Love In The Asylum

In the last two days, I've edited press releases for Aon (Manchester United's shirt sponsor), Universal Studios, and a company that does tech R&D based on psychic remote viewing. The remote viewing people had pictures of the secret alien Mayan sea lab they discovered in the Baltic sea. I had to call my boss over so I could ask her, look, I know this is [our cheap no-touch internet product] and they are all crazy, but do we have an actual bar of Too Crazy For The Internet?

As it turns out, we don't. As long as the Mayan alien psychics aren't engaging in pornography or online gambling or threatening litigation, there is no such thing as too crazy for the internet. Such is my job, folks.

Hope everyone is having a nice Easter/Passover weekend. Not my holidays, and family doesn't really do easter, so we don't have any big plans. I intend to spend it dealing with apartment stuff (getting electric and cable set up, and possibly buying a coffee table), playing the SWTOR free trial, and waiting to get our running water back. I may even watch some football. I might have heard about Arsenal playing a game this weekend, some team from Manchester, I don't know, doesn't sound like that big a deal.

I'm going to come out and say it: it is a bad sign when you start fangirl-style flailing over produce in the middle of the co-op. Which I know, because I totally did that this afternoon.

All in all, it was an awesome, lovely day with the awesome, lovely hanjuuluver. We made plans before I left California to go to the Folk Festival this weekend, so she picked me up early and we staggered our way over to the fairgrounds - and only got lost a very little bit - to check it out around ten. And it was pretty neat! Not huge, four stages and booths in two sections of the fairgrounds, but a lot of fun. We made a godawful amount of horrible noise at the instrument petting zoo (I got to play a dulcimer! Very badly!), poked around the craft booths, and listened to a very energetic afro-gypsy band at the demo stage. Chatted up a nice guy who came over to see if we were registered to vote and ended up telling us about his webcomic. Boggled at the amazing facial hair - saw one guy with the most awesomely 1850s-esque waxed and curled handlebar mustache you could just tell he was incredibly proud of, and an older man with a huge, bushy white beard down to his chest. Actually, we were just surrounded by hippies the whole time, broom skirts and ponytails everywhere you looked.

Once we ran out of things to do at the folk festival we decided to get lunch...and promptly got unbelievably lost. Of course. My dad's suggestion of buying hanjuuluver a GPS is starting to sound better and better. So we went on an hour long tour of Albuquerque's Sketchiest Neighborhoods before we finally found Nob Hill all of five blocks from where we started out. Had lunch at this great little tapas bar - soy-ginger ribs and garlic shrimp and tempura brussels sprouts, oh my - and then wandered over to the co-op grocery store next door and lost it over produce. Seriously, we were so full of enthusiasm for the unusually-colored carrots, goat cheese cheddar, and Italian lamb sausage that people were starting to stare. Mostly because we are enormous food dorks, but I was also boggling at how cheap everything in this state is - even the stuff at the fancy organic grocery is half what I was paying at Safeway in California. Which is awesome. So I got hanjuuluver to buy me fancy soap and organic polenta and arborio rice, and we decided that I am going to get an apartment in Nob Hill and embrace the queer urban hipster lifestyle. (As it turns out, one of my dad's clients who runs a real estate business handles apartment rentals in that area, so this was already in the plans for me. But it's nice to know we're on the same page!)

Eventually, and with much less getting lost, we meandered our way back to hanjuuluver's house for Story Time, which is a thing she started doing with all her engineering friends to make them read actual books on occasion. A big group of her friends met us there and we sat around (and on top on each other) and took turns reading from Neil Gaiman's latest short story collection. I was familiar with "A Study in Emerald" already - oh please, how could I not be? - but I've never read it before! Especially not out loud. Very creepy, fascinating story. I put in a good dramatic performance, and may have let myself get talked into bringing my Slender Man story to read for next time. Oh boy. Also, hanjuuluver gave me my graduation present, a completely and utterly brilliant stained-glass dragon she made for me at school. ♥

And now, after a brief stop-over at my grandma's, I am home, and also exhausted and rather sun-burned. I think that was more socializing than I've done in the last month. Time for football and the Star Wars radio drama and bed, I think.

In the process of making dinner tonight, I burned my arm, set off the smoke detector in Apartment Roomie's bedroom, and set one of my pot holders on fire. Not my most elegant of moments. But oh wow, the ribs with black bean sauce and the garlic-braised baby bok choy was totally worth it. SO GOOD. I've been a bit hit or miss in the kitchen this week (we aren't talking about the honey-mustard chicken, okay?), and it was nice to have something turn out this good. I'm really glad I brought a bag of fermented black beans back from home with me, I'm already coming up with a whole list of recipes that I've been dying to make but couldn't because I didn't have them.

To Do List for this weekend:

• make crepes
• make sourdough bread
• read the next four letters out of Abelard and Heloise (oh my god, more Abelard The Unceasingly Arrogant, I love it)
• buy a ridiculously expensive course reader
• work on coming up with a syllabus for my Levinthal (btw, if anyone has any good recs for short story collections that are a) set in the American Southwest, especially NM and/or b) written by Latino or Chicano authors, I would love to know)
• clean my unbelievably disgusting kitchen
• dye my hair purple (the best thing about the purple, as opposed to the blue or red, is that it fades out really pretty and as natural looking as purple can be, but still, it's been months, wtf self)
• finish season two of Being Human in time for the new American series and the third BBC season, which is sad but actually unusually timely for me, Slowest Television Watcher In The Universe

I live the most exciting and dangerous college life ever, y/y?

Quiz Time! What have I done this weekend?

a) attended a four-year-old's birthday at which I was the only person not drinking either sangria or margaritas and got into an argument with a stranger about international trade reform

b) met an Irish tattoo artist who told me about how he spent Friday night drinking with one of the actors from Star Trek (not as implausible as it sounds since we've always got a few movies filming here)

c) played with unbelievably tiny ponies, obnoxious attention-whore cats, and The World's Biggest Goat (no seriously, I'm used to knee high goats, and this thing was the size of a Saint Bernard. GIANT GOAT)

d) all of the above and a trip to the bookstore to boot

EVENTFUL WEEKEND WAS EVENTFUL. I think I need a nap now.

ETA: did some quick googling and DUDE ANTON YELCHIN IS FILMING HERE WHY DID I NOT KNOW THIS OMG

Things That I Have Done Over Labor Day Weekend:

• worked, which was fairly hellish, since it was 7.30 to 4. Also it was very strange sitting in someone else's cubicle. 
• finished several pieces of paperwork I needed, including my letter of resignation for work (handing in tomorrow!) and my absentee ballot form so I can vote for Obama and Udall in November.
• Finally finally finally got in touch with my roommate for this year. She's a junior, econ major with a creative writing minor, sounds really nice so far. Hopefully we will get along, yes?
• got a metric ton of sleep, which is always a good thing. I don't care how much my dad teases me - sleeping is /fun/
• downloaded (still in process of) some new comics, because i am feeling keenly a lack of sufficient Impulse, Robin, Super-boy and Nightwing in my life. And one can never have enough Booster Gold. XD
• played Sims for 4 hours, in which I had one of my Gen 6 Llewellyn heirs meet a new girl, hit it off, date, have hot lesbian sex, and then get engaged, only to have Max spontaneously shut down because of overheating, which meant I lost everything. Woe. But I played for awhile toniht and got them back together, and at least Cymry and Evan and their eternal 3-bolt love affair are safe.
• became addicted to a new game: Mechquest. Thank you oh so much, hanjuuluver . One of the reasons work on Sat was so hellish was because I only got 2 hours of sleep beforehand because I was up so late playing. But it's so captivating! And simple enough that even someone like me who fails at RPGs can handle it, and I'm playing as one of my space opera OCs, so I get to make up stories about him while I play.

So yeah, all in all not a bad long weekend.