On West Egg

GUESS WHAT, Y'ALL.

No really, guess.




Have you guessed yet? No? I guess I'll give you more time.




Oh, well now that's not terribly kind. But I guess it counts as a guess.

Well you're wrong. IT'S MY BIRTHDAY! I am now a quarter of a century old. It was a pretty uneventful day, though. I worked both my jobs, which didn't really leave time to do anything much else (I've been working part time at a college bookstore during their rush on top of full-time at my regular workplace, btw).

Oh, and I work eight hours tomorrow.

BUT THEN TWO DAYS COMPLETELY OFF FUCK YEAH. :DD

In other news, I have moved across town from the two-bedroom apartment I'd been in to a room in a townhouse that I moved into July 30th and has only juuust stabilized as far as residents overall go. (OMG SOON THE KITCHEN CABINETS WILL MAKE SENSE AND IT WILL BE GLORIOUS.)

So, my rent is up but it includes cable and heat and electric and internet and water and and and, so my bills are actually down. Working 40 hours a week (up from the 38 I had before getting the new position mid-July) has given a slight-but-noticeable increase to my income, and when I officially get the position in payroll, I'll be getting about $1.50/hr more, plus benefits.

OH HEY I FINISHED THAT PAPERWORK TODAY, HAPPY BIRTHDAY ME.

Also, last week the super uncompetent manager got fired, and while the new one is young and over ambitious and kind of on the fast-track to burnout (AND TOTALLY NOT KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT VENDORS AT ALL OMG, though he does at least outwardly acknowledge that I know what I'm talking about and if I say "don't do that again because" he probably won't do it again), his lofty goals are at least good goals, and he's still probably going to be better than the old one after burning out.

OH AND HEY. After like one-and-a-quarter years I have finally stopped being and Ohio licensed driver and got my PA one, and transferred the title and got a new insurance policy and everything.(Oh and I registered to vote, which I have been FAILBOT at for a while. Uh.)

I live here. With growing savings.

And I can probably go off food stamps soon! (Should, even. THAT IS MY GOAL FOR NEXT WEEK.)

(I set goals and follow through now. Soon there may even be lists. Because I'm a MOTHERFUCKING ADULT WTF.)

Oh hey, two days off. Maybe I'll finally get caught up on my currently releasing toku (well, the old stuff. I watch the weeklies and will miss OOO dreadfully) so that I can get back to the completed series I was in the middle of and last watched/live-tweeted at least like two months ago?

Or I could finish PONIES. They are starting up again soon...

(Also at some point over those days I intend to finish the scene where [redacted] from the ridiculous powerless HS AU Samurai fic I haven't worked on at all since starting. Maybe this time I won't get distracted by the internet.)

Sorry, you guys I just have SO MUCH to catch you up on.

...OH YEAH. I got (hopefully the last time ever) texted out of nowhere by Awful Ex about how he's so glad I'm still in this town and how he hopes I succeed at life and blah blah blah "I'm still in love with you."

I have two exes. How many "I'm still in love with you" messages have I gotten? TWO. WHAT THE HELL. :| At least Awful didn't wait THREE YEARS to send that one.

Also, he says he's deleted my number but AHAHAHAH EXPECTING HIM NOT TO LIE.

Oh, and he tried a "remember me by the good times" thing except the "good times" he chose were A)after he broke up with me B)a thing he was doing on his own that just happened in the same room I was in sometimes, and C)was a series he was marathoning six seasons of with the tv set loud enough that I couldn't sleep well. GOOD TIMES, MAN.

And then he misspelled my name. (And, correcting for spelling, used my birth name and not the one I go by, which is just a dick move.) (For those wondering, he didn't misgender me, I just... don't go by my birth name much anymore. It was still totally disrespectful and dismissive of my wishes, but there wasn't dysphoria or anything triggery. Just what would have been major annoyance if I had any fucks to give about him anymore.)

I think that's everything but IDK.

tl;dr: Life has been steadily improving. With health care in three months! \o/

I've written a bunch of things. Enough things, at this point, that I feel like a fic master list isn't a waste of time. (Well, it might have been a waste of some of the ridiculous amount of time it took to put together. WHY DID I NOT RATE THAT LONG STORY WAY BACK WHEN. I HAD TO READ THE WHOLE THING. GOD.)

Anyway, the list is here. There might be something on it that you never knew I wrote! (Especially since there's a fic from 2006 - my first fic ever, and only fic for A VERY LONG TIME.)

JSYK.

Um, so. 1915 more words. Just sent it to second_batgirl. Was asked to pinch hit at about 9:30? It is now 12:44.

I was not lying when I said that I like words and they like me.

Also, it is good to know that my skill at banging out fic is not dependent on my having the fic in my head for like two months and then going OHSHIT DEADLINE. \o/

So I'm in Alpha's Magical Fic Exchange (because Power Rangers, you guys. You guys, Power Rangers), and I totally thought that the fic was due on the 8th and totally hadn't written anything. I was blanking on the minimum word count (not that I had any worries about making it; I like words and they like me back), so I went to the signup post to refresh.

AND HOSHITSHITFUCK THE FIC IS DUE TOMORROW.

So I banged out 1998 words of pure ridiculousness and now I cannot immediately share them with you because they are for a fic exchange. ;_;

second_batgirl (the one running the exchange, for those who don't care not in the know) had good things to say when she read it, for what it's worth.

She also tried teasing me about the fic I'm getting, but I pretended to be was immune, so she stopped.

I finally got back to importing entries from when I was on Blogger to this LJ, in part so they'll get archived offline with the rest of my LJ posts (ljArchive is a nice little tool), but largely so that all my online journaling will be in one place. (Once I finish with Blogger, I'll move on to the Xanga I had.)

OH MY GOD DOING THIS SUCKS. I have to open up each Blogger post-in-edit-mode in it's own tab in order to copypaste it over (because I'm not going in and hand-inserting italics tags and so on if I copypasted from the blog itself), but also have the blog open since the edit windows don't show the date of the post anywhere obvious, nor the time, and I need to properly backdate these things.

Plus, I have to do a month of posts at once or else I'll never remember where I left off, which means doing this SO MANY TIMES IN A ROW. I posted at an incredible rate back then compared to what I do now, and so much of it was UNIMPORTANT SHIT. There's a reason I have a "why I regret importing everything" tag, and it's only going to see more use as I go on. At least the frequency with which I have to use the "gratuitous Japanese" tag is going down already, and I'm only five months into a good few years worth of posts. (Thankfully, I do have a dead spell in early college, and I don't get back up to my ridiculous posting frequency until after I already was on LJ. Less thankfully, that ridiculous posting frequency continues past where I've imported to for some time.)

Did I mention I started this importing old posts project in 2008? Yeah. Still going to finish... someday. At least the "read through everything in one go" project that will follow will be significantly easier.

(Mostly I'm just making this post so everyone will go to my archives and lol over how ridiculous I was in 2001. Because oh god, was I.)

So, I've done a few things. One, I've got all my prompts in order, and am about 97% set on what stories I'm going to write to fill them. I think that the hoops I'd have to jump through to include the Shinkenger story I want to write are a strong sign that that prompt is where I can pick up the TF slack, and Zeo never quite gets its own story, but it shares in more stories than any other season, I think, and one of the stories is going to be very Machine Empire focused, so I'm okay with that. (Besides, all the Zeo rangers were in other seasons, so.)

Also: I have come to the conclusion that I am going to write THE WHOLE THING first, and then give you a fic a day for ALMOST A MONTH. A MONTH.

It will be awesome.



...If I survive

Just once, I'd like a writing project I take on to remain the size I originally thought it was, or maybe even wind up shorter than expected.

You guys, I'm not just aiming for a blackout on my Ranger Bingo card. I'm aiming for a 'Verse. I'd like to stay fairly mum about the thing, since god knows I'm going to be jiggering the thing about significantly before I start setting anything to paper (which is why even though I promised a story a week, nothing's been forthcoming yet). All I'm going to say right now is the running theme of the stories is "The thing you're proudest of that you've never told anyone."

There will be pan-season stories, and stories that focus on each of the seasons individually (although right now Time Force gets some of its focus split to SPD. I may have to pull one of the RPM stories over even though I really like both ideas. And I guess Zeo and PRiS are sharing a bit, too. Hm). And if I feel like any of the seasons get shafted in covering the bingo card, I guess I'll consider "FREE SPACE" a prompt, or just write something that fits in. There's going to be a lot of room to insert moments into canon, the way I plan to write this.

(Oh, and second_batgirl don't worry - you'll get more details, just not here ;D )

I'm amused. According to my LJ Statistics page, which tracks the most recent 100 logged-in visitors for your last 30 days, I had one person reading something here on the 5th, three on the 13th, and then 77 logged-in LJers have been to my journal since that fic went up. I know at least one has been a repeat visitor, and I've got at least one more bump coming when the story gets linked in the next spandex_report.

Of course, I'd probably have more visitors if I wrote something every now and again, yeah? But that's silly talk.

In matters of actual import, I really like the apartment (all we've got left are like a couple mid-size boxes of CJ's stuff in the bedroom, and a handful of things that are waiting for shelves to go up out of the cats' reach in the living room. (Okay, out of one of the cats' reach. Athena can't even get up on the futon, because she is like the definition of a Fat Cat. Hades is, unsurprisingly, exceptionally evil, even for a cat.)

We've got a few other items we'd like to get, too. We're going to be getting a DVD/VHS combi, because even though the market no longer has a place for them we, like many other people, don't feel like buying the movies we already have on VHS again. Plus, my high school band state competition performace recordings are on VHS, and I'd like to show those to CJ someday.

We also need colored tape or spray paint for the dining room chairs we picked up, because the gold really stands out in the apartment, and we unintentionally picked up a suble 5-color rainbow theme to the apartment, and the chairs have five bars running up the back.

Also, we discovered that if you tell a designer that they have 5 colors with which to make a rainbow, they always throw out orange. Always. It's like the most mundane conspiracy ever.

I still haven't found a job because, well, college town in the summer. Almost nobody is hiring. Don't mind looking, because we're about 2 miles and lots of hill away from the main commercial area by campus, so I'm getting exercise again. Plus, I got HeartGold, so I get a ton of Watts in the Pokewalker.

There've been some rough moments, because High Stress + Preexisting Issues = Yelling between CJ and I, but we've worked things out (at least for now), which is always nice.

We're having a belated housewarming party (because we're going to need the funds to throw a party first and, um, we don't right now) in mid-July. If any of you on my flist think you can make it to Mid-Pennsylvania on a Saturday, you're more than welcome to get in touch with me and try to come, but I understand that y'all likely can't.

Did I miss anything? I dunno. Ask me stuff!

What the hell. Also, I wrote it in like three day, so at least I can rest assured I have good output as long as I have ideas.

The one thing that sucked about moving right when I was going to start writing for the fest is that I seriously just posted a first draft that I didn't even have the time to scan for typos, let alone structural or pacing issues, go "to print".

That's scary.