Standing On Boxes

A red E30 325ix in extremely good condition.

You never forget your first car. (You can see a scanned picture of mine on my Flickr pages.)

But the car I’m actual thinking about?
My 1991 E30 318is. My first BMW (I’m on my third – an E46 325i. My second was a 94 530i. The V8 in it was eating my gas budget like it was water. All of them with 5 speed manual. )

I really miss driving that. I wish I had the money to get it back on the road. Instead of in my mother’s barn where it is slowly oxidizing.

No, it isn’t the mythical TtH member’s app (for writers and readers).

There’s a new WordPress iPhone blogging app. Give it the URL and login info for your WordPress blog and away you go.

Haven’t tested it, beyond making sure I can access my blog. The previous version was okay. This one looks better.

It’s that time of year. The eggnog is now in season. Christmas must be just around the corner.

Sure, it’s pasteurized “stuff” that is more food coloring and artificial flavoring that actual egg-ful eggnog (We made the real/basic stuff when I was growing up. Throw some eggs, milk (the kind that had actual cream in it), vanilla, and sugar in a blender. Garnish with freshly ground nutmeg. Nothing like it. If you don’t mind raw eggs in milk.)

But I love the store stuff even if I ‘cut’ it with milk so it isn’t so thick.

Not a new idea.

How about a Bible crossover?

What if Joseph (Yes, THAT Joseph) came from a long line of Watchers? And Mary was his slayer? Wouldn’t that explain a lot of things? And not just the age difference between them (though that is, in reality, probably a cultural thing.)

Who better to protect Jesus as he grows up than a slayer who happens to be his mother?

(Personally I prefer Alanis Morisette’s depiction of God in “Dogma” than George Burns in “Oh, God”. But would that make this idea femslash? Is the world ready for that?)

This idea has been running around in my head for years. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out a way to actually write this. Yet.

Maybe as a lost book (aka Gospel) of the Bible?

It’s a bit tricky. Would it make a good fic? Do you want to offend people? Those Christians are very prickly about such things.

Somewhere out in cable-land, a rerun of that George Burns/John Denver classic, “Oh, God” is playing.

All those people in their creepy 70′s clothes. Yikes!

A few actors I recognize. Poor Teri Garr. In the 10 years after her appearance on Star Trek… she couldn’t get a better role than as John Denver’s wife?

Hmm… I’ve been having ideas for PWP fics. But I don’t write those kinds of fics. Heck, even in the fics I’ve labeled femslash on TtH it’s all subtext or innuendo or “later the next morning” stuff. Not even PG-13. So any PWP I wrote would be very short.

But the ideas do happen — BtVS of course.

• Something involving Buffy, Dawn, and Joyce — no, not an ‘incest fic’ (Can I get a loud “Ick!” on that one?)!! Maybe a Joyce/Jenny Calendar fic? (Of which there are actually a couple out there.) And Buffy catching them or Dawn catching them or some kind of train wreck like that. And someone or someones naked.Unfortunately, the idea never really jelled and the above is all I remember…
• And a “When I Woke Up” fic – set in Vegas of course. I actually have a couple hundred words of outline/idea for that one.

  Basically:

  Buffy and Dawn go to Vegas (Dawn is going to some sort of conference and Buffy goes as Dawn’s “buffyguard” thanks to issues from the last time Buffy let her go some place like that on her own.) — and the day they are supposed to head home, they both wake up (after getting very drunk the night before (not sure how that happened)) with unexpected bed partners. Who know each other.

  Can we say oops?  (A crossover of course. Stargate or maybe Gilmore Girls) And shocking for all involved. With the partners chosen for most potential chaos.

But I already have too many fics going on… that I need to finish. So.. these won’t happen any time soon. If ever.

That would be — using an iPhone app (the one from The Weather Channel) to check the temperature outside. Not sure where they get their temperature info (local airport?) but it’s probably not the same as it is here.

Laundry night…

Just got back from the apartment laundry room (there are two 4 washers, 4 dryers. At least 1 dryer is always broken. I think everyone else in my building has their own but I didn’t want to deal with that if I had to move… ).
I do 2 loads at a time every week – week and a half.

The price per load just went up (without warning!). When I moved in (6 years ago) it was $1/load. Last year (or so) it went up to $1.25/load.

Some time in the last week, they replaced the washers and dryers. Digital displays. 1 slot for quarters (the old ones had those traditional multi-slot coin things.) so they can change the $$ without changing the machine.

It’s now $1.50/load (Unless you want a “Super Wash” – whatever that is – for $1.75). And the washers are smaller so it might take more loads. So, now I’ll be paying $6 every time I do laundry. Two rolls of quarters will no longer get me thru the month. I’ll need more. Basically, $24/year more to do laundry. But still not as much if I’d purchased an apartment size washer/dryer when I moved in.

And 2 of the dryers are already broken (1 of which I didn’t find out until I fed it some quarters.).

(Of course I don’t want to say where this is. Wouldn’t want to get sued for slander…)

But wait, there’s more…

• My rent went up in July. (They say it didn’t — but since I now pay for water/sewage when before it was PART of my rent… I think that counts as going up. The Apartment Management Co. gets more. I pay $10-15/month more. (And half of that water bill is a processing fee to a utility bill management company in Utah. )
• My car insurance went up $5/month this month (usually it goes down as a car gets older). (Haven’t gotten my renters insurance bill yet but I expect that’ll go up also.)
• My cable is going up ($2/month MORE for the same cable modem I’ve had for 6 years? Huh?) $10/month
• My health insurance? Yup, it’s going up (not sure exactly how much yet. $70/month? And I now have a large (not huge) deductible where I didn’t before.). But at least I have it.
• AAA membership fee went up.
• BMW CCA membership fee is going up. Fortunately, I won’t see that until 2011 since I pay for 2 years at a time.
• Food costs more.
• My VISA? My interest rate is going up. At least they didn’t lower my credit (yet)
• Gas is going up again (No surprise there now that Wall Street thinks the economy is better — even if unemployment is still going up.)
• A bank I do’t use (last car loan – they didn’t cancel the account afterward) is going to start charging to send out paper statements. Need to cancel that.

What else? I’m sure I missed something.

Oh yeah… my Yahoo SB Hosting fees went up. Usual – cheap first year to get you hooked and then triple it the next year. Mostly for the domain names I grabbed (Guess I should only have gotten 1 instead of three (.org, .net, .com)… but I wanted to cover all my bases.)

(My phone bill(s) went up but that’s my fault for getting an iPhone AND trying to bundle my landline in with it. That messed everything up.)

Life is going to cost me at least $150 more a month this year. And it won’t go down of course. And there were no raises in Mudville this year. Just gladness that we’re all still employed.

And taxes? I’m sure those will go up.

And my car needs to go to the garage. More $$$$. And then there’s the annual T-giving trip. Need to make travel arrangements. And bring clothes for a possible funeral

A wonderfiul month!

I’ve been saving my fics on the server (http://words.neocows.net/fics ) using my favorite Mac (free) text editor ( TextWrangler) as I move them over from the old site. They are UTF-8 w/Unix linefeed.

But… I have a meta tag setting the character set to text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1

Firefox seems to have a problem with that. Safari deals with it okay.
(I know it’s the character set because the problem goes away in Firefox if I set the character set to UTF-8)

Something to fix. Before I get too much further into this adventure.

Fixed.

Maybe it’s just when I do things from the WordPress admin interface but…

I’m using the default Yahoo WordPress database config — meaning I told the Yahoo site manager interface to install WordPress for me. Not sure what it does but occasionally it comes to a staggering halt when doing some database operation. It eventually recovers but it really shouldn’t do that.

So don’t panic! I’m looking into it. (And it only affects the blog, not anything else I have on the site.)

Can Stephen Colbert Save the U.S. Speedskating Team? – TIME

Not sure what to think about this… I wonder if it’ll catch on.

A word to the wise — all comments to this blog are moderated. At least the first time someone posts a comment. (Of which there have been 2 so far since I set up this blog – both spam.)

I’ve started moving my fan fiction over from my old blog. It’s going to take a while. Probably only a story a day. The Fic Updates page will list them as I go, though I’ll probably miss one or two as I go.

Step 1. Copy it over as static pages

If you click on the fan fiction link at the top here… you’ll see a page that resembles the old fic site. But not as cluttered.

Unfortunately, it’ll take at least a month for me to move the fics over. So expect a few bad links for now. They’ll gradually clear up.

I’m leaving the old organizational structure there for now but I’m also creating a new one based on different criteria.

I also need to change the way the Table of Contents for each multi-part story and multi-story series is set up. I’ve got at least five different ToC designs in use at this point. As soon as I have them unified, I’ll be able to create a template that I can use with something automated.

So… all the stories should be over by the end of November/middle of December. An actual redesign, where all the stories are formatted the same might take another month or two for the 30+ stories I have (Hadn’t realized I had so many… after all it’s less than half a million words. Which includes the 35 stories and 480K words I have on TtH – and that’s just the completed stuff.)