highly volatile travel plans!

the california trip is off.

it went from logistical hitches making me skittish and irritable yesterday evening -- jesse didn't know how soon he could get there, which meant figuring out what to do with myself in L.A. for an indeterminate amount of time. not to mention suddenly needing lodging, since we were intending to stay at his mom's.

to worse -- he came back this afternoon with the news that he has to work monday. after scrambling around to find a workable plan, it became evident that it wasn't happening.

upsides: i still have a voucher good for a ticket to L.A. or to elsewhere. (just not for flying directly to san diego this weekend, hence unreasonably messy logistics; since it was a free ticket, i have to give 14 days notice) MLK day weekend's looking like a possibly a good time to use it to go meet the family and see the area. and i get to catch some of lindy focus and a reunion with college friends.

so the current plan: work friday and monday and keep my vacation days, dance friday night, hang with people i never get to see often enough on saturday and sunday, and head back to asheville to dance all night new year's eve. i hate to miss the last rhythmic arts festival, and i hate not getting expected time with the boyfriend, but other than that i'm pretty freakin' excited about plan b.

it's not that i have bad credit...

i just don't have any credit.

i don't like borrowing--my finances are seriously simple, and i like it that way--so i normally don't have a problem with that. but increasingly, i'm finding a few places where life's a little easier if you have a credit card. so i applied for one. denied.

for getting from los angeles to san diego for the rhythmic arts festival this weekend, life will be much easier if i can rent a car. the one time i previously rented a car, they wanted either credit card or proof that you live where you live. then, i took a copy of my lease.

now i'm on month-to-month, so i have no current lease. no big, i think, as i run out to fish a bill out of the mail.

despite having filled out the little change card a few times, my electric bill still gets addressed to "kate p mahar". not bad, but not quite. d'oh!

hope it's close enough.

i'm not an engineer...

uploading some old photos that've been hanging out on the laptop. this one's from halloween... the latch on my car door got stuck... just after i'd opened the door. i was leaving work a little late, wearing slippers and pajamas (my friend alice's awesome idea for a "costume" -- when, days before halloween, we decided we didn't have a hope of winning the group costume contest, we went for comfy...), hoping to get to a dance in knoxville, and didn't want to wait around for help... after ten or fifteen times closing the door and being disappointed when it once again fell open, i went back in the office and started scavenging for tools... car keys, a flashlight, a screwdriver... none of them made the door shuttable. i called my dad, because that's what i do when i get stuck. he, being an engineer, had a brilliant idea:

duct tape to the rescue!

(fortunately, once i got to the dance, my friend mark was able to show me how to unstick the latch.)

'twas the night before christmas...

since we couldn't actually go to new york city last night (boyfriend's working again today), we did our best with albany. first, to sub in for ice skating at the rockefeller center, home of the really big christmas tree, we attempted ice skating in the empire state plaza, home of the huge egg, seen as it appeared in september, along with the reflecting pool that is currently a skating rink.

don't you wish your city had an egg?

skate rentals were closed, so alas, it was but an attempt. instead, we wandered around the plaza a bit, played on a frozen-over snow bank, and took some scary photos of ourselves.

merry xmas... really, we don't eat small children

initially, i accused jesse of doing something very strange to my camera's exposure settings (for he has professional photographer skillz and very easily could have), but when i turned around, the sky was actually that color.

then, instead of a broadway musical, we went to see the one musical playing in albany -- sweeney todd, the movie. as dark as you could want for a christmas eve. and i was sitting next to one of very few audience members who hadn't heard a story synopsis before buying a ticket, there was the extra fun of surprise reactions.

here's a link to the 1846 penny dreadful text, thanks to robin who posted it a couple weeks ago; i dug it out when we got back to jesse's.

greetings from albany!

i'm here for xmas weekend. the plan was to go to nyc yesterday, but the boyfriend has to work -- i'm learning not to bet on the military's planned time off. still, it's good to be here for evenings together. and i find plenty of ways to keep myself busy.

i just got back from my "if i stay here inside any longer, i'm going to go a little nuts" walk. the leftovers from about a foot of snow that a nor'easter dropped here early last week are still on the ground. as a southerner--climate-wise if not cultural--it's a little strange for me to see large amounts of snow on the ground that don't stop the world. it's probably just as well that it's week-old and visibly dirty, because i don't have waterproof shoes along and i still have to fight the inner seven-year-old who wants to dive into the biggest snowbanks just for fun.

the latest xkcd made me a teensy bit homesick for xmas with the parents... less incompatible sleep schedules, but 11 a.m. as lunchtime has been a minor point of contention ever since i moved out; moving to the eastern time zone has ameliorated it. i'm planning to go visit in a few weeks.

the boyfriend is now on his way home, so signing off. merry christmas, everyone!

babelfishies!

for a minor language geek... you have no idea how much fun it is to have babelfish-like translation bots available in google talk. not that it's hard to get to ye olde babelfish, but putting things right in the email window i always have open is nice. i don't really regularly chat with anybody who doesn't speak english (yet!), but i can amuse myself for hours with this stuff. now waiting on the swedish-speaking bots so my friend mats can tell me how much of a garble they make of things...

20 grains of rice per word...

i, too, have gotten hooked on free rice. improve your vocabulary, donate food to people who need it, what's not to like?

if only they'd have similar sites for other languages' vocabulary...