Hell and Fireflies

Blogging between chores, so this’ll be short and sweet.

New house.

Old walls.

Fresh paint.

Since I’m still settling in, I don’t want to put any new holes in the walls for pictures or anything else. Hang a shadowbox this week, that spot could be behind a bookcase next week, and I’d have marred that bit of paint and drywall forever. (Though if the bookcase stayed put after that, I guess it wouldn’t matter much.) I really don’t want to put holes in the bathroom tile or the basement cinderblock. I’ve had stick-on hooks and holders and whatsits before, and generally they do one or more of these things:

• Break off at the hook
• Separate from the adhesive and fall off, leaving a wad of stick-on foam that can’t be removed short of blasting torch or chisel
• Fall off completely
• Fall off and take a piece of the wall with them, or
• Stay up as intended, but look amazingly ugly the entire time they’re there. The uglier the hook, the greater the staying power, in fact.

Couple months ago, I found stick-on metal hooks, supported by 3M’s Command Adhesive. They’re attractive, they’re easy to install (the hook you see mounts on an easier-to-position plastic base), and if past experience with the Command stuff is any indication, they’ll remove cleanly.

Time to return to those chores I mentioned. Cleaning the oven next. I’m looking forward to that so much, I wrote a whole product review in procrastination.

Economically depressed. We had layoffs at my day job yesterday. I’m employed, but carrying a bit of survivor’s guilt and a little “what hit me?”

On a road trip last May, I caught the middle section of an episode of This American Life. If you’re not familiar with the show, I’ll sum up. It’s a weekly documentary on National Public Radio. I don’t catch it often, but if I tune in, I stay tuned in. It isn’t that the documentary’s subject is always fascinating—it’s the storytelling.

Anyway, this episode focused on what we used to call the “housing crisis.” (If you’ve lost track, that was between “housing bubble” and “credit crunch,” and well before “credit crisis” and “global financial meltdown.”) It’s called “The Giant Pool of Money,” and you can listen to it online. Adam Blumberg (the show’s producer) and Adam Davidson (NPR financial reporter) not only explain what hit you, but how it got that way. If you have that what-hit-me feeling, too, it’ll help.

A little.

Tip of the Day:

When choosing meds to include in your everyday-carry first-aid kit, (yes, I have one—doesn’t everybody?), go with tablets or caplets, not capsules. In my kit, I had five doses of diphenhydramine (generic, mostly, but I’m going to save typing and call them all Benadryl) in sealed foil packets. My poison ivy is driving me mad, so I pulled out a packet. Contents of packet #1: Fragments of capsule shell coated with powdered Benadryl. Contents of packet #2: Ditto. Contents of packets #3 & 4: Usable but slightly cracked capsules, which I’m taking now and later. I haven’t open packet #5, but it’s caplets (brand-name Benadryl, in fact), and I can feel through the packet that they’re just fine.

My everyday kits gets sat on, pulled on, and stuffed into purses, computer bags, and backpacks where other things pile on top of it or press up against it. It’s crammed near to bursting. The surviving packet (no pun intended) is an oversized (i.e. heavier) one with fancy logos and design, but it did the job. The packets that died on me are all from purpose-built first aid kits, and a decent manufacturer’s kits, at that. They’re trim and lightweight, but they’re staying in the car kit from now on.

Yes, I have it again. This will surprise no one who knows me. And once again, my case has quirks.

Last time I got poison ivy, I picked it up from some azaleas. They’d picked up the urushiol (the oil that makes poison ivy, oak, and sumac so evil) from poison ivy growing on the ground next to them. I was scrupulously careful cleaning those out. (My method is to prowl the yard with plastic grocery bags. When I see poison ivy, I put my hand in a bag like a glove, grasp the ivy through the plastic, pull that sucker out, and turn the bag inside out over the plant.) but I hadn’t realized the azaleas were close enough to make contact…so I unlayered my thick, long-sleeved T-shirt and kept working in a yoga top. The next day, I had a truly beautiful, textbook-quality rash: Dramatic, linear presentation along the right arm, where I’d brushed past the azalea leaves; milder, but still wretched, reactions all around that area, where the oil from my elbow had rubbed off onto my shirt and my shirt had spread it as I was working; and plenty of secondary exposure anywhere I’d scratched a mosquito bite after touching that arm.

Today’s case, ladies and gentlemen, is a sporty little rash—a small splash of red on my left jawline, a tiny bump or two on my left arm, and a wide (and quirky) band around my right wrist like a bracelet. Again, I knew there was poison ivy out there. Again, I took elaborate precautions. No exposed skin came into contact with the ivy. I wore decent (washable) gloves. Fat lot of good they’ve done me. At first I thought the “bracelet” was the result of reaching up to scratch my right wrist with my contaminated left glove. But as the days go by, things haven’t improved much. New hypothesis: A tiny bit of ivy stem or root must have fallen into my jacket and spread the sap all over the side of my wrist and the sleeve. The stuff is still in there, and I guess it’s been migrating up, down, and around everytime I’ve moved in, put on, or taken off the jacket.

I’m going to know for sure in a few hours—I forgot my hypothesis this morning and pushed my sleeves up to the elbow. I can hardly wait…

P.S. Two best poison-ivy sites I can find: The Poison Ivy Site and the Poison Ivy, Oak, & Sumac Information Center. Get the facts. Take the quizzes. Know thine enemy!

The surge of activity that brought me to post last Friday has dried up and withered. Foolishly, I thought I should start the new year by setting my little domain in order, sweeping out the cobwebs, and doing all my neglected chores. Now that I’ve slogged through nearly a thousand spam comments and found only seven that merit investigating (I’m pretty sure they’re spam, too), I’m staggering to a halt. My last, feeble energies are going into writing this post and turning on the “must be registered to comment” option…

Next time, I’ll start with the fun bits. I promise.

So…since July, I have

• moved houses (all the way across town)
• moved offices (about 90 yards)
• gotten a new boss (so far, so good)
• helped organize a conference (exhaustingly good fun)
• worked a booth and demonstration for a big festival (JapanFest Atlanta)
• married off two roommates (they did all the work)
• married off my brother (I made a speech!)
• had surgery on my foot (doing great, thanks for asking)
• been busy as heck at work
• been in a kimono fashion show with Bebemochi
• gone shopping for kimono with Mojuko
• gone to a reception at the Japanese Consul-General’s residence (in kimono)
• gone a bit out of my mind getting through the holidays
• written .005 posts per day

I’m back today. I make no promises about tomorrow.

1. Been without blog access for a few months now. Long story, and my apologies to anyone who’s been awaiting my next installment with bated breath.
2. In a perfect world, I’m a guest at Dragon Con at this very moment, reading from my next novel, hanging out with every quirky* Irish musician in town, seeing old friends, and dodging Batmen, Crows, Heroes, Iron Men, stormtroopers, Jedi, Sith, and ninja.
3. This is not a perfect world, and I’m 99.9% certain my guest application was caught in the great Guest Application Fortean Event of 2008. I’ve had my fingers crossed, but my name was not added to the site, I haven’t heard from Guest Services since early July, and I’m not in the guest list in the program, though I am listed as a panelist on the Tolkien track with my good friend Susan Nease.
4. Susan and I have both been moving this summer—house, in my case, and brick-and-mortar yarn shop in hers. (She’s still in business, though, and I’ll update this later with a link to her online store.)
5. Susan and I have been planning this panel (which was going to be simply killer—the Dark Side of Tolkien, discussed from the Mythic Journeys perspective by Susan, from the horror-writing perspective by myself) for a whole year, but could not get together for the final session or two to firm up talking points, references, etc. (Besides which, my Tolkien books were lost in a cardboard box until Wednesday of this week.)
6. The panel, alas, is canceled, since neither of us was prepared to get behind those microphones, er, unprepared. I’ll be stopping by the room we were scheduled for at about that time, just in case folks were counting on seeing me there. Autographs, you know (cough, cough)…or tar and feathers, for canceling on you.

—Kathy

P.S. If you see me, check out my T-shirt. Like, my T-shirt, ’cause I drew it and designed it. I need to write a post about that, actually. I need to write a lot of posts.

* “Quirky” meaning, “strange and geeky enough to want to play Dragon Con as a gig and enjoy it, warts and all.”

So, I’m terrible at my own publicity—should have mentioned this months ago, I suppose, but better late than never.

I’ll be appearing at Fanime 2008 in San Francisco. Don’t know how many of the attendees will have an interest in a gaming author; my closest approaches to anime and Japanese fiction were writing the Hengeyokai supplement for Werewolf: The Apocalypse and typesetting The Road to Science Fiction, Volume 6: Around the World, but that’s entirely beside the point. I’m going to Fanime in my capacity as the kimono-wearing, kitsuke-learning, traditional-Japanese-clothing-studying, obi-weaving, junior moderator on the Immortal Geisha forums. Look for me on the Yukata Interactive panel at 4:00 p.m. on Friday, the Casual Kimono Interactive panel at 8:00 p.m. on Friday, and a panel on How to Dress as a Geisha at 11:00 a.m. Saturday. Also, we’ll be doing a kimono fashion show at 2:00 p.m. Sunday—that should be a hard one to miss, since we’ll have a stage and a hall and everything.

Photos to come…

Last year, during a frenzy of sewing kimono, I became 100% fed up with my tomato pincushion. It was never where I needed it, my red glass pins were hard to see against it, and it tended to roll away if set in any really useful position (such as resting on my knee). I had bought some old shirts to use as patches on a noragi (a working kimono jacket, often frugally patched until the original fabric is hard to identify). I had cut off all the parts I didn’t need—anything with seams in—and I used them to make a pincushion on the spot.

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It’s been a busy, bleary, and weary March—one flat tire, two kinds of “check engine” lights, 10 days of flu, and a jury duty summons in a pear tree. But in cleaning up from the flu and some things that made the month worthwhile (a weavers’ guild meeting and a road trip to see very old, very good friends), I stumbled across a pile of folders that went missing in the great post-Thanksgiving clear-out of 2007. Inside the best of them lay all my hand-written notes for posts-yet-to-be, including the Dragon Con wrap-up and public thanks to all concerned. I mean, everybody. All the business cards and e-mail addresses written on paper napkins or bits of pocket program were in there, too. I’ve been carrying around the guilt of not writing about or to any of the people in the folder, and I’m hoping to settle up with my conscience before the weekend (and March) are out.

Whew.