a fic recommendation

She's going to friendslock the fic soonish, but for the moment, it's still open. Fans of LotR who've at least given the Appendices a glance should enjoy this obscure-but-obvious pairing. Helps if you like the King James Bible too.

... even our bones, they shall not see it.

Downfallen, by aesc, who if you would believe is an old college chum of mine. (I just like saying it that way.) A lamentation for a lost love, and much more, but containing nothing explicit.

o cruel snowdrifts of fate

By the drifting of the snow in the wind, half of our driveway was clear. From the windows, this looked good: little to shovel. I couldn't guess at our total accumulation, but I'm going to make a wild stab and say eight inches. Of that mean grainy-sticky blizzard snow.
So Dave went out light-heartedly to get rid of the drifts in front of the garage (two feet high) and at the front of the house (a foot or so).

Well, the other half of the driveway was also under a two-foot drift for its entire length.

Pain in the ass. But, we persevered, and I am nicely warmed up for work now, i guess. (Ugh. Sticky. I hate exercising in the cold because you can never find a good temperature to be.)

We ate Chinese takeout and watched The Bourne Supremacy last night. It was fun; exciting movie, nice complex plot, Karl Urban looking ratty, Matt Damon's nose is really big. Hell of a car chase-- I liked all the camera work from inside the cars being struck, though I think it might have been a little more interesting had they acknowledged that there ought to have been people inside those other cars. They were trying to make the move realistic and human? Oh well. Dave hadn't seen the prequel and didn't really need to, though we might watch it at some point if we ever get bored enough.

Today I hope to get some sort of control over ch. 5. The events in it are unfolding far too abruptly, as I've shifted so much of the sequence around. i cut out a night because it was too slow-paced, but that makes everything that ensues happen rather too quickly. Curses on this 'pacing' thing.
But I am still confident in Ch. 4, which means that can go up tomorrow without a problem. Just... I'd hoped to stay 2 chapters ahead at all times in case of drastic time-crunch problems, and I haven't. I hope I can make some time this week and get things done! I have a lot to do tomorrow, though-- things that should have gotten done last wed&thu (my weekend) but didn't because I was playing with a puppy in Melrose instead. Bah. Chapter 5 needs to behave.

I have to leave for work in 45 minutes, and in that time have to eat lunch. Feh. Y'know, I like earning money, and I don't mind doing the work either, but I resent the incursions into my free time. Yes, i am aware that I am a ridiculous human being.

Web Toys!

The lovely Dave has finally updated his website.
What has he put on his website?

His Web Toys.

Yes. For any of you who may have forgotten, amidst all my whining about how he never does anything around the house and we're so broke, Dave is actually a hardcore computer geek, and indeed has four years' experience as a software engineer, and Knows His Shit. Also, he likes to screw around with computers, which is where you get the cool stuff.

My favorite part, personally, is the banner on the page. That kind of ugliness doesn't happen casually. No... that took him all afternoon. That's a complicated javascript. Run your mouse over it a couple times. It's kind of addictive.

For Kat, who thought the Homestar Runner cartoon randomizer might be cool? Here it is.

Any who like Renaissance madrigals may want to see possibly the world's only PowerPoint-generated madrigal music video, Chi Chilichi. Oh yes. Animation, music, and... gritty Italian realism. (Done the hard way, of course. This is Dave, people. Nothing easy is good. Things are better because they're more complicated, see? The result being, it's the best damn PowerPoint you're ever going to see.)

Any of you with Mac OS X can play with the DT-1000, but for the rest of you there's not much point, as it requires OS X in order to run. Dave cobbled that one together for a class and didn't have time for cross-platform crap.

And those of you who have ever lived in, been through, or heard of North Jersey may appreciate this one:
The Bergen County Suburb Name Generator.
At the top of the page there's a list of suburb names. If there's a link beside it that says "taken", it's real. I'm not shitting you. Click the links.

"Woodcliff Lake" was one of our most successful names. This, despite the fact that the three most striking features of the future Woodcliff Lake are not a cliff, lake, or even small forest, but rather a "flagship" A&P grocery store; a strip mall with a pizzeria, a Chinese food buffet, and two "New York-Style" delis; and a newer strip mall with a Panera Bread, an Apple Store, and a Pottery Barn.

[As a politically-incorrect but truthful aside, a friend of the family who teaches public school in the South Bronx stole the code behind this page and replaced the name elements with random syllables, and made a random name generator that comes up with the actual names of his actual students on a disturbingly frequent basis. He wonders whether his students' parents had access to such a thing.]


My boy is a spaz, but he's a smart one.

so, MY day

So. Worked at Club Empty tonight. Made $1 an hour in tips, which puts me up to minimum wage. Yup yup.

There are, I think, six US Air Club ladies. One of them had her father die late last year, I think just after Christmas. Another one's father was ill with cancer and died just this week. His wake was today, so all of the various ladies (for some reason, the staff is entirely female) came in to spell one another so all could attend the wake for a little bit.

I spoke to Judy, the one who was staying until closing time. And she told me the following two things.

1) It was an open casket. So the deceased was lying in the casket, and on his lapel was a pin. The pin read, "Thanks for stopping by."

Not kidding. Apparently, in life, he always used to say that, not being a particularly demonstrative or emotional person. So, at the end of a visit, it wasn't, "I love you" or "Hope to see you again soon", it was, "Thanks for stopping by." He was just like that.


2) The bouquet on the casket didn't say "husband", or "father". (You know how bouquets say that.)
No.
It said,
"The Other Half."

I guess they'd known for a while that he wasn't going to recover, so he was involved in all these sort of silly things they were going to do at the funeral. But Judy said, "It was kind of bad, because I was standing there at the casket laughing my ass off at my friend's dead father."