Appetizer
When you were a child, which crayon color was your favorite?
I liked the name “Magenta” and the color of green-blue. I always thought it was odd that green-blue was more blue, and blue-green was more green. Now, it makes sense.

Soup
On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being highest), how likely would you be to change jobs if it required you to move?
Well, I work from home, so that isn’t at all a likely scenario. Fuzzy’s job keeps threatening to move us to Boca Raton, FL , though. Um…I wouldn’t refuse a job I really wanted because a change was part of the deal, though.

Salad
Take all the numbers in your birthday and your phone number and add them up, one by one. What’s the total?
1970 + 17 +9 +8 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 +6 + 4 + 2 +2 + 2 = 2050

Main Course
Have you ever “re-gifted” anything? If so, what was it and who did you pass it on to?
A bottle of wine, once or twice. But it was only re-gifting in the sense that we brought it to a party.

Dessert
Name something you need from the store.
2 each black and white long- or three-quarter-sleeve shirts.

[blenza_autolink ff]

…when you spend it on stage. I’d only done one all-star show with CSZ before tonight, and that one wasn’t really the same, as there were five of us, and we arranged who would play in which game. Tonight was a learning experience, but it was also fun, and there was a sense of camaraderie that isn’t quite as strong during a normal show. Also, I learned that being the only woman on stage can be a blast.

We played (in roughly this order): Story (with 2 volunteers), Interrogation, Blind Line (we had great suggestions), Changing Emotions and Styles, Audience SFX, Dinner at Joe’s, Five Things, and 185. I need to be more aggressive, louder, and work on setting things up, a lot. The audience loved the show, and I felt like I didn’t completely suck, even in 185 – especially in 185.

I know that there are other players who are better than I am, and more likely to be given shots at remotes and special shows, but I’m really glad I got to do this one.

It was a day of fighting through vicodin fog. Three cups of tea (earl grey, hot) didn’t help. Two mugs of coffee brewed on the extra strong setting didn’t help. A cheeseburger and fries scarfed down in the car on the way to downtown Dallas helped a bit.

Workshop made everything better. Oh, I wasn’t perfect, or anything, but I didn’t feel terrified, and I had fun, and did some stuff I’m proud of, and now even though I’m still hurty and groggy, I’m also jazzed and my brain is zooming.

Also, dulce de leche frappucinos? Totally taste like flan in a cup.
YUM.

We’d meant to go to church today, really, but it didn’t happen, as it hasn’t happened for various reasons, since January. I’m just…not feeling it. And Fuzzy doesn’t push, or say what he feels.

Skin still hurts, though now only in a couple places where the sunburn was on the border of being 2nd degree. Alas, one of those places is where most of my bras hits. Spent the day wrapped in soft cotton, and slathering myself with Aloe. Am peeling anyway. It happens, I guess.

Actually wrote something today. Go read it at Universal Blend. Leave comments, please.

Have been groggy and restless and cold, then hot, then cold again, all day. Chatted with my parents. They loved the party we paid for, and the gift, and the thought.

Fuzzy brought me wonderful chili rellenos for dinner. I love Mexican food.

I think I’m going to watch the end of Blood Ties and then turn out the light.

A few weeks ago on the phone with a friend, I learned that Joss Whedon was writing a virtual eighth season of his television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in comic book form. This is NOT a review of the comics, though I will say I’ve now read the first two (sadly, my copy of the first issue was from the second printing, not the first) and had forgotten how frustrating it is to be gripped by a story, and have to wait a month for the next part.

In any case, I haven’t read any kind of comic book, save for a beautiful Beauty and the Beast graphic novel, since I was ten or so, and read reprinted first-year Superman comics (and Supergirl) comics that I read in one sitting, on a hot and sunny summer afternoon. I remember sitting on my bed, with a glass of iced tea next to me, and my white poodle sitting next to me, my hair twisted into a single tight braid.

My hair was in braids a lot when I was nine and ten. Usually one, sometimes two. I have very fine hair that tangles far too easily, and I have a lot of it. Even now I braid it at night, or at least twist it into a bun on the top of my head, so that I don’t wake up with a matted rat’s nest of hair. Back then, though, I had a pass to the community pool, so there were weeks when my hair was braided once, and then I’d be swimming every day, showering every night, and only unravelling it for a thorough washing every three or four days. When you’re ten you can get away with that.

The Buffy comics brought all that back. And even though I read them on a cold and snowy day in April, and not in the heat of summer, there’s a part of me that was ten years old today. Again.

If you live in the general vicinity of Connecticut or New York, the article A Garden Cures Rootlessness, by Larry Bloom, will be in tomorrow’s edition of the New York Times. If you don’t, clicking on the article title in the last sentence will take you there.

Go read it – and not just because it’s about my aunt.

My skin still hurts, although the pain is ebbing, slowly. It was a serious sunburn. I feel stupid – but I was wearing sunscreen, and I don’t generally burn much, if at all. My skin and clothes and sheets have all taken on the slightly herb-y scent of the aloe gel, however. It smells the way green should smell. Not sharp like grass, which is a more yellow-green scent, but softer, darker, a little bit sinister.

While working today, I was half-watching wind making choppy waves in the pool, glimpsing the fin of our toy shark from time to time. In the grey light we’ve had on and off – mostly on – all day, I can blur the deck into sand and almost feel like I’m sitting near a beach. And I like the beach during inclement weather. It’s so much more primal when not filled with the sound of sizzling (human) meat.

Thus inspired, I put on the original JAWS followed by DEEP BLUE SEA, in a sort of personal shark movie mini-marathon. I work better with background noise, and movies and television with their conversational rhythms are easier for me to not quite hear than music – especially music with lyrics – which distracts, inspires, and makes me have to stand on the bridge spanning my living room and sing.

After a quick assignment to change some code, which turned into an hour-long headache because the template broke, I took a lunch break and checked the mail. DIRTY DANCING: HAVANA NIGHTS was one of the Blockbuster films waiting for me. I’ve seen it before, of course, but never on disc, just on cable, so I wanted to see the special features and hear the commentary, which is quite interesting. I feel very much at home inside this film. I may have been born in 1970, and my family may be Italian and German immigrants, but a part of my soul is from pre-Revolution Cuba (and I still owe SG a ficlet about that).

I am tired this afternoon. So tired.
I think I will rest now.
And do more work later.

… I’d been having such a pleasant morning, working outside.

If I were a Thanksgiving turkey I’d be on the cover of a cooking magazine right now. Why? Because my face, arms, chest and upper back are burnt to a crisp.

It was too nice a day to work indoors this morning, so I dragged the Zen, the Mac, and the Razr out to the deck, sat in one of the cushy deck chairs at the glass topped patio table, with the glass doors behind me, and the shiny blue pool in front of me, and settled in to work.

I had, in fact, slathered on sunscreen before going out. I mean, I don’t generally burn at all, but I’m not stupid. Apparently, I didn’t slather on enough, though, and I didn’t realize I was getting crispy and red because there was a lovely breeze and I didn’t feel hot.

When I was forced to move inside because of a software glitch I needed to test on another computer, I noticed myself in a mirror, and thought, “Ooops.”

Two hours of work, a coldcold shower, lots of aloe-laced lotion, and three bottles of water later, “ooops” became “ouch!” My skin is glowy red – nuclear plant red – from the first knuckle on each finger to the where the chair reached on my back. And it’s still throwing off heat, which means I’m feeling both chilled, and rather tempted to claw the skin off my arms.

Fuzzy got off the plane at 5:30, and I crashed about then, waking when he came home to present me with an orange Jamba Juice and a kiss. “My god,” he said. “You’re really burnt, Lovey.”

Fuzzy is really good at stating the obvious.

The good news is, I work from home, so if I’m in too much pain to put a bra on for the next couple days, it’s not a big deal.

As for tonight? We had a tornado warning, and are having a dramatic rainstorm, and I’m hungry, and wanted a cheeseburger but that would mean putting a bra on, and, for that matter, something other than a soft cotton eight-sizes-overlarge shirt. So I’m thinking cold cereal more water, and a vicodin are in order.