Updates and the like

Got to the board meet yesterday all in one piece and without getting significantly lost on the way! This is probably a large part due to the fact that a) I have a talking car that is smarter than me and b) the boy was driving. Met Masq, Fresne, Vicki, Miyu, Sheri, Buffyboy and Liq, had good food and very tasty margaritas. Have a picture as well, but due to absent-mindedness on my part, the camera's still off in the boy's room, so I can't upload it =(. And wow! I met up with hecatehatesthat before for the Buffy finale, but I still get so surprised when I see people in person! It's not even as though I have pictures in my head as to how people look.. well, actually, I always think they look like their icons. So my general visual impression of Masq pre-meet would be an icon of someone in a pink shirt frantically typing away or a blue mask, etc. Now I'm giggling at the picture of a whole bunch of floating user icons sitting around a table. But now I have voices to match LJ entries! I just hope the poor boy wasn't too bored being tech support, although without him there I could have never engineered whatever he did to get us online. And it was just really nice talking to fandom people who wouldn't look at me funny if I said something about having to have the TV Guide with Angel and Spike on the cover or other sundry affairs. Plus, not to stereotype, but I've discovered that there is a tendency for people who I know from fandom to read the things I read and watch the things I watch (ex. Gaiman, anime, fantasy, etc.) and for people who read and watch the things I do to be more.. susceptible (?) to fandom. Of course this isn't a perfect correlation or anything, but I think if I asked one of the people on LJ about the latest Neil Gaiman thing out, there would be a greater chance that they knew who I was talking about.

(Leafblower guy has started again, grrr)

Speaking of Gaiman, I succumbed to temptation (which I seem to be doing quite often now) and hied myself to a comic book store and got the first issue of 1602. It was six dollars!! For this little pieces of paper!! I could buy a big paperback for about that much! Anyhow, next time I'll probably wait for the bound version to come out instead of shelling out six bucks every time. Sigh. But oh, it's gorgeous and pretty and the colors are absolutely stunning. And I'm enjoying it so much already -- the premise is that Gaiman is taking classic Marvel characters from pre-1969 and putting them in Elizabethan England, where the world is apparently coming to an end. I don't know that much about the Marvelverse, but with all the movies coming out and with my occasional reads of X-Men and Batman (I know, not Marvelverse but sometimes they cross over), I could pick up a good deal of the characters. It was like a scavenger hunt ^_^. Then of course the second I finished it I had to get online and look up the annotations.

Other than that, not much reading has been getting done this week =(. Mostly I've been spending all my after-work time with the boy, who's running around trying to set up his room and etc. I have also done tons and tons of origami, since the boy has finally unearthed our origami-of-the-day calender (I like origami. And jigsaw puzzles. And charades. And all those dorky things ^_^). Oh I forgot how weird I felt after yesterday was over. First was the board meet, which was nice, but which also entailed meeting new people and socializing. Then (worse still) the boy had some GSB (grad school of business) barbeque thing which he took me too, in which I met a LOT of new people and had to be all social and whatnot. Too much socializing with unknown people gives me this kind of weary, odd, the world has shifted by a few degrees and everything is a bit off kind of feeling. I've gotten quite used to my own company in the past two months, with occasional socializing with the boy, the aunties, Ning and Ning's friends, all of whom I have known for an extended period of time. I dunno... seeing all those people, esp. at the grad school, made me feel as though my life were boring and that me and the boy don't do much. But really, that isn't true. Plus, everything's all odd because though my schedule is now firmly in place, his still isn't, so I'm spending a lot more time with him than I probably will in the future. Which is nice, yes, but on the other hand, I'm not getting my normal computer and book time. I kind of miss that about being single. But sometimes I just need a little downtime where I can catch up with everyone on LJ and catch up on my massive reading list.

Anyhow, today is my day, since the boy has all sorts of GSB stuff -- laundry, grocery shopping, LJ, reading and cooking ahoy! And the calla lily must be repotted.

Squick

I did many things today -- grocery shopped, repotted the calla lily, laundry and etc. And I invented a casserole that tasted pretty good.

Just finished reading Octavia E. Butler's Dawn and Donna Jo Napoli and Richard Techen's Spinners. Both good books -- Dawn talks about nuclear holocaust and the survivors being rescued by aliens who want to mingle genetic data. Sounds silly, but works out to be an interesting book on what it is to be human, how different one can be before not being yourself, communities and the building thereof. Spinners is a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin. Not so much a retelling, since the authors stick to the plot completely, but they flesh out all the characters and make them real people. And oh it's a miserable book. Not the craft of it, which is good, but just so depressing! I think I'm going to have to stop reading Donna Jo Napoli because almost everything in her books end in death and destruction and in human faults never being redeemed or anything. It's a rather bleak worldview, IMHO. And Dawn wasn't much happier of a read, so now I'm desperately backpedaling and picking up Nora Roberts, which is much more feel good.

That is all.