Category: Me

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41 and feeling good

I’ve been getting lovely comments dropped on my Facebook wall from folks who saw there what today is, and I’ve gotten the usual lovely email from userinfostickmaker wishing me natal felicitations. What I did not expect however was to get a little email from the folks who run JournalFen, wishing me a happy birthday and inviting me to send in and/or post interesting birthday stories. That was awfully nice of them and makes me glad I’m continuing to maintain an account on their servers. So this is me sending out a shoutout to JF’s staff: thanks, folks! Thanks also to all of you who have already sent me comments. :)

Birthday Weekend 2010 for Anna will be involving a second viewing of Avatar tonight and probable sushi. There will be cake, but it’ll be tomorrow in conjunction with this week’s Jam, since I didn’t want to have cake and pie in the house at the same time and I felt it would be lame to offer partly eaten birthday cake to folks who show up for Jam. I will however have a fancy cupcake tonight as Birthday Cake standin, the thanks for which go of course to my lovely userinfosolarbird!

Also as part of this weekend’s laid-back fun, Dara and I listened to the first CD of one of the Big Finish Doctor Who audios I bought her for Christmas, and that was great! First of all it was fun to hear Paul McGann reprising the role of the Eighth Doctor, but even more fun was hearing a Dalek Supreme actually be–at least by Dalek standards–subtle. It’s not too spoilery to say that the general thrust of this plot is that Eight and his new companion Lucie wind up on the planet Red Rocket Rising, which has just been devastated by an asteroid strike. And oh hey, a passing alien fleet has just offered to rescue the human survivors from the planet–and OHNOEZ they’re Daleks.

What the Daleks are up to, pretending to be compassionate, is part of the great fun of this episode. In particular there’s an awesome bit where the Dalek Supreme first learns from the Acting President of the planet that the Doctor is around–and you can just hear the Dalek forcibly keeping itself from going ballistic. Later it pretty much orders the President to turn over the Doctor in exchange for Dalek assistance, and Dara and I lost it hearing it say “THE DOCTOR IS AN ENEMY OF THE DALEKS! HE MUST BE EX… TRADITED!”

Unrelatedly, more fun was had last night as I did indeed spend the rest of my Amazon gift certificate. Many thanks to you all for your extensive book and music recommendations! The things I wound up purchasing were:

  • The Green Glass Sea, recommended by userinfosutures1. YA.
  • Mark of the Demon, recommended by userinfoalfvaen. Urban fantasy.
  • Graceling, recommended earlier to me on Goodreads by userinforosepurr. YA/fantasy.

This brings the total of books acquired in 2010 up to 25!

Just about all of the rest of the recommended titles have gone onto my Goodreads Recommended shelf, and I’ll get to them as best I can! Some of them aren’t available in digital form so I may wind up checking them out from the library. Yay, books!

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Ten pounds less of ME

This morning when I got on the scale I saw a lovely number I hadn’t seen in over a year: 182. Which meant, much to my delight, that I have now hit the 10 pound mark in the great initiative to lose 42 pounds by June!

So yeah, thus far the whole LoseIt app on my iPhone is continuing to be a win. I have not significantly changed the stuff I’ve been eating: I’ve just been eating less of it. And really, this means not getting too crazy with the snacks–either the tasty tasty M&M cookies that they sell at the cafe next door to my workplace, or the deep, deep temptation of Starbucks’ Vivannos and Toffee Almond Bars, or worse yet, Seattle’s Best Coffee’s Cocoa Trios and Triple Chocolate Chunk Cookies. Looking up how many calories those things cost me has been very educational! And it’s really kind of amazing how useful knowing “okay, if I want to eat these things, I have to manage my eating the rest of the week in order to have enough in the calorie budget for it” has been. I.e., I can still sometimes have these things; I just have to earn them.

I’ve noticed already that it’s easier to bend over and to get out of the back seat of the car. userinfosolarbird clued in as well that the surgery scar across my right shoulderblade has been changing now that the fat layer back there has lessened. It’s wider now and shallower. It’ll be interesting to see how it continues to change as I get thinner. My energy is up and my sporadic back pain has lessened.

All in all, a win. Thirty-two pounds to go and I’m on track to get there by June. Wish me luck, folks.

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Another awesome picture

I wanted to give this one a post all by itself. Ladies and gentlemen, from April 12, 1968, I give you my father and mother, Donald Ray and Judith Elaine Highland. And if my calculations are correct, on that date, I’m only a short time away from being more than a gleam in my father’s eye!

And not like I normally pay attention to such things, but I gotta say, Mom’s outfit in this picture? Kinda stylin’, in a wholesome 1968 kind of way. Dad, on the other hand? Total dork. ;) All he’s lacking here is a slide rule.

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Whoa! Family history FTW!

My little sister userinfowildshadowstar sent me a lovely, lovely thing in email today: a whole bunch of scanned-in copies of old photographs from our grandmother. Nearly 10 megs’ worth. I’m not going to post them all, but I totally need to share a couple of them with you.

This first one is in Naples, Italy, in 1944. That dog-tag-wearing guy on the right? That there is my grandfather, Jim Sherer. I totally do not remember him; he died when I was very small. I have vague impressions of him as a much older man, heavier and ruddy-faced and with much less hair. But I can’t honestly say whether that’s because of pictures I saw of him; I have no recollections of his physical presence.

But wow. This is my granddad as a soldier. Wow.

There are several pictures of my mother as a little girl, too. Everybody in my family keeps telling me that I look so much like her, but it’s really driven home to me seeing this pictures. Especially this one. I love her expression here.

The coup de grace, though, is this one. Four, count ’em, four generations of women from my family. On the far right is my great-grandmother Margaret, who I again completely fail to remember. Next to her is my grandmother Hyson. Next to her? That there is my mom, Judy Highland. And that blonde moppet in her lap? That’s ME.

I’m thrilled to have these. I think I need to send my grandma a letter to thank her for sharing them with the family. They’re wonderful. Many kudos to Becky for sharing them online too. <3

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Ten Years Ago

There’s a fun meme going around Twitter today with the hash tag #10yearsago. For the benefit of those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook, here are my contributions! It’s fun to write these down, especially given that this year was before I was regularly doing anything like blogging.

Y’all will notice there’s a whole lot of fandom and geekery here. This would be because, well, I was indulging in a lot of fandom and geekery that year! Which has certainly not changed at all in the ten years since.

  • #10yearsago Mylee Ejercito drew me a Shenner picture! https://www.annathepiper.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/shenner3.jpg
  • #10yearsago I was still totally fangirling on Strongbow from Elfquest, enough that I had a web page dedicated to him!
  • #10yearsago X-Files was starting to wear out its welcome at the Murk, but ZOMG Season 3 of Buffy. Big, big fun. Mayor FTW. <3
  • #10yearsago Had big fun seeing The Matrix, Sixth Sense, Toy Story 2, and The Mummy, and OK fine ogled Ewan MacGregor in Phantom Menance. ;)
  • HA I was wrong. My Presario laptop was NOT running XP. It was running Windows 98 and I upgraded to SE that year. #10yearsago
  • #10yearsago Phantom Menace came out! Mimi and I were in line for a late show with a kid with blue hair. We played Egyptian Rat Screw!
  • #10yearsago We didn’t go to Worldcon in Australia but DID go to NASFiC in Anaheim and had a 3-day marathon Disneyland run! Indy ride FTW!
  • #10yearsago I’d quit PernMUSH, BUT! I was still writing in Pern fandom offline in Telgar Weyr, as brownrider Tember and bronzerider J’marr.
  • #10yearsago I was still using a Compaq Presario as my laptop, and it was running XP, and I was FINE with that. Poor deluded 1999 me! ;)
  • #10yearsago Wayfound was born at the Willowholt on Two Moons MUSH, and I destroyed the Willowholt in floods at the end of the year.
  • #10yearsago Tance Vokrim was my surviving character on CrystalMUSH, and he got his beloved Kesya back halfway through that year.
  • #10yearsago I was playing Shenner and Han Solo on Star Wars MUSH and making people’s jaws drop that a girl was playing Solo.
  • #10yearsago in addition to not knowing Great Big Sea yet, my dad was still alive, I worked at Attachmate, and I’d just joined AetherMUSH!
  • In 1999 I was still living at MurkSouth and had not yet discovered either Russell Crowe or Great Big Sea. Had no idea what I was missing!
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Two weeks in, so far so good

So y’all know how I posted two weeks ago about using the LoseIt! iPhone app to start trying to get my weight under control? I’m pleased to report that so far, the plan seems to be working. And in fact, I’m a little ahead of the game since I had set the thing for losing 1 1/2 pounds per week and so far I’m down four pounds, not three.

I made a point of checking in with my general care doctor too so that she is aware of the Plan. Happily, she agreed that what I’m setting out to do seems sane and a healthy rate of loss; she counseled me to make sure to not drop more than two pounds a week and to be prepared to bump up my exercise later as well, neither of which were surprising. She wants to see me in 2-3 months for a physical, so we’ll see where I am in March or so.

Going to have to brief my post-cancer endoc and my thyroid doc as well, especially the latter, given that weight reduction will of course also affect my thyroid levels. Fortunately I have appointments with both of them next week during my vacation time, which will be nice.

All in all I am finding the app a breeze to use, since it conveniently combines several things I was either trying to do or was intellectually aware I should have been doing anyway: i.e., a food log, an exercise log, and managing not only what I eat but how much. Really, the idea of losing weight by eating less and exercising more is one I have known for most of my adult life–we ALL know this one. But knowing it and actually having an effective tool to pull it off seem to be a world apart, at least for me!

Having a daily calorie budget and a way to easily check against it also seems to be vital. Knowing how many more calories I have to blow in a day has already led me to decide against snacks when previously I would have had them; as I type this, I am stoically resisting cake. Because I don’t have enough of a calorie surplus yet, and I won’t until I get on the treadmill Saturday morning!

Long story short, I love this plan! I’m proud to be a part of it!

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Steinbeck! Hemingway! SCUZZBOPPER!

If you happen to be like me and am crossposting these days over to LJ and LJ-related sites off of WordPress, you might want to give a look to the shiny new version of the JournalPress plugin. It just upgraded to version 0.3 and includes, finally, support for letting you choose what userpic you want when the post shows up on LJ!

This gives me a Happy, since it takes a few extra steps out of my crossposting efforts. And lets me specifically do something like oh, say, choose to show those of you who’re looking at this post on LJ or Dreamwidth the shiny new icon that userinfospazzkat made me! It’s a new version of Great Amurkian Novel, featuring Scuzzbopper, who is arguably my personal muse. I <3 Scuzzie so.

But for those who’re looking at this post via WordPress, here’s the icon itself, behind the fold!

Continue reading “Steinbeck! Hemingway! SCUZZBOPPER!”

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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.

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*tap tap tap* Is this thing on?

So yeah, if you’re reading this, you’re either visiting my shiny new official writer-type page at angelakorrati.com, or else you’re seeing a mirrored post over to my Livejournal and JournalFen accounts. Either way, hiya. This is the inaugural post to break in my actual writer site.

Not too much to report here yet and probably won’t be until Faerie Blood comes out. I’m still awaiting the proposed cover art and requested edits from my editor, which will hopefully come in soon. We’re tentatively aiming to have FB ready to come out by March.

In the meantime, for those of you who haven’t already, I invite you to go around to Drollerie Press in general, and in particular, check out the first official Drollerie Authors Blog Tour.

If you’re already reading my LJ, you don’t also have to follow angelakorrati.com; I’ll be mirroring its posts over to Livejournal. Angelakorrati.com’s posts will be exclusively about writing news and interesting things happening with the books.

But regardless of how you read me, glad to see you doing so. Watch this space, whatever space that might be, for more!