kaffy_r | Dept. of Hello Again

Weekend Roundup (includes 1 Kickstarter pimp)

It's been a few days since I last did anything but check desultorily on other folks' posts (oh, and post Chapter 22 of Hearts & Moons, which small victory I still feel I must trumpet, or at least flute.) When it came to other things, life kept getting in the way. But at the end of this very long week, of which more, anon, I think I finally have the spoons to do some sort of catch-up.

First, thanks to everyone who commented on my entry to the spoken word meme fun. I had a lot of fun with it. I am also enjoying other peoples' words -

a_phoenixdragon ,

flowsoffire ,

eve11 and the delightful

jjpor , whose chatty entry into the meme I'm enjoying a whole bunch. (I really should let him know that, no, going on at length isn't a bad thing, it's a good thing.)

I'm working on Chapter 23 of the aforementioned WIP o'doom ((c) eve11, I think), and feel good about that.

Work is really grinding me down; I'm realizing how difficult it is for me to make the 2.5 stories per day minimum. The stupid, unrealistic, counter-productive minimum. And now that the Idiot In Charge has forced my boss to haul in people who drop below two stories a day for disciplinary warnings, I'm going to be a lot more busy on the union side. In fact, I spent Friday in one of those with someone who was hauled in for doing only 1.8 stories a day. *eyeroll* When I talked to my boss off the record about this whole thing, I actually told him, "This is killing me." I feel so bad for him, because he's caught in the middle between the Idiot In Charge and the reporters he actually thinks are smarter, at least about this sort of thing. I've probably mentioned that before, so we'll move on.

I had my car towed Friday. I'd gotten up very early to head downtown for the disciplinary hearing and parked in the lot I normally do before I get onto the el to head into the Loop. But I parked in a section of the lot I don't normally do - and failed to see the "don't park here, it's not part of the free lot" sign. Soooo ... $198 later, I got my car released by the Lincoln Park Pirates. The lady in the towing company's office was very glad that I wasn't mad at her; I told her it was my own damned fault, so why should I be mad at her? Still, that was $200 I had planned for something else. Grumpy

kaffy_r is grumpy.

We sheltered a stray dog (one of the little wooly types, a Peke-mutt mix) for about 12 hours mid-way through this past week, before having to take him down to the Anti-Cruelty Society. He was running around loose Wednesday and someone rang our doorbell, asking if we knew who he belonged to. I made the mistake of thinking that it belonged to one of our upstairs neighbors, so the lady who rang my doorbell and I chased him down and I brought him in - only to find out from the upstairs neighbor that, no, he wasn't hers. I couldn't just let him go back on the street, especially not in our neighborhood, so BB took him up to a vets to check for a computer chip (no such luck), and we held him in our cat carrier overnight, before heading down to Anti-Cruelty.

They keep animals as long as possible, as compared to the city pound, and I made up "we found this dog, and here's where you can get him back" posters that I'll put up tomorrow. Although I'm not certain that whoever had him should get him back - even in the house, your dog should have a collar on, if only to prevent this sort of thing from happening; I'm guessing he got out. Also, I haven't seen any lost dog posters up, which tells me that maybe they weren't all that fussed about losing him.

BB and I watched Frozen Friday night. I liked it a lot, with the exception of a 180 degree personality change on the part of one character. That could have been written better, but the rest of the story was really well written, avoiding a lot of the saccharine things that can bother me about Disney. I liked the music, the animation, the relationship between the two sisters ... in all, I'd give it a solid B on my own personal chart.

We also watched Pacific Rim, which I can overall give a C+ to - largely because, let's face it, it's live-action mecha, so I shouldn't have been expecting as much as fandom had somehow led me to believe was going to be there in terms of characterization and, yes, female empowerment. And yet I still liked it, both visually and kinetically. And if they'd taken out 10 minutes of action and replaced it with 15 more minutes of characterization, I'd have enthusiastically upped it to a B, or possibly a B+ because, hey, Idris Elba and Ron Perlman, and Rinko Kikuchi and, yes, because it is live action mecha, and I love anime. As it was, BB said the best actor in it was the little girl who played Kikuchi's character as a child, and I'm inclined to agree.

And finally, please, consider helping this Kickstarter campaign: Crossed Genres is the kind of magazine I wish I'd been able to read back when the type of SF&F magazines ran the vast, diverse gamut from Analog to Isaac Asimov's. It champions diversity, it looks for quality writing, it's worth it. There are only three days to go on its campaign, and as I write this, they are about $3,400 away from their goal. There are a lot of good causes out there, and when you have a limited amount of money to give, the arts often have to give way to more immediate life-saving charities. But the arts save lives, too, so if you have an extra $5 or $10, think about helping this campaign beat the deadline.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Location: the livingroom
Crossposts: http://kaffyr.livejournal.com/299054.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

eve11

Ah, I haven't listened to yours yet! I too am still catching up.

Oh, that sucks about work, and about the towed car, :( But good on you for looking out for the poor lost pup. I was driving down the road today, rounded a corner and a little shih-tzu came charging at my car from the bottom of a driveway at the edge of a pretty big yard. No fence, no leash; she obviously wasn't supposed to be there. I was going slowly so I just stopped and was going to get out and try to corral her when a guy came around from the driveway, followed by a contrite kid about seven. "Oh thank god," he said, "My little sister let her out! Thanks for stopping!" So the doggie was rescued.

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