Here’s one of the good reasons to be on Facebook: a lot of my relatives who I otherwise would not be in touch with are there. One of my cousins found me there last night, letting me know that she’s putting together a memorial DVD to honor my uncle Marion who recently died and offering me a copy, which was very sweet of her. But she also has sent me a bunch of very old pictures of myself and my brothers and parents, and various other family members as well.
Including this, which is possibly the oldest picture of myself I have seen in YEARS. Good gods I am TINY. Check out that purple dress!
Remember those huge Asian pears I mentioned? Here is a picture of one of them, next to a cute little Clementine orange! (I shall be eating several of these cute little Clementine oranges, which are miniature vitamin C bombs, for the next several days as we are entering the last two weeks of a MONSTER PROJECT at work and I CANNOT GET SICK. And we have a bug going around the office AUGH.)
My keys are included for scale, and also because Chibi!Chewbacca is adorable.
I didn’t get too many pics during the show since I’m still learning the fine art of how to do a picture on the iPhone that doesn’t suck–and then how to actually save it in the best possible format. However, I’m pretty happy with this one of my B’ys! As you can see I wasn’t too far back from the stage, with only a small number of fans in front of us.
Y’all may have noticed that I haven’t posted in days. This has been because I’ve been sick as a dog with a cold that just will not quit, and have been ever since the day I came back from Vancouver. Woke up this past Monday with a soreness to my throat, and my first though was “oh shit”. I made it to work okay, but by the end of the day I was quite hoarse. And by Monday evening it was official: I was sick.
I stayed home the rest of the week, coughing up a storm, fumbling for the tissues, and ingesting any number of OTC remedies. On Thursday, I saw one of the other doctors at my usual clinic (since my usual doctor wasn’t in that day), and she said that yep, I had a nasty cold. Never had a temperature of note so we were pretty sure this hasn’t been any form of flu. It’s just been a Martian Death Cold.
I got back enough brain by Friday to work from home, and as of today I’m functional enough to be bored silly, but I’m still snorky, coughy, and prone to needing to curl up under the blankets for random bouts of zzzz’s. I have been absolutely useless for getting any writing done or much of anything else. I’ve been consoling my ailing self by rewatching first season Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and solarbird and I have also taken the opportunity to get caught up on Caprica, which to our pleasure is continuing to fail to suck. And since I’ve also been useless for continuing my previously planned Laurie King readathon, I’ve punted instead to re-reading the J.D. Robbs–since I’ve started exchanging my paperbacks of those for electronic copies.
I’ll be staggering back to work tomorrow, and if Cliff Mass is correct in his last post, it’ll be just in time for the weather to take a turn for the sucky. Joy. I’m sick all week while it’s warm and sunny, and it gets wet and cold just in time for me to go back to work. I’ll be lucky to shake this damn cough before April.
The cats have been quite happy to curl up beside me while I’m making with the zzzz’s, though. I even got a picture of them. Dara says this is particularly good and that I should post it!
When I was walking down the hill to the bus stop, the sunrise over the lake was stunningly pretty. There was quite the cloud formation going on over the treeline and the lake, and sunlight was pretty much setting the entire thing on fire. Best of all, it was bouncing off the lake as well so there was this great lovely span of pink before me as I was heading to the corner.
My dinky little iPhone camera doesn’t really do it justice, but here it is anyway:
(ETA: Grf, for some reason the photo isn’t coming through on the version of this post mirroring out to LJ and Dreamwidth. Possibly due to a recent WordPress upgrade on my part! Anyway, if you’re looking at this from anywhere but the WordPress blog, try looking here for the picture.
ETA #2: No wait duh. I didn’t see the picture because AdBlock Plus was eating it. Oops!)
I wanted to call this out particularly because the last couple weeks of weather here have been classic Seattle winter: rainy and windy and awful. The last day or two though, it’s cleared up. And it brought us the lovely sunrise, so!
Meanwhile I would also like to note that the tally of books purchased or otherwise acquired has jumped significantly for the month! Continuing the January theme of “Buying Things Written by desperance“, I ordered the two missing books of his Outremer series from Powell’s, and a copy of Dispossession from Mr. Brenchley himself. I was particularly interested in that one, since a) its cover is the source of his userpic, and b) it involves amnesia in the plot, and y’all know what a sucker I am for an amnesia plot. ;)
I do think I’ll have to have me a Chaz Brenchley marathon sometime soon.
Also! I volunteered to do a bit of coding work for Smart Bitch Sarah Wendell, as I posted before. Took me a couple hours this past weekend to get her something approximating what she’ll need; it’ll need a bit of fine-tuning perhaps, but it’s at least in the ballpark. She kindly paid me for my time in the best way possible: a Fictionwise gift certificate! So I have a new pile of ebooks to add to the list of things purchased/acquired thus far this year:
Magic Bites, Magic Burns, and Magic Strikes, the Kate Daniels novels by ilona_andrews. Urban fantasy. In the case of the first two, re-buys of books I’d previously purchased in paperback form
Dead to Me, by antonstrout. Urban fantasy. Another re-buy in ebook form
Unperfect Souls, by markdf. Urban fantasy. Pre-order of the forthcoming next Conner Grey novel
Three Days to Dead, by Kelly Meding. Urban fantasy.
Deadtown, by Nancy Holzner. Urban fantasy.
Sentinels: Wolf Hunt, by Doranna Durgin. Paranormal Romance.
Exception to the Rule, by Doranna Durgin. Suspense/Romance.
Beyond the Rules, by Doranna Durgin. Suspense/Romance.
The Knights of the Cornerstone, by James P. Blaylock. Fantasy. Re-buy in ebook form, since Fictionwise was selling it for only 84 cents!
This brings the Books Acquired tally for 2010 thus far up to 22. Go me!
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.
My little sister wildshadowstar 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
