sternbunny

Ahh, another Bethpost. Let's see what I have to talk about...

Yesterday was the first day in five that we _did not_ have a massive downpour between 4 and 5pm. On Monday, it rained 1.6 inches in 45 minutes and flooded some of the basement where I work.

Ever wonder what it looks like to see a cross-stitch piece be done? Sam and Max to the rescue! From an awesome gamer stitching site that I need to visit more often.

This isn't the mandala that I had written about before that was at U of I but a similar one caught on fast forward!

Dog Licking Screen is very cute but the server may be down at the moment.

I'm getting better at doing my job and just this past week, we've received over 120 samples for one of the techniques I do. @.@ I don't see as much sunshine as I did at the old job but I get more walking in and see it at the beginning and the end of the day more.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, we went to visit Eric's family and we all went to Kentucky near Mammoth Caves. The fishing boat was nice, even if the fish were, to quote Eric, "Picine Lupin!" (Apparently one of the reasons my husband loves me is that I get some of his jokes better than his family.) We also went to Mammoth Caves. They had plushies made from recycled water bottles, especially an incredibly cute bear!
(Picture here if the link didn't work)
Also a type of lip balm called Bear Smooch. We went on a simple cave tour and it was fine. Then we went to the New Entrance. Now, I have a thing about heights but I didn't realize how...serious it was. For about 200 steps, you go down steps that were about the size of my foot, wet, darkish, see-between-the-steps and with hundred-foot drops to either side of the railing. Yeah, not a happy Beth. Thank God for Eric and for him putting up with the whole thing. (I was blessing the submarine builder who made the very strong steps by the time we got to the end of the steps.) I was very determined that I was _not_ going to go back out that way. Fortunately, I did not have to.

That same weekend, our little niece was born! Hello Emma! I am stitching a birth announcement for her with turtles on it for her mom and the Superman-crest-shape for her dad. Hopefully I will get it done before she is one.

Eric found out that he got on the Dean's List again and made it even higher in his class rank! Whoot!

And we celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary. I am so very thankful for Eric in my life. He takes better care of me than I ever did. For celebrating, we went out to Timpani's which is near my work. Awesome food, especially the crem brulee. And we both got iPod Touches, Eric because his PDA broke and me because it was theorized that music might be nice at my work. (Just too bad I don't have wi-fi access there. :P ) I have also ordered some Lush soap for a little get-away later this month.

Shadow Creek is still going. Nobilis is still going. Just joined Dan's Talislanta game where I am playing a Thrall. I like to think of my Thrall as a bald, tattooed version of Benni, my female orc warrior in Warcraft. Speaking of WoW, my priest is still plugging along. Might be able to join in on a progression 10-man group. Joined a PUG 25man the other Sunday that was nice. Eric finally came to a 10man raid in ICC but unfortunately, the server crashed on our way past Lower Spire. But I think he continued the tradition of his character killing some form of my character. But if I'm in the progression stuff, I won't be able to play in the same instance with him. :(

I have signed up to help with a Chemistry Day Camp for Girls in July. At the moment, I will be working with Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream! *evil laughter!*

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate women in science and technology!

And guess what?

I am one!

So, this post goes out to all of the science women out there! (Especially Jenn, because I couldn't work with boars like she does even if they paid me tons of money.) This goes out to all of the lab rats, trying to balance work and home. Trying to get that last reaction to work. Grinding out that next paper.

My first lab job, most of the lab people I worked with were women. The next job, I was the only female tech there for the next decade. I think they were surprised I lasted that long, given that the two previous female techs had left due to family stuff within two years. And now, I may be the only woman in myparticular lab but I have lunch almost every day with other women who work in the science labs in the Chemistry Building.

I enjoy science. I love my professional co-ed chemistry frat. I like being able, as a support lab technician, to not just work on _one_ project but to help dozens of different projects, every week! I may not ever get my name in a paper for it or any of the work I did at my old lab but hey, I know what I have done. I know that to the clients I work with, they can expect a certain standard of consistency and accuracy. And that I will work my hardest to try and help them.

• A house on my way to and from work has a large picture window in the front. Over the winter, they have hung a huge blanket in the window...which has a large left eye on it. I wonder what it would be like if the house next door hung a right eye or if the original house would switch the eye around and whether anyone would notice.


• In one of the labs that I filled NMR instruments in, they had some really cool posters. They had ones on the geological stuff of Illinois but my favorites were the periodic tables. One was the periodic table of fruits and nuts, one of vegetables, one of desserts and finally, in the corner, the periodic table of fish.


• Eric has got me watching Chuck. I'm liking it so far, although I cringe a bit at over-the-top nerd-awkwardness. Probably because it hits too close to home.


• I'm working (slowly) on the cleaning up of the start of Season 3 of Shadow Creek. I don't know where I'm going with this season. The game is six and a half years old. I don't know if it's burnout or what. I feel like I can't give a reasonable bad guy, possibly due to power creep. I feel like the moment I introduce a Big Bad, Billy will smell him coming, Nelson will throw a spatula and Ella will snark over the corpse as Dr. Caine pokes it with his cane.


• Along with Cake Wrecks and I Can Has Cheeseburger, I have also been reading My Food Looks Funny and Daily Squee.


• I got a Wind Rider Cub plushy! You can see some nice pictures of Blizzard plushies in the wild and in captivity from wow.com. So very cute, with his little ear tufts.


• Jinx just came out with its Legendary Priest shirt. And to be honest...I'm not really impressed. Okay, they have Fort, they have bubbles, they have CoH, they have Wings...but what weapon is that? It's not Benediction/Anathma. and it's not whatever the Lich King drops. (Plus, they don't have anything Shadow related on the shirt.) And of all of the hats they have to pick, they pick the popped collar hat of Tier 10. *shudder*

Speaking of Tier 10, I'm in a bind. I had decided that for the sake of mana regen, I would go with the 2pc Tier 10, since I wasn't crazy over the 2pc bonus and I was worried about the 4pc, mostly that it was new and strange and I thought I would miss the proc often. So, I went ahead and bought the off-set chest when I had the emblems. I then went back to slowly saving up for the primordial saronite for the uberawesome crafted legs of doom.
Then they went and changed the 4pc bonus on the PTR. From a proc that reset Penance's cooldown to a flat +5% to bubbles. Which is equivalent to about 300 spellpower. Which is nothing to sneeze at.

But now I have to think about whether it's _worth_ it to get that 300 spellpower. Because if I had it to do over, I would have gone with the crafted legs (which are only beat out by two pieces of Heroic gear) and gotten all of the rest as tier pieces. Although, even getting the tier pieces, it feels like a bit of suckage because I can only raid twice a week if I'm lucky and whether a) we're doing ICC 25, b) get down someone that has an upgrade token, c) have the priest/pally/warlock token drop and d) I get it all determines whether I go from a two-step upgrade to a six-step upgrade.

My preference at the moment is that the 5% be switched to the 2pc bonus (or maybe drop it to 2-3%) instead of the Flash Heal HoT that doesn't really do much when you have a tree around and keep the proc-based 4pc bonus. That way, the people who have already bought off-tier pieces will be able to get the % bonus before the next expansion and the people who liked the proc bonus will be happy too.

But who listens to me? :)

To all of my friends who are currently under the weather, having bad things happen to them and are fighting alien brain monsters, I wish I could do more than offer my prayers. But you have them and Orc stick figures.

Some cool things I found...

And the recipe is at http://www.omnomicon.com/rainbowcake


Angelo - I saw this and thought of Ftisk. :)

Happy birthday, Coeli!

More in a later post...

The theme of my life lately seems to be...graffiti.

Noticing things here and there...
On my building at work, someone has added a Rubber Ducky above the stencils of a Ba-bomb and Lon Cheney-Phantom that have been there since I don't know when. And now a second Lon Cheney-Phantom is across the doorway from the first, but not quite parallel. And I can't remember whether it's always been there or not. It's like I'm in some weird Unknown Armies or new World of Darkness game.

A shark is painted on the next building, along with the phrase: "You can only see as far as you think."

In the chemistry building's women's bathroom:

Sorry, the Chamber of Secrets is on the third floor.
Thanks for the tip! Some jerky kid killed my last basilisk!

In the chemical engineering building's nitrogen room:

Science is WOmen's work! (The WO is in different pen.)
So is art!
Art needs to do his own work!

Near a Chinese food place, there is a polar bear.
Near a sports store, there is one of two skeletons, a male and female embracing as in caught by a bomb blast onto the wall. I think I can see their iPods.

I am an autumn person in personality. Change seems inherent to me, mutable person that I am, but I dislike it. I notice things, especially as I watch out of the bus window to and from work.

A building being slowly torn down.
A hawk on an SUV in our parking lot.
A man with an accordian standing next to someone with a paintbrush. Is the accordian for visual reference or inspirational music?
Back in September, I got a chance to watch this being made. It was so cool and the rasping of the metal funnels were so soothing. You might not be able to tell from the picture, but there is even a 3-D-ness to the image, in that the sands aren't just placed in a flat manner but built up into hills and valleys to convey depth.
The nearby gardens of the Arboretum have a lot of different chili/pepper plants used in the ornamental borders. I liked the black ones and the shiny white and purple ones.

I made a fudge cherry-Dr. Pepper cake last week. It was good, although Eric didn't think he could taste the Dr. Pepper in it. I also made banana toffee chocolate chip cookies for my family who visited yesterday.

Okay, I could use some help. I happened to find out that there are now fractal cross-stitch patterns. And to quote Igor, (at least one) Must Be Mine! But I can't decide. So I would appreciate if anyone interested in giving an opinion would take a look here and say which ones they think would be cool to stitch. (If the link borks, it's Nordic Needle and their site search for 'fractal'.)

And for the Shadow Creek reading public, the second season finale has been posted, along with a DVD extra and a commercial for season 3. I'm still amazed that it's lasted 6 years now...

Timeline: It's now been a year since new people have been popping into Nobilis. (Unfortunately, the Curse of James has claimed all but the newest, Angelo. It could be that this brash new player will stay longer, especially since he used the L word _right in front of Entropy_! Angelo's awesome, if I do say so myself. :) ) And it has been three years since Sara joined my Shadow Creek game. Man...wait, a minute, that means that basically the latter half of Season 2 took about half of the entire real-time length of the game. @.@

Dan - one of my coworkers talked about Isle Royale and said that he saw a moose there! Made me smile and think of you. :)

The rest of this post is toward my littlest brother, Michael, who needs to hear various musics. So, shorty, enjoy these:

Elvis is Everywhere by Mojo Nixon
which leads to Punk Rock Girl by The Dead Milkmen
and Gone Daddy Gone by the Violent Femmes (Sorry, couldn't find the real video right away so this AudioSurf will have to do. Which is a pretty cool game to play with your music. And as much fun as it is to watch CGI bugs play instruments, I like the original Violent Femmes version better.)

Newer songs might be Caught in the Rain by Revis who are from Champaign if I remember right and Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus just because.

Okay, so Paul and Storm used to be part of DaVinci's Notebook and they did such songs as My Enormous Penis, Internet Porn, Another Irish Drinking Song and The Captain's Wife's Lament

and Jonathan Coulton rocks: The spiffworld videos are the best, with many many songs to choose from. (You will not be able to play First of May, sorry, dude, NSFW.) But stuff like Creepy Doll, re: Your Brains, Code Monkey, Betty and Me, Big Boom, Chiron Beta Prime, Skullcrusher Mountain and The Future Soon are all awesome.

And just for fun (make sure to share with Steve) Nun Fight!

The computer room liiiiives!

Turns out that our wiring is hooked up to some other outlet on the outside of the building and said outlet there has rusted through, causing the short on our end. We now have power to all but one socket of our computer room. Our bedroom is still shot, though, as the person who fixed our bedroom wiring earlier this year (about a half year ago, the sockets in the bedroom went funky. Took a while but someone finally came by and ended up rerouting all of the bedroom sockets into sharing a wiring with the half-bath socket) did it _wrong_ and this electrician is going to fix it. (Me, I just want the sparky juice to flow, my alarm clock to work when I need it to and the soothing yellow light beat back the night.)

It was nice to have the extra time with Eric but on the other hand, we were both depressed and I felt like we were rerunning the Vultures from The Jungle Book into the ground. At least with the internet back, we can find things to point out to the other, we can watch tv shows together and be up later than sundown.

So, Saturdya was so much fun...got caught in a downpour when Eric and I went out to the Farmer's Market. (Got three chocolate croissants for $1, though, good food.) When we came home, we were in our computer room and there was a buzzing sound. Then the lights flickered and went out. Sounded like the circuit breaker, so we checked and reset it. Buzz and breaker went off again. Tried it again and the circuit breaker just quit. We looked around the rest of the apartment and not only was the computer room out but everything else in the apartment except for the bathroom and the kitchen. Oh and the AC/hot water heater. Thank goodness.

So, we call maintenence. They say that they don't have the part and will come by on Monday. Grr! But that they might be able to find the part and will give us a call back to let us know what is going on. No call.

We're getting ready for church Sunday morning and there's a knock at the door. Maintenence! So he's working on that. We go to church and the cell phone that I told the guy to call if he had any questions decides to ring in the last 5 minutes of the service. *sigh* I scramble to turn it off and call the guy back after we're out of the church. Turns out that the new breaker that he put in also went *ZAP* so it's something in the wiring and we'd have to wait for an electrician on Monday. We come home and find the AC isn't working now either! But we did some looking around and there was a big button that was set to Off that when we turned it to On turned on the AC.

So, now we're waiting for the electrician. I had no internet to see if I had to come in to work today (I did), Eric missed out on Arena last night, I may miss out on Ulduar tonight and we have no idea on whether we'll have everything back for Shadow Creek tomorrow night.

I have gotten a large amount of cross-stitch done. Oh and the baked banana donuts did not turn out as well as I had hoped. Not quite Granny Weatherwax-quality baking but not far from it either.

Still not King..I mean, full time, yet.

Had dinner with AXE people last night. Was nice to see folks and get the compliment of how long my Buffy game has been going. However, I was not to _get_ to play Buffy as the electricity went out about 15 minutes into the game and was out till 11:30 pm according to the clocks the next morning. :P

Monday night was awesome. Went into Ulduar and killed Thorim for the first time...and one-shotted him to boot! Also killed Mimron for the first time as well! Did not get tier hat or gloves. Did get awesome staff from Freya last weekish thanks to the main holy priest in the raid passing (I'm a regular Disc priest.) and thankfully the staff that _he_ wanted dropped the next night from Iron Council. (But they totally misnamed it. Rapture should be the Disc staff's name. ^^ )

Our World of Logs page: http://worldoflogs.com/guilds/5487/

It's raining here again. My instrument blew up this morning and they sent me home (not my fault!). I am hungry and yet have not eaten yet because I have been _baking_. I have made a second batch of banana toffee chocolate chip cookies thanks to a recipe I recently saw on sockkpuppett's livejournal. The first batch went quickly. :) After the cookies, I made a batch of baked banana donuts. Will see how those turn out. Must eat leftover shepherd's pie now.