Mmmm...Nummy Thanksgiving feast has been had. Hel fell asleep early; I am only awake because I slept around twelve hours yesterday. That itself was a treat; usually I am lucky to get a full four hours of sleep each night. I did actually fall asleep myself when I tucked her in, and woke up just to come downstairs and make this post (and play the Sims).

I made a turkey for me and the cats. Not content with the generous chunks of white meat I gave them, Laguna lept into the trash after we were asleep and fished out the drumstick I had tossed earlier. I also made green bean casserole for Hel, and we made mashed potatoes together. She had started roasting the pumpkin to make a pie, but we never got around to it. We'll have to make pie in the morning. :9

So I worked on my costume for almost two months. For those of you who didn't know through other modes of communication, Hel and I were going as steampunk versions of the Mad Hatter and the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. My White Rabbit was actually a nine-foot steam golem suffering from incredible levels of metal fatigue who wore a white bunny mask and tried to serve tea with its one remaining arm. It looked good for what it was, and it looked great for being made out of cardboard and PVC. But it was big, and our efforts to rent a UHaul to get it down here to Florida failed. We decided to have a hitch installed on the Lincoln so that we could rent a trailer and tow it to Orlando ourselves, but they told us the day before we had to leave that they didn't have the hitch in Gulfport; it was in Atlanta and would be here yesterday evening. So we were left wrapping the golem in a car tarp and securing it to the top of the car with bungee cords, which worked great for about one hundred yards of the several hundred mile journey. Then it fell off. So we had to drive back that 100 yards and drop it off in front of the garage. So I am dressing up as a pirate this year!

Hel and I saw some cool stuff on the way down here, but I was traumatized by this one rest stop that had disgusting bathrooms (nothing flushed, the soap dispensers didn't work, the water only worked in one sink, and only just barely, the paper towel dispensers didn't work, I emerged from the bathroom to find that nobody was in the store and had to wait to buy two bottles of water that I believe were filled up in the very same bathroom, and there were rows of dead baby sharks floating in blue water jars as souveniers. Just wrong!)

So we got to our hotel and took a half hour nap (Hel's first sleep in close to three days!) before going to Universal Studios for their Halloween event. It was awesome, except that as the night went on, more and more people kept smoking outside of the designated smoking areas. Now I am generally a supporter of smokers' rights, but this bothered even me. We ended up leaving earlier than we wanted to and crashing for some long overdue sleep. Oh, we also ate at this amazing Italian place just outside the park. Yummy food and perfect service!

So this morning we went to Hurricane Who, the Doctor Who convention at our hotel. It was much, much smaller than we expected (Muso, the vendor room was not even an eighth of the size of the one at CoastCon!), but the people were friendly and the panels were largely interesting. We got to see a life-size Dalek that one of the fans built out of fiberglass and particleboard and a powered wheelchair. It gave me a ton of ideas for rebuilding my bunny golem. We also went on an adventure to find an Indian restaurant. I had looked up a few in the Yellow Pages last night, but I had no clue where any of them were, so we just drove and guessed. And my string of guesses led us unerringly to the Indian restaurant that had been my first choice the night before! We stuffed ourselves with delicious curry and nan and other yummies and went back for more Hurricane Who. It is now a quarter to seven, and we are relaxing for a bit before we dress up as pirates and head down to Church street. Apparently there is a huge party there with a $3000 costume contest. It makes me want to break my tradition so I can come back here next year with my improved bunny golem!

Anyway, I hope all of you are having a wonderful Halloween! If you have been wondering where the hell I have been lately, please feel free to look me up on facebook. I am there much more often these days.

More awful awfulness! Awesomely awful awfulness! Do you like movies that make their mark by emulating better movies? "Actors" that look kind of like the stars they could not get to touch a project like this? Softcore porn actresses trying to emote whose most sincere moments come with lines like "I like Dick"? Then Dinocroc is the movie for you!

Borrowing (read: shamelessly stealing inasmuch as their budget will allow) shots, sets and CG from Jaws, Jurassic Park, Crocodile Dundee, Anaconda and Godzilla, Dinocroc follows the lives of people who look kind of like Kevin Sorbo and Laura Linney (but who aren't) as they...you know what? I'm not going to ruin it. Rent Dinocroc today!

Wow! We went into that knowing it would be awful, but that was about four thousand flavors of awful! I'm not usually one for spoilers, but in this fine feature film the main character, a washed-up ex-Olympian hopeful who was a marine for twelve years and who is now a ski instructor saves the mountain (and the WORLD!) with skiing! Best line in the film: he has just killed one of the spiders with a deer head he pulled off of the wall. The room is full of screaming, terrified people who have just watched someone get their skull caved in by the mandibles of a five foot arachnid. Ski Instructor/Marine turns to Obvious-Love-Interest Scientist girl who helped create the spiders (but not really - that was the big bad government's doing) and says, "Hey Doc, nice rack!"

...

Nice rack? Okay, man. I understand a well-placed inundo, but the spider you just killed is still covered with the warm blood of the guy it just killed in front of you. Or it would be covered with blood, if the tech guys had bothered to add realistic blood or lighting effects to the giant spiders.

On the plus side, we saw the original Stepford Wives yesterday, and it was infinitely better than both Ice Spiders and the remake of Stepford Wives. The remake was neutered, safe, boring and played for laughs. The original was a horrifying tale of entitlement and the concept of gender roles blown to extremes. Rent and watch the original. It is truly terrifying. The remake is nothing more than a wet fart.

Well, I got married again. FINALLY, a good excuse for not updating enough!

We tried to get married last Friday, but there was a huge rainstorm that caused an accident that forced us off the highway into downtown New Orleans. Neither Hel nor I are very familiar with that area, and we barely found our way back, let alone the way forward. So today we tried again (I got off work to go!). First, we got a late start. Then we blew a tire in the middle of nowhere and had to change it with traffic whipping by us at 80+ mph. Then we could not find parking at the courthouse, and when we did we were stopped for many minutes while Hel took off her knee-high black combat boots for the metal detector (they have like 30 screws each in the soles!). And that was just to get the license! After that, we learned that the Justice of the Peace was on vacation! So we had to drive all the way to Marrero to find someone to marry us. We got there just before they closed, and a mean old receptionist tried to turn us away. But we prevailed and got married. Then we drove back to Gulfport where we went to the most pretentious restaurant ever and had cream of Jesus mushroom soup. YUM! Now we're home, and Hel is sucking on my neck as I type this.


...I gotta go!


ATTENTION: Hel has demanded that I make it known that she was not the one most excited about this marriage. She detests the idea that just because she is female, she is going to be thought to be sucking on my neck because she is excited to be married. She insists that she enjoys sucking on my neck all the time.

If any of you thought that she enjoyed the idea of getting married, then stop it. Stop it right now! DAMN YOU!!! JUST STOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP!



She only married me for the medical benefits...and so that she can kill me and get the insurance.

Hello there.

Hel and I are in Montana. It's been an odd vacation. Fun, but more tense than I would have expected. And I miss my kitties.

When was the last time I logged on here? When was my last post? Ugh. I've got so much to do. I hope all is well with all of you. I am hoping to get my computer at home back online soon; maybe I will someday get back on here regularly. It doesn't feel likely right now, though.

*sigh*

Ugh. Okay, I need to recover from this before Hel gets home.

I was on Facebook (don't judge me!), looking up old friends and acquaintances from high school and beyond, when I came upon the name of a guy I knew way back when. We were never friends, but I remember knowing his name and being impressed at the Freddy Kruger glove that he had made himself and brought into class one day. This was back in the days when you could do that and not worry about anyone getting killed or arrested. I never really gave it much thought at the time. And I never really gave the guy a chance because he was into metal shop and the auto shop and all of the things I was not into. Whether he cared or not, I snubbed him, because he did not fit into my world. Today, I discovered that he is now a famous artist and designer for horror movies.

I suck. I suck doubly hard because I have a finished script and I have yet to send the damn thing out! I think it's time I officially stop calling myself a writer. When was the last time I wrote anything? What good is my creative energy if it goes forever unrealized? If the only person who sees what I have to show is me?

I feel sick.

Fweeeee! She'll be here in just a few hours! NOBODY CALL TONIGHT AFTER 8:30!!! There are two weeks of cuddles to be had!

Oh gods, please let the last vestiges of this cold melt away before 8:00!

I don't feel orange and green and tropical anymore. I'm not sure I feel completely like my new theme either, but it's closer. I should learn how to create themes for myself.

Imagine a side-scrolling video game. You are running very fast, and you leap off a cliff and soar out into the night sky. You have a sense of your speed and lift as the ground zips by beneath you, but once you pass into the featureless sky, you reach a point where you cannot tell if you are flying or falling. It's not frightening, but you don't know what to expect. My life is very much like that right now.

It's tough, but I'll try.

I mean, honestly. There are so many people out there that have it so much worse than I do. So without whining, what's going on in my life?

Well, I have now lived in Mississippi for six months, I'm engaged, but for reasons that have nothing to do with Hel or with our relationship, but which I cannot really go into here, the date for the wedding keeps getting pushed back. We had agreed to have a simple court wedding; no religious ceremony. But I did recently find a place in New Orleans that will let us have a pirate wedding, and I think that would be awesome.

I don't have a lot of free time anymore, and I spend most of what free time I do have caring for the cats and the house and the garden. It's a lot of work. Sadly, that is taking its toll in other ways. I try to keep in touch with my friends from Mountain Home, but I don't remember the last time I heard from any of them other than Pedro (no offense meant to Pedro! It's just that I miss the other guys, too). I don't know if it's a drifting apart, or if they're pissed at me, or if it's some other thing. Worse still, I don't have much of a social life here yet either. We've had few gaming leads, and those never panned out. So now we go to conventions.

I finally got leave approved in July, so Hel and I will finally be going to Labyrinth! Awesome costume ideas we have, but I cannot go into most of them yet; I have a terrible habit of abandoning projects once I tell other people about them.

Coastcon was largely disappointing, but we keep meeting people who have been in years past and who assure us that it gets better. We finally found a flea market and have vowed to go every weekend we can dressed as pirates. FLEA MARKET PIRATES! That's the name of the next band I create in Rock Band 2.

Well, it's 9:16, and I am getting an extra seven or eight students in my class tomorrow, so I had better go learn what I am going to be teaching them. I hope all is going well with each of you. Hopefully I will have a chance to catch up on your journals once I get a few more classes under my belt (then I won't have to spend my evenings studying).

What do you do when someone you love is far away and miserable, and all you can do for them is "be there"? Yes, it helps to know that someone is there and cares about you and wants the best for you, but am I supposed to be satisfied with being able to provide only that? Damn it! I want to fly out there and show up with a car so I can say, "Whenever you're ready..." Instead, she's miserable and all I can do is sit here and say, "I'm sorry you're hurting. I'd be there with you if the government wouldn't throw me in jail for going AWOL."

Worst of all is that I've been bitching about being BORED! I suck. And I miss my Hel. Boo.

I thought that when Hel went to visit her family that I would magically tap into some vast stockpile of time and motivation, but unless you count playing Rock Band 2 for hours, I don't think it's working for me.

The damned raccoons are still out there, and they dug up my elephant ear. I hate to even think it, but I might have to kill them if I want any of the garden to survive. Deer, too. Fuckin' deer.

Well, it's 10PM, a full two hours past my bedtime, and the washer finally stopped, so I can toss my uniform in the dryer and hope it's dry by 4AM tomorrow. *sigh*

Sorry for the continued whining; I figure whining and getting it out of my system is better than disappearing from lj for a few more months.

Right?

Honestly, who has the time anymore?

So much has been happening! The van died, and I payed way too much money to have it towed home so that I could fix it, but months have passed and I have yet to even buy the maintenance guide for it. Bought a Lincoln Town-Car (I'm a whore for big, steel, boat-like cars) which I have yet to get emissions tests done on.

Ugh. I get up at 4:00 AM so that I can get to work by 6. I spend all day teaching a subject I am no good at and don't care much for to students who could not be any less professional without hanging their junk out when they walk through the door. At 3:00 I am supposed to go to PTT, but there are too many other things I have to do to get ready for tomorrow's lesson, so I'm getting fatter. No, really. This time it's so much worse. I am up to 245 lbs! For those of you who don't know, I am supposed to weigh 185. I get home by 5:00, unless something else goes wrong, and I have three hours before bed. Three hours, from 5-8, to spend with Hel and the cats, plant stuff in my garden, make and eat dinner, study for tomorrow's lesson, make costumes for Pyratecon, clean up around the house and get to bed.

I'd whine more, but I'm too tired.

wah wah wah, meer meer meer!

Well, I can't even pretend anymore. I have fallen so out of touch with everyone and everything that I could probably be declared a different person entirely. I have made many changes since coming to Mississippi; some great and sweeping, others not so much. But one of the best changes is that Hel and I have begun cooking.

Tonight we are making bhari simla mirch (Hel got me a giant curry cookbook among other wonderful things for the holidays). Although it's an Indian dish, the potatoes tasted decidedly Greek.

A few days ago we made sandwiches. Among the ingredients we used were:

hoagie relish, mustard, mayonnaise, pickles, tuna, havarti with caraway seeds, goat cheese with red peppers, romaine lettuce, cucumber, egg, seven grain bread, wheat-berry bread, golden apples, nutella, orange marmalade, banana, almond butter, all natural peanut butter, hazelnuts, Gouda and blueberry jam.

I can't remember whatr else we have made recently, and this list is proving less entertaining than I originally predicted. And I have to go watch an episode of Ugly Betty while the peppers cook, so I'll see you later. Happy Holidays, everyone!

It all came today! New washer and dryer, and none too soon; we have been reduced to wearing the fumes coming off the least dirty of our clothes. And now we have cable . Yay for being able to post regularly again! (note: just because I can does not mean I necessarily will).

All the house stuff came yesterday. Some things have been put away, but most of it is still in boxes. The cats love it.

Now that I have the internet back, I'll try to keep up with my correspondence. Sorry for the long delay.

So I am in the middle of my first day of work. My work day runs from 6:00AM to 4:00PM with an hour for lunch. Of course, if I want to beat the morning march to class I will have to be here by 5:30, which means leaving the house (once we get it) by 5:00, which means getting up by 4:15. Of course the duty day only OFFICIALLY end at 4; I will most likely not leave work until close to 5, meaning I will get home by about 5:30. So my actual day will run from 4:15AM to 5:30PM, and since I will have to go to bed by 9PM in order to get enough sleep to get up at 4:15, I am going to be left with a whopping three and a half hours each day to spend with Hel and the kitties.

yippie.

They make a big thing about how we have every other Friday off...it is not looking like a fair trade to me right now.

Well, for whatever reason, I cannot get into the Air Force Portal right now, so I will have to go wait at Force Management so that I can open my sealed info packet and hopefully get my IA form so that I can go wait in another line to get my email account set up so that I can start getting emails about potluck lunches and ways I can give more of myself to shape the leaders of tomorrow.

No, I'm not bitter. Why?

So much going on these days. So much stress. If it isn't the seller whining about something and trying to get out of making necessary repairs before we buy the house, then it's the meathead we're currently sharing a bathroom with inviting his friends over to have what sound like two hour pee parties wherein they laugh, talk loudly and name each other's dicks before leaving and forgetting to unlock our door to the bathroom (the bathroom opens into both rooms, and each door locks in both directions).

Hel and I are both stressed over the cats, as well as our crumbling resolve about wanting to add two more cats to our family. One was a stray, the other abandoned. Both are curious and friendly, and both need a home. Hel and I both know that having nine cats is a big enough responsibility, but it gets harder every day to resist the two loving creatures that reside at the vet clinic, waiting for homes and loving, caring humans to dote on them. The biggest problem is, of course, that we would both happily adopt every cat in the world, even though we could never care for them all. Sometimes I fear that we will be biting off more than we can chew, but if not us, who will give these cats homes?

And on top of everything else, I go back to work on Wednesday. I still don't feel quite ready to deal with it, but I'm out of time to prepare.

That's all the biggest news. Sorry for such lame and spotty updates. I hope you are all doing well.

By now most of you who still read my journal know that every year I spend Halloween in a different city. I've got the list somewhere in my brain, but I cannot find it at the moment and I want to get some things down before bedtime.

This year I spent Halloween in Gulfport, Mississippi. Hel and I started the day with a fight. One might find that inauspicious, if not downright portentous and declare the day over and doomed. Well, I don't care how corny it sounds; I would rather fight with her than be away from her on any day, to say nothing of today (technically yesterday, but Halloween does not end until I go to sleep). Anyway, we resolved the fight and made up, then went to bed at around 4:30 in the morning. We woke up at 9, but did not get out of the room until close to 1. We went to see the kitties (they are being boarded at a vet just outside the base). Hel remarked on the sudden drop in the level of care and attention being given to the cats; ever since we told the vet that we were going to move the kitties not because we did not like their service, but because it was prohibitively expensive and we found another place that will board them together and for less money, they have been cold toward us and toward our cats. We are getting them out of there tomorrow.

Actually, Hel just reminded me that the day ACTUALLY began with me calling Firebot and telling her my Halloween story`"All Hallow's Eve at Whiskey's". I tell that story every Halloween. :)

So after the cats, we went to see our realtors. The boxes toward getting our home are being checked off, although lately it feels like the work is overwhelming us and that we have no time to relax. And today was no different. After seeing Stephanie and Stacey, we took the van to SpeeDee, a garage in the musty, sweaty ass crack of Pass Road. We thought they were being rude and trying to sucker us, but it turns out we were both just being impatient asses, and that what we thought was a cataclysmic failure of every working part of the van was in fact low power steering fluid and an almost empty radiator. After that, we were FINALLY on our way to the outlet mall to find beany baby cats to affix to my costume.

We arrived at the outlet mall after I turned into two wrong parking lots, and were greeted with signs pointing the was to the Castle of C.H.A.O.S. "Awesome!" we exclaimed. We had inadvertently stumbled upon a haunted house! When we went to see it, however, we learned that it was a "Christian message" haunted house. I cannot find what the acronym stands for, but although I wanted to go in and laugh at what promised to be weak attempts at scaring me into the arms of teh LAWRD, Hel was still having so hard a time not murdering the guy running the Dippin' Dots stand for smoking and was not sure she could be counted on to let everyone in the haunted house go home at the end of the night with all of their organs in the right place, so we instead went to find a better wig for her.

We did not find a better wig, but we did suffer the last minute crowds at the party place/costume shop for about fifteen seconds before leaving to see the kitties one more time today.

It bears mentioning at this point that at ten minutes to six, I noticed that Shadow's litter box was still full and his food bowl still empty, just as they had been at 1:30. They also told us very casually that Meilyn had not eaten anything for two days. HOLD THE PHONE!!! One of my kitties stops eating and you, the people I am paying a hundred dollars a DAY to care for my cats did not even think to call and let me know?! And they told us right before closing time, which means that there was nothing we could do about it. I hope Meilyn eats tonight. I don't want her to get sick. :(

After leaving the vet, we searched in vain for a thrift store before finally returning to the room to get ready for the evening. By now it was about 5:50, and everything we had looked into started at 9:00. Hel transformed a hideous glam rocker wig into a decent Death wig.

Oh yeah, we both went as Death this year. She was Neil Gaiman's Death, and I was Terry Pratchett's. She looked great, while I was asphyxiating behind a thick latex skull mask. We left the room at around 9:30 in search of The Dock, a Gulfport bar and restaurant. Instead we got lost and stumbled upon The Terror 08, a real, if sophomoric haunted house. They relied far too heavily on strobe lights and loud noises, but it was fun. Hel and I both got groped by a small group of large black women who were so frightened by the place that they were perfectly willing to grope perfect strangers to feel safe.

We left there and went to a sports bar that we knew had something going on tonight. We went inside to find the front half of the place hut down and empty save for a handful of people playing beer pong, and the back half overflowing with loud, obnoxious music and girls in slutty costumes. We left and went to eat at the IHOP, returning to the room at a little after midnight. We showered and now she is reading while I post this.

So I'm going to end this here before she goes to sleep and see if I can't get some kisses in before Halloween is over. Hope everything went well for each of you this year.

Happy Halloween!

I have never been as completely hooked by a video game as I have by this one. I have been having Rock Band dreams, and my fingers hurt for an entire week after the night I first played "Mississippi Queen" on Hard. Hel has promised me that we will get a PS3 and buy the game once we get a house in Biloxi.

In other news, my name is now LEGALLY Alexi! As of 1:30 PM on October 10th, and no, I will still not tell any of you what the name used to be, and those of you who already know know better than to go spitting that name out.

The house sold (four days on the market!) and closes on Wednesday. Stan is coming Wednesday and we begin our drive Thursday morning. My loan is approved and there are a few houses Hel and I are already excited about; I'm finally ready for this. Leaving will still suck in ways: I'm leaving behind a small but deeply significant group of friends, a town I am finally comfortable with, the mountains and the real winters, the proximity to my parents' home in Montana. Mostly it's the friends I'll miss.

I don't make friends easily. To have even a handful of friends this close is a rare and wonderful thing; to have enjoyed their friendship for so long (eight years for two of them) is something I will cherish, and while we will not stop being friends just because I am moving away, I will mourn the loss of proximity. It's a greatly comforting thing to have such close friends be...well, close.

I'm sorry for not posting for so long. I have not read anyone else's journal for a long time either, so I am once again out of touch.

I blame Rock Band. Seriously, play it. It rocks. Hard.