Archived LiveJournal

It’s been years since I posted to LiveJournal, but it’s a record of my twenties and early thirties that I’d like to hang onto…and I keep wondering when LJ is going to go the way of GeoCities (and I’m not the only one). I finally decided it was time to export the whole thing, and discovered that WordPress has a LiveJournal import tool. (Admin sidebar: Tools→Import→LiveJournal)

It took a few minutes to set up a new site (since I didn’t want to just exchange one third-party service for another), and another two minutes to import all of my posts and comments.

Nice! Now I have my own copy, and I can use WordPress’ much-better tools to actually find stuff. It’s as permanent as I want it to be. Continue reading “Archived LiveJournal”

Writer’s Block: Roommate from Hell

Have you ever had a nightmarish roommate? What made you incompatible? How did you eventually resolve your conflicts?

This isn’t technically a roommate from hell story. It’s a story about the ex-roommate who (I’m 99% certain) stole my credit card, then convinced his friends that I’d been going after him.

A tale of theft, compulsive lying, police, and not covering one’s tracks.

Thanksgiving

Spent Thanksgiving Day with the in-laws, who were helping host a huge Thanksgiving dinner for people at their church. So instead of the 8-12 people I’m used to for holiday dinners, it was 24. Hectic, but I discovered that I’m actually good at playing Jenga. (I swear, I haven’t played the game since college, and I don’t remember being any good at it at the time.)

With the warm weather, I’d been joking that we should have a Thanksgiving barbecue. The first thing I saw when we got there: a barbecue. Okay, it was being used to cook a turkey, but still…

There was also the highest pie-to-person ratio I have seen in a long time. I think there must have been at least 10 pies, if not a dozen. Probably enough for everyone there to eat half a pie!

We stayed in on Friday, avoiding the insanity of Black Friday sales (though I did look through the 15 or so emails from various online stores whose lists I’m on), then drove up to Westwood in the evening to see Equivocation (Shakespeare gets caught up in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot).

Current Music: Some video game from someone else in the waiting room at the car service dept

Normal?

As of tonight, I am back down to the level of allergy medication I was on a year ago!

Short version: a reaction to *something* (lots of tests, nothing identified) last November gave me systemic hives for months. By January I was up to three 24-hour antihistamines…each twice a day. Plus Benadryl. All on doctor’s orders. (Slightly longer version here, from last Dec.) After a couple of attempts to lower the dosage resulted in the hives returning, I stayed at that level for several more months. Since the beginning of summer, my allergist has had me slowly been tapering the medication down.

Last night, I took the last dose of Allegra.

I really like not having to take zillions of pills a day!

Naturally, this coincides with the arrival of dry, windy weather, which is wreaking havoc on my usual allergies. I’m thinking of adding something back so I won’t spend all day sneezing. *facepalm*

Into the Rainy North

Final preparations are underway for our first vacation of the year.  We’ll be heading up to the Bay Area this week, hitting Hearst Castle, Monterey & Carmel, San Jose and San Francisco and visiting my brother brionv and his fiancee, my aunt, and sekl and non_seqvitvr. We’ll also be attending WonderCon for the second time.  We had fun last year, but figured on making it an occasional trip rather than something annual.  Then we decided to go visit people in the area, and found out the best week (i.e. when   was going to be done with her current job) was going to be the week leading up to the convention.  If we were going to be in San Francisco anyway, the con was cheap, so we might as well go.  (Then the perfect timing became irrelevant, but we had already bought tickets to the con, and I’d already arranged for the time off, so we were at least partly anchored to this weekend in San Francisco.)

It looks like this trip is certainly going to mirror last year’s trip in one more aspect: rain.  Someday we’ll have to schedule a trip up north at a time that it’s expected to be sunny.  (I’m guessing February isn’t it.)