Anime Explo

Anime Expo's alley will be opening for pre-reg on the 31st, but they released the paperwork this afternoon. Leafing through the announcements I noticed that staff have doubled the price for a traditional-sized table from $50 to $100, in addition to the $50 registration fee that you must pay before you can even apply for the alley spot. They also put in about a hundred more tables, which fits my personal definition of "oversaturation."

I thought to myself, yeah but still... and then I stopped to consider the cost of travel and expenses, the hassle of tax registration, the fact that I don't like SoCal very much. Mulling all of that over gave me a nasty feeling that my AX 09 plans had just fallen through with a resounding "meh."

BUT FUCK THAT NOISE, WHO'S UP FOR DETOUR NEXT MONTH?

PANIC! AT THE OLD HEIDELBERG II

Me: Now where'd I put that audiobook? Maybe I put it on the external drive.
Maxtor Backup Drive: Haha, folder corrupt.
Me: What, the whole thing?
Maxtor Backup Drive: Yup. Pretty much the whole thing.
Windows: That folder's empty for real though.
Me: Shut up, Microsoft. YOU JUST ATE 450 GIGS' WORTH OF DATA?
Maxtor Backup Drive: Oh. Um, so did you not want me to fail, then?
Me: ARGGHHLBARGLL

Seebs is sodomizing the drive at the moment with his sonic screwdriver. He says the files show up. As to whether they're usable, all is mystery.

I can replace the iTunes stuff (they allow you to re-get lost content) that makes up a good chunk of the lost date. My giant audiobook collection, videos, all the saved images and data I was moving around... not so much.

FUCK.

For once, however, my art, music and comic files are in no danger since they still exist on the main system.

YOUUUU DOG

I got all my work done today and decided to spend the evening vegetating in Best Chair under my super-soft plush blanket. The Captain, as he often does, kept walking over and laying his head on my leg and staring at me, so finally I let him jump up and watch Bullshit! with me. OOF, sixty-five pound lap-dog. In a few minutes he settled down and went to sleep with his butt in my lap and his head almost hanging over the foot-rest of Best Chair.

It was an excellent time until he had a very upsetting dream of some kind. He started twitching and woofling, and his hackles went up in a stiff mane and stayed that way for a while. Next thing I know I smell this rotten stink and look down, and sure enough my beloved sleeping puppy has pooped on me a little bit.

Fifteen minutes later, the super-soft plush blanket is in the wash, and the arm of Best Chair is soaked through with antibacterial cleaner from a merciless scrubbing.

I wonder what he could have been dreaming about that literally scared the shit out of him.

My Teefs Is Broken

I've been beefing up my dental hygiene routine by making sure the last thing I do before bed every day is floss. This has been working out pretty well for me since I have a battery-powered gizmo that does most of the work, and I do not want to lose my teeth. I have what could probably be diagnosed as a full-on phobia of tooth-related trauma. If I don't brush, I have nightmares about my teeth getting loose and coming out in slow motion, which is a perverse but excellent source of motivation.

That said, I bet you already know where this entry is going.

A few minutes ago I was going through my floss routine while watching some Battlestar Galactica, when I hit a snag between my front lower teeth. I've been pretty scared of the possibility of decay below the gumline since it usually feels rough between those two teeth and the floss sometimes catches, but having no insurance makes it a lot easier to hope the problem goes away on its own, so that's exactly what I've been doing to combat the problem.

This time that snag was more pronounced than before, and when I guided the floss back out, it caught up on something for a second. It came free, and then all of a sudden there were hard little pieces of grit in my mouth.

I spat them out in my hand for a closer look and one of them was shiny on one side. FUCK.

So I totally panicked and went whining to the roomies with my tooth-chunks and fear, and the general consensus was that my enamel has deteriorated and I need a dentist.

Jesse asked me when I had my last appointment with a dentist. I told him 1996. He said that's probably why my mouth is falling apart.

NOOOOOOOO! Postive thinking and mouthwash, you have betrayed me!

Meanwhile, my problems sleeping have made me fucking useless. I blew last week's update for the protest, and this one I basically sleep-walked through in a daze of exhaustion. How I envy people who have functioning circadian rhythms. My weekly battle with the infamous slow-creeping schedule flip means I rarely have any sense of time or continuity, and my work suffers the consequences. It's hard to get any usable ideas out of a head that's only half-awake, so if I'm not sleeping right, I'm probably not working either.

Maybe having to do 200 commissions to pay for dental repairs will stabilize things a bit, but I may end up having to buy an alarm clock and setting it so it'll alert me when it's bedtime every night.

(PS: Oh God oh God please don't let my teeth fall out)

Everyone's Out To Get You, Motherfucker

Something else has apparently gone wrong.

Remember how Mom put me on her Wells Fargo account back in the day?

Well, she took out a loan at some point and had been paying it back at a fixed rate of $50 per month, automatically deducted from her SSI benefits. You see where this is going?

Her benefits have stopped on account of EXTREME DEATH, but my brother just informed me that the deductions have not. Not only is her account in negative balance, they're also tacking on a fee for each transaction. Or something. I found out about this too late to call them and get the information for myself. I don't even know if I'm on the hook for it, because I know nothing about how debts work. When I incur them, I either pay them off or run away until they default.

I have to call the bank tomorrow and find out what's going on. Fuck's sake.

Also, my little baby basil sprouts (which I have been gleefully showing off to the housemates as if I had personally given BIRTH to them) fell out of the window and the pot smashed on the floor. I was able to save the plants and re-home them in a tiny Halloween bucket painted to look like a kitty, but I'm worried that there might have been trauma to my babies. But that might be oversharing a bit.

My brother got taken in for $220 on an eBay transaction and his complaint to PayPal got no response. He's as unfamiliar with the internets as I am with the bank and financial world, so I've volunteered to help him try to get either the auto part or his money back.

All of this has happened in the 2 hours since waking up today.

I'm still not done with the pages, because everything has been going wrong since I woke up. I'm working on them, though. My sense of personal responsibility is going apeshit and won't shut up until I can keep a promise, any promise.

Looking on the bright side, it's a very nice day out. I haven't been able to leave the house to enjoy it, but maybe next week things will be different.