I had an interview today at a bookstore. It went well (actually, it felt more like socializing than interviewing - was it just her, or have I just been doing really badly all these years?) and whenever the background check comes through (the webform to fill out for that was also easier than I was expecting, but then, a bookstore BG Check != US Clearance App, so maybe I'm being silly) then I should get a call for an interview with the GM. I'd put in for management or sales clerk, and the manager told me they don't actually have any openings for management right now - corporate just likes to keep those posted on the job site. Apparently they promote from within, for the most part. Works for me. I have plenty of experience in customer service and add-on sales, and it's a bookstore...! Why haven't I tried this before? Oh, I know - because before I wouldn't have had the will to avoid buying out the place every time I set foot in the doors :P See, extended underemployment has taught me something!

So, when I finally got my email up - for some reason I had to reboot everything from the modem to the computer - I had some other messages next to the background check link. It seems one of the applications I emailed a while back has finally garnered response - three responses, from three different email addresses, two of them within an hour of each other, telling me to log into three different websites and provide information. Evidently, scammers don't keep track of how many times they email each mark. Interestingly, the first one specifies that I log in with Facebook.

Yyyyyyeahhhhh. So here's the question: do I go after their whois and complain? They're probably using a domain privacy service, which would likely cancel them for this, and once before I complained to a host/registrar about a fake job email (which was completely out of the blue, that time) and they emailed back to tell me that apparently it had been set up on a stolen card, so it was shut down now. Most of the Craigslist posts these days are fake jobs, which is seriously frustrating, but since the majority of these spammers are re-routing hopefuls to their affiliate links rather than trying to get their personal data, there's no easy/obvious way to stop them. I hate to say it, but maybe Craigslist needs to implement a posting fee on the jobs section here, like they did with the big cities.

Also, speaking of FB, what a nag it's turning out to be. It used to be that occasionally I'd get a message that someone sent me a private message, or a "hey, you haven't logged on in a while, we miss you!" Lately it's more like every few days: "Chrystalline, you have notifications pending." It's annoying, but I don't want to turn off notifications altogether. JournalFen has a more effective approach. They send me notices when I get comments, so when the spammers hit my journal, I have to log in to delete them. LJ lets me screen all anonymous and suspicious comments, which means I can leave it for a while, and on FB, the spam is almost always from my friends, trying to get me to play a game. (Look, you're my friends and family, and I love you, but quit it with the games, will you? The only apps I have on FB are the ones I a. can't remove, b. use for job-hunting, or c. use for political stuff. I'm not into webgames, sorry to disappoint.) Anyway, yeah, FB is turning into that kid that pesters you for attention every five minutes: "Hey, look at me. Didja know I could do this? Hey, I'm over here. Hey, hey, didja see this? Hey!" :: whap! :: Shut up, Navi.

You know, I don't really understand spammers. First of all, the majority of blog platforms have implemented NoFollow into their comment link display, assuming you get past the screening and spam filtering, so spamming a blog with links gets you ZERO search engine boost. Second, they seem to go after older, less-traveled blogs, which means there are fewer people to see it. You put time into posting stuff here and there, and all you manage to do is annoy the one or two people who maintain each blog - why do it? Makes no sense.

Oh and BTW, for some reason I've been having trouble getting my WP blog to restore properly, so I've switched hosts to try again. I'm not intending to go back to WP, just copy/paste over here (since LJ seems to be where everyone prefers to comment anyway) but I'd rather have it formatted properly via WP than have to manually go through the entire SQL file and reformat it. For some reason, it says it's imported the SQL and the main page looks fine, but when I click on any of the links, I get a 404 Page Not Found. Grrrr. Might be a while.

I usually have weird dreams. Bizarre "Escher meets Lewis Carroll meets Gene Roddenberry" adventures that no one would ever write on purpose. The most memorable ones are often frightening, too; the spiders on every surface, including between the layers of Kleenex in the box, or the one where flying alien pancakes that secrete human-dissolving acid interrupted Commander Riker's (yes, that Riker) class on swimming in a church gymnasium that has never held a pool but did for that dream. (Think Reign of Fire with flying acid pancakes instead of dragons and you'll be pretty close - and yes, in a totally bizarre anti-climax, we humans succeeded in fighting back with forks) Occasionally they're even simple scifi, like the one about the super-human girl and the anti-government rebels surrounded by the dictatorial government's forces and struggling to find a way to get everyone out to fight again another day; that one I typed up, at least in part, and my dad keeps asking when I'm going to finish the story, because he liked it a lot. I've posted about my weird dreams once or twice, but I don't think I ever mentioned the prophetic ones.

I say prophetic because I don't know a better word to refer to dreams about things that later come to pass, but it seems awfully pretentious for the level of events I usually see in those dreams. It started a long time ago, when I was in grade school, and let's face it - having your mother sign an absence form for when you were sick doesn't seem important enough to be worth dreaming in advance. In college, I dreamed about hanging out with friends I hadn't made yet. It's pretty much always been minor things, little snippets that are just enough to know, 'hey, I dreamed this before it happened!' but not enough to make a difference in any way. It's not like I have a chance to change anything based on these dreams, because it's always just a single moment in time, a snapshot featuring people I may or may not know. I won't see it coming in real life until it happens; the people I don't know yet in the dreams are vague and indistinct. More annoying than anything, really, so I've had no patience with people who hype it up: "I dream about things before they happen!" "Yeah, so?"

Last night (or this morning, I suppose, since it's the dreams right before waking that are memorable) I had another dream. I was at a clinic, with my indistinct husband (who, oddly enough, felt like an afterthought here), and I was pregnant and scared. A lot of the details are fading, as is usual for dreams, but weird as it was, it felt like one of the prophetic ones, which leaves me torn, and a little freaked. I mean, sure, deep down, I really want to be loved (who doesn't?) but I've already officially given up on the whole romance-and-marriage thing. The chances of finding a guy who both interests me and is interested in me are infinitesimal - it's never happened before (don't get me started on the ex-BF-in-love-with-love), and I can't really see it happening in the near future. For this dream to come to pass, it would have to be the near future, because it's only a half-dozen years until I turn forty, and unless God plans on repeating miracles, pregnancy after forty is...unlikely at best. There's a reason it's newsworthy when forty-five and fifty-year-old women manage to give birth (though why someone would choose to start at fifty is beyond me; children run around a lot - it's exhausting even when you're twenty-something). I run away from guys who interest me because I'm sick of making a fool of myself. I misinterpret everything as interest from a guy I find interesting (I don't notice at all if I'm not interested, unless he gets really obvious, like telling me directly and asking me out, or being skeevy and leering at me) and I can't help reacting, even though it makes me look pathetic and clingy. (I've found some of my old crushes on FB and IRL, but I'm too embarrassed about the past to ever contact them) It's safer to just run away. Loneliness hurts, but it's easier than repeated humiliation. Dreaming of a future pregnancy leaves me fighting hope and fear, that part of me that desperately wants to be held and treasured facing off with the part of me that put up locks and walls to block out anyone who might attract me. There's a reason I identify with the protagonists of Skip Beat and (Kaicho wa) Maid-Sama. I'm really confused right now.

He'd been doing poorly for a while, so I should have done this sooner, but as you probably already know, I'm not good at letting go. Without going into too much detail, last night he got really sick and I had to take him to the 24-hour clinic to be put out of his misery. He was 16, so he had a good run. I don't know if it's because he'd lost so much weight recently, but the anesthetic worked very quickly. RIP, Wyberd.

Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow - the stormfront moving through is worse than usual (understatement, I suppose, as I'm told it's the remnants of the tropical storm coming up from the Gulf) and I'm really feeling it. I don't know if I've really mentioned it online much, but when I was a kid, I dislocated my elbow, leaving me with permanent arthritis in that joint. Early on, it hurt every time there was a storm, but after a few years it got to be milder, only reacting if there was a serious pressure change. It didn't bother me much through most of the day, but tonight, it's aching so much my fingers are tingling. I *really* don't envy the elderly with full-body arthritis in this! Ow. Think I need to go find some aspirin - milder painkillers won't touch this.

On a much more fun note, I've been thinking about e-readers for a while. I'd been thinking I wanted to get a NookColor, because hey, color screen, yay! My brother pointed out a much cheaper option in the Aluratek Libre Pro, which is available through Target, and after some consideration, I think I'd rather get one of those. The NookColor has a color screen, and wifi, and a slightly wider range of formats, but the Libre Pro has a much lower price, and, even more importantly, the ability to use full-size SD cards (which can be write-locked, unlike the MicroSD cards which are the only size the Nook will take). The pre-loaded public domain ebooks certainly don't hurt, either.

Write-locking is kind of a big deal to me; I like the idea of using the disks for archival. If I can buy enough of them in bulk (not that I have the money right now) then instead of a collection of DVDs and CDs taking up a whole row of shelves (or a few spindles, depending how I do it), I could have a small box full of SD and SDHC cards. Archive materials need to be write-protected so they can't be accidentally overwritten or infected with a virus. So, yeah, I'm thinking I'll see about the LibrePro, as soon as I've steadied my income situation.

So, I'm trying to get back into online life, and I'm not getting there smoothly. I did have a brief stint with a local print shop, but the owner there made my previous manager look like a paragon of steadiness and predictability, and her cavalier attitude about copyright severely grated on my nerves. I'm currently waiting tables at a small local restaurant, but it's not enough, so I'm also looking for something else. Of course, I'm not sure whether that "something else" will supplement or replace, and it probably depends entirely on TPTB at the something else. We'll see. I had hoped that the tips would improve as I got better at it, but it's settled at "slow descent into insolvency" so yeah, I'm looking.

As for journaling, I've more-or-less decided to go with LJ and Feed2JS on a static HTML page instead of WP, but I'm still going to have to set up WP long enough to restore the old posts so I can copy the rest of them back over here. For a while, I had it set up to only cross-post part of the entry, so I have to use the archived version of the WP blog to fill in the rest. Don't think it'll restore the moods, though, so I'll probably just remove the nonsensical numbers. It's going to take me a while; I'm always overheated from work (it's usually about 85F in the dining room and 95F in the kitchen, and the heat outside afterward sure doesn't help - 108F in the car today), I'm tired, and my back and feet hurt. Handy that LJ now links to FB for cross-posting there, though. Should help.

Oh, yes, I got another cat in November. He'd been running around stray for months, a little ginger-and-white tom with a stumpy little tail, and after Smokey finally bit the dust, I had room. (the complex only allows two pets per apartment) About the time I decided I'd try to take him in, he disappeared for a while, so I thought he had a home. A couple of months later, I was coming home in the rain and found him huddled under a bush. Poor guy; I decided I wasn't going to wait for a convenient weekend and scooped him up. He wasn't keen on the whole "being carried" thing, but I managed to get him inside without too much flailing. I kept him locked in the bathroom so he couldn't pass anything to Wyberd, and the next morning I dropped him at the vet for testing, shots, and a bath.

They confirmed he was healthy, part Manx (not mutilated, which the neighbors had claimed) and a longhair. My first longhair. Kind of troublesome, really, but whatever. I still kept him in the bathroom, with a flea-and-tick collar (and felt justified in doing so when I found a dead tick on the linoleum later) and after a few weeks, had him neutered. He was very angry with me that day; it's amazing how much emotional range "meow" can cover. Anyway, by the time he'd recovered from that (they'd advised me not to let him out with the other cat until he'd healed), he and Wyberd had managed to get used to poking at each other under the bathroom door. So despite my fretting, the introduction was anticlimactic.

I toyed with the idea of calling him GingerSnapDragon, as a play on Gingersnap and Snapdragon, because he's ginger (almost the color of my hair) and white, and because while he's playful, he's also harmless. It took him a few weeks to learn not to use claws while "wrestling" with me, so I had a lot of scratches for a while, but he's got it now, and he has a marked tendency to run like a rabbit whenever anything unexpected happens. Still, that was too much of a mouthful.

Then I thought, he looks like fire on snow, how about Snowfire? Ah, but that sounds silly in English, so what will Google Translate give me? I thought Irish would be apt, since Manx come from the Isle of Man, near Ireland. Unfortunately, while Google Translate would give me the Irish Gaelic words for "fire" and "snow," it gave me no idea how to pronounce them. I wasn't about to name him something I couldn't even say, and most of the other languages sounded really goofy to me. Japanese, though, worked okay: "Yuki" is snow and "Hi" (hee) is "fire" and "to" (toe) is a typical ending for boys' names, so I put them together as Yukihito, and only then realized that it sounded familiar. Quick check with Google - yep, it's an existing Japanese name, and at least one of the manga I like to read has a character with that name. Leave it to me to find the long way around :\

He's very vocal, which is annoying, particularly since his favorite time to be vocal is about bedtime for me. I grew up with a half-Siamese who meowed only rarely, so having a cat that yowls every night is...very different. At least neutering made his meowing a little less insistent!

Ah, where to start. It’s been really busy for a while, between work and Meetups and ordinary household (apartment) maintenance and CPAC and America’s Got Talent and you’re saying “wait, what?!”

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Mirrored from Chrystalline.

I know, I know, I haven’t said anything, but that’s at least partly because I didn’t have a lot of lead time between when I found out about it and when I had to fly. It was only about two weeks ago I found out about CPAC – my mom sent the link, and I almost disregarded it, but I glanced at the posted agenda and saw “How to Get Started in Hollywood” on the schedule for Thursday morning, and I had to come.

So I’m in DC. This is awesome.

The flight was almost an hour delayed, and I was exhausted before we even started because I don’t pack well in advance, and the idiot chicken-cat scratched his ear open Tuesday night, so I had to deal with a) catching him and holding him still long enough to get it to stop bleeding, and b) scrubbing off blood spatters, because the moron tosses his head when his ear is bleeding, which makes it look like someone went around flinging blood off a tiny baton or something. Work is still slow, so Manager had no problem with me leaving a little earlier than I’d planned, which meant I was ready almost exactly when mom & dad & brother arrived to pick me up.

DC isn’t as cold as I’d thought it would be; it’s about how Huntsville’s been the last few days. The snow piles are kind of impressive – the taxi took us past rows of cars parked on the sides of the road with snow piled up to their windows. Clearly, they’re not going anywhere.

The hotel is jaw-droppingly huge. It was kind of strange to get in the elevator, select our floor, and have the elevator start down. The lobby (which we entered from the front driveway!) is on the eighth floor here.

What really gets me, though, is how awesome it is to be in a crowd of people who mostly agree with me on so much. The Hollywood panel was great; conservative & artsy people like me – I did as much info exchange as I could. Again at the blogger free-for-all, too. I like this group. I hadn’t realized how much I’ve silenced myself because I’m so often around people whose views are incompatible with mine and I’m too timid to rock the boat. Getting cursed out by my grandpa at Christmas (because he disagrees with my political views) has shifted something in me, though, too – I think I want to start speaking out more. It’s my blog. It’s my life. I think I want it back.

Mirrored from Chrystalline.

Tweaking WP most of the day, so now I’m testing my changes. (Oh, better try it on a different browser, to test the whole not-able-to-add-tags thing, too) Here goes Firefox! Hmm. Maybe it’s an admin plugin issue – still no workee.

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Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.

Thanks again to everyone for the thoughts and prayers; I really appreciate it. We got back Saturday night; I went to bed rather earlier than is normal for me because it was a draining trip, and Wyberd woke me at 5:30 am to make sure I was there. Goofy cat. Better believe I went back to sleep;) Had miscellaneous unpacking and householdy-type stuff to do Sunday, and that kept me busy. Work today, back to usual.

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Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.

to everyone for the prayers and thoughts and well wishes. My grandma passed away this morning, and we’ll be headed out of town in the morning. I’ll be away from internet until sometime this weekend, probably late Sunday.

Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.