Whew, I just got back from 2 weeks in Vietnam (which was such an amazing country, I hope I can go back soon). I doubt I'll ever be able to catch up on my friendslist, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. Have I missed any exciting new fic?

I signed up as an artist for this year's spn_j2_bigbang. I am so full of ideas just from the prompt, I can't wait to start working on the art.

Unrelated: I just got word that my friend was able to get pro-registration at comic con for me so it looks like I'll be down there. Anyone else planning on being down there? I'd love to meet up!

I find myself in the weird position of feeling like I have one foot in the proverbial fandom door and one out. I think it's been about a month and a half since I last posted and I almost feel like I have too much to say now that it's been so long. My life has been incredibly hectic and over the past month and a half I've moved, changed jobs twice, and am thinking about moving again. I wish I could say that all of the business has been good and productive, but I don't really think it has.

I made arrangements, before my trip to Europe, to move in with a friend of mine. He is recently divorced and has two kids who would be there part time. Unfortunately, when I returned, him and his two part time kids turned into him, his two kids, his manipulative girlfriend and her horrid, obnoxious, demon spawn of a child. If they were out of the picture, I think the roommate situation would be perfectly fine, but it's not and I've only been here for a month.

The brighter side of my life right now is my new job. I actually have a real, full time, adult job with benefits and a retirement fund and all sorts of crazy stuff. I'm the event planner at a really fantastic local non-profit with an annual operating budget of over 2.5 million dollars (!!!) I still can't believe they hired me. It's not my long time career goal but it is pretty much my pre-grad school dream job and it's going to look fabulous on any resumé.

In an effort to feel a little more involved with fandom, I'd like to invite all of you to give me your contact info so I can send you holiday cards. I've been wonderfully domestic of late, with lots of baking, cooking, and sewing projects and while I doubt I'll make my own cards from scratch this year, I do have some pretty awesome cards to send out and I'd love to share.

[Poll #871462]

Oh hey, and, in completely random news, yesterday I posed naked for a photographer friend who is making a book of photos of naked dead zombies. His girlfriend did the makeup and I laid in a muddy drainage ditch under an old wooden bridge for an hour while they covered me in fake blood and dirt and took crime scene style photos. It was the awesomest.

I apologize for being so lax with the updates lately. Life has been good, but swamped and until yesterday I probably would have posted about how fabulous I'm doing.

I'm still going pretty good:

My vegetables are growing like mad, I've been harvesting zucchini, crookneck squash, and cucumber for weeks now but it's been cold in the mornings lately and my tomatoes are not ripening at all. Lame! I've been meaning to take pictures of everything but I've been a total slacker about getting it done. Perhaps I will take some today if it ever gets sunny.

I've been organizing a benefit dinner for the nonprofit infoshop thing I'm a part of. So far we have a date, a venue, bands, and some confirmed donations for the silent auction we're planning. I won't be able to do much organizing work while I'm traveling in September so I've been trying to squeeze a lot in now. I have high hopes that the dinner will be a success. I'm really excited about the way it's been going so far.

All of which has made me realize that event organizing is really one of my favorite things to do for this project. I've done a bunch of art shows, this benefit dinner, and last monday organized a barbeque. All of them have gone really well and I've really enjoyed the stretch because I've never been much of an events planner before this.

Work has been going really well too. I love working for the nonprofit I work at. I love the people and I think they really like me too. The only problem is the lack of hours. I'm not really working enough and I'm really hoping that when I get back I'll be able to talk with them about finding other possible jobs at the agency to fill in the gap.

On the down side, the boyfriend broke up with me last night and I'm not really sure what to do with it. Basically, he's really stressed out about every other aspect of his life but me: his living situation sucks, he doesn't have stable transportation, his family is driving him insane, and he's been having issues at work. All of which is adding up to him feeling really boxed in and stressed. So he basically told me that because there's all of this stuff going wrong that he needs to work on he can't date me because he doesn't want to make me get caught up in the drama, and also that because he can't invest 100% in the relationship right now he'd rather spare me the potential future hurt feelings and break it off now.

The shitty thing is that I do understand where he's coming from with all of it. And I do think things will get a lot better for him once he moves in 2 weeks. But he's not really seeing that and I can't force a guy with a huge responsibility complex to date me if he doesn't want to. But, uh. He was the one who was so intense about our relationship in the first place. None of the reasons why he broke up with me had anything to do with me or how he feels about me and I can't help but feel like it's not really over. Basically I don't know how not to get my hopes up about him coming to his senses about this and I really, really don't want to leave myself open to that kind of heartbreak if he doesn't.

And now I'm off to shower and get to work. Where someone will inevitably ask me how it's going with the boy and I will have to find something to say.

On a completely different note: I am going to sew this dress tonight; will post pictures when it is complete.

Well I haven't checked lj since I last posted, and I'm running late for work right now so that's not so good either, but here's a quick update on the state of me:

I um. Have a boyfriend. And he's awesome. This is a very strange set of events for me. I like, miss him when I don't see him. It's all quite new and foreign. And we're already horribly domestic. We garden together, and hold hands, and the other night we walked to the grocery store and then cooked dinner together(spaghetti, garlic bread, tomato basil mozzarella salad) and I made zucchini bread and we fell asleep on the front porch. All in all. No one could possibly be more surprised about this turn of event than I, but I am absolutely not complaining.

I am also ridiculously busy. And I've noticed a trend with how little time I want to spend on my computer doing fun internet things because I spend all day at work on a computer too. So seriously, how do all of you guys do it? With the working and the social lives and the boyfriends and the internet? Because I cannot figure it out. At all.

Lastly. I am getting sick. I woke up this morning with a sore throat, headache, stuffed nose, swollen glands, and cramps. Clearly, God hated women. I feel that I am quite poorly designed if I am meant to put up with debilitating cramps every month for the next 25 years despite the fact that I have no interest in creating babies with my stupid, stupid ovaries. Especially if I can't take birth control because it makes me allergic to sunlight. Poorly designed, lj, poorly designed.

We put my 18 year old cat down yesterday morning. She was really old, and pretty sick, and I know it was the best thing to do for her, but it still really sucked. I had gotten her when I was four years old and she's been with me ever since. I will miss her.

Uh. So some of this might be TMI or whatever, but some of you might be interested, and I'm feeling a lot more up to typing it all out now so here's the recap of the breast reduction. I might, at some point, post under friendslock the before/after pictures my doctor took, but that will have to wait a while because I totally haven't reached the after stage at all.

The basics:
The surgery took about 3 and a half hours. They took out close to 3 pounds of breast tissue and I went from a 36DDD to a low 36C.

( read all about it )

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In summation:

movies watched, 3: Harold and Maude, The Producers, Superman Returns.
tv watched, a ton: Seasons 1 and 2 of Grey's Anatomy (LOVED!), 2 episodes of Dark Angel (omg Jessica Alba is painful to watch) 2 episodes of Gilmore Girls (also sort of painful to watch) The BBC/Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice (awesome, very, very awesome.)
percocet taken: 24 over approx. 72 hours (about 1 every 3 hours.)
advil taken: I could not possibly begin to count. A lot. I'm not in much pain anymore aside from muscle stiffness but the advil helps with inflammation so I need to keep taking it.
time slept: a lot. Strangely, the first night I woke up every hour on the hour. The second night I did the same every two hours and the pattern continued over the third and fourth night. Weird.

The most pain I've had, interestingly, hasn't been my breasts themselves, but my back muscles which got really tense from having to stay so immobile for a couple days. Unfortunately, that's one of those things that they don't warn you about.

Advice I'd have for other people who elect to get the surgery: Get a good zip-front sports bra or two (at least one size larger than normal) and a couple tank tops for wearing post surgery. Book at least two massage appointments 5 to 7 days from your surgery. Buy easily cooked and eaten food ahead of time unless you have someone cooking for you. Stock up on vitamin water, arnica, advil, a small bike bottle, and paper plates because real plates are going to feel too heavy. And definitely, definitely have a friend/parent/relative who can take care of you for at least a couple days cause you are not going to feel up to doing anything up to and including flushing the toilet and washing under your arms.

Oh and also, my doctor told me that for scarring silicone sheets like these are actually quite effective and that "if I were his daughter he would have me use them."

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Reading this over before posting I notice that I haven't said a single word about how I feel about my results. And the only possible answer I can give is fantastic. I keep looking in the mirror and staring at my awesome breasts. They're the perfect size for my body now and I feel so much better. I can't tell you how good it is to not feel dominated by my chest. I can't wait to go shopping in a few weeks (and I really can't wait to get back to the gym in two weeks, the lack of workouts and my ability to move easily is driving me a little nuts.) But seriously, impatience aside I don't think I could possibly be happier, it really helps that I have a lot of really awesome friends and a fantastic mom and dad who took care of me this past week.

Anyway, I'm going to wrap this up but if any of you have any questions, or want to refer other people to me, feel free!

For those of you who have been playing along at home, you probably already know that I'm having breast reduction surgery. It's happening tomorrow morning, in like, 8 hours. So I'm probably not going to be posting too much over the next couple of days (or maybe I'll be posting more with my current update history.)

Everyone keeps asking if I'm nervous and I'm totally not, not at all. Is that weird? Cause mostly I'm just excited. Anyway, wish me luck and I'll keep you all updated on my progress.

Things I have noticed:

If you don't actually know the end score of the game, watching the Mavs play the Heat in game 6 of the NBA finals is just as tense as watching it live. I was totally yelling at them pretty much the whole game. omg.

I would like to party with Christian Kane. Yes, I would. It sounds like fun: [ mp3 of the house rules thanks Kassie! ]

My friends find it bizarre that I like basketball. I am still trying to figure out how I will be able to convince them to go watch Golden State Warriors games next season.

My personal corner of fandom has pretty much slowed to a well, a really slow thing, during all of this MsScribe stuff. Personally, I was active on fandom_wank back in those days (mostly due to a pretty strong sense of cynicism about my only active fandom at the time, Harry Potter) so I remember pretty much all of the events discussed in the saga. To find out that so many of the huge blowups in that fandom are waaaay more correlated than anyone would ever have imagined is sort of horrifically awe inspiring.

And on a more personal note: I'd be lying if I didn't say that I, at one point, wished I was a bnf. I imagine that most fandom newbs wish for that. But good lord, cliquishness, in most forms is not pretty, nor are the lengths msscribe went to in order to be part of that. I can also admit that when I was in junior high I helped to ostracize a girl simply because she shared a first name with one of my friends. It was a stupid, horrible thing to do and it is such a perfect example of how mobbish and vicious teenage girls can be. I only wish that that sort of behaviour was limited to teenage girls who don't know of any better ways to get out their aggression than skullduggery and name-smearing. What a shame that so many supposed adults engage in the same petty vindictive behaviour all over fandom all the time. I would love to think that we will all learn from this, and learn how to better assess our cliquish persuasions, but I doubt people really will. For me, that's always been one thing that sucks big time about fandom.

In my first attempt at gardening since I was a little kid and my best friend's mom taught me some stuff (and my best friend made me lick a snail because I didn't want to look like a girly girl in front of my male bff) I have discovered that I still do not like bugs, and that I grow easily frustrated by gardening difficulties.

I have planted so far: 6 planter boxes and pots of mixed flowers, 2 tomato plants, a cucumber, a zuchinni, and a crookneck squash. I have seeds for carrots and beets and plans for a raised box of lettuce, spinach, basil, and other herby salady things. It was quite disheartening to go check on my little vegetable plantlets this morning only to find holes, HOLES! in some of the leaves. I really do not like bugs at all. They might kill my plants before I can eat them! This is highly distressing!

In looking for the link to this engadget post, which made me bust out laughing in the middle of my quiet office this morning, I was reminded by unholyglee's Jack Daniel's icon that I had wanted to post this mp3 by a Santa Cruz county/bluegrass/I don't know band called DevilMakesThree which is, essentially, the best ode to Jack Daniel's ever. [ DevilMakesThree - Old No. 7 ]


PS. I I owe people anything, replies, media, music, comments, or anything else, please let me know, as am afraid I might have fallen behind on a ton of things lately.

PPS. Run DMC's greatest hits, anyone? [ zip file, 65mb ]