped about a quarter of the way into the first series) - my February holiday may be entirely TV based!
Organised all my fanvids on my hard-drive as I realised that having grabbed a whole lot in October I'd never sorted them
Written and addresses Christmas cards to all people who answered my poll ages ago (there will be a related post after this on this topic)

And tomorrow (day off) I have to:
Go to the hospital for an ultrasound
Possibly go to the gym
Do a bunch of brought home work
*Post* the Christmas cards
Answer LJ comments

...

Remind me to tell you about my t-shirt I want somewhen.

wyomingnot @ 04:07 pm: Okay, whom do I need to thank? A Stargate: SG-1 Christmas ornament just arrived at my home.

THANK YOU!!!

It's on the tree now, after a bit of playing with the lights and hearing some of what it had to say.

Meanwhile, I've started clipping for my festivids assignment. Heck, I've got a couple clips in place. But that's all the further I'm going with that until I'm done clipping. I didn't go with the fandom I was matched on, but rather a movie I haven't seen before.

I just typed in "christmas" in my Media Monkey search box. Result? 1375 tracks. Huh. I had no idea. Seriously, I thought I had cleared a lot of holiday music off the computer. Wait. Just figured it out... I *did* remove a ton of stuff. Media Monkey hadn't updated the library. 537 tracks now. That's a bit more reasonable. ;)

I'm not really feeling the season yet, which is disappointing. I'm going to take a computer break this evening and wrap some presents. I'm hoping that will help.

Oh! Worth mentioning, I think. I hung stuff up on the walls today! I've been in this house for over a year, and the only stuff on the walls was hung on nails already in the wall. Today marks my first nail pounding.

Enough random for now. Back to the vidding process...