For those of you not on Twitter

Here are a couple of quick pics I snapped today!

Last night, like I am wont to do, I was whipping through my “Anna’s Set” playlist on my iPhone, which is the various songs I can play to one degree or another on the guitar. And while there’s even stuff that isn’t Great Big Sea on that list, it was somewhere just after “Lukey” when I looked at my pick and realized it suddenly had extra points on the end. Oops!

GBS Kills Another Pick

Meanwhile, the cats have gotten very fond of parking on the windowsill in the kitchen and staring out to the walkway just behind the house. I still don’t know what they think they see back there. And by “they” I mean “Fred”, because George is clearly a slacker when it comes to being a watchcat.

Kitties on Watch

Wayfound logs

Here are some Wayfound logs as well, since as I mentioned, the Wolfbringer’s daughter is just refusing to leave me alone. Bear with me, folks, I’m going to be posting logs for a while, I think!

“Tefin Meets the Captain” has Wayfound introducing Vardeus to Tefin, a fascinating Go-Back she’s met in the nearby woods; in “Keeping Watch and Making Plans”, Tefin finds Wayfound on watch over the Vraeyan camp by night, and the two elves share something of their childhoods with each other and make plans to head to Lostholt; “Of Babies and Gold” is a log fragment in which Wayfound and Tefin hang out with the human youth Maerro and the baby Jorrico, and learn a little about human babies and Maerro’s own history.

More Seafarer logs!

Because I’m totally on a nostalgia trip for the Seafarers, and because Wayfound and Arnos still aren’t leaving me alone, I’m on a major log-posting kick today. All of these are logs out of my long-unposted backlog. Hope those of y’all who were in on the Seafarer RP with me will enjoy! userinfodamara, userinfostickmaker, userinfossha, userinfoanimenathan, and most especially userinfosyn, these are for you! (Any other former Seafarers actually reading this, sing out, crew! I miss you!)

“Council by the Campfire” shows Vardeus and Kephissa learning quite a few things from the humans and elves helping them, while making plans for finding the rest of the crew; “A Joyous Reunion” is the log of Vardeus and his party finally finding the rest of the crew; Vardeus shares with Coralfire the news of his betrothal to Tiana in “The Captain’s Delight”; in “Coralfire’s Dilemma”, Coralfire shocks Vardeus by seeking out his advice on what to do about her love life.

So this ought to be fun

Good Murkworks friend userinfodarthhellokitty has had amazing progress this year losing weight, and on Thursday, userinfosolarbird pointed me at a post by another local acquaintance of ours, userinfopetit_chou, who’s been working hard on losing weight as well. It seems userinfopetit_chou has been having great results using an iPhone app called LoseIt!, so I’ve decided to check this out.

The way this works is, you tell it your current weight, where you want to actually be, and it’ll work out for you how long it should take you to get there and how many calories you’re allowed to consume in a day. Then you enter in what foods you eat and it’ll tally up that up for you. You’re allowed extra calories if you get in exercise, which it also lets you record. (Courtesy of this I learned I burn roughly 300 calories a day just walking to and from work during the week.)

So yeah. Given that I’ve continued to have weight issues and that I really need to get on the stick dealing with this, given that it’ll significantly reduce my risk of a recurrence of breast cancer, I’m going to give this a shot.

I started trying it on Thursday night and so far the app is quite easy to use and kind of fun. Since I have my iPhone with me all the time anyway, it makes it very easy to just whip the thing out and track stuff as I eat it, or as I finish a bout of walking. It’s also handy for providing immediate visual data on how much I’ve done during a day and how much more I’m allowed, and for keeping track of progress as well. This seems like it’ll be a way more effective tool than what I’d tried before, which is to say, keeping a manual food log on my laptop.

Trying it last night when we went out for sushi was fun, too, since it meant I was able to go “okay, I’m down to about 120 calories left, I can either have another round of sushi or go for the mochi!” Mmm, mochi. And today, I’m feeling kind of weird and almost-hungry, like my system thinks it should have more food except it doesn’t really need it. So it should be interesting to see how far I can get with it all. Wish me luck, folks.

Another quickie book roundup post

userinfosolarbird relayed to me that Amazon lost its suit over the Kindle book deletion brouhaha and will be taking steps to insure that books cannot be deleted off a Kindle without user consent, unless the content has been identified as a virus or a Trojan horse of some kind. Which is fine by me, and enough to make me reverse my personal ban on having the Kindle app on my iPhone.

Which is good, because there are a few books that are available electronically only in Kindle format, such as an SF novel called Arapeta by New Zealand author Peter Tashkoff, which I’d added to my To-Read list a while back. My only options for getting hold of a copy of this were either ordering a print copy, or getting the Kindle version. Now I have the Kindle version. Yay!

Meanwhile I have also bought J.C. Hutchins’ 7th Son from Barnes and Noble’s e-book store. This is the print edition of a story that’s seen quite a bit of love in podcast form, and which eventually scored the author a print contract. The whole situation is pretty cool to me, since Hutchins had originally tried to pitch his story to the traditional publishers, without any luck; he then turned to making it a podcast, which finally actually got him a print contract. Plus, the story sounds pretty fun; it’s an SF thriller involving cloning and political machinations, and it starts with a bang with the President being assassinated by a four-year-old boy.

This brings me up to 170 books for the year. And Fictionwise is trying to tempt me again with a 15% off coupon I got as part of a monthly drawing, too! Ohnoez! ;)

Outer Alliance spotlight on me!

Check it out, you guys! The kindly , @omgjulia on Twitter, the driving force behind the Spotlight posts on outeralliance.org, has just put one up on, well, me! *^_^*;;

She winged me these questions the weekend just before Thanksgiving, and this was lovely turnaround time in getting the article posted. Go read if you like, and while you’re over there, don’t forget to check out the rest of the Spotlight posts on Outer Alliance authors!

This one’s for the Willowholters

Here’s a log that takes place shortly after the destruction of the Willowholt, when Rillwhisper, her lifemates, and their young cub Wayfound, along with a few other tribesmates, have been taken in at Lostholt. And Wayfound, who is growing up fast, has to go and ask her “Fur-Father’s Advice”–because there are certain matters at which Trollkiller’s expertise is absolutely unparalleled!

Seafarer Log posted

This is mostly for the amusement of my fellow veterans of Two Moons MUSH! Since I went and merged my archive of TM logs with the rest of my roleplay logs, I’ve been absorbed in re-reading a lot of the best of the lot–especially the ones involving Wayfound and the Seafarers. So I got into the mood tonight to pull out a few of the ones I never posted and add them to the archive. I may do one of these a day for a while and see if I can get more of them caught up.

Tonight’s log is “Calm and Storm”, a quiet little scene between Wayfound and her soon-to-be Go-Back lovemate Tefin, who’s introducing her to a Vraeyan version of chess.

That robot video I promised

As I found out shortly after I yoinked this video off my iPhone, I didn’t actually manage to get proper footage of both of the cats closing in on this little guy… but I did at least get about a minute or so of the robot making cute noises.

So here it is, y’all, this little video snippet of the most unusual guest that came to Turkey Day at the Murk this year–and as it happens, this is the first video I’ve ever managed to take with the phone, too. Props to userinfodpawtows, userinfoepawtows, and userinfoypawtows for bringing him, and giving me a chance to get comfier with what my iPhone can do!

Cute, ain’t he? I was totally convinced the little guy looked like something that should be wandering around a Star Wars set. He even made R2-D2 noises. <3