My parents' visit was awesome! We had a really good time and great weather, thankfully. Friday was a trip to the zoo and a fancy dinner out (soooo good), Saturday was the farmer's market and the Dublin Irish Festival, Sunday was brunch with Rachel and relaxing at home. Our evening movie watching consisted of catching Mom up on the Avengers films - she'd seen Iron Man 1 and 2 so we watched Captain America, Thor, and Avengers, then Sunday we watched Skyfall which I had not seen, either.
Except now I am sick. Dizzy, headachey, throat hurty sick. I stayed home yesterday but came in today, I wanted to get SOME work done. Something must be going around, my manager said like six people called in sick yesterday.
So things are good here. I am now working at home two days a week which is fantastic. I find that I'm really productive - without that "want to go home" thing I'm quite content to sit in my home office and work well into the evening, past when I'd stay at the office. I can play old West Wing episodes on Netflix for background noise. I can throw in laundry or schedule a haircut in the middle of the day. Plus it's saving me gas (my commute is about 12 miles, so it's about a gallon per workday) and lunch expenses, yay.
Tomorrow evening my parents are arriving for a long weekend visit, hooray! Mom hasn't been here since my surgery in 2009 and Dad hasn't been here since...god, I don't know when. A trip to the zoo is definitely planned and we're also going to the Dublin Irish Festival, one of Cbus's biggest yearly events. Good weather is forecast, so yay.
Meanwhile I can't believe it's August tomorrow. Ack.
I'm taking part in Bowling for Rhinos, a fundraiser for rhino conservation totally staffed by volunteers from the American Zookeepers Association, so 100% of donations go directly to the conservation projects. The event started at my home zoo (the Columbus Zoo) and is now taking place at 60 zoos nationwide. Last year they raised over $350,000!
I am starting to feel like the only geek on the Internet who thought "Pacific Rim" was terrible. Like, I was filled with actual anger at how excited I was for it and how very badly it disappointed me.
Senioritis. Oh, and I mean "last day of work before my trip," not "last day of work, period."
The last two days have draaaaaaaaagged something fierce. I'm hoping today goes fast. I came in a bit earlier than usual so I can leave around four - have some more errands to take care of. Need new wiper blades for the car, want to get a manicure, a few odds and ends to pick up.
I've been debating and debating with myself whether to buy myself a really awesome Fossil tote bag that I've had my eye on. It's $100. I can afford it, but...well, I'm a pretty cautious spender and I just have to go through this debating process before I can buy it, and I have to make sure there isn't some tote bag somewhere else in the world that I would like just as much for cheaper. I'm compromising with myself - I'm going to check at TJ Maxx and at Stein Mart, both of which have lots of awesome bags, and if I don't find something I like just as well for cheaper, I get to buy the Fossil tote at Macy's.
Then it's go home and pack, basically. Change the sheets on the bed so it's nice for when I get back. Buy groceries for my housesitter. Make sure I have all the eight million different chargers and cords and adapters I need. I put each one in a different small Ziploc bag which I label with my label maker, because that's how I roll. I do enjoy the growing trend in charging cords for them to plug into a USB adapter, which means you only need one of the USB plugs for your eight different charging cords, so they take up less space. Tomorrow I'm going to get an oil change on the way out of town.
Talked to Mom last night and she said it doesn't seem real. She said "I was afraid you were calling to say the trip was off!" I know what she means, though.
Between my hiking club, being a zoo docent, work, my friend Dayna's upcoming wedding (in which I am a bridesmaid) and getting ready for my London trip, it's been nonstop.
I also had the pleasure of traveling to Atlanta in April for a Sherlock convention, which was a BLAST. I saw some friends, met some new friends, sat on a few panels, and generally had fun. Can't wait for next year. I've also been invited to be a guest at another Sherlock convention in Seattle in October, so that might be happening.
But the immediate future is all about my trip to London with my mom. I leave Columbus on Saturday, because I need to drive to Wisconsin first, and she and I fly out of Milwaukee on Sunday evening. Everything's all in order and I can't wait.
In writing news, it's been a bit slow, but I am making really good progress on the sequel/midquel/whatever to "Performance in a Leading Role." What started out as a one-shot that would just be about their wedding is now almost 100 pages long and I think it must now be called a bona fide sequel (even though all of it takes place before the Epilogue of Performance). Other than that, it has not been a very productive year or so in terms of writing. I've been trying to write another web-available short novella about Jack and D and I've made some progress, but not enough to release. Sequel plans for that still exist but are a bit stalled.
In personal news, my grandfather's been rather ill for a few months but has finally had some surgery and now seems to be at last on the mend.
I think that's about it. As always, I'd like to post here more often, but my fandom activity has almost entirely migrated to Tumblr (where I am also madlori, but be warned that that blog is almost entirely fannish/geeky content and I make no apologies for it) and my more life-related stuff is almost entirely on Facebook. HOnestly I would enjoy still using this space as a sort of blend of the two, but maintaining this much of an online presence gets exhausting, as I'm sure most of you will understand.
I know, a bit late, but there you go. I had a lovely holiday at home in Wisconsin, although I had to drive back sooner than I would have liked to beat the bad weather system that was moving into Ohio. We had cold temperatures and quite a lot of snow for a few weeks but now it's warming up rapidly - in the 60s by this weekend! - and raining, so the snow'll be gone soon. I've been cooking quite a bit, but late December and this early part of January have been pretty quiet, which is nice...frankly, I needed the break.
But now it's full steam ahead, and one of the projects is to get things planned and sorted for my trip to London with my mother in May. I've found us a fantastic rental flat in Kensington (for those of you who know London it's a few blocks north of the Gloucester Road tube station) so I need to put the deposit down on that, and soon plane tickets.
I'm also organizing a few more trips out of the city than I took, because Mom would love to see some stately homes and palaces besides just the ones in town. So we're going to Hampton Court Palace, and probably Ham House the same trip. In addition to the previous package day trip I took (Windsor/Stonehenge/Bath) we're taking one to the Cotswolds. I'm trying to figure out if it'd be worth it to go to Chatsworth. It's in the middle of nowhere, there's not a lot else to see there, and it's like three hours' travel. Sadly, Highclere Castle (the real Downton Abbey) is not an option...they're not open in May except on bank holidays, which there isn't one during our planned stay, and even if we were going to be there, those days are sold out. Blenheim Palace is much closer so that's a viable alternative.
I'm trying to pay for as much stuff ahead of time as possible. I bought us a joint membership to the Historic Royal Palaces after I figured out that even if we only go to the Tower and Hampton Court, I'll save money on admissions. I'm going to order our Oyster cards online and have them sent here. I won't be able to buy tickets for some things ahead because I just don't know what day we'll be going to, say, St. Paul's.
Stolen from Libbie, who stole it from somebody else:
You know how sometimes people on your friends list post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating HIM/HER? Since when???" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.
Please copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out.
If you want to ask me anything, now is your chance. I don't have any secrets.
FIRST NAME: Lori, nickname for Lorna, which only the IRS calls me
AGE: 39
LOCATION: Columbus, Ohio
OCCUPATION: Associate Scientific Information Analyst. Essentially I help maintain a global database of chemical journals and patents which is used by the entire scientific community. Also freelance writer, on hiatus at the mo, with one novel published.
PARTNER: Uh...look, a squirrel!
KIDS: None
BROTHERS/SISTERS: Younger brother Tommy, who has two kids, three stepkids and two step-grandkids.
PETS: None, but several pets-of-close-friends who I get to spend doggie and kitty time with.
3-5 BIGGEST THINGS GOING ON IN YOUR LIFE: 1) I absolutely love being a docent at the Columbus Zoo & Aquarium.
2) I run a Meetup club, it's an outdoor activities club for women with 750 members.
3) I do a lot of hiking and have been doing really well with my personal exercise routine.
4) I am really active in the Sherlock fandom right now and have written copious amounts of fanfic for it.
PARENTS: Garry and Jenny, who this past April concluded their Grand Retirement RV Adventure, sold their RV and bought a house back in our hometown in Wisconsin.
I spent most of last night wrestling with iTunes, with the ultimate goal of being able to load it up with video for workplace background noise. I have a 160G iPod classic and I've only got like 20G of music so there's plenty of room, and the less I'm using the streaming wifi on my phone at work, the better. Plus I really really really want to be able to play West Wing while I work.
The first task was just setting up iTunes. I haven't actually used my iPod in probably over a year. My phone has all but supplanted it. I don't have much music on it, but when I listen to music hiking or at the gym it's almost always Pandora. I hadn't even bothered setting up iTunes on my new computer, which I got two months ago. So I did that, and then imported all the restored music files from the backup hard drive of my old computer...which erased all my playlists (no great loss) AND somehow generated like 800 duplicate files which I had to go in and delete.
Next step: acquire West Wing on AVI. Thaaaaat's all I'm gonna say about that one.
But iTunes won't accept AVI. So the next step was download Handbrake and convert the files to mp4. I did a test run on something I already had (an episode of "Elementary"). It converted no problem, and added to iTunes no problem.
After some fiddling with the sync settings and getting iTunes to stop downloading like 400 back issues of various podcasts, I got my iPod to sync up. It synced everything...except the episode. It was there in my Movies section. It would play in iTunes. But it would not sync.
I consulted the Tumblr hive mind and was informed that when I used Handbrake to convert, I had to click the "iPod 5G support" box. So I had to delete the file and re-convert it from AVI with that box clicked. Went through the whole process again (incidentally, Handbrake takes like 20 minutes to convert one TV episode, so it's non-trivial to do that). It STILL would not sync up the video file. I was about ready to give up when I was advised that if I select the file in iTunes and go to Advanced, there'd be a "create iPod or iPad version" and iTunes would convert the mp4 so it could be synced! Hallelujah! That took like another twenty minutes to convert. BUT IT WORKED. The video was on the iPod! With sound and everything!
So I set up Handbrake to convert all the season 1 episodes over night. This morning I moved them all to iTunes, and set it converting all of them to iPod forms. Then I get to do that six more times. Holy God. But once it's done I will have the whole show on the iPod and I will be very happy about that.
Yes, tis a yogurt maker. I had never made my own yogurt but I eat a lot of it, and if it works out, it'll save me money and possibly be tastier!
I've made one batch. There's a couple of ways to make it. You can boil the milk, or you can not boil it. You can use yogurt starter, or you can mix in some already-made yogurt. You can add powdered milk to make it thicker. My first batch I used 2% organic milk with one jar of heavy cream mixed in, and some Fage for the cultures. I did boil it. The texture is...off. It's kind of grainy. It tastes pretty awesome, though.
I'm going to make another batch today, without boiling, with powdered milk, and I'm going to blend it more thoroughly this time.
busy
excited
