Aspiriations

First off, I apologize for this post. I went to work for a half-day, it was hot outside on the way back, and what do you know, but I have Woodchucks hard cider in the refrigerator. So now I have 12 ounces of that at 5% alcohol in my bloodstream and haven't eaten lunch... follow along and do the math! Or let the nearest cop do it! I bet they can do it in their heads.

But the thing you should take from that isn't the strange feeling of my brain trying to float out of my skull, but the fact that now I have a job! Buying the hard cider was in celebration. I just picked up a position at Valvoline Instant Oil Change.

A step up from food service? In my opinion. A good job? In my opinion. I get that it is still an entry level job, but it isn't food service... and I like the idea of doing oil change. It's mechanical in nature and I like things like that. I've always been interested in putting things together and fixing stuff, but I wanted to be unique and my little brother is now a helicopter mechanic out with the Marines in Afghanistan... so if anyone in the family was the fix-it person, it was him. And, you know, I'm a girl.

But that aside, they pay better starting than what I ended at Panera, they have seven holidays to Panera's two, they are closed Sundays (the one I'm at is), and they seem a lot nicer and a lot more chill. I was at work only a half day today, but it felt like I was hanging out. Even with cars to work on, it didn't feel that much like actual work.

Oh, I know it's all new and shiny (or dirty with engine grime, as the case may be), but it still seems like it would be better, even after the 100th or 1000th car. Better than asking 300 people a day if they want a drink with their meal. I know it gets busier, but I've been in busy situations and you just have to take it a step a time.

I think I could do this. And maybe in a year or so, if I don't still love it, I'll find something else to learn. But I like where I'm at right now.

My adopted grandfather-in-law said something along the lines of, "that seems a strange sort of thing for a girl to do. But we heard you liked that."

"I'm a strange sort of person," I replied.

I'm living my Mercy Thompson (urban fantasy, Patricia Briggs, my favorite) fantasy. I have oil under my boy-short nails.

I've also always been a bit of a boy, in some things. I don't wear makeup, but I get proud when I get oil under my nails, blisters, and make my knuckles bruise and bleed from boxing. This might be just the place for me.

Linsey's Plant Manifesto

Forgive me father, for I have sinned. I have taken many lives today. But with God's help, I will not use a weed-whacker again.

I don't like weed-whacking, even if all the lives taken were of green matter so low, that my mother-in-law won't even deign to call them "plants." Apparently, that special title is reserved for the green things that are wanted.

Poor little non-plants.

Anyway, a death sentence hangs over all non-plant vegetable matter in my mother-in-law's garden and yard, especially the ones next to trees and buildings and the like that cannot be mowed. Sneaky little usurpers. It's that sort of anarchic behavior that calls for a brand new bright orange weed-whacker.

Ok, so I don't feel the same way. I like some long grass around trees, I think it looks nice. Kind of like how I think hair in strict ponytails looks better with a few tendrils escaping on the sides. I've always had a more chaotic preference when it comes to lawns. Whenever someone says their lawn needs to be mowed, I look at it and think it looks nice the way it is. But this isn't my lawn, so it doesn't matter. It is Michelle's, and she can have her lawn the way she wants it.

Expect, I was working for her. And David had the more manly job of chopping down a tree that I will have to hold a funeral for later (it looked plenty alive to me!). Armed with a very noisy bright orange death bringer, I set out to force order upon the lawn. The lawn that looked as though it needed to be mowed again (not my standard) even though I just mowed it three days ago!

But back to forcing order. In the beginning, I was just doing a job. It was clearing debris, snipping hair, or some other task of making things look neat. But the loss of plant life was taking it's toll. About the time I had to whack a group of perfectly innocent purple flowers at the base of one tree, I was sorry. My conscious was laden with the innocent grass-like things adorning the bases of trees. But I had a job to do, and I pressed on.

After that, I needed conditioning. I couldn't just keep killing and remain the same. So I got angry at the plants. Why were they making me kill them? Didn't they know better? Didn't they ever consider that under the trees was a bad spot? Stupid poor dying non-plant things.

Finally, I thought I had hit every tree on the lawn. Personally, if I had that many trees, I'd let them keep their plant adornments. And supposedly Michelle is the only person at that residence that does weed-whack around the trees. The kids just do the fence in the front yard.

So I put the death-thing away and went on to the other tasks. We rounded the shed to hook an ill-fated auger to the tractor, and Michelle pointed out some knee-high plant life in an area behind the shed and the horse yard, rife with junk and other not-junk stuff that was sitting in the way. "That will need to be weed-whacked too," she said.

"It's David's turn," I replied. My hands were still vibrating in their gloves. And I think whacking that portion that isn't even lawn yet is superfluous. You should know David probably won't do it, either, but he is her son and can get away with just being stubborn. He wasn't even going to cover the trees.

I also spend some time weeding Michelle's garden of various non-plant plant-resembling things. And I've decided something. If I ever put effort into a garden, the effort is going to go into specifically designing it to exist with minimal effort. And maybe I like some of those weeds.

All this to say, I would suck in the army. I can barely kill plants.

Horse is a Horse

I'm sorry but I really had nothing to say! Not a thing! That's what I get for posting all my book reviews on Goodreads now. I'm coming to realize I like action/adventure books with a budding romance and maybe some mystery. I should just surrender to the young adult genre.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

I wanted to talk about horses! Don't all little girls love horses? Want a pony for Christmas? Frolic about pretending to be one?

Well, while I did like horses (and pretended to be one, frequently. I was an imaginative child.), I never actually wanted one. I think even as a child, I had an idea about how much they pooped. And I lived in an apartment...

But, I do know one girl who is living the horsey dream, as she is fourteen and has not one, but TWO horses. She is my sister-in-law, Emily Gravlin.

That is Emily and one of her horses named (deep breath) Folly Bug Sue Can Do. Not kidding. Apparently horses like carrying around their sire's name, and I think that's one of those words there. And horse naming is just ridiculous. Emily's other horse has the much more sensible name of Twigs. Course, she isn't horse royalty, like this one here. Sue here has a pretty good bloodline and is also a trained barrel horse. Which is why Emily is in the location pictured.

The location pictured is an indoor arena somewhere on the Iowa State Fairgrounds hosting a fancy-pants horse event. I say that because it is nothing like a rodeo and has mostly highly boring English riding events, with the rodeo-style barrels and poles tacked on to the end as "speed-events."

Here's how I would choose between styles, if someone was offering to teach me one: Which has the coolest hat? And that is Western, hands down. Cowboy hats vs black velvety helmets. Then look at the rest of the outfit. Button-up vs standard high-neck navy blue jacket. Jeans vs tan leggings. Cowboy boots vs knee-high black boots. Well, actually I think their boots were the only thing not bad about their outfit, but still can't beat cowboy boots.

Not to mention, I like the pommel of the saddle. Like an emergency handle.

Now, rodeo vs fancy-pants horse event. If you've even been to a rodeo, you know they are conducted loudly, with blaring pop music, rodeo clowns, and large crowds of cheering country people in blue jeans, cowboys hats, and strangely stylish bling tops on the girls.

This event had under thirty people watching and was conducted in almost complete silence. And most of the English events (that I saw) consisted of like four to seven girls in the same blue coats and tan leggings walking, trotting, and cantering around the ring.

Hey, the snack bar sells strawberry daiquiris!

Rodeos have crazy events that involve lots of speed and danger. I saw a guy break his leg while riding a bull.
Crazy bucking broncs and bulls, roping cows, racing... yeah.

Not like I'm really comfortable with either. All my hours of pretending to be a horse did not unlock horse whispering or any sort of higher understanding for those creatures. Riding them is like riding a bike with attitude. But I find horse events fun because it's like looking into someone else's world, a blast from the past that had cowboys. I'm a city kid, and rodeos are distinctly country. But hey, always fun. And Em might give me the beads from her broken cowboy hat strings... cool stuff for my hair!

Headache

My brain is probably about the consistency of porridge right now. Next time Ron Paul asks me to donate, I'll say that I have... in the form of forty dollars and eight hours of mind-numbing boredom.

I'm getting a headache and I don't know if I want to go into politics anymore.

Is it true we really can't get anything accomplished without hours upon hours of political language and excessive amounts of ballot casting? Now, I think this process would have been literally twice as fast if we had a little bit of technology. I mean beyond the low resolution projectors and microphones. We need something like the clickers from college, something where you can immediately cast a ballot and have it counted and the results can be tallied in as little as thirty seconds, give or take three minutes for all the people still trying to figure it out. We were using paper ballots. We wrote on them with a pen and passed them toward one end of the aisle.

Does that not seem rather archaic to you? I mean, granted, you need money for technology. But clickers in college are like sixty bucks per person. I'm only twenty short.

But here I am, hopeful alternate with forty bucks in my pocket, thinking they won't need me.



I wasn't one of the original delegates, or even alternates, and I missed the Polk county convention, which people generally agreed was a disaster. I became an alternate because there is something that allows everyone in the Polk County Central Committee to be an alternate delegate. It makes sense; we were all probably elected at the same time and by the same people to represent as the original delegates. I didn't think I would be an actual delegate because they randomly assign you a number that determines in what order you are allowed to become a delegate. I was 171 out of 300+. However, I don't think there was much more than twenty alternates for Polk county who showed up, and I have no idea how many delegates didn't show up. I just know that someone from the Polk County Convention started walking along being like, "Are you from Polk? Go get your ballots." They only give ballots to actual delegates. But be careful. Alternates don't have to pay the fee. Delegates do. You know what that means? Those are forty dollar ballots. You wouldn't think it, would you? Looking at those pastel colors and that cheap staple.


[Covering up the name cause they gave me a delegate nametag to prove I was one... but it wasn't mine.]

But whatever. By the time I got to the floor, some damage had already been done. They voted to change a rule allowing the people with the most ballots to win to a rule that says the people have to have 51% of the ballots to win. Not a big difference, you think? Add some rhetoric to make it sound like they won't represent you if you didn't vote for them?

By the end, people were voting to suspend that rule just to let others win so we didn't have to vote again. It wasn't clear that you had to keep voting until you got a winner. So say eight people run for four slots. Everyone can put four names on their ballot. Two people are popular and win with over 51% of the vote. Instead of the two right under them being in the other two spots, everyone else is declared a loser and we have to vote again on those two spots. The two with the least votes are then dropped from the ballot and we now have four people for two spots. Then we vote again. What really bothers me is that instead us actually getting a majority, we just keep cycling the people and eliminating the lowest until we're all forced to vote for the same people. Is that really agreement? I don't know.

But, I think Ron Paul came out ahead. I found some people from the Ron Paul camp beforehand, and we clustered to get instructions. Afterward, I met some more Ron Paul people, probably some of the youngest people in the room aside from the junior delegates. It's my job to try and get to the next meeting of the district convention to decide who goes to state or national or something like that.

It's really weird to think about. We voted in caucuses back in January. I believe that after recount, Santorum won. But now Santorum has dropped out. And even though all those people voted for Santorum, the delegates never even got all the way up to the top.. What happens to them? I guess they vote for someone else. So even though Santorum won Iowa, he now has nothing here, but they aren't just dead votes.

Did you know the average age of the Republican voter is 65? One guy is like, "What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be out working to pay my social security?" People asked my age and when I told them, they're all like, "Oh good for you!" being all happy that someone that young was at a Republican convention.

But, like me and another Ron Paul supporter shared conspiratorially... we're not really Republicans.

Another website!

Finally! I have found a way I might spare all y'all (that is, all three of you) from expansive book reviews. And the answer is Goodreads. It is basically a website for ranking/rating/reviewing books.

So, I can go through and give books stars, one through five, from "didn't like it" to "loved it." It then adds itself to my listing of books. I could also add a written review. Others can read and comment on said review. I could group books into specific lists, like "Best Books of All Time" or "Steampunk Books" or similar things (if I thought I actually had the knowledge to make lists like best books of all time. I don't). Based on the books I rank and my rankings of them, Goodreads can then recommend me other books. I can add the books I am currently reading and my progress through them. I can add a list of books I want to read.

And that last part, the "to-read" list, is pretty awesome because I can also get a Goodreads smartphone app and look up all the books I want to read while I am, say, at the library. It also has a barcode scan which I have not tested, but I assume it allows you to scan a book and add it to your lists.

The way I've been using Goodreads recently is that I rank some of the Steampunk books I liked, e.g. the Parasol Protectorate series, and Goodreads recommends other books similar. I can look at the covers, names, and so on for the ones that look interesting, then hover my mouse over them and see their ranking. I usually shoot for at least a three or above. If that is interesting, I can read part of a description, and even click on it for full description and access to other reviews.

The reason I got signed up for Goodreads in the beginning is because they had a book giveaway contest. I did not win, but the point is that they also have contests and the like.

I love books. I still have the nostalgic connecting to actually holding a book, turning the pages, flipping backwards to find a particular detail, stuffing it in my bag, curling up on the couch... I also don't own a Kindle Fire, so I have no other real choice. And the library is free. Even though there is a 78 hold wait on the Hunger Games.

Long live the written word!

In Recent News...

I would have had a post for you. It was a short little clip on wanderlust and the various places I want to go. I think summer always makes me want to go to a tropical paradise. I start getting all swoony about beaches. Even a picture of the Dali Lama with a bunch of heavy islander-looking guys will make me swoony simply because they are islander-looking and that makes me think of beaches...

And I want to go to a beach. Or on a cruise. Or crash on an island where everyone has their own creepy interconnected backstory and there are crazy invisible forces and polar bears roaming about...

I never did finish Lost.

But you lost that small gem of a post because of my phone. Basically, I wrote that post on my phone and hit "publish." I happened to be in data roaming at the time. I had also used up my 50 mb of allowed data roaming. So technically, I could not use data for publishing. But I had wi-fi. And I had been using that on my phone instead of data. So I thought my Blogger app would publish through wi-fi. Well, it didn't. It tried to use data. And it couldn't publish through data, but it kept on trying. And as long as it was trying to use data, I couldn't use wi-fi. My webpages refused to load because I wasn't allowed to use data. And I couldn't delete the offending post because for some reason, the delete button would not press. And it was a virtual button, so you can't like look for gum stuck under it or anything like that. I ended up having to delete my Blogger app. The small post was lost.

A moment of silence for my small post on wanderlust.

Moving on...

I have become addicted to a webpage game of a similar variety to Facebook games, in as much as one can get addicted to a game where you must use energy for most things, you only have ten energy, and they recharge at the rate of one energy every ten minutes. That's an hour and forty minutes for your whole ten energy.

However, moving past energy problems, I have found this game very addicting. But that's for me. The only things really truly addicting to me usually have some storyline going on that I MUST follow. Have you every seen me play Dragon Age or Dragon Age II? I invested around two weeks, almost solid, to each one of those games, playing through it once, then playing through it again, this time carefully engineering all my choices to reflect a desired overall plotline.

Even Sims 3 draws me back as I engineer shallow soap opera plots for my house of hapless victims... ahem, Sims.

So what is this addicting energy-swilling game Linsey is rambling on about? (Oh, apparently I don't type my name in Blogger much. Good thing, as I apparently misspelled it. Shucks, there went my announcement hype.) The game is called Fallen London! And that link will take you to my character profile. From which you can sign up!

As far as I can make out, the game is a post-apocalyptic Victorian-era role-playing game. It's sort of steampunk, but doesn't have much in the way of inventions. Apparently London has fallen, dragged down by bats or other nefarious means to a place below the earth. This place is often referred to as the Neath (as in beneath) and the surface... well, the Surface. London is much closer to Hell as a result and rules, including the rules of physics, can be a bit different here. There are four primary stats you can invest in, and I believe with time you can get them all high, but I chose to go with shadowy and persuasive. My character is a bit of a sneak-thief.

And in Fallen London, you have a vast amount of freedom to choose what you want to do. You get storylets, which are often repeatable snatches of story, like robbing a weasel-seller or trying to make a name for yourself in the artistic world by telling jokes. Some of these lead to more extensive quest-lines, others you just keep doing to up a skill or gain some materials. There are also cards which are one-time use random storylets.

You can obtain a variety of equipment. For some reason, you start of in prison. You become acquainted with the interface through your attempted escape, and choose your first skill that you want to pursue. When you get out of prison, you are wearing manacles and prisoner's rags. These can easily be sold for some less offending clothing with a variety of stats.

And that is what has occupied my imagination of late. I was mentally following my character through the darkened streets of the Neath, a girl with long braids, a bowler, suspenders, trousers over scarlet stockings, a dog at her heel.

Well, at least it is interesting to me.

And I would want my dog to look like this:


This was David's sister's dog, a puppy named Champagne. She's half yellow lab and half Great Pyrenees, I believe. She was the most adorable puppy, but Becca couldn't keep her because she moved in with us and our apartment only allows cats... and we would've kept her, if we could have. Breaks my heart.

Anyway, the Amish ended up taking her, so now she's an Amish dog. I doubt she'll keep her name, but I don't think she really knew it yet.

I wonder where we will find a dog like that when we're ready for a dog.

Update... of a sorts.

I'm sorry I haven't posted anything in... well, I can't remember the last post, so it might as well be forever. I've been working on another pet project, detailed at my new blog called "Dreading Telling Mom." The name is a bit of a joke as Mom already knows. Sorry mother, the joke is a bit at your expense, but it isn't really intended toward you specifically, but the institution known as "Mom" in general.

Wow, this is starting to sound like an update post. I don't normally do those unless I have something to ponder on. What can I ponder on that would make this less of an update?

The first thing that springs to mind is cheese. Why always cheese? Why do you haunt me so?

Now I kind of want cheese. But I already brushed my teeth.

So not cheese. Let's see... bacon! *sigh* Am I hungry or what? But it is 23:30 already and I don't want to eat before bed. And I already brushed my teeth.

Well... nothing comes to mind. You may have to be content with that. And hey, I wrote a lot at my other blog. Give me a break.