Ruffled Fur

The Rule in our house, for decades, has been that the person who does the cooking does NOT do the cleaning.

The addendum to that Rule has been, for decades, that if we're having gaming that night, then the GM does NOT do either the cooking or the cleaning, because the GM is already contributing a lot of work.

...

Apparently the above Rule has an exception: when I do the GMing, I still might have to feed myself, and I certainly must do after-session cleanup. When I cook, no one else is going to take responsibility for cleanup that night.

This is bullshit.

I have pointed out that this is bullshit. When I stop talking, everyone else in the family goes right back to whatever they were doing.

You know, if I were living alone, I would be in a much smaller place. Probably a townhouse or condo. I would have to do ALL the work but I would only be working to support myself and maybe a cat. (Probably not a cat any more. I probably would have never gotten over Delia and Marco.) I would not be happy but I would also not feel like I do not register in my own home.

Some years, September 30th is not a big deal to me.

• I survived the tornadoes of April 2011, and the re-roofing.
• I have a pretty good family.
• I missed Dragon*Con but I'm going to spend a week at Disney World later in the year.  I'm making a costume for the Halloween party there -- a costume I've long wished I could do.
• I survived cancer.
• I survived cancer treatment.  In fact, at one point I survived two and a half weeks of only being able to eat apple sauce or oatmeal. Hello, weight loss! Where've you been?!
• I survived finding out that, in a crunch, my parents have my youngest brother's back ... rather than mine.  Still kind of reorienting my world around that one.  It was not any of his doing at all, it was purely them.
• I read the very last Spenser book.  I've seen a lot of people praise the new guy, but he's writing fan-fiction, not the actual characters as established. Key elements of Spenser, Hawk, and Susan are missing from Lullaby.  Defining traditions of their interaction are missing.  I wish Ace Atkins well, but I won't be picking any more of his versions up.
• I lost 30 years' worth of hair growth. I started the sequel. I actually have to LOOK already to see my scalp!
• I got my City of Villains main character to 50 at last.  She successfully -- with a LOT of assistance -- faked her death, and escaped. Now she starts living her life for her own purposes, rather than the mastermind's.
• I wrote somewhat more than half a book.  As the mental effects of chemotherapy lull, I slowly redevelop momentum on writing the remainder.

This year's marker is worth commemorating, I think.

I find myself in imminent need of a wig.

I happen to have in my possession some yarn that looks disturbingly similar to my actual hair.

I am also, of course, an utter geek.  Even at my age!

Can anyone point me at a crafter of wigs for the local Goth scene in the Huntsville/Madison/Athens/Decatur area of northern Alabama?  I want a "rag doll" style yarn wig, that will fit me comfortably during the typical weather of this area's spring and summer, that can be at least hand-cleaned, and that has a chance of still fitting me after my hair grows back.  In addition to supplying the yarn I of course expect to pay for the quality of labor and skill, plus whatever materials are necessary to make the base layer for the cap.

I have maybe a couple of weeks before my head is naked, just in time for the entire sunny season.  I do have a couple of other lovely nerdy things to wear, none of which are hats -- wearing hats indoors is a little too much violation of customs I learned in my youth for me to not fidget.

Thank you to anyone who can make introductions for me!

I live just south of Capshaw in Madison County, Alabama.

I'm alive.  I'm fine.  Our house is mostly fine.  We just got power back today, actually a day or two earlier than we'd been planning for it.  Thanks profusely to the Huntsville Utilities crews and visiting crews who have been working 'round the clock to get us functional.  Thanks also to Publix, which got itself open and restocked on Thursday so people could buy peanut butter and fresh-baked bread, and not starve.

Very tired.  May go cycle laundry and then nap.

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My longest-running superhero genre roleplay character is called "Feral" when she's fighting crime, but if I were a superhero, I'm extraordinarily confident that my supername would be "Maximum Verbosity".

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Every once in a while, I look up "Karl Kohler" on Google.  He moved away from Poway a week before we did, and to a different base, at the end of 2nd grade (we were around 6 or 7 at the time).  I haven't found him, as all the ones on the search are the wrong age, and at this point I doubt I will.  I can't really say that I miss him, but he was the last really good friend that I had for several years; he introduced me to anime, and taught me how to play the card game "War".  Wherever he is, however he wound up, I certainly wish him well.

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In fact, she's my icon:  Elektra of the Teen Force, one of four superhero groups featured on Space Stars.

I wanted the teleportation, the telekineses, the long red hair, and the super-cool space bike.  I wanted to have durable, unquestioning, mutally supportive friendships with a couple of peers -- preferably guys, because even at age eight, a lot of the girls in my class were of alien mindsets to me.  I wanted the first question people asked about me to not be "who are you dating?" but "who are you fighting?":  what matters should be whether I'm a useful part of a heroic team, making the universe a better place, not whether I'm a decorative support for somebody else.  I thought Jan and Tarra were kind of disappointing:  they spent their entire existences being rescued by the nearest male character or admiring the lead male character.

Honestly, I'm pretty sure that this was not some early notion in my head of feminist concepts.  It's just that any character so useless, even the animal is more relevant to fighting the Bad guy ... I couldn't respect that character, much less identify with her.  Bad guys would see Elektra, though, and have the "Oh, crap!" reaction, and then she'd subdue them.  I could totally do that!  All I needed was a nifty outfit, complete with helmet, and to dye my hair the same color as Mom's, and learn how to ride a space bike....

Needless to say, it never quite worked out.  I did learn to keep aware of opportunities to handle a given situation with team tactics, though, instead of trying to promote myself as the primary hero.

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The worst teacher I ever had was my first grade teacher, at Painted Rock Elementary School in Poway, California, starting in 1978; none of the listed names ring a bell for me.  I would tell her the following:

1:  I don't even remember your name.  I remember nothing that you meant to teach me.
2:  The only thing you taught me was that an adult can be unreasonable and vicious.
3:  I had never met a child who was a bully before I met you.  I had no idea what a bully was, before I was a student in your care.
4:  My mother never forgave me for lying to her that year.  My lie was that "school was fine today".  I paid, for the next fourteen  years, for your unprofessionalism.
5:  I still color outside the lines, and in colors that aren't pastel.  I still have a messy desk.  I still sing under my breath when I'm fully involved in a task.  I still write my capital J with a hat on top in print, and with pointy bits to the left and top in cursive; no one has any trouble figuring out what letter it is.  I still stand up, speak up, and get in the way when someone tries to use authority as a flail against their unfavorite.  Threatening to attack me in addition, or instead, just makes me more determined to ruin every aspect of the bully's professional life.
6:  You had no business being a teacher of any age group.  You played favorites.  You liked to make a big scene, whether handing out praise or criticism.  You should have taken a clue from the fact that no other teacher had any problem with me, whether we were combining two first-grade classes to practice our letters or we were turned over to the librarian for an introduction to the lending program or we had a substitute for a day.
7:  My hair was prettier than yours then, and it still is now.

Part of the problem with this woman probably came from my educational past:  I'd never attended preschool, and half my kindergarten year was spent at a Montessori-style class.  She expected me to sit quietly at my desk, remain completely organized and focused on the current task, and for God's sake I should take school seriously.  I still thought learning was a joy, though I was a little curious when she'd start teaching something I didn't already know.  By the time we got into addition, which of course was still rote memorization at that point, I was so excited to finally hit something new that I read every line of instruction and threw myself into the problems.

I'm horrid at rote memorization, though, so I was lousy at math.  I had to do every problem more than once, trying to figure out what the expected answer was.  I'd be so relieved when my answer came out the same twice, and then get yelled at for being wrong -- or for writing the numbers crooked -- or for taking too long -- or for wiggling in my seat as I worked.  The best I could hope for was no reaction at all, which meant that I'd gotten everything the way she wanted it.

And I, of course, was six.  Five when the school year started.  Reading at a fourth grade level because those were the oldest books I was permitted to access.  Confident, simultaneously, that the world basically loved me, and that all adults essentially agreed with each other.  If the teacher said I was a rotten brat, and I told Mom how often I was getting yelled at, then Mom would have to yell at me too for having been bad at school.  So I made up a happy story; I told Mom my kindergarten teacher had visited, and we sang songs, and we had fun; and I never mentioned getting yanked by the arm and my desk getting upended and the entire class being ordered to say that the Class Favorite's drawings were pretty while mine were ugly.  She didn't find out what was really going on until I finally cracked under the pressure.

I hope that woman wound up in a job more suited to her personality.  Hog washing, maybe.

How many moons does Eternia have, according to the 2002 version of canon?

I know FILMation's version had (I think) 5, according to the spacescape painting.  However, I'm working on something that specifically fits the latter series, and I can't find an image or even a reference to the moons.  And it's making me nuts, because I could've sworn that somewhere in the first five episodes or so there was an image with multiple moons in the sky ... but if I can't put my finger on it, I can't be sure there was more than one.  Or, indeed, one.  Well, there has to be a minimum of one, you can't have people wondering about an eclipse if there's never been a moon.

Anyway, my Google-fu is weak tonight.  I'm going past it and working on other stuff, but I'll have to come back eventually.  Eternia has an equator, oceans and/or seas, and seasons; everything else checks out for the science end of the MacGuffin.  If there are two or three moons, all can be handwaved; if there are five, I'm going to have to redo the math, because the orbit won't work properly.