So, I thought I'd give home-dying my hair a try. One of the casualties of my home-ownership budget was getting my hair coloured regularly, and it's been boring the crap outta me recently.

I picked out a brand, selected a colour, and this morning, screwed my courage to the sticking point and gave it a shot.

The goal? reddish with blonde highlights (see icon for example. *g*)

The result? brunette with blonde polka dots.

Oh well, it'll grow out or fade eventually, right?

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So, I have just discovered the joy that is good cookware. (Yes, I am mumbly-mumble years old. Why do you ask?).

While out shopping yesterday, we found a KitchenAid ceramic roaster for 60% off, and picked it up. And then, we cooked a turkey for dinner last night.

Holy crap, it's sweet.

The turkey was cooked in exactly the amount of time that it should have been (which kinda threw off the rest of dinner actually; I was expecting the turkey to take about an hour longer, since it always does.) And, it was nicely cooked through, with no over- or under-done spots. The biggest problem that we had was that the bird was probably actually a little too small for the roaster, and so we had to add some stock to the bottom of the pan to keep it from drying out.

The best part was cleanup, though. Instead of having to leave the roaster to soak overnight and then spend half an hour scrubbing to get it clean, it just ... wiped clean. It. Just. Wiped. Clean. After cooking a turkey.

When I start rhapsodizing over cookware? You know it's gotta be good. *g* Either that, or, yes, my life is just that exciting.

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So, I went to the doctor yesterday for my annual physical.

One of the things that came up was my unusually-low blood pressure. The first time she took it, the number came up as 90/50. As crystal_diva noted, that's the point at which, on ER, they start yelling "We're losing her!". So, the doctor then asked me if I'm dizzy or light-headed often, I said no, she re-did the test, and got 90/70. A little better, but still pretty low.

The thing is, it occurred to me later that I damn near passed out in the middle of the liquor store on Sunday. I put it down to the cold I'm getting over at the time, but I was certainly dizzy. Hell, every time I stand up, I grab for a table or chair to balance myself to make sure I won't fall down again. But, everyone gets a little bit of a head rush, right?

If I don't have a symptom in mind when I go in to the doctor (i.e., if I'm not visiting about that specific thing), if I'm asked if I have it, I say "No." Always. Am I the only one who does this? It's a bad thing to do, I think, since my doctor never gets a complete picture of what's going on.

I'm wondering if it boils down to, for me, ignoring any symptoms so that they're not "real", or just the stoic-don't-make-a-fuss-thing that's standard in my family. Or maybe, if I think something's normal, it just doesn't occur to me that it might not be.

Hmm.

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With some recent unexpected bills (I wish comprehensive pet insurance had been around/promoted when our pets were still young enough to qualify, that's for sure), M and I have decided we'll have to skip the roadtrip to Jersey to see Springsteen & the E Street Band close out Giants stadium. :-(

So, I'm now looking to sell the pair of tickets. I'd like to recover the cost of the tickets, so I'll sell them for $150US or $170Cdn, if anyone wants them. They're in section 313 row 8, and they're for the Saturday Oct. 3 show. If you're interested, just let me know.

(I'm not really expecting anyone on my friends list will want them - I don't think I know anyone in the New York/New Jersey area, let alone anyone in the area who's into Springsteen, but I thought I'd ask)

Has anyone used StubHub to buy/sell tickets? Any recommendations for or against? Are there any other good ways for selling tickets? I could use eBay as well, I guess, but with StubHub I don't think I'd need to worry about getting paid the same way. Besides, there are over a thousand sets of tickets for the series of concerts on sale on eBay - I'd think it would be really, really easy to get lost in the shuffle.

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Wow.

60 solid minutes of lightning and thunder, and watching the sky for changing colours and circling clouds. We put supplies in the basement, in case we had to take refuge. We put new batteries in our flashlights.

We lost power 3 times, only once for more than a couple of seconds.

And I discovered that the 4 "D" batteries I had for my battery-powered radio won't do much good when the radio needs 6 of them.

Now, the worst seems to have passed, and I'm marveling at the colour of the sky. It's like dawn, at 8 o'clock at night.

Is everyone else in the GTA/Southern Ontario ok?

I'm trying to decide whether I should walk up to the No Frills (it's about 1K) to pick up the sour cream I forgot to buy earlier (what's baked potatoes and fresh, from-our-garden chives without sour cream, after all?), put my fizz-pop away and wait an hour and drive up, or just do without.

It's awfully hot to walk. I don't really want to put my drink away. I'd really like sour cream with supper.

Since this is the biggest decision of my day, my life does not suck. *g*

It awfully hot out, though.

A little something I thought neeuqdrazil might like...

(the new season starts really early, in 4 weeks. I can't wait!)

Work Days off: 10
Number of emails in my inbox: 6132

It's gonna take my spam filter hours to sort them, before I can even start.

It's gonna be a loooong day.

Torchwood, Yum!  I think I'm gonna have to make a "fights like a girl" userpic for Gwen, 'cause she kicks ass  Watching this in full HD was really, really pretty, but I kept getting distracted by Eve Myles' freckles.  I didn't know she had any, before this. *g*

( spoilers for Torchwood 3x01 and 3x02, Children of Earth )

Doing one story over 5 nights allows them to really ratchet up both the creepiness factor of the happenings, and the excitement of the story. I'm really enjoying it, and I hope I can get a chance to watch Day 3 tonight.

This was just too funny not to share...

I spent the day yesterday outside, gardening, planning new gardens, moving around the BBQ, doing some weeding, talking with the neighbors...

Y'know what? It was a really good day. My legs are tired today (mostly from crouching to weed - making our front garden as wide as we did may have been a little short-sighted *g*), but they're a good tired.

We're still trying to figure out the best kind of shade tree for the back corner, though. Our backyard faces west, and so it really really hot in the afternoons. We'd like to add trees for shade, but anything that's big enough to actually cast shade is prohibitively expense, and we'd like it to be shade-casting in less than 20 years. So, oaks and maples are out. *g* We were thinking maybe a black walnut or possibly a peach tree, but I'll have to do a little research on growth speeds and heights for those. I loved the walnut trees out at M's old place in Cambridge, so that seems a good way to go - as long as the combination of 10-year sapling we can afford + length of time until it actually casts shade isn't too out to lunch.

I'm impatient, I know.

Life is good.

Well, that is ... weird

I'm in the middle of a Perl course, learning a little about how the language works. I figured I'd eventually volunteer as part of the Dreamwidth dev team, but I wanted at least a little knowledge of the language first.

Anyway, the lesson I just finished was the first to use perl in a web context. I just spend an hour trying to figure out why a dead-simple script wouldn't work, once I'd configured my local WAMP install to handle perl.

It won't accept leading whitespace.

I don't know right know if this is configurable on Apache, or if this is just the way web scripting works, but - I can't indent an IF statement, using either tabs or spaces? WTF? What kinda damn stupid language doesn't allow me to use whitespace to delineate my control structures?

There's gotta be a setting somewhere...

Apparently, I'm emitting a "hard-drive fail" field while here at work. I've just crashed my 2nd hard drive since Christmas; once again, my puny little 5 year old 80G drive is back in my machine and I'm running virus checker and Windows updates so that I can get back to work.

Are Dell computers allergic to Seagate drives for some reason? Stupid machine only has room for a single hard drive in it, so in order to give me more space, they bought me a nice big 500G drive. Actually, they've bought me two, now, and I'm guessing there will be a third one on the way eventually. I'm getting really, really tired of having to rebuild my working environment, though.

At least all my important files are either on the network drive or on the Linux development machine. It's just my local environment I keep having to re-create.

Sigh.

An hour left before the weekend, and I figure it's time for some Good Things:

• An hour left until the weekend, natch!


• lunch with the girls tomorrow


• A really productive week at work. My to-do list is still longer than it was on Monday, but I got 5 incidents closed yesterday alone, and that makes this a good week


• My garden is growing. The hostas are getting bigger, all the tree type plants came back really well, and even the asiatic lilies survived the winter - I can't wait until they bud and bloom! (What? It's my first year with a garden to watch bloom in 20 years!)


• I managed to snag a ticket home for a week this summer on points, and I've even got the approved vacation time for it. Two whole weeks off, one in Newfoundland, and one here. Yay!

So, what's going well in your world?

I just watch the first episode of Leverage.

OMG, sooo much fun!

I really liked the way they mixed up the stereotypes for a team like this. On the heels of Racefail '09, it's kinda nice to see the black guy playing the geek instead of the muscle. Plus, the women are competent instead of needing rescuing.

Huh, thinking about it, almost everyone maps perfectly back to a character in the A-Team:
B.A., the muscle - Eliot
Mad-dog, the crazy one - Parker
Face, the con-man - Sophie
Hannibal, the leader / planner - Nathan

The geek character is new, not being a trope 25 years ago the way it is now. So, we've added a geek and lost a damsel in distress (the reporter on A-Team, Amy) - I think that's progress. With the exception of the white male leader, they've changed race or sex on each of the tropes. I just hope the women stay competent, and don't turn into damsels in distress.

Off to watch another episode! (well, after I get a shower and go buy some grass seed. Home ownership stuff's gotta get done, too)

Crossposted to dreamwidth here

I'm not liking this much at all.

It's bad enough that's it's cold outside - we took the puppies for a walk last night, and in 20 minutes, even wearing long underwear, my legs were numb when we got home - but it's cold inside, too.

Our heaters here in the office are pumping out heat at a remarkable rate, and it's making no difference. It's COLD in here. I've got sweaters on, so the core of me isn't bad, but... the faster I type, the colder my fingers get. I can't type in gloves, I just can't. My typing's bad enough as it is. I'm even being somewhat productive - the solution to a problem that's been on the back burner for a couple of days hit me this morning, and trying to code it is making my fingers go numb and white.

Damn my genetically-inclined over-reaction to cold! When my fingers start turning blue, I'll give up and try typing with gloves on. *g*

'Twas a bit of an up-and down weekend, at least in terms of my mood.

For the first time since I moved to Ontario in the fall of '89, I'm not going home for Christmas. Surprisingly, I've been okay with this, so far. The last time I tried to stay up here Christmastime (about 10 years ago), I was a wreck by now, so unbelievably homesick that I ended up getting a ticket (on points, thank God, since first class seats were all that was available for love or money) 2 weeks before Christmas and going home anyhow. Things are different now, though - I have my own home, I have a partner I want to spend Christmas with - I've been looking forward to Christmas, here.

And yet, for the past week, I've been saying "I've got to get the gifts wrapped and in the mail", and then procrastinating. Oh, I had reasons to procrastinate - first all, I didn't have them all. *g*

Saturday, I finished my mail-away shopping. Then, Saturday night I set out to block the shawl I'd knit for my Grandmother. This was were things started to go wrong. Somehow, someway, in a brand new shawl, finished all of a couple of weeks ago, I managed to break the yarn. I was spreading the shawl out on the bed, trying to find enough room to pin out the points, when all of a sudden I saw this stitch, just hanging there, with no anchor on it. I thought, at first, that I'd dropped the stitch while knitting, and somehow managed to not unravel the whole thing shawl down. But then I looked closer, and the yarn the row above the un-engaged stitch was broken. The row above that, one of the two plies of yarn was broken. I finished pinning out the shawl, putting a pin through that stitch, so that it could dry, anyway. I don't think it's repairable, although I am going to try to darn it, somehow. This really disappointed me - it's a nice warm soft merino shawl, shaped so that it won't slide of her shoulders - I thought she'd really like it.

Our original plan for yesterday was to go up to one of the Christmas tree farms nearish to us, and cut our own tree. The extreme cold yesterday kinda kiboshed that idea, though.

Then, I finally figured out why I as procrastinating so badly on the wrapping front. This is the first year that I'm mailing the gifts, instead of bringing the gifts. I think this is the first real, tangible sign that I'm not going home, and I'm putting it off. Once I clued into what was happening, M & I decided to go get out Christmas tree yesterday, after all, although we did go to the local Lion's Club lot rather than to cut our own, as a concession to the cold.

M put the tree up as soon as we got home, and only one potted plant was broken. *g* It's a Douglas fir, and it's huge - we figure it's about 10 feet tall! We left it alone overnight to fall out, so it's not decorated at all yes, but I think it'll be pretty. *g*

So I finished my mail-away wrapping with the scent of pine in the air, and somehow, that made it easier. My house smells like Christmas, now...

Saturday, I watched two dear friends promise to love each other always, in a wonderful, intimate ceremony. The venue was lovely, the bride was radiant, the groom was handsome, and all the vibes were good. It was a really good day, and I wish them both the best life together.

Yesterday, I bought a lawnmower, and started actually planning a real garden. We planted cedars, and researched rhododendron varieties, and repaired the grass where we could, after the winter. We have a cute little battery-assisted reel mower, and mowing the lawn yesterday was almost ... fun!

Last night, I found my first gray hair.

And I think my nose is sun-burned.

Overall, it was a good one.

What a lovely day it is outside.

We were up and out early, tackling the snow piled up in our driveway. Now, normally, I'm not a huge fan of shoveling snow. This morning, though? It felt like a block party. It's such a beautiful day outside, and everyone was out, talking, laughing, helping each other out. I met more neighbors today than I have in the the three months since I moved in. The kids next door were having a ball, using crazy carpets to go down the banks into the yards, having snowball fights, just pushing each other into the snow. This is starting to feel like a neighborhood, and I think it's gonna be a good one.

There's something about the sound of a bunch of kids screaming in laughter, even at 10 in the morning, that just makes a day seem brighter, y'know?

And I think the version of Proud Mary that Tina Turner and Beyonce just performed was magic.

Every now and again, the Grammys just come up with a performance that just stops your breath. I think I've just seen this year's.

(And can you believe that Tina has legs that are arguably better than Beyonce's? The woman's gotta be hitting 70!)