filigree_shadow

I'm a junkie! I'm a junkie!

I loooove testing BPAL before I go to bed. It's dark out, and I have something like Dead Can Dance on the stereo, and it's just me and some lovely scents. It's one of my very favorite alone-time times. It seems so calming to me, and a little indulgent, too.

Thanks for the tips! It does feel very weird having short nails after having long ones for so long. Obviously when I was growing them it was a gradual change that I didn't notice so much. But this new short thing is a drastic change.

Is this part of the "sexyback" revolution going around on these boards?

Heehee. Growing my fingernails was in fact an attempt to be more sexy, but that was a year ago. Painting them bright red today, though -- that's definitely part of Operation Sex Kitten.

Wow, that is a windfall! What an order!!!

Five days? Damn. He brought her to your house? Sheesh. Apparently he has taken leave of his senses. That is really low. Is this woman aware of the situation? I mean, your relationship with Jason and your current living situation? I've known some pretty uncaring women over the years, but none of my women friends would ever put another woman into such a situation as what you walked into.

I have this one long black skirt that's a little tight and kind of stretchy, and it goes to my ankles. One time I was wearing it walking along the sidewalk, and I had to take a step up on a curb, and I swear my leg sproinged back down like it was snapped by a rubberband. Not too sexy. I learned to hike it a little before trying to step up.

It's funny how you sometimes have to learn how to move in your own clothes.

You're paying serious money for that class, I am sure, and at the very least you should bring up your concerns to your advisor, or to the dean.

Thanks! I sent an email to my advisor, and she was very concerned (as she should be, I think). She told me that for new professors, the students fill out a mid-term evaluation halfway through the quarter in order to give the professor a chance to fix mistakes rather than waiting until the class evaluation at the end of the quarter to get feedback. She also gave me a phone number for the dean -- she told me that I can call and be anonymous.

Not too anonymous, however... there are only 3 or 4 students in the whole class (of about 35) that had anatomy before taking this class, so if an anonymous student says her anatomical descriptions in class are wrong, I bet she'll be able to figure out who it is. Especially since I had to tell her on the quiz last week that she had left one of the answers out of the "word bank" for our multiple choice questions and she had to announce two new words to add in the middle of the quiz. I never think students should correct teachers in class, but come on. That was pretty bad.

Hi!

And congratulations on the baby. I guess this means you probably won't be coming to my house in a skunk costume so we can duel any more.

What a crazy dream that was.

Hmmmm, where might one buy something like these Zebra-Striped Panties of Power?

As you were describing your boss jumping in to grab attention for himself when it was going well, I was immediately reminded of a man who used to do that at my old office. He was the big boss, and he had the small brain. He talked a lot but didn't really know anything. He'd jump in to rephrase whatever the previous person had just said in order to make it look like it had been his idea all along. It was completely transparent, and it didn't fool anyone.

Strangely, I had a completely different take on gender dynamics based on where I worked for the past six years. There were a couple of men there who very strong, incredibly smart, loyal to their teams, and extremely beloved by the staff. The other men in the company (who were corporate drones and not loved at all) did basically everything they possibly could to take away power from those men and turn people against them. Every meeting turned into a pissing contest. You could almost see the thoughts "What does HE have that I don't?" in these guys faces. They were insecure, jealous, and threatened. They made the whole environment there unbearable. (However those of us who were staff spectators had lively conversations about alpha males whenever the managers weren't around.)

As for women? Competent smart women were treated as a mild thorn in the side. Women were, for the most part, ignored. Any time a woman pointed out a real problem and said it needed to be addressed, someone would inevitably ask whether she needed some chocolate or if her children had given her a rough time at home. I'm not kidding. It was disgusting. And if you happened to be an attractive woman who was competent, some manager male latched on to you and got you to do all his planning for him, as though you were his work wife in charge of throwing his dinner parties to make him look more important. Like a trophy wife.

Um, yeah... I don't work there any more.

Seconding the winter lights! As a matter of fact, I have decided to leave my "winter tree" up until Spring!

I dated a guy in high school whose family left their tree up all year long and decorated it depending on the season. I liked that!

Jumping on the winter lights bandwagon! Where I live, it never seems to snow in December and then dumps a buttload in January and February, and the lights are always the prettiest with snow on the ground.

That's the way it snows here too -- we hardly ever have snow in December, so when people have their lights up it's mainly just brown and muddy. Ugh. Lights look so pretty with snow!

I'm thinking maybe next year after Christmas I'll exchange the colorful lights for white lights, so the neighbors realize I'm doing it on purpose. If I didn't live in the most conservative neighborhood ever I doubt it would be a problem, but we're already known as the weirdos on our street so I don't want the neighbors breathing down my neck about something else that is - ACK! - not in complete agreement with the tacit rules of suburban yards. My neighbors would really like for our street to be the epitome of classic good taste. (They're probably all hoping that Brett and I will move out soon so they have a chance at achieving that goal. We're the scourge of the neighborhood.)

I love the Winter lights idea. People should do this! Just take them down in March or something. I just don't understand how some people go to the trouble of putting up lights, & then take them all down on Christmas Day. Leave them until New Year's, at least! Do they really run out of festive spirit that quickly?

 

Hope you're enjoying the tart & festive music. I'm kind of doing the same thing - Mexican cocoa candle, mug of coffee, pondering taking a bath. (Leftover vacation days that have to be used up by the end of the month - excellent!)

I'm glad I'm not the only one in favor of winter lights! I remember when I was little my dad used to grumble about the neighbors leaving their lights up after Christmas. I never understood why that was a problem -- there's nothing else pretty to look at in winter, so why not have lights up? I'm not talking Clark Griswold lights here, just some nice festive lights on the shrubs or something.

I'm burning a tart that smells like cake and I'm listening to Weird Al. It's the best I can do under the circumstances.

Those look like interesting books -- and I'm always happy to see people reading several books at one time. My husband reads one book start to finish then picks up the next one. I usually have two or three going, and I choose one depending on my mood.

I bet those areas will look great in the spring! I didn't plant a single bulb this fall... I spent some money on fancy-pants purple tulips last year and not a single one came up last spring. Grr. I probably should have dug up the bulbs and checked them but I was too irritated to bother with them.

The doctors think it will go away spontaneously in another six weeks? Is it an allergic reaction to something?

An inflammation 4cm wide that lasts for 3 months seems like it would be something serious to me, which is why I'm concerned for you.

WOW-congrats on the decrapifying!That sounds like a terrific solution with the ebay selling and the money making and the clearing out-kinda like a decrapificationlooza!

what an event!

 

Moving is always one way of decrapifying,but um I moved and I still have unpacked boxes.In an effort to decrapify,I looked at some posters I hadnt framed,and went to ikea in search of frames,and found the reasons the posters have remained unframed and rolled up in a tube-they werent standard sizes-!!!

 

BTW_I once cleared a house after my aunt had lived there for 35 years-it took a long,long time,so um-do what you can now-and keep us posted!

One of my favorite things to say is, "You never know how much stuff you have until you have to move." I always start the moving process with the best intentions of getting rid of things, but I give up and start throwing things in boxes.

I also have a couple of poster tubes, but mine lean more toward the kind of posters I hung on my dorm wall. Because, yeah, I'm really going to need that Depeche Mode poster from 1987 with the corners ripped off. (I bet there is some 22 year-old out there somewhere who thinks Depeche Mode is the coolest band ever and would pay dearly for one of their early-ish posters.) (I can wish, right?)

We're making some progress, though. So far we have two U-Haul boxes full just with books and DVDs. But we're starting to do that thing where we hold up a DVD we bought 3 years ago and never watched and say, "Ohhh, but I really did want to watch this one, maybe we should keep it for a while longer..." THAT's what got us into this pickle!

I'm a little behind the times here, but I've just read your blog entries. Your lists and the way you're doing decision-making based on recommendations sounds a LOT like what I did all last February and March. I mostly wanted something that would be sexy (that's normally why I wear perfume, to be honest), but I was pretty sure I liked woodsy scents too, and no florals. I am not a feminine woman. Not necessarily masculine, but... kind of androgynous. Florals aren't for me.

I also have dry skin, so I've had to do the same tricks you're doing with lotions. I used a scent locket (until it broke!! ), and I put BPAL in my hair when I get out of the shower. Propaganda Bath sells an unscented lotion (the scent is called "Emporer's New Clothes") that is specifically intended to be used by people who want to add their own perfume oils to it. You might want to check that one out, if you're not allergic to any of the ingredients.

When I first started trying BPAL, I was pretty sure I liked woodsy scents. Turned out I was thinking of sandalwood as what I liked, not notes like pine and cypress. What people on the forum were describing as woodsy wasn't want I had in mind. I also thought I wouldn't not like foody scents at all because I didn't see why anyone would want to smell like a cookie. But the Pumpkin Patch scents blew me away. I love those.

I hope you have LOTS of fun trying all the oils from your imp packs, and even more fun as you eventually work your way through your lists.

OMG, you poor baby. I thought I had weird in-laws - okay, I do. I deal with them by telling myself over and over in my mind, ``I pity you and your insecurity.'' This usually keeps me from attempting to choke the living crap out of them.

 

Also, wine is very, very good.

Yes, wine. Mmm. I'll have to smuggle some into their house next time.

I think I need one of those Zen calendars.

But my take on your in-laws is that they find you intimindatingly smart and if you're on their turf, they're going do whatever it takes, including being rude in weird and contradictory ways, to keep your intellect off their radar screens as much as possible. Look at it this way, it probably tires them out more than it does you!

Heh heh. Actually I bet they think I'm dumb. Their kids are all off-the-charts smart, and conversations at their house run to the stilted academic side. Heavily. Heaven forbid anyone mention anything even remotely human, like excusing yourself to use the *gasp* bathroom, or being so unfortunate as to have some sort of medical condition. Even talking about LOVE is a no-no. They don't touch or hug each other. Talking about whether my husband and I will have CHILDREN is bad. If it's something you read in a book, something suitably innocuous like the plotline of a fiction book, then it's probably okay. But if it has to do with real human stuff, they don't want to hear about it. It's very odd. I feel like they have no interest at all in me, they are only interested in hearing about what I've read.

You know, I do think that I will eventually become a sort of silent bystander at family get-togethers, like you have. I imagine that if I ever get to become a pathologist, I will never be able to talk about work with them. As far as diseases go, macular degeneration is nowhere near the top of the gross-out list. And if I can't even talk about that, well... One of the reasons I want to be a doctor is to save people's lives, or at least help them live more comfortably and in better health. It seems like that would be something my in-laws would be proud of -- but I'm never going to be able to tell them about it, and they'll never know that I'm pretty damn good at what I do. The one thing they might actually respect about me is one of the things I'm not allowed to talk to them about. That seriously sucks.

/rant off

oh crap, nobody had better tell my dad that a&e released dvds of nero wolfe!

 

my dad adores buying dvds of his favorite tv series. unfortunately, he's got like ... a gazillion favorite series. on the bright side, he DOES watch the dvds, because my mom doesn't allow him to buy any more dvds until he's watched the dvds they've already got.

For some reason that situation sounds alarmingly familiar to me... Oh, right, that's because my husband and I have the same conversation as your parents about twice a month. Usually it's when he's calling me from Costco to tell me about AN AMAZING PRICE on some DVD and how it sure would be great if he could get it at this price right now.

However, I have to give him credit on the Nero Wolfe ones. These are actually good.

I can't speak for anyone else, but as part of the "Entire GC Swap" several people said that they would post reviews in their blogs to keep track of which ones they've reviewed, package by package.

That swap started at right about the same time they introduced blogs to the forums and not many people were using their blogs at that time... so even though it seems a little strange now at the time it made sense.

Swaplifting seems to be going on fairly frequently lately, and I'm not sure if it's just always been that way and I didn't know because we didn't have the swap feedback system, or whether it has picked up recently.

We actually have less swaplifting than we used to.

I kind of hoped that would be the result of the swap feedback forum, so YAY!

I'm nosey, and now that we have the capability I look for bad feedback even if it's someone I've never swapped with. So now I notice swaplifters whereas before I never knew about it unless someone told me.

ETA: SCHOOL'S OUT!!!! A textbook will not be open in my house until the first week of January. YAY!!!

That sucks about losing your CT bottle. Mind if I ask who it was?

I really like the new(ish) swap feedback section here, but there's one feature I wish it had: an easy-to-access list of all the users with the worst swap ratings. I'd like to be able to see at a glance who the problem people are, rather than having to look through each letter category. But I'm glad that people are now publicly accountable for these things. It seems like often after a couple of people give them bad feedback, they disappear from the forums. But I wonder whether, before we had the feedback system, those people would just continue to do stuff like that because forumites at large had no idea they'd swaplifted other people.

Swaplifting seems to be going on fairly frequently lately, and I'm not sure if it's just always been that way and I didn't know because we didn't have the swap feedback system, or whether it has picked up recently.

Dude. THREE MORE DAYS. As of Wednesday night, the quarter is officially over for me too and I am officially on HOLIDAY for a MONTH.

And yes, I should be memorizing the muscles in the upper limb right now. But I'm not. Because if I SEE another stupid index card right now with my anatomy-related crap written all over it I think the blood vessels in my eyes will pop. No more flash cards!! Sick of the anatomy flash cards!!! AAARGH!

*deep breath* Three more days, three more days, three more days...

OK, don't laugh at me for only commenting on the armpit part of your post. I haven't thought about this in a while, so it's thanks to you that I'm thinking of it at all.

A guy I dated for a few years shaved not only his armpits but basically his entire body with an electric razor with the shortest possible guard. (He has no chest hair, so he didn't bother with his chest.) And what did he have on his head? Dreadlocks. Maybe he thought the rest of his hair just couldn't meet the standards his head was setting, so he got rid of all the rest of it. Who knows. It never bothered me at all; in fact I liked it. Except when his legs were all prickly.