In the continuing adventures of Tori and Geoffrey have a weekend off, today we had the TV off almost all day, until The Simpsons was on, and then after the Sunday night animation adventures on Fox (minus American Dad, because we cannot stand it) we continued the non-Kelly friendly TV adventure and finished the second season of Sherlock. _

Also, things we did yesterday include when the neighbors started screaming, rather than worrying about anything, really, we tried to find the best place in the apartment to eavesdrop.

(They were fairly muffled by the ceiling; the only words we could hear were "I don't understand!" and "Why don't you understand!" and "I'm trying to communicate!")

At some point I asked if it was cop calling time, and we decided that while it sounded thoroughly unpleasant, we weren't hearing any of the thuds that make us nervous.

But, seriously? Apparently they've been engaged for like 5 years. And they have huge giant screaming matches, often with the sound of thudding furniture (we hope) at least once a month. (Apparently before I moved in, and before K started calling the cops, it was weekly.) BREAK UP ALREADY. As entertaining as it was on a Saturday afternoon to try to listen in on the screaming, it's less fun at midnight. _

 On the other hand, yesterday I did most of the dishes, took the trash and recycling out, bought new pillow cases, started an absolutely fantastic novel, and watched the entire fourth season of Breaking Bad. (And then I had really weird dreams about warring drug cartels, because that is what happens when you watch twelve episodes in a row of a show about warring drug cartels.)

And now I am sitting about in my living room, with the TV off. I was hanging out, reading my book, with rainbows dancing about my living room, drinking coffee and eating sugary scones, with the only sounds coming from the dishwasher. (We have a lot of dirty dishes. Even if I did do dishes yesterday. Because I think I am the only one who does dishes.) _

I am not, by nature, a particularly tidy sort of person.

I do, however, have a level of mess tolerance, and unfortunately, once a mess has passed my tolerance level, it is also beyond my ability to figure out how to start to clean it up. My dining room is currently at that stage, and it is making me all unsettled and I don't know what to do. It's at that mess stage that my bedroom would get to and my mom would come in and just start directing, because I need the direction.

It makes me feel like a bit of a failure, being unable to clean. It's like the extreme of the time that Tracy and I were unable to collapse the ironing board we had set up for Roy when he stayed with us before going to a wedding. I should know how to keep a house in some semblance of order. I should know how to deal with my dining room table, but I don't have a clue. So I occasionally take a look at it and go through old CSA boxes and throw away things which we really ought to have eaten/refrigerated/thrown away weeks earlier (we had a bag of lettuce melt into the table, it was thoroughly disguisting), and I try to remove dirty dishes. The last time I tried removing empty shopping bags, I think I accidentally caused emotional distress for my roommate.

And then, feeling like some kind of failure because I cannot keep a house clean makes me feel like some kind of failure as a feminist.

I suspect if I got rid of the giant and ridiculous pile of boxes in the corner, that would do a lot to help. But yesterday, G and I took out all the trash and the recycling, which we hadn't done in a month (only the recycling hasn't gone out in a month; he and I have both been mostly on top of the trash), and we have completely filled our recycling bins, so the boxes will have to wait until after the next trash day. _

 Last night, I went out to dinner with my brother and his new girlfriend. I wound up explaining St. John's to her, briefly and quickly, and C said, "They are the biggest nerds on the planet."

"I mean, we're nerdy," I agreed, "But we are in Kendall, surrounded by MIT. You can hardly call us the nerdiest people on the planet when we are surrounded by MIT." _

 I get Goodreads email updates, and I often have to try to guess which of my two Elizabeth's is rating things. It's usually fairly easy; I know who is reading nonfiction about WWII and who is reading Ptolemy, but sometimes I have to guess. Which Elizabeth is rating The Last Unicorn?

(I am guessing they were all Libby, this time around.) _

Do people tend to grow out of nightmares? I woke up this morning thinking "what was I reading? That was really interesting" and then slowly piecing things back together and realizing that, no, I had not been reading about the Holocaust before I went to bed (I was reading Fables before I went to bed), I had just dreamt that I was a prisoner at Ravensbruck and was shoved into a truck to be carted off to be gassed.

There was more to it than that, I think, but I didn't wake up terrified. The last time I dreamt Nazis were trying to kill me I was in such a state of panic that I wanted to get in bed with my parents but I was also too afraid of the dark to cross the living room. (Thank you, Quentin Tarantino, for putting my most terrifying childhood nightmare on screen. Really. Thanks.)

So, what is it that makes it so you don't get nightmares as much as an adult? Anyone know?

  _

My weekly attempt to not let the blogmass die, even if BLT  is dying and Google+ is awesome.

One of my coworkers was standing in the office with a bunch of daffodils. And I said, "It's St. David's Day!"



There is a brief pause while she and the person she was talking to turned to stare at me. "I beg your pardon?"



"It's a Welsh thing. It's today. There are daffodils. That's about all I know about it."



There was a sort of general peal of laughter, then. The woman with the daffodils is one of my more orthodox coworkers; she had just seen the daffodils in a flower vendor's cart on her way in and felt the need to buy them. _

Several years ago, I tried to watch Community, back when it was new. Two days before my brother's brain surgery, in fact, Brianne dyed my hair and we watched Community while the dye set. (Twice. We dyed it twice, because it came out hot pink the first time, and so we had to go to the store to get a proper auburn and not whatever bright red we were experimenting. Because these are the kinds of details you remember, your hair turning Tonks-pink, the train to Philadelphia breaking down for a few minutes and panicking that you're going to miss the connecting train and miss the surgery and that while you have missed the surgery something WILL GO WRONG and your brother will die or be a vegetable or become "Locked In" all the while you were being stressed out about something IDIOTIC like YOUR HAIR.)

Tonight we gave it another shot, since it was on Hulu+. All right, internet in general and blogmass people who have said so particularly, it's funny.

When I put that all together tonight, when I remembered when exactly I'd watched it before and said so, we all agreed that probably, under the circumstances, there was no way I would have liked it. _

 I went to see Chronicle this evening, because I could walk to it from my house, it didn't involve Liam Neeson punching wolves, nor was it that Safe House thing, nor was it about Rachel McAdams having a traumatic brain injury and forgetting her husband. I quite enjoyed the kids exploring their superpowers part, I loved the whole thing where they played football in the clouds, because, hey, you're 15, you've just figured out you can fly...Football in the clouds! Makes total sense to me.

And then there was like this whole other movie, on top of this fun little romp with telekinetic teenagers, there was this tense movie about a teenage boy in a family where the mom is dying of emphysema or lung cancer or something and the dad has no job and is an abusive drunk and he has no friends and goes on a rampage. (But a less funny rampage than when Archer goes on rampages.)

So. In short. One good movie. One movie that kind of made me wish I had gone to see Liam Neeson punch wolves.

On the other hand, I spent time away from my house, which was good. _

 I was going to comment "YAY TENTACLE PARTY" on Moss's blog, but then I remembered that he disabled comments. So I decided to go all oldschool and just put my comment on my own blog.

YAY TENTACLE PARTY.

(So old school I am using capslock for emphasis.) _

I have a prescription for antibiotic soap and some nose thing that when used in conjunction have been known to end MRSA colonizations. I am to use them after this latest wound in my leg heals. My new PCP is a totally sweet resident who actually read all my notes before I went in, so she knew already that I really detest bactrim. (Apparently, if you ask enough doctors to switch your antibiotic, eventually that winds up in your notes, and someone might eventually pay attention to them rather than to just ask you to repeat the medical history that has brought you in time and again.)

Apparently there isn't actually any medical statistics that say taking a bleach bath would help, which I am so very okay with; I feel like that would just suck.

So, hopefully, this will all be over. I have also started washing my linens on hot, which I think would shock and horrify my environmental lawyer of a mother, but I figure that it might help sterilize them.

In other news. In the two days between open recently infected wounds (ARG) I dyed my hair for the first time in months, and I feel quite vain and gleeful and thrilled that my hair looks like my own again. And Katherine is coming to town for the weekend! Hurrah! Katherine! And the little sister I wished I'd had is moving to Boston! (It is okay for me to say this, because when we were all little Jamie and I agreed with our two best friends that we would like for the little sisters to change places.) _

As I stood at my desk, swalling the third to last pill in this round of antibiotics (I am on four a day. They don't make me sick, like the last antibiotic they put me on did, but they do make my mouth taste bitter and gross for at least an hour after I have taken them, no matter if I take it before I brush my teeth, drink coffee, and eat ten tic-tacs like I did this morning) and the HR/COO lady was walking by, and she said, "Oh, you're still on antibiotics?"

"Yes, well, I mean, again as of last week, but still as of that last round?"

I really hate this. I want it to go away, for real and for good. How the hell do you kill the antibiotics that happen to be living in your skin?

My sister has yelled at me about going to Google for medical advice, but I figure that the advice I saw to wash my clothes and linen in hot water rather than warm water isn't going to hurt anything, as well as being hyper vigilant about hand washing and towel changing. (Various places online suggested soaking in a bath with bleach in the water.) I haven't shaved my legs in months, because I didn't want to get new nicks and ingrown hairs (although I seem to get ingrown hairs anyway) and whatnot, but I am going to switch from the fancy expensive Venus razor to disposable things, at least for a while. Or maybe switch to using Veet once a week, I think I have less problems that way. ARG.

Anyway. I have a doctor's appointment this afternoon to talk to someone with actual medical knowledge about how to make it go away for good. My PCP just sort of spun me off to surgeons with the first two bouts of this, with this third one I just went in (I wrote this all up on Google+ last week, when the blog tracker was broken) to the surgical clinic first thing in the morning, to avoid the inevitable delay (my PCP's urgent care hours start at 10:30 and the surgical clinic takes patients, including walk ins from 8-9; and they are closed on Thursdays, and this was Wednesday; everyone at the surgical clinic agreed that it was good that I'd just skipped the PCP), so I called them up last week and threw a little fit.

I am rather on top of this, and I get a little panicky everytime I get cold; when I uncurled out of the blankets I was wrapped up in while we watched a movie last night and my teeth started chattering, I was like "oh, fuck, maybe I should ask Tom to wait to leave in case I have a fever and the chills and I need to go to the ER." But my temperature was at its normal happy healthy 96, so I think it was just taking off the blankets. ((sigh)) Or can you get the chills when you don't have a fever? _

 Sometimes, I am slow. My roommate and I skulked in our living room and watched a random "all star musical romp" that we were able stream with her new BluRay and Amazon Prime account called High Society. I can't really speak to whether all the supporting roles were stars, but the three leads were Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly. It was unbelievably fun.

But, it wasn't until I looked it up in the middle that I realized that, even with the names and the exact same story, it was a retelling of The Philadelphia Story. I was sitting there thinking, "Hm, maybe I should watch The Philadelphia Story again, this seems kind of similar."

Anyway. It was fun. The boys sounded great. Grace Kelly sang perfectly nicely in a few duets. Louis Armstrong had a kind of random cameo/supporting roll, and he sang like Louis Armstrong always sings. If you're ever in the mood for very silly lighthearted entertainment, I recommend it.

 

(I think we streamed it with Amazon Prime. We have all the streaming options. It's a little insane.) _

We have a fancy new BluRay player with surround sound speakers and a subwoofer. That does things the old one didn't, like turn on on the first try.  (Also, it streams Amazon and Netflix and Hulu+, but it looks like we're still going to have to download the fourth season of Breaking Bad if we're going to watch it soon.)

We are watching Star Wars, which is rumbling all around us. WOOHOO!  _

YAY! The Bloglet Tracker is fixed! Thanks Moss! _

Yesterday, watching 30 Rock or Parks and Rec or something, there was a commercial for one of the several action spy movies that had blurred into "not going to watch that" they showed a preview for before Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

me: "Oh, I saw a preview for this when I went to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy!"

G: "Of course you did. In their defense, you were at a movie about spying."

me: "Yeah, but it was low action. It was really about men sitting around in rooms smoking and not trusting each other."

I think this can serve as an answer to who is right, Mark or Simon. _

 Conversation last night, in my house, when I came upstairs with my last load of laundry. (I did all my laundry yesterday. I have one more load of clothes that can't go in a dryer, but there also isn't room for them on my laundry rack, and I am out of quarters. Also, as much as I would like to be done with my laundry war, they are all summer skirts, so if they don't get done right now, it's not the end of the world.)

K: "So, the laundry is defeated?:

me: "Yes, I have defeated all the laundry!"

G: "But, at what cost?"

me: "About $10 in quarters, I think." _

The nice girl at the pharmacy, handing me the nice pills that make it so I am not so sick to my stomach I just want to curl up in a ball and because of these fucking antibiotics looked at me, said, "How are you doing?" Me, "Well, those will help with everything." She laughed. Then she glanced down and said, "D you always get a three day supply?" Me, "Well, apparently my insurance company will only pay for 9 pills every seven days. Since I'm on this because of an antibiotic, and not radiation or chemo, I figured I'd just deal with their stupid rules. But really I just need one of these for every antibiotic I have left, and now my numbers match up, so I should be okay."

Stupid insurance. Stupid leg. Stupid antibiotic.

Also, they have me packing my own leg, since this one is in a spot where I can, well, see it. It's utterly gross. I felt incredibly clever for thinking up soaking my manicure scissors in rubbing alcohal before cutting the packing tape stuff. (Er...I really don't know what else to call it. Gauze strip? It is more held together than gauze.) _

 I'm tired of being all complainy and health whiney on my blog, but basically just as soon as the thing on my leg has decided that it is closed and basically completely healed, I had the same thing happen on my other leg, this time just below the crease of my knee, which makes walking tons of fun.

Seriously. It's the same thing, although this time I'm at least not running a fever. And I also know for sure that this time it started with an ingrown hair. Now I just want to know what the fuck is up that this keeps happening. I am used to not getting sick like ever ever. _