Enemy of Entropy

Sam took Katie up to Republican land to pick up her new glasses lenses today–she went to the eye doctor while she was with my parents, because they were out driving and realized that she was squinting to read the road signs. Her eyes hadn’t changed much at her last few yearly check-ups, but they did this time. She says everything is very nice and clear. I need to go get my own checked, but glasses are so danged expensive!

We had a nice date and a delicious steak dinner. Sam’s been promising that he’ll make chicken fettucine alfredo since last weekend, but the girl was gone, then he had a pretty tiring week. That’s quite a meal to cook after a day at work. So I’m hoping he’ll feel up to it tomorrow. The steak was really good, though!

Katie got a long letter from her friend Josh, who left for Air Force basic training recently. Then she even got a phone call from him! Apparently his group¹ is doing really well, so they got access to a sort of recreation area with vending machines and pay phones after just two weeks of training. Another friend of theirs who just got out of training said they didn’t get that until after five weeks, which is apparently pretty standard.

I worry about Josh–this just isn’t a good time to be going into any branch of the military, as far as I’m concerned. But I’m sure he’ll be a good airman, and it’s what he wanted to do.

Thanks to Elizabeth Bear (matociquala), I now know that, Ohs noes! Franz Kafka read pron! I can’t quite figure out why it’s such a big deal to anyone, but I’m certainly not a Kafka scholar. Is there any healthy adult in the world who, given the opportunity, has not read/viewed porn at some point in his or her life?

The girl saw Mamma Mia with my mother, and said she thinks we’ll enjoy watching it together. I don’t pay much attention to what’s in the theaters, so other than thinking it might have some connection to Abba I was clueless. Bear also posted a link to an interesting review that finally gave me a clue as to why Katie liked it so much.

Sam and I just finished watching it–the 2004 Cole Porter biopic/musical. It was, absolutely, De-Lovely and Delightful and every other positive adjective you can think of! Porter is my favorite composer, but honestly, I put this one in the Netflix queue after seeing a YouTube clip of John Barrowman singing “Night and Day” with Kevin Kline as Porter.

Sam watched it with me and enjoyed it, too. How many men will sit through, not just a chick flick, but a musical one, and enjoy it just as much as you do? It was just over 3 hours long, too!

Jen, the little one reminds me of Cherub!

Hat tip to Noël Figart

Wow. This has been a very short week. I’m sure it doesn’t feel that way to my poor Sam, but it does to me. That’s what happens when you sleep through most of it, I suppose. I’ve avoided acknowledging the possibility that Katie AND I have mono, but I have the same symptoms she does, and neither of us are getting any better.

My dreams are increasingly weird. I have to think that I’ve slept so much that my brain is done with ordinary processing, so now it’s dredging up All That Weird Shit. Increased hypnagogic episodes, oh joy. I hate those!

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I got through NaBloPoMo, as ridiculous as it was to commit to posting at least once a day for a month. So of course that small success has led me, in a moment of more-than-usual-lunacy, to sign up for Blog365 (otherwise known as “Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire”).

The purpose is fairly clear: to post at least once every day of 2008. February 29 is a “rest day.” Posts may be written on any site, rather than sticking to just one blog, so I’ll try to spread them around on mine/ours. If I can’t get something on the actual site on a particular day due to net connection issues or whatever, I have to write (yes, write! like, cuneiform or something!) a journal entry and transfer it to a blog as that day’s entry.

It would be far simpler to have a system of some sort. Maybe I’ll create a rotation:

• Fibrant Living - health, living with a disability, podcasts
• Academy Caritas - homeschooling, education, college
• House Fireheart - polyamory, particularly my and Sam’s approach to it
• Heartsong Handicrafts - home of my original needlework patterns, and soon to be home for the rest of my stitching information
• Cyberstalked! - internet safety and privacy issues
• Cynthia Armistead - my professional portfolio, where I put the geeky stuff
• Enemy of Entropy - here, of course, where I put general stuff, book reviews, and the like.

Hopefully there will be new podcasts up soon. There will definitely be more music, as we have that lovely concert piano we received via freecycle all repaired and put together. It’s beautiful and sounds great! Not at all bad for one drive to pick it up and less than $200 in repair fees! (Sam wanted to just take it to the nearest authorized repair center rather than doing it ourselves.)

2007 wasn’t a stellar year, but neither was it terrible. Sam has a steady, secure job that he enjoys, in an organization that’s allowing him to advance. , Katie had a lot of health problems, but I’m hoping that we’re on the right path to resolving them. Shelley passed away a little shy of her 18th birthday, but since we’d been told in 1999 that she only had a year (at most) left, we felt that we’d gotten an “extra” 8 years with her anyway. Kioshi has grown into a nice companion, too.

We really kept to ourselves a lot through the past two years. When you’ve been betrayed and hurt as deeply as we were by our former housemate’s sudden craziness in 2006, there’s a lot of healing to be done. I don’t know if I’ll ever approach Thanksgiving without trepidation again, but we had a good one anyway. The stress did contribute to the deterioration of my health, and that does make it harder to get out. We’re working on it, though. We certainly learned who our true friends were, and we’ll never forget that.

So on to 2008, which we hope to be full of more time with friends, better health, much more music, Katie spent last night and almost all day today with friends from the school she was attending as well as her new beau. Sam and I spent the day gaming, upgrading some web sites, eating good food and watching movies. If it’s true that whatever you do on January 1 indicates how your year will go, we should be just fine.