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I caught this picture of my cat Ebony on accident, but figured it’d make a great caption contest pic.

You all have the floor.

I swear, if I find the entity in charge of running the universe, I’m going to give the asshole a piece of my mind. I’m absolutely frickin’ tired of him/her/it pissing on me and mine.

Short of it, Mom’s in the hospital on top of everything else that this year has dumped on me so far. She’ll probably live — but that’s not the point. Anything to do with the ticker malfunctioning is pretty scary.

(The latest news can be found on my Twitter and Facebook, and I’ll write a substantial blog post when things calm down, hopefully towards the end of the week.)

New beginning, by cuellar on flickr

My psychiatrist chewed me out today. I can’t say I didn’t deserve it. In fact, in all honesty, I needed to be spoken to bluntly about the subject.

You see, last…oh, god, June, was it? When California was having really awful budget problems (err, well, I guess that’s still now, never mind — anyway, last summer), one of the consequences of the lack of state money is that I got kicked off the county mental health program. My psych gave me the number for the place he was moving to, and I made an effort to call, but of course, the callback went to the answering machine and I never got around to returning the tag. I had a couple refills in the system, so it wasn’t really any big deal — so I just forgot about making a new appointment.

…which leads to December and coming off the meds in a rather messy fashion. And yeah, this is a big no-no. Add in that I’m fairly certain the thyroid is out of whack again because I’ve been avoiding my primary care doc — I hate doctors that don’t listen to me — and yeah, it’s probably no frakking wonder *why* I crashed hard in December.

I’d went with the thought that I’d make no resolutions this year, but that’s kinda morphed around a bit. I think I do need to make some. I’m going to keep them low key and somewhat nebulous, because I’m fragile enough that not making them is going to hurt. So I’ve got two semi-nebulous ones out there:

1. Either have or be in a position to obtain full time work by December 31, 2010
2. Have done enough work to warrant enough nominations to end up on the long list of folks nominated for a Hugo for best fanwriter in 2011.

The first is relatively intuitive; the second is just a way of stating “do more fanac in 2010″. I mean, technically, if folks want to include me on their nominations list, that’s awesome, but I want to sorta feel, in my own mind, that I’ve done something I can point to and say that I’ve earned it.

But the doc’s kinda put a 1A that pops up to the top of the list — figure out where this tendency towards self-sabotage is coming from and begin the hard work to thwart it. I mean, I hear you all saying that I’m smart and I’m talented and all of that, and … yeah. I wanna believe you; I’m not entirely sure I can. Which plays into this, I think.

So, I had four monthly goals to achieve, and have done one. A second is coming up because performance reviews are on the table at work…which just makes my stomach even more flippyfloppy.

1. Visit doctor
2. Write resume
3. Begin learning C##
4. Pub ish by 1 Feb

Anyway. I’m going to need my friends. I’m going to need them more than ever. Will you help me?

New Year’s Eve Fireworks by mastermaq

I wanted to write a bit more about looking back and looking forward, but I’m probably going to have to push things back a couple days into the weekend. The house is full of Jill’s brownies, with all the ruckus and noise implied by nine second and third grade girls who are somewhat hopped up on sugar and excitement. In other words, it’s not exactly conductive to reflective thought.

Anyway, this here is just to say I’m alive on the precipice, but where I’m going from here is anybody’s guess.

So I suppose the thing I could most use on this precipice is the acknowledgment that my friends are out there and that they’ve got my back.

Happy new year everybody.

As jennkitty said, I could really use the egoboo right about now. It’s an anonymous thread, so I won’t know who you are, but I could use just a little light this holiday.

Linky here.

I’ll leave the commentary to the peanut gallery.

Ebony has the right idea of what to do on this cold morning. Wish I could have crawled under the covers and went back to sleep myself.

Bookshelf cat laughs at your puny attempts to understand.

(Now it’s your turn. You caption the shot.)

I seem to have acquired 15 Google Wave invites. They are free to good homes; leave a comment with an email if you don’t mind your email in public on the Intartubes, or toss me an email (katster AT retstak DOT org) if you do.

First come, first serve, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.

Back around 2005, the first time I did a NaNoWriMo in the friendly confines of the Sacramento region, we had a slight contest. I think I won this one, for most convoluted and long opening sentence. So, to share with you (since I found the notebook it was in), here it is:

In the beginning — if anything could be said to have a beginning that wasn’t some other beginning’s end or end’s beginning or end’s end or beginning’s beginning — the universe seeked heroes to uphold truth and justice and its very own internal structure and it called these heroes out when needed or even wanted; the universe, it seems, is in dire need of heroes to be eaten alive, and this story is about a particular groups of bold and brave heroes (and heroines, for heroes can be girls or anthropomorphic squirrels or protoplasm or transforming robots or whatever, really; the key is to simply be willing to be chewed up alive by the universe, and these heroes had that in spades.)

While I would never write a story starting this way, I’m oddly proud of that.

I have absolutely nothing to say today. (I should probably stick to Twitter.)

It was a great holiday. I got to talk with relatives, and I also got about three pages longhand of a piece of the novel that means I can move forward somewhat. And it started with a simple twist the bot gave me in our nano channel last night:

What happens if your main character wakes up as the other gender?

So yeah, things have just gotten interesting.

Hope your thanksgiving was great!

The Big Money, photo taken by David D. Muir // CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I’m pretty angry over what went down at my bank today. You see, I got a WaMu account back about four years ago, and I was pretty happy with them. They weren’t perfect, but there was something friendly about them and they made a point of mostly staying out of the way between me and my money, which I really appreciated.

But of course, WaMu was stupid during the whole real estate bubble, and when things got ugly, it collapsed and was bought up by JP Morgan Chase. And over the past year I’ve been watching the transition, and every bit of it has just seemed like the bank’s gotten colder and unfriendlier. To begin with, today was the first time I’d walked into my branch since the transition. WaMu used to have this open floorplan — the tellers had podiums in the middle of the room, and the banking operations were scattered around the edges. When I first walked into the bank today, they’d placed the tellers in a more traditional counter and gave the banking operations what appeared to be cubicles. Granted, I was already predisposed to disliking them, but the sterile feel just really bugged me. But okay, I can deal with it.

So I bring my checks up to the counter. Now every other time I’ve done this, they said “Sure, no problem, we can cash those.” Today, I get informed that they can cash the Chase check, but the Wells Fargo one? Nope, it’s going to have to take a day to clear; if I’d had the amount of the check in the account, they’d be able to give me the money, but it’s just not possible. Of course, with today being the day before Thanksgiving, what they really mean is that I won’t have that money until Friday. When did this change? I asked. Last month, I was told. Nnnnnnn. You might try Wells Fargo, they said, but they might charge you a fee.

Okay, I said, just out of curiosity, what happens if I close the account with you and then bring in a Chase check to be cashed? “Oh, we charge a $6 fee for that privilege.” Double you tee effing eff? SIX BUCKS? To cash a check written on your bank?

There’s a reason there’s a nasty mood involving bankers in this country, and it’s right there in the nickle and dime fees they throw at you. If I bring in a check written on your bank, WHETHER I HAVE AN ACCOUNT THERE OR NOT, you should cash it cheerfully and promptly, without demanding money from me for the privilege. If you have a problem, it’s your account holder that wrote the check, generally I’d assume you know where to find them.

If I have a working relationship with your bank, and I bring in a check from another bank, again, one would think you should cash that cheerfully and promptly too, although I can understand that a bit better. (Although I don’t understand why WaMu didn’t care and Chase is nasty about the policy.) But still, in this day and age of electronic funds transfer, I don’t know why things can’t go faster. :P

But seriously, it’s the tickytack fees and the appearance of living high on the hog when the rest of the country suffers from something you caused — yeah, it’s no fragging wonder bankers aren’t exactly the most popular of people right about now. And God help them if the lid gets blown of the pot of simmering resentment.

But no, consider this a straight recommendation that, if you have a choice, AVOID CHASE. They’re just….nnnnnnrgh. (Actually, at this point, I’d be avoiding any of the monolithic chains — Chase, BofA, Wells Fargo, Citi — as it just seems there’s too much of a potential for them to be assholes in the name of greed.)

Anyway, that ends this rant.

[EDIT: So at lunch, I walked the other check over to the Wells Fargo across the street, and they not only happily cashed it for me despite my not having an account (and they only asked me twice if I wanted to open an account there), but they didn't charge me anything. So yeah, maybe Wells Fargo isn't quite as evil. I still hate Chase, though.]

Huh, damn, it’s nearly midnight. I’d meant to write about the weekend (summed up in one word: AWESOME) but I’ve been at home all day with an ugly headache, so I’ll just take it easy today and will hopefully find some time tomorrow to inform you of everything that happened this weekend.

But right now, sleep is in order. Mmm, sleep.

on my way from san francisco and the night of writing dangerously. Testing my mobile blogging interface. It works well. And I made fifty thousand words tonight. Yay!