Otter's Rock

• Even the weekend before Thanksgiving, there are still tourists in Gettysburg.  You know how I know this?  Because the idiots can't figure out how to drive in a traffic circle.  It's really very simple.  If there's a car coming across the circle, wait your turn.  If there's a break, go.  Don't get half-way out into the circle, then realize there's a car coming, and stop.  If everyone drives responsibly, it's a safe and efficient way of handling an intersection.  If they don't it's a mess.  It was a mess today.
• The Christmas tree was up in the town square already.  And see point #1, it's not even Thanksgiving, yet.
• I hate, hate, hate shopping for any kind of pants, but particularly jeans.  It always ends with me trying on a bazillion pairs to find one that fits.  Apparently, I have a small waist for my size (or I have a big butt for my  waist size, but I much prefer the small waist, you know?).  So if I find a pair of pants (particularly jeans) that are big enough to get over my hips and butt, there's usually a huge gap in the small of my back.  And my torso is long enough that low-rider jeans are too low, so I can't solve the problem that way.  When you've tried on every single pair of jeans in your size in a department store and none of them fit, that's frustrating.  I ended up having to go to the Spawn of Satan (aka Walmart).  But at least I found not one but three pairs of jeans that would work.  Which was good, because I was down to one pair fit to be seen in public.  And the winners are: Signature by Levi Strauss and Co. Totally Slimming at Waist, Riders by Lee Comfort no-gap Waistband and Riders by Lee Slender Stretch Mid-rise boot cut.

On the bright side, only in Gettysburg would you see two ladies in Civil War clothes in the womens' changing rooms at Walmart.  And I now have jeans!
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This is hysterically funny.
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Last night I stayed up way past my bedtime reading comments to cereta's post On rape and men (Oh yes, I'm going there)</user>.  In one comment thread, there was some talk about how men react when women start telling stories about assault and things that have been done to them, and how men sometimes don't like to listen and try to derail the conversation because it makes them feel uncomfortable, to which the response is "well, if you hear stories of assault and don't feel uncomfortable, there's something wrong with you."  Because being comfortable is a problem when it blinds you to the realities of those less privileged than you.

And today I am writing my sermon tomorrow, and find myself remembering a quote from Thomas Cahill: "The purpose of the Gospel is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
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Tuesday I saw a neuropsychologist. (Recap: I had to resign from my internship a few months ago mainly due to poor social skills caused by undiagnosed Aspergers.) I was diagnosed with Aspergers, which was not a surprise (I've known I had it since we started researching my brother's autism), but I was also diagnosed with Face blindness, which was a surprise but explains a lot. I've always been bad at pairing faces and names. When I was at camp in middle school, on the last day when we were getting ready to go home, one of the girls from my cabin came up to me and I didn't recognize her because she'd changed her clothes from what she'd been wearing in the morning. I can recognize people I know, but it takes me a while to learn to recognize new people, particularly when I meet them in a large crowd. From the testing I got, apparently I can memorize about three new faces at a time, and any more than that forget about it. I've never thought much about it because my Mom's the same way, and lots of people talk about being bad with names and such. But apparently I'm much, much worse than most people, which doesn't help social skills that are already pretty bad because of the Aspergers.

Apparently, they're in the middle of reviewing and updating diagnosis criteria as a prelude to a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). So she evaluated me on a version modified by current discussion on the issue.

( Aspergers criteria that fit me )

( What this is like from the inside )
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No, really.  I know this will come as a great shock, but they do.  At least, this seems to have been a foreign concept to the woman who built our house and landscaped the 8.5 acres it sits on.  She loved all these ornamental and rare trees, and got a lot of them to put in certain areas.  And the nurseries she got the trees from told her how far apart the trees needed to be, and she decided that that was wrong because the trees looked so far apart when she laid them out that way, so she put them much closer together.  Twenty-five years later, things are ... dire.  The most spectacularly bad example: a Sequoia with four other trees within a thirty foot radius of its trunk.  Of all these wonderful trees she planted, probably a third need to get taken out, and of course they're much too big to transplant now.

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... scientists claim to have created transparent aluminum!  Is that not cool?  Star Trek is just around the corner!
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So, usually, in the Willamette Valley we'll have a few days each summer that get up above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, a lot of 80-degree days, and even more days in the 70s. We have had more 90+ days in the last two weeks than we normally have in a whole summer. And they're saying next week should have two days over 100.

I'd call it global warming, except that our winters (particularly this last one) have been colder than they've been in my lifetime. It's not that the average year-round temperature is going up, it's that we're getting more extremes (and heavier storms) at both ends of the spectrum.

Either way, I've been staying inside a lot.

On the bright side, I finally figured out a top to go with the cute skirt I got in Hawaii. It's purple with cream flowers. I have white tops. I do not have cream tops. I have a purple cami that goes with it, but I can't wear a cami to church or to someplace I need to look professional without something else either over or under it. (And I rarely wear skirts except to church or when I need to look professional.) I just realized, I have a black tanktop that, if worn under it, would provide adequate coverage. Yay!

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So I'm home for the summer, right? Grad school, not college. Our washing machine broke and a tech came out to fix it. Parts will have to be ordered, so he'll have to come back tomorrow. Mom and Dad will not be home tomorrow, but I will. Tech guy says "I don't like being alone with minors."

I'm closer to thirty than twenty.

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You've probably heard that Geocities will be closing down its service later this year.  While some geocities sites will probably be making the move, a lot will simply be lost, and if you're like me you'll want to save copies of your favorite stories/pages/whatever.  If you're like me, this is a major task because you have a lot of bookmarks and can't remember off the top of your head which ones might be geocities.  (I have 1249 bookmarks on Delicious.)  And while you can sort by tag on delicious, I couldn't find any way to sort by address.

In the top left corner of Delicious, right under your name if you're logged in, are three little icons.  They're easy to miss.  They consist of one, two, and three stacked horizontal bars.  These control how much information you see for each bookmark.  The default is the middle icon, with two horizontal bars.  If you click on the right one, with three horizontal bars, you will get more information for each bookmark, including the url, and then you can use your browsers search function to find "geocities" on that page.  But you still have to go through each page one at a time.

If you have Firefox, the process is easier.  Bookmarks--Organize Bookmarks or ctrl-shift-b brings up Organize Bookmarks, and then you type "geocities" into the search box in the top right corner and it brings up all the webistes with geocities that you have bookmarked in Firefox.

Yeah, sure, these are both pretty simple, but for someone not necessarily tech-smart, I was pleased to figure out a way to do it without having to ask.

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Day before yesterday, I was making dinner--chicken rice bake, easy recipe, tastes great.  It calls for a can of cream of mushroom soup, and one of cream of chicken.  You know those pop-tab lids Campbells has gone to the last couple of years to make them "easy to open"?  And are approximately ten times harder to open that just using a simple can opener?  Yeah.  I sliced my finger open when that sucker finally came off.  It bled a lot, but I got a band-aid on it and didn't think much about it.

This morning I took the band-aid off, and decided I needed to see the doctor.

Definitely should have been stitched.  (It's bigger than I thought it was.  There was too much blood to see the cut clearly.  Looking back, maybe that should have been a clue.  Possibly.)  It's deep.  It'll take a long time to heal.  Because of where it's located, if I move the finger too much it's likely to come open, so I'm not to move the finger.  Nor do anything that might get it dirty.  So no yardwork or washing pots by hand for the next few weeks unless I can do it one-handed.  (Did I mention that my "rent" for living at home over the summer is a certain number of hours of yardwork per month?)

Oh, and if that's not enough, the reason the tip of that finger feels slightly odd is that I probably cut through a few of the surface nerves.  But I still have full range of motion and feeling (it feels weird, but I can feel), so it's probably very slight nerve damage which will heal. 

From opening a %$&! can of soup.

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So, I didn't post anything about/during Racefail '09 because I'm pretty much generic whitebread middle-class American and had nothing to say on the subject that other people weren't saying far more eloquently and didn't want to add to the signal/noise ratio. Also because I'm lazy and don't like conflict.

But you know what? Racism and productive/constructive ways to deal with it and (as much as possible) prevent it are ordinary, everyday situations that should be thought about constantly, not just whenever it happens to blow up. That way, hopefully, we can make things better instead of worse. I still don't have much to say on the subject that others haven't said better, but I do have a rec: Go read the Spock/Uhura Racefail Prevention Post. It's concise, it's positive, and it's got good advice for how to talk and think about issues of race particularly in the fannish realm but also in general.  With links you can follow which lead to lots of other places where racism in life and in fandom are discussed in helpful ways.

For those of you who don't know, in the new Star Trek movie Spock and Uhura (a character of color) have a romantic relationship. This has led to a whole lot of fiction and fan attention for Uhura and to the creation of a community dedicated to the pairing. Within two months of its creation, spock_uhura has had at least one major incident of racefail.  The mods then publicly apologized on behalf of the community to the person who'd gotten attacked, put together a post on how to prevent such things from happening again (and then on how to respond appropriately when they inevitably do), and generally serve as an example of how to be responsible human beings.

I swear.  If the anti-racism training they'd given us in school had been even 1/4 as sane and reasonable and reality-based as the stuff you can learn through fandom ...</user> This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/134942.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

So, we've got an exchange student from Taiwan living with us for the summer to work on her English before starting school in the fall.  She's got classes this summer, plus living with an English speaking family (us).  Last two weeks, she's been often saying she was sick and staying home from school.  This is suspicious since we haven't seen any symptoms except a runny nose and sleeping a lot.

What's probably been happening: she's been staying up all night IMing her friends back home, and sleeping during the daytime.  So now, not only does her computer stay out in the living room, but I'm going to be disabling wireless in the house when I go to bed.

Mom chose not to directly tell her we know she's almost certainly been lying and staying up late IMing, but she's not stupid.  Nor was she happy about having to leave her computer out in the living room, and she wasn't getting ready for bed when Mom knocked on her door at bedtime, so she may be thinking of coming out here after the household is asleep.  Hence disabling wireless.  But she didn't directly try to challenge anything.

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What is really annoying is when your computer decides all of a sudden that it doesn't want to remember to login to LJ automatically, so I have to do it manually all the time.

What is also annoying are people who go to high school graduations and then talk loudly through the whole thing so that no one around them can hear the band play, the choir sing, or the speakers speeches.  And then get up and leave halfway through the presentation of diplomas after their own student gets theirs.

And call me old-fashioned, but this thing where you wear dresses that show your bra?  Not the bra straps but the bra itself?  That's incredibly tacky.  Like, it may not scream "hooker" if you've got enough of the rest of your skin covered, but it sure as shooting screams "trailer park trash," particularly when the bra doesn't even match the dress.

So, I was in a car accident Wednesday afternoon. Completely not my fault, I was sitting still at a stop light when the truck in front of me decided he wanted to pull into the parallel parking spot beside me and started backing up to get into it without realizing I was there. Pull over, exchange info, report it to our insurance companies, etc. State Farm claims was very helpful to me, explaining procedures and things, and it's better if I go through his insurance to fix the hood and front bumper of my car, because if I use my own insurance I have to pay a $250 deductible, but I shouldn't have to pay if I use his insurance since it's his fault.

Alas, his insurance is so far less helpful. Their hours are much shorter, and I wasn't there to answer the phone when they called yesterday. So I call back with the extension the lady left in the message, and get told she's not there and nobody else there can handle it because she's the claims representative assigned to it so I have to wait for her to call me back. Aargh.

I was fairly active in the time leading up to Christmas, being in Hawaii, and wasn't eating that many more calories than I normally would. After Christmas, now, that's a whole different story. I have in my apartment now:

( Chocolate everywhere ... )

Normally, I keep myself from eating too much fatty/sugary stuff by the simple expedient of not having much of it in the house. This induces in me a feeling of deprivation so I ration it, which is healthier for me and better for my figure and keeps me from eating it instead of healthy stuff when I'm hungry. It's ... a lot harder to be good when I know there's lots of it sitting around waiting to be eaten.

(It did not take me long after arriving at seminary two and a half years ago to determine that people like feeding seminary students. Apparently, they like giving chocolate to pastors.)

And the Oregon Department of Transportation is a crowning example for why the salvation of souls lies, ultimately, in God's hands and not in human hands. Because if the leadership of ODOT was standing before me, writhing in the torments of Hell, I'm afraid my current response would be one of satisfaction rather than grace.

For those of you from other corners of the globe, ODOT is notorious for being a department of non transportation rather than transportation; you see, they are more concerned with keeping as few cars on the road as possible (better for the environment, don't you know) than actually keeping the roads usable. (Case in point: they're building a new, expensive bridge over the Columbia River in Portland. But it can't allow any more cars over than the current bridge it will replace, because that would encourage people to drive and that would be Bad. So the point of building a new bridge and wasting all that time I'm not exactly sure.)

Anyway, they have a horror of de-icing roads; they believe that salt and chemical de-icers are an abomination against the environment and refuse to use them. They also seem to not like using blades to scrape the snow off for unknown reasons. Their publicly-stated philosophy is that once the snow gets packed down and they put sand on it, it's fine to drive in if you've got four-wheel drive and chains on; and if you don't, you shouldn't be driving in snow anyway.

They have been allowed to get away with it because Oregon doesn't get that much snow; we may get snow once a winter, and it's usually gone in a day or two. ODOT (and the rest of people in Oregon) can wait it out without too much trouble.

We are currently having the longest snow in about fifty years. (We've had times when it got colder; we've had times when there was more snow. Snow that's lasted this long? No way.) It started getting cold and snowing about a week ago, and has kept on since, with a few ice storms for good measure. I-205 and I-5 are nuts; you can't get much above ten mph from Portland down to Woodburn. Considering that those are two of the most major roads in the state, and that's the highest-traffic area, this is a serious problem. It took us almost five hours to travel what should have taken only an hour or so (Portland Airport to Grandma's house in Salem). On the way, we passed no less than four pieces of road-clearing equipment owned by the state, sitting by the side of the road with several inches of snow on top of them. We passed one sand-spreading truck and one team of workers actually out clearing the road (both were on I-5 northbound). Needless to say, we were Not Happy.

It didn't help that we'd been travelling since 10PM last night when we boarded the plane in Lihu'e, Kauai, Hawaii. It also didn't help that when we got to Grandma's house to drop her and my Aunt off, we had to spend an hour and a half digging them out of the snow before we could get in the car for the final stage home, by which point it was dark. However, 22 and 99 South and West of Salem are in much better shape than I-5, because it got less snow. Picked up the dog from the kennel, checked the studio to make sure everything was all right there, and came home to find out that the ice had taken down a couple trees and numerous limbs on our property, though we still had power. No water, though. Dad's out checking the well and the rest of the property to figure out what's going on.

And I fly out to Pittsburgh early in the morning on the 26th, is the latest information. So, given road conditions, I'll probably be spending the night there. Joy.

So, yesterday I married my brother--no, no, not the way you're thinking, get your minds out of the gutter--I performed the ceremony as my brother married his high-school sweetheart in Smith's Tropical Paradise with a luau after. It was my first wedding but it went off without a hitch. (Okay, there was a minor thing--I forgot to tell them to kiss the bride and they almost walked out without it, but that'll just be the thing we laugh about ten years from now.) It was a beautiful ceremony in a beautiful garden and I didn't start getting hoarse and having severe sinus problems until after the whole thing was over. It wasn't raining, which was a change--they've been having bad weather, lots of rain. Which meant that we had to put on long-sleeved shirts with our shorts, oh, darn. Anyway, much better than being home in Oregon or Pennsylvania where they've got ice and snow and horrible weather.

Except, we're supposed to fly home today, and Portland Airport is closed. So is Seattle--they're having a blizzard up in Washington. In Salem it's been icy cold for a week, with snow and freezing rain, and this is really unusual because the Willamette Valley rarely gets below freezing, and that only briefly. So, actually, we're going to be stranded in San Francisco--they want us to take our flight from Lihu'e to San Fran and then figure things out there. Joy. If we must be stranded somewhere, we'd much rather be stranded here in Hawaii where it's sunny for the first time since we've been here.

My personal problem is that I have a couple of days in Oregon where we were going to do a home Christmas dinner before I go back to PA for Christmas; I kinda need to be there because pastors (even intern pastors) don't get Christmas off, y'know. However, looks like we're not getting to Portland until mid-morning on the 23rd, and I'm supposed to fly out from Portland at 6:15am on the 23rd. And since it's a different airline, I'm not sure how that'll work.

There are worse places to be stranded, though.

I'm bad with people. I do not pick up social cues naturally; I really have to work at it. Things are much easier in stories, because they focus on the cues that build the story; in real life, you have to sort through the ones that are just automatic and/or red herrings to figure out which ones are significant, and that's the part I have trouble with. On the internet, however, most of the time one has only text-based clues to work with (no tone of voice, no body language, no facial expressions, nothing.) Misunderstandings are much easier here than they are in real life ... and I'm bad enough in real life, so when I'm missing most of the cues I've trained myself to look for, I can very easily come across as rude, annoying, insulting, etc. without even realizing it because I've completely misread the "tone" of the conversation. Thing is, most people don't want to be rude or confrontational themselves so they won't directly tell me how I'm coming across--they'll try to gently imply it. Well, this is a problem for me because if I've already misread the tone of conversation I almost certainly won't get any subtle hints! And I can't fix my words and attitudes until and unless I know I'm doing something wrong. This has resulted in some pretty nasty interpersonal blow-ups both with people I deal with face-to-face (that was mostly when I was younger, I'm much better at dealing with people face-to-face now) and with people I deal with over the internet. Believe me, I much prefer it when something I do or say that's annoying or insulting or rude or whatever gets called immediately, so I can correct my behavior and things don't have time to fester to the point where a huge blow-up is possible. I can take correction. So, please, if you have a problem with me, tell me to my face, preferably when it's still a small problem and hasn't yet had time to grow into a bigger problem.

I love my internship; I'll post more on that later. The congregation is great, the town is great, it's wonderful to actually be doing what I've been called to do and not just studying it, I feel like I'm learning and having a decent amount of responsibility without being tossed in the deep end, etc. ... I could go on.

But besides the whole "job satisfaction" thing, there's the fact that I have a paycheck for the first time in a year and a half! I have money! I know I should be good and save as much of it as possible to pay back my student loans with, and usually I'm very good about that, but right now I just have to splurge. A couple of days after I got my paycheck, I got an e-mail from Barnes and Noble saying they had a 40% of sale on selected DVD box sets, so I'm sitting here staring at Buffy seasons 4 & 5 and Star Trek: The Next Generation season three that just arrived in the mail. And one of the merchants on Amazon.com also had a really good sale going, so I've got West Wing season 7 and From the Earth to the Moon on their way, hopefully to arrive this week. I just hope that once the novelty of actually, you know, having money wears off, I can get back to my usual good fiscal discipline.

• Y'know, it's a good thing that when I pick up washclothes 10 for $1.99 in the "College" section of Target to use as cleaning cloths (I know, but I wasn't going to haul worn-out t-shirts across the country), I think to myself, "Self, I bet washcloths this cheap are cheaply made, so I will not just chuck them in the laundry with everything else because they will probably run." I wonder how many unsuspecting college students pull their first load of laundry out of the washer and freak because everything's blue or green or pink ....

• I cannot be a member of the community choir I wanted to join because it rehearses the same night most committee meetings are for church. I will, however, be able to participate in a community orchestra; it should be interesting, because I've been in bands before but never an orchestra.

• I have two prompts 3/4 done, and am not starting another until one of them is done and posted.

• tgawarmychris came and visited me on Sunday, watched me preach (which went well). It was good to see him; I've missed him while he was on internship, and now that he's going back to class, I'm on internship!