iesika

Just a reminder, for anyone interested, or anyone who maybe didn't see my post before.

I'm auctioning 10,000 words of DC fanfic for help_japan . The bidding is currently up to $150! 



I'm thrilled and flattered XD. I didn't expect the bid to go so high! (I was kind of scared that no-one would bid at all, actually.)

The bidding closes on the 31st, just in case anyone's looking to challenge the current bid-holder...

*flails around a little*

I talk about T a lot, and I'm not sure who, outside me closest internet friends, knows who she is. T's my primary client as a caregiver - a 15 year old girl with Downs Syndrome (and probably undiagnosed autism). She's a complete and total handful - she hasn't gotten a lot of the care, attention, therapy, and basic life skills training she should have, by this point in her life, and every day is like a crash course, trying to a) keep her from doing anything *too* socially unacceptable in public and b) catch her up. She still doesn't understand concepts like money (other than she can trade a dollar bill for an icee at the place we go sometimes), or the days of the week. 

I am going to miss her terribly when I move.

When I picked her up from school today, she and her teacher came out to the car, and she gave me a pair of earrings. They're very simple - red and blue glass beads on one of those pin set-ups you can buy at the craft store. She told me they were for me. Her teacher told me that they were supposed to make jewelry for their mothers today, but T kept insisting they were for me. And had been talking all day about how she was going to give them to me.

I thanked her and hugged her and took them out of the bag to look at them, and asked if she'd picked out the beads herself. She leaned over in the car, touched the red bead and said "Red!" and sat back looking pleased (red is her favorite color) and just as I was translating from T speak that she had in fact picked out the beads, she leaned back over, touched the blue bead, touched my arm, and said "Blue!" (The bead was just my favorite shade of blue.)

And then she was very confused because I started crying. I had to unbuckle to squeeze her properly XD. I'm going to miss her so much. And now I've got something she made me that I can keep. I've got pictures she's drawn and cards and things, Christmas ornaments we made together. She made these for me by herself, though, and picked the pieces out special and... I'm tearing up again. ;_;

Okay, so. I get my keys tomorrow and start moving the little things. Furniture help will be Saturday. After that, I have to unpack and put away and buy all the things I need to buy. So I'll be not around too much for the next few days. I'm only taking a short break right now because I've been loading my trunk with stuff and the last few boxes were HEAVY.

So, of course, I have an overwhelming urge to write.

...which will probably be gone next week, because that's how I apparently roll.







Godfuckingdamnit. I hate strenuous physical activity SO MUCH! (yes, I know, lazy. DISHES ARE HEAVY!)

Fuck yeah I am awesome. I am so rad, I glow in the dark. Literally.

You can't really tell well from the picture... hopefully I will get some proper ones on Halloween itself (though I will have a different suit then) - but I am glowing in half a dozen places, my face is melted, I am covered in slime, and my suit says RADI-TEC WASTE REMOVAL (and the back is a huge radioactive warning symbol). Also, all my goop was black light reactive.

Anyway, I took 2nd place at our apartment complex's Halloween party, tonight (a wee bit bitter since the person who won 1st was dressed as a witch), and M got third for her "pirate booty", so between the two of us, we got $175 knocked off our rent for the month.

The suit is just painted coveralls, expertly modified with sharpie (everyone thought I'd bought it as was), and I was wearing clean booties, black rubber gloves, the melted face mask and respirator, and a ton of slime and paint. The slime was made out of borax and glue. There were glowsticks secreted all over my person.

It was motherfucking awesome.

But the coolest thing? My downstairs neighbor told me that for Halloween? He has an actual hazmat suit, and I am free to do whatever I like to it.

I left the apartment for twenty minutes. When I got back, my roommate's dogs had gotten into my backpack, which was on a table, and eaten my rent.

They hadn't had time to finish it off - but a hundred dollar bill and a twenty dollar bill are missing from the sodden pile I found on the floor.

THEY ATE MY RENT.

I don't even know how to *deal* with that. They are so lucky the worse thing I'll ever do to a dog is smack it on the nose. SO LUCKY.

I'm back! The weekend was rather less emotionally devastating than I was fearing - score one for the power of tiny children as distractions.

It rained a lot Saturday, so we didn't get to do as much boating  as we would have liked, but Friday night we had a ridiculous mini-rave in the living room and Saturday there was a game of Minute to Win It.

Got to catch up with the branch of the family who have oil foam in their yards right now. CNN interviewed one of my cousins (who runs a pushboat company), which I'd known about, but I'd somehow missed the fact that another cousin was interviewed on NPR despite HAVING HEARD THE INTERVIEW. I caught about half of it and thought "Wow, that really sounds like Peg-Leg Pete. Haha, everyone in Burris sounds the same." ^_^;;;

My cousin's name is not actually Pete, by the way, but that's how he refers to himself. Because of the peg leg. Oh god, family, how are you so ridiculous.

I haven't updated since I posted the last bit of Kings, and a lot's happened. BGBFF came to town last Saturday and we went to see Sherlock Holmes. I enjoyed it, but I hadn't read any Holmes since elementary or early middle school (I remember not liking it, probably because I was trying to read up in level a little too much) which is the only reason I didn't do my usual hatenewcanonhatehate movie thing. I know some people have loved the movie and other more hardcore Doyle fans have hated it, so I just want to say one thing in it's favor - It's gotten me interested in the books again. I'm on Baskervilles now, going more or less in order, and enjoying myself immensely. There may be a DC fusion in the planning stages.

Mom fell off a ladder on Thursday and broke her heel. Because she's mom, she was literally crawling around the house with a broken foot instead of asking for help (She did ask Macie to get her shoe when it fell off during the fall and landed under her (brand new) truck). Then she went to the doctor, finally, and discovered she had in fact broken something. She's wearing a boot now and chafing under the restriction of inactivity. The Siblings and I have been picking up the slack - Brother's done the shopping and I did all the cleaning this weekend and intend to bring her chili and homemade salsa verde tomorrow.

Macie blew her knee out early last week (the same one she's been having trouble with the ligament on, not the one that got nearly torn off by the alligator). She's been to the vet and she's going to have to have surgery, but the vet school won't take her for at least a month because they're backed up. She's limping horribly but, as always, does not seem to feel any pain. I swear she doesn't have pain nerves or something. Maybe if she were a little more sensitive, she wouldn't keep seriously injuring herself.

I'm currently working on another Kings installment, and something with Steph and Tim. And the fusion thing.  And replaying GTA:San Andreas. And, you know, working. A lot.

And...I've never done this before and I'm reluctant to do it now because he doesn't show up at all in Google so the minute I post this I will be the top response for anyone who searches for him, but I'm going to rec a piece of music by a local artist, because I know I have some Star Wars fans on my flist and because I adore everything I have heard by him. He goes by Shoelace, he's a hip hop artist here in Baton Rouge, and you can find at least a selection of his music here. He did a show this weekend that's got everybody talking. ^_^ I want his cd so bad. The primary song I'm reccing is "I Am Your Father," but all his stuff is fantastic.

I got home from an overnight shift this morning and went to bed. A few hours later, I hear B in the living room (I didn't know she was in town), and we all wound up piled up in B's truck headed out for begniets. On the way, though, we saw the aftermath of a car accident. We were stopped at a red light, and the accident was around the corner, and of course there was rubbernecking - which is the reason why we saw the guy on the ground and the woman absolutely failing to perform CPR on him in anything like the correct manner. So I shout for B to pull over, and ended up jumping out in traffic and taking over CPR until the paramedics got there. When I arrived, the man was not breathing and had no discernible pulse. Shortly before the paramedics got there, he started breathing on his own, and his eyelids started fluttering.

And then the trained professionals took over, and I went and climbed back into B's truck, and we continued on our quest to get food. The begniet place turned out to be closed, so we went somewhere else in another part of town.

As far as I was concerned, it was all kind of a matter of fact thing...I could help, so I helped. Everyone else has been making a huge deal out of it. I've gotten called an angel and a superhero today, and Granny cried when she heard the story.  I'm telling the story again here because it's something interesting that happened today, not because I feel self-congratulatory. I stopped my car two weeks ago and saved the life of a stray dog. Yesterday I gave a different stray dog a flea bath because she showed up at the camp, and she had fleas. If someone needs help, and you can help, you help them, the end.

And this is turning into a post about the ethics of a moral atheist, but whatever. ^_^; The conversation I had with L this afternoon was the best part of the whole thing - he said "Oh, now you can get into heaven!" and I said "No, because good works aren't enough," and he promised to keep me company in hell when his upcoming stint in sub-saharan Africa doing social and medical work with the Peace Corp fails to balance the scales against his homosexuality and agnosticism. On a similarly hilarious note, Brother won two different religious awards when he graduated this week (from an Episcopalian school), and he's also agnostic. And at least one of the pastors responsible for deciding to give him one of the awards knows that, and gave it to him anyway, which makes him cool in my book.

Things have been crazy lately. I'm starting training for a new job on Friday (as a PCA), and moving soon, too. I mentioned to M that I was looking to move, and she jumped up off the couch shouting because their rent went up and they were going to have to move from their nice 3-bedroom down into a 2...except I saved the day, and now I'll be living with my best friends instead of with the family I'm not getting on so well with right now.

A week ago, my parents were talking about throwing me out of the house on my ass, without giving me time to find a place to live. Now that I've handled things, to some extent, my mom is being very odd  and insisting I not move yet (wtf?). My dad, I know, wants me gone.

I feel like a bum for having lived with them for so long. Then I remind myself that I had a place and a job in Lafayette, until dad insisted I move back into the house, four years ago. He's pretty insistent now that I be gone, like, yesterday. I'm going to let him and mom hash it out between them, all the while bringing small loads of stuff over to P&M's to stash in the spare room (my room!), which I've been helping them clear out, over the last week. There's only the closet left to clear out, now, because M needs to get her closet straightened up before we can start shifting things. B came over Sunday from Lafayette and helped marshal the troops. I thought it was fun, but then, I'm the one who's going to be sleeping in the room and not the one being told she has to throw things away (M is an enormous pack-rat).

There are two dogs in the apartment, Zoe and Rosco (aka Bubba), both at least appearing to be Lab/Pit mixes, and both very sweet but rather mouthy (with a tendency to eat shoes), and rather skittish of strangers. I love them dearly, already, but I'm going to miss Macie.

On the plus side, I'll almost certainly be a lot more social, living with friends, than I have been while living with my parents. I mostly spend all my social time with P&M and B, anway, actually. M is a vegetarian, like me, so we're planning to work out a grocery sharing scheme of some sort. P is very picky and doesn't eat a lot of veggies, though I intend to be sneaky and trick him into eating a little better Neither of them cook, so I'm volunteering that service as part of the chore rotation. I'd be cooking for me, anyway - it's not any harder to cook for 3 than it is for 1, as long as you aren't left with the entire grocery bill. It will save a good bit of money, too, since I can make, for example, a 16-inch pizza for about 4 bucks, rather than P calling Papa John's for the tenth time in a month (cutting out the money he spends on donuts will probably save him thirty bucks or more a month - someone needs to teach the boy to budget).

(speaking of pizza, I'll be posting the BEST RECIPE EVER shortly... I was about to start typing it, but I just got a call from my new employer to come do some paperwork.)