What I need is time, what I get is...

business, I guess. I've been too busy with trying to get ready to take the GRE and other things in life that I haven't been able to blog. I'm sorry.

I'm hoping to be able to put up entries about Dragon*con, as well as other things of interest, but I don't know when I'll have the time.

Maybe on Wednesday, after I get back from Brook Park and my *gulp* court date.

Instead, I'll briefly regale you with the story of the missing mp3 player.

I was asked to participate in a quartet for church last week, and I went to rehearsal on Thursday (unknowingly) with my Sansa 2gig mp3 player attached to my belt by my Hello Kitty pouch. The snap closure had been acting funny lately, so it must have come loose when I was driving to the church. I was looking for a way in when the choir director's boyfriend opened one of the side doors at the bottom of a hill to let me in. It is at that point that the pouch fell off, but I didn't notice because I didn't know I had even brought it with me and (which was probably my biggest mistake) I had taken off my headphones, which would've jerked around my neck to let me know I had dropped it.

Well, I assumed that the player was on my living room table with the headphones and I didn't look for it until I was leaving for the UNCF walk on Saturday. I was supposed to meet my team at 9:00am for the group photo. I didn't leave the house until 9:45 tearing it apart for the player. I finally asked my husband to call the church and to call the interim pastor. I figured that if I lost it there, maybe they would know something about it. I ended up doing the walk with my old, reliable, Memorex mp3 player, but I still fretted about my Sansa.

We got calls back from the interim pastor saying that a member of the church found a gray item and gave it to her. Unfortunately, she got it on Friday and proceeded to leave it on a table where it could've been during the BREAD meeting [some interfaith bible study that was meeting at our church], and I figured someone took it during that meeting and that I would never see the mp3 player again. I was upset over the loss of money for the player, but I was a little more upset about losing the Hello Kitty thing, because it was a one-of-a-kind, handmade item I bought on eBay that couldn't be replaced. We then get a call from the son of the person who found it in the first place and told us that it was in the church safe.

After trying in vain to get the item back earlier this week, I finally got it back on Thursday evening after choir rehearsal.

Funny enough, though, I haven't used it for more than 5 minutes since I got it back. My head hurts and I have a terrible cold, and I really shouldn't have come in to work today, but I'm here and I'm trying to get some work done...or at least keep my eyes open.

I've returned in one piece (more or less)

This is going to be a brief entry, but I had a great time at Dragon*con! I got to meet & get autographs from Peter S. Beagle (author, The Last Unicorn), Terry Moore (author, Strangers in Paradise), and Lloyd Kaufman (President of Troma Entertainment, The Toxic Avenger), and Voltaire (singer, author, and 'Gothic Clown'). I got to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show done by the stellar Lips Down on Dixie cast, and I got to see so many great costumes.

I also got sick and tired of taking photographs of people whose costumes made mine look very amateurish, and I got more attention wearing a paper hat I made in an Origami panel than for anything else I was wearing this weekend, and I embarrassed myself when I met Mr. Beagle in a tale that I will save for later [because that one deserves to have pictures included]. I even got to see Superman II the way that the first movie's director wanted to make it, and the premier of Poultrygeist, a very hilarious Troma film.

This weekend was great and was almost completely ruined by what happened once we flew back into Cleveland.

We made excellent time in our flight [It only took 1h17min of actual flight time to get back from Atlanta, which meant that our drive back to Columbus was actually 1 hour and 13 minutes longer than the flight] and got back before our scheduled arrival. We were waiting for our luggage like everyone else and what we received was four pieces of mangled baggage; our largest suitcase was open with the contents trying to fall out of the case, and it also had a sizable gash at the bottom. There was fraying on the front of another suitcase and grease stains on that one as well as another. All of the wheel casings were heavily scratched, and it looked like someone roughly handled everything. Why this all stood out is because three of the bags were from a brand-new set of luggage that managed to get to Atlanta without a scratch. Contents were moved around in all four bags, a pirate hat was mangled because it was moved to the bottom of its suitcase, and my bag of costume jewelery [which I accidentally packed in the checked-in luggage] was opened and hidden in a suitcase, but it appears that nothing was stolen...it had no value other than sentimental, so it held no appeal to the thief. We reported our findings to Delta's baggage department & they have offered to fix the hole in the largest bag. It's almost as if we were rewarded for getting to the Atlanta airport early with someone trying to steal from us [The reason why we believe that it was not TSA is because, as the Delta personnel explained to us, the TSA would leave a notice in our suitcase explaining that they chose our bags for inspection].

To top it all off, as we were driving back, I was so upset about the luggage situation that I was speeding in a 60mph part of the highway and got picked up by the cops. I now have to go back to Brook Park to contest the traffic ticket, which is more than two hours away from here, and will require that I leave at 6am [yuck!] to get to court by 8:30 on a Wednesday morning.

I don't know what is missing of my purchases, so I'm still very upset about the whole thing. I do know one thing, however: the next time we go to Atlanta, I'm going to pay to ship all of our purchases instead of taking them on the plane.

Hopefully, more stories from Dragon*con will be forthcoming by the end of the week (with pictures, hopefully!).

[UPDATE: 4:40pm]...and did I mention that my bottle of Luster's Pink Hair Lotion exploded in one of the suitcases? This wasn't as bad as it sounds; it was in a plastic Ziploc bag in a toiletry bag in the suitcase, and it didn't even leak onto the rest of the contents in the toiletry bag. All that happened is that the travel toothpaste, my hair oil, and the travel Listerine has been covered in pink lotion. It's more humorous than upsetting, so I can at least laugh at that one.

Gone to Dragon*con!

Okay, so we don't officially leave for Atlanta until our flight tomorrow at noon, but we are taking off for Cleveland to stay overnight at my father-in-law's place so that we may be able to catch our flight without having to pay to park (he'll be keeping our car) and not driving up for the flight that morning.

I hope to have some great tales about this convention & to also post some pictures as soon as I get back.

I just hope I won't have trouble driving tonight as I've only gotten 2 hours of sleep [I did all the packing] before coming in to work today.

Stay hydrated, everyone, and I'll be back next week!

Taste the rainbow!

I just couldn't resist posting this one!

On the Way to a PFLAG Meeting

Ghetto mama: Gimme some of yo' Skittles, boy.
Little boy: No, they be my Skittles.
Ghetto papa: Boy, you best to give yo' mama some Skittles or yo' ass is nevah gonna taste that rainbow again.

--1 train

via Overheard in New York, Aug 23, 2007

Weekend with my brother

Since I'm actually trying to get a lot of work done today, I'll have to keep this as short as possible.

A while back, I invited my brother to see Transformers with me down here in Columbus, long before the film ever hit the theaters. Well, he saw it with his friends and absolutely loved it, but was still willing to see it with my husband and I so we set up our plan: he would come down on a Saturday, we'd see it on Sunday and I'd send him back on the Greyhound. It took awhile but it finally happened, and while I didn't exactly love the film, it was better than I thought.

Unfortunately, I was being very negative and I feel as if I ruined the movie for him.

What I found out later was that it was the day before my 'cycle', which meant that I had turned into a raging bitch with about as much emotional control as a person has over a whirlpool; it takes you where it wants and there's not much else you can do but ride it out. It's still no excuse for running my mouth and talking about how much I hated certain parts of the film. There was one character in particular that made me so angry that I punched my palm out of frustration [Which is better than where I usually punch myself when I'm on the phone and don't want to betray that I'm angry with the caller; right above my knees.] I know he loves this movie and has loved the Transformers since he was a child, but he started to see flaws in the film and talk about what he didn't like...and that's when I started to feel incredibly guilty.

I wish the audience we had seen it with had been into the film more, because it would've been very easy to get me emotionally caught up if other people had shared his enthusiasm. I probably still would've complained, but maybe not as much.

Even though my husband told me that I didn't really hurt my brother the way I feel I did, I sent him a MySpace message thanking him for coming down and apologizing for ruining his film. His response was simple yet heartfelt; he told me about how he had been wanting to see a film of his favorite childhood show since he was 8, that he was glad that he saw it (and me), and that he missed me. The message made me cry a little the first time I read it (and now the tears are pouring as I remember the message) because I wish he could've stayed longer. All we got to do this weekend was drive down (he actually did the driving in my car...which I guess he didn't know we had gotten a new one until I picked him up from work), have lunch, see the movie, and then immediately drive him to the bus station to catch the 5:00 bus back to Cleveland.

He had never ridden the Greyhound before [Somehow, he's been on an airplane more than a dozen times (2 trips for me) but had never ridden the Greyhound (whereas I had ridden the bus more than a dozen times since junior high).] so I made sure that he was in the right line, and I used the last dollar I had to buy him something to drink for the trip back. We left him there roughly 20 minutes before he was supposed to board, and I didn't want to leave until I saw him on the bus and I have a feeling he didn't want me to leave just yet, either, but my husband wanted to go home, so I left.

[We paid for just about everything this weekend except for the movie itself; I had some silver passes and my husband had a free pass, so that much was free. Greyhound has gone up since I'd last rode with them.]

While I am a bit of an emotional mess right now (and I hate crying in public, but nobody can hear it, I hope), but I do feel very protective of my brother and I cherish and look up to him. I used to get into fights with people because he was he didn't speak to others until he was seven [They tell me he talked to me and I served as his mouthpiece] and while his manner of speech sounds a little slow (due to attending a special school because he was a stutterer, while all the other students had very significant developmental problems), he is in fact, quite intelligent and was the first of all of the siblings to graduate high school on time [I was the second and, so far, the last to do so. The rest...well, let's just say there's still hope that the youngest will pull it off]. My husband understands how important he is to me, so he knows that I would rush to his side if anything were to happen to him. What's funny about it is that my husband and my brother share some characteristics. They both wrestled in high school, they both have the same weird habit of laughing when they lie, and they're both into martial arts. I think it's kind of funny that they say a girl looks for her father's characteristics in the man she'll marry, but I got someone who was a little like my brother.

Funny enough, this didn't take that long to type, but I've definitely got to get back to work. I had a great time with my brother, and I miss him, too.

Pressure

My grandmother found a different tack to use on me in the Pressure-to-Have-a-Baby-2007 campaign: giving a child to one who has been adopted.

That probably didn't make any sense, but it will soon, I promise.

My husband was adopted when he was eight-days-old; his parents arranged the adoption before he was born and after having their first attempt at adoption fail when the mother changed her mind, they made sure to drive right on down to Cincinnati to get him as soon as possible. He and his younger brother were both adopted from teen mothers, but he's always been comfortable with that (as far as I can tell), but it gave my grandmother the [not completely unjustified] notion that he deserves to "have one of his own"; to be able to have a child that is completely his. It's not that I don't want to give him a child, it's just that the body isn't exactly in a cooperating mood of late. It's just that, when my grandmother says it, it feels as if I have more pressure to 'deliver the goods', leaving me feeling as if I'm a complete failure as a woman because I can't (and may not ever) give him a child of his own.

He's willing to adopt if we can't have children. He's the one who brought it up, but he did express really wanting children of his own so I know how much this really means to him. I want to do this, but we need to find out what the problem is so that it can either be resolved or accepted, which would allow us to move forward and do whatever it is we need to do to have a family to raise.

Until more is done to get to the bottom of this, I'm not going to stress myself out about it. I have the GRE to prepare for, and more people to meet in putting together this graduate school endeavor, so I'm trying to take it all in stride and not make myself miserable.

At least, not yet anyway.

Oh well, back to work.

For all the male librarians out there...

I ran across this web comic from Penny Arcade which was a discussion between the two characters on what male librarians are called. I thought it was great because it shows that a) there are some people who think about librarians and b) that gamers can come up with really cool librarian names.

Go check it out (because I'm not posting it here; that would be theft and, therefore, bad!)! Here's the link to The Couch Dialogues.

Have a good day, everyone!