Like Neon

I'm sure I've mentioned before (although maybe not here) that my husband and myself have our priorities completely straight and have a seriously impressive home theatre system in our tiny, under 900 sq ft house.

I just put on the Blu-Ray of Thor I got for Xmas for the first time, so I could watch it while I was eating dinner.

Whole house, shaking. It's like the fucking Bifröst is about to come through the ceiling into my spaghetti.

(Awesome though this is, it is also why I can't watch anything on the TV during the day while Lacy and Megan are sleeping. Life is hard~)

As an aside and at risk of stating the completely obvious, Tom Hiddleston, you are FUCKING PERFECT.

► I am very hungry right now, but I am literally covered in cats, and I am the sort of catmother who hates disturbing them. Life so hard~

► I spent about an hour today going through all the course material for my current new classes and yes, this really is going to be an easy semester. As my Computer Literacy class allows for students to work ahead, I am considering simply doing all the assignments in one or two goes once the book gets here, and just being done with it. Also, my geology class and lab literally finish days before my script analysis class begins. This was accidental, but man, if I could lay out my classes this way every term, I absolutely would.

► Current favorite beautiful person: Nicholas Ripoll. This boy, I seriously cannot even. He has the sort of glorious face that makes me desperately wish I had someone to use him for a PB. Do any of you ever come across people like that?

► Note to self: Take down the Christmas decorations this weekend, lest the situation start bordering on pathetic.

Awesome thing of today: United States of Tara is on Netflix Instant. IDK when it got added as I've not looked at Netflix for a couple of weeks, but I was beyond ecstatic to randomly discover this last night. I've been reluctant to buy the series on DVD because I would much rather have Blu-Ray, but there's no telling when/if it will be released in that format. Quandary: Sorted.

So really, all of you have even less excuse to not have seen this phenomenal show now.

RP-related good things include finally posting Posner and the lovely realisation that I'm not nearly as behind as I thought anymore. (Not really behind at all, if you want to get technical about it.)

School officially begins tomorrow, but there won't be much going on. I'm ordering my few books tonight; fortunately it looks like a relatively cheap term. ("Relatively cheap" here meaning under $200.) Monday's when I buckle down and get back on my firm schedule, but that's not a bad thing; I'm always more productive that way. (She says, having been ridiculously productive over the last 2 weeks.)

Why hello, new journal layout, aren't you just fucking beautiful?

Simple though it is, I cannot recall being this happy with a layout in a long, long time. Each layout I do gets me better at learning the DW CSS, too, which is wonderful. In doing this layout and the one for whatwedo, I've come to realise that I'm going to have to take the_blank_slate's layouts pretty much back to scratch so that I can get them properly coded, but that's okay. I wanted to get something functional up that looked like our old LJ layouts, and I managed that in record time.

Nix, you may yet discover some quirks in your layout, but I am hopefully becoming a bit better at identifying and correcting them.

I didn't style the comment pages on this new one, mostly because I'm lazy, but I might do that eventually. How much do I love that DW allows the manipulating of the mood theme image without an additional theme layer? Seriously, the coding and application of id/classes is so much better here. It makes coding more fun than frustrating. I'm so looking forward to creating more layouts to share once I have more time.

In other news, I didn't get as much sleep as I should have last night, principally because my internal clock now gets me up around 10 everyday regardless of when I go to sleep. This isn't a bad thing, it just means I might not be as savvy about multi-tasking (read: RP) as usual.

School begins again on the 5th. One of my classes this term is Computer Literacy, god help me. This is actually the second time I've taken this course, as it is apparently required everywhere but it didn't count in my transfer credits. Because really, I'm obviously the sort of person who needs to take Computer Literacy twice. :P Also taking Geology, which is…well, what it is. Required science credits. Story Analysis for Film and TV doesn't start for another month yet; it looks to be a relatively relaxed term. Fingers crossed.

Does continuing to cross-post to LJ make anyone else feel vaguely skeevy?

I may have just gone to McDonald's and ordered two cheeseburgers without ketchup and a large fry just so I could bring it all home and eat it with my $16 curry ketchup. >.>

(It might have been delicious.)

I've been rewatching Rome over the past few days. Again. Reassuring to know I still love Brutus and Brutus/Cassius like burning. Also hooray for still having this icon on this account.

Lacy and I went out this afternoon as I needed to buy some shoes and earphones. It's an absolutely beautiful, SoCal sort of day here: Cloudless blue sky, very warm, genuinely glorious. I was glad to get out of the house.

The really notable part of this jaunt, though, is that I spent $16 on a bottle of ketchup. Lacy wanted to stop at Good Dog to eat, but I'd already had lunch, so I just shared some of his fries. I cannot express how fabulous their curry ketchup is. They make all of their ketchups by hand, and $16 is so completely worth it. Certain types of little things can make me inordinately pleased, and this (along with the champagne cupcake I bought from the store next door) definitely did it. Truly, I am thrilled with this ketchup.

All of this is good, because I was feeling pretty apathetic yesterday in general and outright depressed by the time I went to bed. I've pretty much decided to not bother with TR's NYE stuff outside of the one or two threads I need to do for plot stuff; I just don't have the spoons for it right now. I'm also going to FTB on Shari's EP, as it just irritates me beyond belief to use LJ anymore.

I started a new layout for this journal yesterday that I am REALLY pleased with, so I'm going to spend some time working on that and possibly correcting TR's layout code this afternoon, and later in the evening I'm going to get to my open tags. And that will be enough.

This morning I'm putting together a much-overdue sampling of my favorite Rufus Wainwright songs for my friend Kevin, who, along with his husband Nick, was all but completely ignorant of who Rufus was until I brought him up a couple of years ago. (Still WTFing about that.) I went to check something on Wikipedia, and this happened:

Anita: OMG
Anita: Not to interrupt you
Anita: But my mind has just been blown
Anita: Rufus Wainwright's new album next year is going to be produced by Mark Ronson
Anita: STARS IN MY EYES
Ruth: :O
Ruth: it's like two of your favourite people are having a baby :b
Anita: YES
Anita: I want to roll around on the floor
Anita: Like a dog
Ruth: AHAHAH
Ruth: the cats will judge you
Anita: Probably
Anita: I think they judge me anyway

My Christmas morning has been pretty chilly thus far, which is exactly the way I prefer it. I hope everyone who celebrates the holiday is having a good one, not too fraught with family drama. My plans for today are to finish doing TR's layouts, maybe get started on Nix's layout, watch A Christmas Story with my husband and hopefully get in some tags. And I am pretty solidly okay with this.

Dreamwidth has rolled out community imports as promised, which is wonderful. If you're happy to be here and grateful for how amazing DW has been, make sure you go over and tell them so. (Just don't bash on LJ in your comments.)

We had our "Christmas" this morning. We (meaning Lacy, Megan and myself) go out to eat every Friday morning when Lacy gets home (It's the start of his weekend), and most of our gifts were either unwrapped or something we already knew, so we just went ahead and opened them all when we got home. We normally open gifts on Christmas eve, but we're going down to Alabama tomorrow evening to visit with some friends who are in town from L.A. With Lacy's parents moved to NC, we don't really have anyone here to do Christmas with, so. It was nice, though, if a bit impromptu.

I really made out in the media department this year. I had a bunch of titles I wanted on Blu-Ray on my wishlist, and I guess it's easy to buy that, so including the one Megan bought for both Lacy and me, I got 7 Blu-Rays. I also got a bunch of amazing over-the-knee socks, because I'd added a bunch of items from Sock Dreams on my list. Like Dumbledore, I'm really happy to get socks as a gift.

the_blank_slate's move to DW continues apace. We're finally getting some posts up in the communities, people are settling in, feeling the place out. It's going surprisingly smoothly. The last two days are pretty much a blur for me, I've had so much admin stuff to do, and there's still TONS more. Today I'd like to work on my tags and make an EP for high_king, but I really need to get the layouts done. It will drive me batshit until they're up and functional.

On a related note, it's so encouraging to look at my reading list and see it filled with people who have firmly migrated from LJ (As opposed to people just making one or two posts to "try DW out" and never using it again). I think that having an active and familiar friends list is going to be what makes the transition to DW easier for a lot of people.

I feel like I had other things to say, but I really need to get cracking on those layouts while I'm in the right headspace to code. Randomly, if you're looking for a clean and functional yet pretty layout, even just temporarily, I humbly submit my Leaving for Paris series. I'm going to use it on most of my pup journals because I'm still really pleased with it. I keep getting asked to submit them to dreamscapes, so that's on my to-do list for the new year. Maybe someday they'll be official DW themes. :D I'm excited to get back to doing layouts for DW in general, too. The styles are so much easier to work with than LJ.

Anyway, gotta dash. Love to you all.

Part of me feels as if I ought to be more sad about leaving, but it's a bit difficult to be when DW has been so amazing about helping TR move. It was such a novelty to have a journal site give me good customer service that I was practically in tears over it.

So yeah, no more LJ. As before, my non-RP, non-meme posts will be almost exclusively at Bettyville. I've got cross-posting to LJ enabled, but comments turned off over there. Love those of you who are staying, but I can't abide LJ's shit anymore, and now that TR is moving to DW, I don't have to anymore.

SO MUCH TO DO RIGHT NOW, OMG. LOL, I'd forgotten my mood theme over here is Nathan. HELP ME, BARRY, HELP ME~

A quick meme, nicked from mellafe:

Name me a film I know, and I will endeavor to tell you:

1. My favourite actor/character
2. My favourite quote
3. My favourite scene
4. What I rate the film as on a scale of 0-4 stars

1. Unless there are extenuating circumstances beyond my control, return all tags within 24 hours.
2. Hit at least 70 comments on all EPs before I even begin to consider moving on.

Just finished up my last French homework for the term, I shall now post another shipping meme for LJ to render moot with its heinous load times.

Give me one of my ships (Any sort: Canon, AU, Cross-overs, RP, Unrealised, etc.) and I shall endeavor to tell you:

who is the big spoon/little spoon
what is their favorite non-sexual activity
who uses all the hot water in the morning
what they order from take out
what is the most trivial thing they fight over
who does most of the cleaning
what has a season pass in their DVR
who controls the netflix queue
who calls up the super/landlord when the heat’s not working
who steals the blankets
who leaves their stuff around
who remembers to buy the milk
who remembers anniversaries

Wrote this up last night, was going to post it and do a few overdue tags, and bam, DDoS attack. :P

Ship meme. Guess the ship by the (probably really vague) description. These are all general fandom. If they're too vague, I can list the fandoms.

01. the limey and the veteran - Jude/Max (AtU) - flareupwithlove
02. the night owl and the sunshine - Brian/Justin (QaF) - mellafe
03. the golden boy and the black sheep - James/Sirius (HP) - mellafe
04. the control freak and the wreck - Marshall/Lionel (USoT) - flareupwithlove
05. of medicine and of everything - The Doctor/Martha (DW) - flareupwithlove
06. the intellect and the sense - Tony/Pepper (IM) - butterflysteve & flareupwithlove
07. the choreographer and the dancer - Tony/Maxxie (Skins) - flareupwithlove
08. the anger and the apathy - Cook/Freddie (Skins) - flareupwithlove
09. the magnificent and the just - Peter/Edmund (Narnia) - flareupwithlove
10. the lost soul and the cut flower
11. the memory and the insight
12. the fool and the equestrian
13. the headline maker and the reporter - Clark/Lois - mellafe
14. the ascetic and the drunk - Winters/Nixon (BoB) - flareupwithlove
15. the hands and the heart - Ianto/Gwen (TW) - flareupwithlove
16. the role model and the republican - Nate/Brad (GK) - eudaimon
17. the reckless and the rational - Kirk/Spock (ST) - flareupwithlove
18. two third-born sons - Renly/Loras (ASoIaF) - flareupwithlove

You guys you guys you guys you guys

This meme has been going around, but it annoyed me that it 1) used an image instead of text that was 2) riddled with grammatical errors and 3) duplicates. So I whipped up the code for it. I also eliminated a couple of numbers because they were geared toward kids or just stupid.

Wallpaper » Kuvva
Icon Dock » ObjectDock
Icons » Flurry by IconFactory
Calendar & To Do » Statica EN for Rainlendar
Media Player » iSome for CD Art Display used with WinAmp
Clock » Linear Clock for Rainmeter
Date & Intl Time » Standard Rainmeter customized by me
Slideshow » StickyPic for Rainmeter
Beautiful Boy » Thomas Dekker

Friendly

You would rather hang out with others than spend time alone, and you'd far rather be doing something with your friends than just sitting around. You're happy in a crowded room, club, stadium, or auditorium.

You're not a private person who is ill at ease in a group; you don't view excessive socializing as a waste of time.

Aesthetic

You appreciate art, beauty, and design; you know that they are not superficial but absolutely crucial to living the good life. You have good taste, and you're proud of it. Those with a high score on the "aesthetic" trait are often employed in literary or artistic professions, enjoy domestic activities — doing things around the house — and are enthusiastic about the arts, reading, and travel.
You don't think it's pretentious to be moved by art and beauty.

You're not one of those who believe it doesn't matter what something looks like as long as it does its job.

Creative

You are good at solving problems, coming up with original ideas, and seeing connections between things, connections that most other people miss. People with a high score on the "creative" trait often are employed in such fields as finance and scientific research, and enjoy avant garde and classical music as well as literary fiction and scholarly non-fiction.

You do not shun abstractions and concepts in favor of the concrete and tangible.

Competent

You strive to master everything you undertake. You tend to learn quickly and do not shy away from challenges.

You are not a "que sera sera" type of person, nor do you go easy on yourself when attempting to master a new skill or get a job done.

Astute

You are a quick study. You generally don't need to have things explained to you more than once. When presented with a problem, you will often have an instant understanding of where to look for the solution.

You do not take your sweet time when presented with a new task to complete or problem to solve. You don't avoid assignments that require you to learn new skills.

Intellectual

You are thoughtful, rational, and comfortable in the world of ideas. People find you interesting to talk to. You're the living embodiment of the saying "You learn something new every day." In general, those with a high score on the "intellectual" trait are employed in such fields as teaching and research, and are enthusiastic about reading, foreign films, and classical music.

You do not avoid abstract conversation, experimenting with new ideas, or studying new things. It bores you to stick to the straight and narrow of what you already know.

Resilient

You bounce back quickly from adversity. For you, all setbacks are temporary. You don't dwell on bad news, bad luck, or criticism; you regroup and focus on solving the problem, whatever it may be.

You almost never feel that there's too much on your plate, that you don't have the strength to deal with the bad hand you've been dealt, or that you're going to lose it if you have to deal with one more problem.

Curious

You like to get to the bottom of things. You're not content knowing what someone did; you want to know why they did it.

You don't simply take things as they are and move on; you're not content skimming along on the surface; you don't feel you're wasting time by digging for the meaning of things.

Poised

You tend to feel at home wherever you find yourself, even in unfamiliar settings, with new people. It takes a lot to rattle you, and when rattled you recover quickly and gracefully.

You are usually not self-conscious or nervous when you're in an unfamiliar environment or with people you don't know.

Warm

You have a genuine interest in other people. You're a natural host, and are always thinking about how you can increase the happiness of those around you. When friends have problems or are in trouble, you're usually the first person they turn to for aid and comfort. Scoring high on the "warm" trait suggests that you are among those who enjoy domestic activities — doing things around the house — and are enthusiastic about charitable work, helping others, and making the world a better place.

You don't always say exactly what you're thinking; you don't like the idea of causing anyone pain because of your criticism.

► A meme, slightly altered:

THREE NAMES YOU GO BY:
1. Anita
2. The Girl
3. Pooper (yes, really)

THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW:
1. My Superman t-shirt
2. Plaid pyjama pants
3. Toe socks

THREE THINGS YOU WANT VERY BADLY AT THE MOMENT:
1. To stay on my regular schedule now that I've gone back to it
2. To get caught up on my RP tags
3. To continue working on a thing I'm not talking about :P

THREE PEOPLE WHOM YOU HOPE WILL DO THE MEME:
1. Your Mom
2. Your Butt
3. You

THREE THINGS YOU DID LAST NIGHT:
1. Talked to people
2. Watched Being Human
3. Went to bed on time

THREE PEOPLE YOU LAST TALKED TO ON THE PHONE:
I seriously do not know, aside from Lacy. That is how little I talk on the phone.

THREE THINGS YOU ARE GOING TO DO TOMORROW:
1. My FMS 494 quiz
2. Work on that thing I'm not talking about
3. Tidy

THREE OF YOUR FAVOURITE DRINKS:
1. Coffee
2. Coca-Cola
3. Water

THREE THINGS THAT MADE YOU SMILE TODAY:
1. BREAKFAST, including pumpkin praline pancakes, which were amaaaaazing
2. Adorable cats being adorable
3. Adorable husband being adorable

We got back home last night. I was pleased to see that the cats hadn't destroyed anything while we were gone. They were very excited to see us, however, and Bitty is still all over my shit, needing to be right next to me at all times.

Florida was good. The weather was perfect while we were there. I got to visit with my family and friends, which was somewhat overdue, as it had been two years. What you care about, though, is that we went to Universal's Islands of Adventure on Friday, ie, went to Hogwarts~