Currents of Time

aaargh lj. At least I've finally managed to log back in, even if I still can barely get anything else to load. Add me to the (probable) army of folks crying for them to fix it, already! (I wonder if I'll even be able to upload this entry, haha.)

It is still stupid hot here, so I have spent most of my free time continuing to avoid doing much of anything. At work, I am still frequently donning a parka before venturing into the vast and terrible wasteland that is the walk-in freezer. Ooh! But, also at work, I have been getting opportunities to decorate cakes! And it is a lot of fun. I am super proud of some of them. (One person even ordered one "exactly like [one I'd decorated] but gold cake instead of chocolate" because she has problems with chocolate. That was awesome.)

I have been having more weird dreams lately, but one was especially of note! I dreamt I was on a little boat with my brother and some friends and we were just puttering around through bits of a town that had been flooded over by the lake. One of them decided to hop out of the boat, but he didn't stop the motor, first (the boat was not moving fast at all), and then the propeller hit him and he started bleeding everywhere and we had to go back and take him to the emergency room for stitches. Aaand then the day after that, I was at work and one of my coworkers came in and she had a bandage on her foot, so I asked her, what happened? And she had gone out boating the day before with a friend and their family and they'd stopped to get out and swim a bit, and then when she went to get back in the boat she hit the propeller and split the top of her foot open and needed to go to the emergency room and get stitches. That was a bit odd.

(Have I ever told the story of the time I needed stitches? Man, that was a hell of a day...)

And on Tuesday, Final Fantasy was following me everywhere. (Well, for the first half of the day it was, anyway. It stopped when I went to work.)

I woke up to find myself staring down the Masamune. (Man, the sentences you never think you'll end up writing.) See, because, I have several of the Play Arts figures, and I've been rearranging my DVD and game shelves, so some of them are just hanging around while I figure out where to put them again. Most of them are perched on top of the video games. Sephiroth, however, kept falling (jumping?) off. I got sick of picking him up, so I moved him to the bookshelf. Aaand sometime in the night, he decided he didn't like that, either, and jumped from there, as well! And because it's been so damned hot out, I've removed my blanket and it's been sitting piled near the head of my bed / next to the bookshelf… And I guess dear ol' Sephy fell at an angle …sssssomehow(??) and landed on the blanket about a foot off from where he'd been and directly in front of me. So, yeah. Masamune in the face. Good morning!

(What a jerk. I knew I should never have let him in here, even if I did decree him a non-Genocidal Lunatic edition prior to opening the box. Not, of course, that deciding as much would make him not be a jerk, I mean.)

And you'd think that'd be the end of the Random Final Fantasy Encounters for the day, except then I went to meet with my therapist and, as I was checking in, I heard the victory fanfare, because someone in the waiting room (who'd decided to ignore the "please turn off your phones" signs) had it as his ringtone.


But then to make up for Tuesday being full of FF silliness and fun cake decorating, yesterday was some kind of hell. I ended up being 42 minutes late leaving work, and that is about all I am going to say about that!

In town again. Back home tomorrow. Back in town the day after. Probably back home again after that. AND BACK IN TOWN ON WEDNESDAY. And back home for New Year's.

Curiosity has inspired me to turn on My Guests (for now, at least. I feel exposed and I do not like it. NOW EVERYONE THE PEOPLE I STUMBLE UPON WILL BE AWARE OF MY CONFUSED, MEANDERING TRIPS ACROSS LJ. I spend so much time going, "wait how did i get here" it is not funny. Except it kinda is. So now I find myself logging out all the time, and then getting annoyed at being asked if I'm old enough to handle whatever, and then logging in on one of my character accounts - and so then almost posting to them, instead) and it is weird. Also. I get a lot more traffic than I thought? ALSO. The only link I can determine is that a fair percentage of them are members of topgearslash (three guesses which cluster of entries they're coming to from there, and anything not having "GT" somewhere in it don't count) which is kind of surprising (people are still reading that?), but kinda cool. Hopefully it is not offending anyone's sensibilities or something.

Everyone else, I have no idea. More internet nomads. (Hello?)

.....



Anyway, it is a neat feature! But, as written above, I will probably turn it back off soon.

I keep going to write with my left hand. I am mostly ambidextrous, but I generally don't do that. Writing and drawing are probably the only two things I consistently use my right hand for. It's working out so far, though obviously the letters look different (and I keep drawing stick-figures upside down), but, uh. Why am I doing this? Maybe the right hand is tired. Maybe the left hand feels neglected. Maybe this is just one of those weird things that happens on occasion.

Not entirely unrelated, I found out the other day that my father, while he uses his right hand now, isn't entirely sure which hand would have been his dominant hand. Maybe he was left handed, or maybe he was just mirroring the way the other kids wrote when he was younger. (My mother has always used her left hand.)

(Or maybe my brain is just confused. My left eye and foot are dominant, so you'd think maybe I'd be left handed, as well, but no. I grew up using my right hand. Don't know when I started using my left hand, too. I hold my silverware opposite, but am not sure if I always did that. I don't even know. Jumbled brain ftw.)


Contemplating some of my original characters... Some ideas I have I know are... well, not bad, but not ones that would ever actually be used? Just ones that keeping coming around through my head on occasion. I actually do want to do more to address one of them, from Jade and Okame-verse, but it would be more of yet another OKAME'S BRAIN IS WRONG YAY and less No, really, this is fact. The only problem for that would be coming up with a reason for Jade to actually leave, which is unlikely, at best. Unless Okame goes away, which could work, but I am less comfortable with that route. I don't know.

Since I just wrote that entire paragraph without actually explaining what I was thinking about, the idea is that Jade doesn't actually exist. She's just something Hotaru invented, or part of her sanity or something. I do like to think this is something she occasionally worries about when she's having one of her worse fits, but it's not actually true.

ARGH I WANT TO WRITE THIS. SOMEDAY. SOMEHOW. GONNA MAKE IT ALL RIGHT BUT NOT RIGHT NOW I KNOW YO-- stop that, mental jukebox.

I'm not sure what this was about, but maybe half an hour ago, car horns started going off. And they kept going off. It sounded like it was coming from downtown. I've been going over my classwork and such, and my ankle's still pretty gimp (and it bothers me more on days I start by standing around for three hours), so I didn't go investigating, but... listen to this. (You'll probably have to turn your volume up.)

( Video )

I know the image is very boring. I was holding the camera right up to the window because the sound capture isn't very good.

(Now remember to turn your volume back down.)


Kinda creepy.


They finally stopped just a little bit ago, thankfully, but I really wonder what was the cause of all that.


Edit:
Apparently this may have been the St. Patrick's Day parade. I would not have ever guessed that.

So! Last night I found a CD I've been missing for a little over a year. AWESOME!

It was, impossibly, on my dresser.

Avid readers of Jecca's nonsense will possibly remember that at the end of last year/the beginning of this year, Jecca's room was emptied and repainted. This process included moving everything off the dresser and out of the room, and then moving the actual dresser.

It wasn't even one of her parents that put it there, because it was under a pile of papers that have been there for, uh. Like five months?

It was on top of my U2 CD, which is also weird. I knew the U2 CD was there, but last time I checked, it was all by itself under that mess.

I like to think I summoned it back into existence with my mind, because I've been really wanting to listen to it for the last few months.



Also the other night I was downstairs, and I turned a light on and it fizzled and only one of the two lamps attached to the switch came on, and it was strangely dim. Eerie. But I was supposed to retrieve towels and something behind me (the one that didn't come on) CRACKLED and I jumped two feet and shrieked. It was only the light(bulb), but still. That complete freak out was only with thinking a lot about playing another Silent Hill so I am not sure I am actually going to. Makes me way too jumpy.

Something really, really irritating:

Performance arts classes always have a "final concert," ignoring that there isn't any other concert most (possibly all) of the time. My dance class's final performance is... after class which, you know, wouldn't be a problem except for that whole minor I HAVE ANOTHER CLASS AFTER THAT ONE detail.

So rather than schedule us to have the room while we have it anyway, and when we're all supposed to be there anyway, the miserably stupid people in charge of these things decided to slot us in AFTER CLASS and so during the next class. So... take a severe points deduction or skip out on the one class I'm taking this semester that actually goes towards my graduation requirements. Thanks, guys. Thanks a lot.

(Dance from 3-6, followed by science from 6:15-9:15, and the performance is supposed to be from 7:30-8:30+ and we need to be there early to practice, since it's totally not as if we'll have been doing that for three hours already at that point.)

My science teacher wasn't pleased with this either, unsurprisingly.

The guitar concert was after all classes had ended, which seems like the much smarter way to do things. I'd much rather put in for time off at work than have to skip a class I need.


Anyway, now something eerie! On the drive home tonight, as I went over a hill, I saw someone walking along the road. She - I assume it was female - was wearing a really long, white, frilly/lacey/I'm not sure what it was dress, with a whole bunch of different layers and stuff that was flapping about as she walked.

I glanced briefly at her as I passed, and checked the rearview after I'd passed - and then checked again maybe two seconds later and I couldn't see her anymore. I suppose the road could have been set as such that she did manage to fall out of view so quickly but... I dunno, I've been watching too much Supernatural lately, as well, which almost certainly doesn't help.

(I DON'T THINK SHE WAS DRESSED ENTIRELY IN WHITE? SHE LOOKED LIKE SHE WAS CARRYING A LARGE BLACK BAG?)

Edit:
OMG. SE. MY SOUL. OIAHDKNSFDGLKED UPDATE ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ level synch and wfkjkelgrmtg YOU WIN, SE. Sure, it has some quirks that might need to be ironed out, but GLEE JOY HAPPINESS

Man, I wish it were earlier so I could play more instead of going to bed.

Amazon's mp3 library is probably one of the worst things that has ever happened to my wallet. (Well, uh. THIS ONE WAS FREE, AT LEAST. Don't look at me.) (I think I need to just stop browsing YouTube for music videos, because then the amount of new pretty music I encounter will drop off by at least half...)

TODAY WAS MY MOTHER'S BIRTHDAY. She made a cake and it failed miserably*, so then she made a second cake, which came out nice until she dumped a lot of icing on it, and then it ... kind of collapsed in on itself. It was hilarious and I'm not entirely sure why. You could literally watch it slowly slump more and more... We ended up scraping it all back off and putting it in a bowl. So now you have to put it back on if you want any.

* While I was at work, my brother and my mother put half of the first cake in the blender and made "cake balls." (The second half followed later that night, and then Mom melted chocolate all over them. STRANGELY DELICIOUS.)


This morning I had a melting-brain moment. Mother was talking about how she likes a radio bit - think it's called World Cafe? - and how they play pretty much anything. They went from a pretty foreign language song to "Love Shack" right then, so I laughed and said, "Yeah, that's quite different."

Except it came out as "that's quite that's quite that's quite that's quite that's quite that's quite - different." It was the strangest thing. I could not stop repeating myself. Then I went around all day feeling extremely off my mental balance.

ALSO JUST ONCE I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE A DAY AT WORK WHERE MY CUSTOMERS DO NOT EITHER (a) CONFUSE ME TERRIBLY OR (b) MAKE ME WANT TO MURDER SOMETHING.

I've just finished writing this, right? I start going over it, changing a few words, rephrasing sentences, correcting typos, the usual... and it occurs to me the second time through.

The whole thing is written in present tense.


I rarely write in present tense, and never by accident. (Except, of course, now I apparently do.) How odd. Now I must decide if I want to leave it as such or if I want to go through and edit it all into past tense. (And, of course, now that I've noticed, I'm sure I'm going to botch it up somehow by swapping tenses somewhere in the editing.)


First, however, I am going to drop-kick that little blue Ford currently sitting on my desk, because it is surely all his fault.

My mother has started reading fanfiction. Not a lot, not really any fandoms I pay much attention to (just CSI so far, from what I could tell), but still! (This is an awesome and good thing. I am not complaining. I actually dug up the two CSI-related fics I know of for her.

This afternoon, right as I was getting ready to walk out the door to work, she came over and said, entirely too excited about the whole thing, "JKR's outed Dumbledore!"

... Over dinner, it came up again, and we had to spend a ridiculous amount of time explaining to my father that this meant the character, not the man who plays him in the movies.



Beyond that step into the unexpected, though, the day was a bit boring. I was prodded awake this morning by my parents, who were going out to drive around and look at the foliage. I needed to come! And bring my camera to take pictures with! It would only be an hour or two. Come on, please? It'll be fun! And bring the camera.

Okay, fine. I dragged myself up and stumbled into the car.



FIVE HOURS LATER we got home in time for me to eat a light lunch before going to work.


I'll probably upload some of the pictures I took later. A few turned out really well. (Most didn't, since despite my mother's insistence that I take pictures of nearly everything, she wasn't willing to slow down to allow me to do so.)

Edit:
Images added. No direct pictures, just a lot of links to them, if anyone wants to see. They aren't as nice as they should be, because it got cloudy shortly into the drive, so things just look duller than they should.

( In which Jecca writes a lot of html )

That is nowhere near all of them. I'm a bit camera-happy when I don't need to worry about changing film.

Our car is possessed.

Our van's been acting a bit... odd lately. The engine's made funny noises and, okay, honestly, big, powerful engine or no, it shouldn't be able to coast at 40 for a couple miles. (I had both feet flat on the carpeting. The car then accelerated to the new 50 on the slight downhill at the end of the 40 stretch and stayed there for another, oh, half a mile, before I had to finally give it some gas because it was a steep hill and the car behind me wasn't happy with my going "only" the speed limit.)

... Nor should it be accelerating on an uphill, especially not when one is applying pressure to the brakes to avoid hitting the car ahead.

I told my parents about both incidences, but they didn't think anything of it.


Mom just called from town. She'd gone out for groceries and some supplies from the hardware store and brought the dog (and so was in the van). The engine was acting very odd, racing and making funny noises. She went into the hardware store and bought whatever she needed, and when she came back out - mind you, she had her keys with her - the engine was racing.


O... kay.


So now I'm going to pick her and Max up because she doesn't want to drive it and I don't really blame her.


Edit:
Van is now sitting, abandoned (and completely unloved by Mom, who admits to hoping someone will be stupid enough to steal it), in a parking lot in town. We're probably going to have to get it towed to wherever we decide to take it for service.

... We can't afford for the thing to keep breaking down like this, not with the repairs we've had to make to the house this year. x_x