An archive of my old LiveJournal
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.
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).
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*
And the game is total crack. alenxa has been playing it all week, and it’s that perfect combination of WTF and fascinating.
Saw Noises Off at South Coast Repertory. Hilarious. Also brings back memories from high school & college productions. Forgot to tape Lost.
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.)
One of the side benefits of going on a restricted diet to try to identify what the heck new allergy I’ve developed is that after working off the holiday weight gain, I kept going. I’ve been hovering in the 150-155 range for most of the past year and a half, climbed up to the 155-160 range around Christmas, and have dropped down to the 145-150 range.
There’s only one problem: Back when I was fitted for my wedding ring, I weighed somewhere between 170 and 180. And it’s been cold lately, so my fingers are even smaller than usual.
This morning while making my lunch, I stopped to washed my hands. As I dried them on the towel hanging from the refrigerator handle, the ring slipped off, landed on the floor, bounced a bit, then rolled right under the refrigerator until it pinged to a stop against something metallic.
Ordinarily I would have used the plumber’s claw to retrieve it, except for one detail: I haven’t been able to find it since we moved. alenxa suggested using a BBQ skewer, so I took a flashlight, lay down on the kitchen floor, and looked for the ring. Fortunately it hadn’t rolled too far back, but I still had to flatten my hand and reach under the refrigerator to get the skewer far enough in. It took a few tries, but I got it back. Katie helpfully finished my sandwich while I went to change into a shirt that didn’t have dust all over the cuff.
To top it off, it fell off again at work while I was leaning my chin on my hand. It took a while to figure out where it landed, until I realized it had fallen into my shirt pocket.
New task: get ring resized.
Took a half-day on Wednesday, then went home and took a nap. Went over to help my parents set up for their New Year’s Eve party, planning to come home later & watch LA Confidential, and ended up staying. Watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and the “auditions” for the Evil League of Evil submitted by fans. Some were good. Some were…not.
Slept in Thursday. Started out reading Greg Keyes’ The Hounds of Ash, a collection of short stories set in the same world as The Waterborn and The Blackgod. After 2 stories, decided to re-read the novels. Fortunately, we recently pulled them out of storage since alenxa was thinking of reading them. Ran some errands, ended up across from the Apple store in South Coast Plaza. We’d already discussed replacing the mostly-dead PowerBook, both wanted to replace it with another Mac, and we’d even worked out which model we were going to get, so we just went for it. Then headed over for dinner w/ my brother & his fiancee (who flew back on Friday) & my parents, where we helped work through leftovers from the party.
Friday: more reading. Made a point of walking to lunch. Laundry. Working on my Flash site after a long delay. Watched 2 episodes of “Walking with Monsters: Before the Dinosaurs” (computer-generated nature show with prehistoric animals). Nice visuals, but I was bothered by some of the things that I can’t imagine could be extrapolated from fossils — like protective coloring & behavior that’s not based on skeletal structure.
Saturday: Shopping. Finished “Walking w/ Monsters,” watched “Helvetica.” More interesting than expected, but less interesting than was led to expect from reviews.
Somehow managed to get through last-minute Christmas shopping. I’d like to thank the following people for helping: Starbuck, Kelly, Peet, and the Bean sisters (Coffee and Lost). Read and reviewed the final issue of The Flash (the third time it’s been canceled for a relaunch in as many years) while alenxa baked cookies, and on to a “relaxing” evening yesterday of laundry, dishes, and wrapping gifts, with a break for Mickey’s Christmas Carol.
Today, went over to my parents’ for breakfast, meeting up with them and with my brother and his fiancee, who flew down Wednesday and are staying at their place. Then carpooled off to my grandparents’ house for the big family get-together. Follow-up with alenxa’s family on Saturday, originally scheduled around SIL and her boyfriend driving down from Oregon. With all the snow earlier this week, they decided it wasn’t a good idea to try the drive, so it looks like we’ll be hitting the post office sometime in the next few days.