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 (), 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!

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.

We’ve watched so many movies in the last few weeks that they’re all run­ning togeth­er. We just fin­ished The Trans­form­ers. Yes­ter­day was Baby­lon 5: A Call to Arms (we’d seen that before, of course) and Catch Me If You Can. Some day before that was Har­ry Pot­ter & the Pris­on­er of Azk­a­ban as well as Gob­let of Fire. Sam watched Order of the Phoenix, but I haven’t seen it yet. He also watched Gods and Gen­er­als, but I could­n’t even pre­tend to be inter­est­ed, and the accents were too offen­sive to my ears. There’s been at least one sea­son, maybe more, of West Wing. We’ve still got Star­dust and some oth­er stuff that Sam rent­ed. My brain is explod­ing and I can’t remem­ber the rest, but I know there was more.

And what do I want to watch? Fire­fly. Which I can’t see, because Sam’s par­ents have our Fire­fly DVDs. Includ­ing Seren­i­ty. Bah.

Sam real­ly, real­ly loves movies. Can you tell? I love my man. I wish he had a movie-view­ing bud­dy near­by so he could see stuff in the actu­al the­ater.

Sam’s last day off is tomor­row. It’s been so good to have him home! I’m ter­ri­bly spoiled all the time, but more than a week with him at home has been absolute­ly incred­i­ble.