Our building has IT people and sales people. The IT people get here in the morning, before the coffee, before breakfast tacos are even a possibility, we let the light of our monitors draw us like moths.

The sales people get here and they turn the lights on in our cave.

pizzabrains:

“somewhere, someone needs me.”

Dose of Happy: 5/20/13

It’s Monday, so it’s time to enumerate the things that make life ok:

• My RPG sessions this week were pretty awesome*. Thursday we’re playing a Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off and we spent a lot of the time calming down our watcher and bringing the gang together, but it was good bonding roleplaying. Saturday we fought a giant centipede (I say *we* though my barbarian very early on decided to try to ride it into submission, remembered her armor penalty halfway through the acrobatics check, tripped over her own feet, and fell to the bottom of the cliff where she lay dying until Trig, the beautiful gnome druid, came down and healed me). Sunday the adventures of Cole (he’s the Dashing Hero) and company (I’m Xayide the sorceress) commenced in medias res as we escaped from the sewers after a nearly botched job.
• Adam continues to be amazing. Even though he felt sick yesterday afternoon he helped me clean up the living room. He always finds a way to tell me he loves me and to make me feel like I deserve that love.** ***
• Star Trek: Into Darkness! My favorite lens flare is at “I surrender”.
• I’m only 80 pages into Mistborn, but I am loving it.
• Yoga, three times a week. I’m improving, maybe?

*Though on Saturdays we have recently had two players quit and I don’t know exactly how to feel about that especially given that they are the two that seemed most enthusiastic about playing Pathfinder.

**I guess I’m enumerating the shadows down here in the footnotes. In this case we still have not returned to the discussion of my wanting an open relationship that we started a few weeks ago. I know that he doesn’t want it, but I don’t know how to stop wanting it. I don’t know how to give him the confidence in our relationship that I have, how to convince him that I am not now and never will abandon him. I don’t know how to convince him that my desires to seek additional romantic companionship are not about or because of him. I know that this is selfish and presumptuous on my part. I am selfish for wanting to convince him to let me have my way even when I know it hurts him. I am presuming that there is some way to make him feel better about it (repeat previous sentence).

***Also, about once a week my metaphorical uterus spasms out a round of “You want another baby!” “Wouldn’t Adam make such a great dad?!” “look at the baby pictures of your other babies and how cute they are and how much you miss carrying them around” and I seriously need to SHUT THAT DOWN because not only could I not afford a baby right now, physically, financially, or mentally (both Adam and I are dealing with serious shit on all three fronts), but also the thought of growing another adult terrifies me.

My Dose of Happy - 5/13

The tigers were out playing at the zoo. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a zoo where the big cats were doing more than resting or pacing (except when the lions were mating that one time), but this time three young tigers were playing in the pool. It was amazing.

As if that weren’t enough, the lemurs were in the tree jumping around, the tortoise decided to take a swim just as we got there, the squirrel monkeys were chasing each other along the front fence, the orangutan was getting his morning snack, the turkey was strutting, a greater kudu was up on its hind legs trying to get the high leaves, the otters were swimming, the milk snake was moving, and the meerkat was standing on top of his house and quietly barking at us.

We (myself, Adam, my kids, my grandparents, my parents, and my little brothers) spent three hours at the zoo when we usually spend about an hour and a half.

If depression were a cuttlefish I’m a hypnotized crab. Adam’s a hypnotized crab.

My daughter has a birthday party this weekend. I ran flat out of money but luckily bought her presents already. I hope she still likes Barbies as an 8 year old.

I don’t want to do anything. I want to write but when I get home I don’t.

I want to do my blog on my trip to Chicago, but when I get home I don’t.

I want to be a rock for Adam but am so scared that between the two of us we can’t do anything but exist.

Colors feel so bright that they hurt. I feel like my brain is painted in black and white and that simplicity is soothing. Everything else is too complicated.

A Moment in my life

Going through old emails (looking for a story I emailed to someone that I couldn’t remember whether or not was good enough to edit/polish) I found interesting things. I was in the middle of my Boy of the Week/Cursed Vagina phase. And I fought for every single one of them when that week was up and they decided to end things (maybe except Irish Guy since I was the one that ended that with good reason). For example, I remember fighting with The Genius because his reason for ending things was that his friends didn’t like the fact that I had kids.

Looking back, it was probably stupid of me to fight for them. Maybe it was the fact that I was jumping in with both feet every time that was driving them away. Or maybe I was just waiting for the guy who knew that the jumping in, the giving so much away, was a misdirection to keep them from seeing the parts of me that I didn’t want anyone to see.

I’ve found that man, the one that stuck with me through that and who I have stuck with through hard times.

But here’s a window into my past. Below is the email I wrote to one particular boy who was the best of the Boys of the Week and who didn’t get a nickname because I liked him enough to call him by his own. I wasn’t honest with him at the time, because I wasn’t honest with myself, but the uncomfortable twistings I felt myself doing when he asked questions that went to the center of my problems started me on the path to being who I am right now, to admitting the reality of things and accept them.

This post is a little bit apology and a little bit gratitude to that boy three years ago who was only in my life for a week but who changed my life for the better.

Read More

montereybayaquarium:

How do you get the most out of an Aquarium visit? You’re the real experts; we’d  love to know your tips! (©2007 Robin Lerios)

Plan your visit.

When my dad was at DLI in Monterey when I was a kid we drove across the country from North Carolina to visit him and we went to the aquarium. Sitting in one of these glass bubbles is one of the few memories I have of that visit.

Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex

geekfights:

This weekend the Legion of Geeks will be in Chicago for C2E2 and, while I am excited to see everyone and to geek out at the convention, I am SUPER  excited to go to The Field Museum and see Sue, the largest and most complete T. Rex skeleton ever found.

I first read about Sue in Jim Butcher’s Dead Beat in which Harry Dresden reanimates Sue and proceeds to ride her around the epic zombie battle that is going on.

…but from my first dinosaur action figure my imagination was captured. I spent a lot of my childhood wanting to be a paleochemist (which I had, at the time, made up completely) so that I could carbon-date bones and figure out what dinosaurs ate. I had a computer game where you had to scale a cliff looking for dinosaur bones and then choose the right tools to excavate it. I watched Jurassic Park and The Land Before Time (with their varying degrees of accuracy and anthropomorphism) and wondered at what it would be like to live in a world with dinosaurs.

Even though many of the things we thought we knew about dinosaurs when I was a kid have changed, going to see Sue is a pilgrimage to my childhood land of imagination.

Are any of you going to be in Chicago Monday the 29th and want to come with me?

What’s your favorite dinosaur?

-Karin

@geekfights

Facebook

Geek Fights Podcast