summer

This is the first week that it's really felt like summer, even though it's been warm for ages. I knew it was when I came home from work the other day to a house that smelled like my Grandmother's back room--old house, old furniture, books, a running washing machine, Florida humidity, grass, the dirt outside the open windows. I walked in, and for a moment, I thought I was going to cry. It's been almost a year and a half and I still keep getting broadsided like this.

But then, that passed and I remembered all the happy summers when we'd come back from wherever we were living all over the world, and we'd live in Grandma & Grandpa's un-air-conditioned old house, sleeping on cots and roll-out beds and the floor, and the heat didn't matter then because we were little and it doesn't matter to kids. I wish the summer could still be like that. I still get the urge, as soon as the temperature spikes, to go somewhere other than here. The emails I get from various travel sites probably don't help much with their "799$ for a week in an Irish Castle!"-type deals.

I guess I'll always be a gypsy like that. So I've made it a goal: I want to make enough money in my living to be able to just pick up and go every few months when a good deal to somewhere I want to go comes across my desk. I'll stay a week or three, decompress, work from the beach or a castle or whatever, and come home happy to see the place again.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to enjoy the sun before it gets so bad I can't bear to be outside.

I am now sans creepy mole

As you can see



Not that bad, considering they literally cut a piece off of me and charged me 115$ to do it. It was really rather anticlimactic: I went in at 3 and I was out at 3:11, including payment time. The most painful part was getting the Novocaine shot that made my foot numb for, like, twelve hours. For two days it hardly hurt at all. Then, when I went back to work, it started aching the longer I stood on it, and it's like now it remembers that it's an injury, and it hurts more. It's basically a moderately deep cut with a burn over it, so I guess it's entitled to hurt, but it's still annoying.

I'm going to replace my mole with a prosthetic one, then, later, a cyborg mole, and it'll be the first part of me upgraded. Barring that, and depending on how it scars, I might just tattoo around the scar in a circle filled with  safety and healing symbols. You know, until the cybernetics are perfected.

I'm still waiting on the lab results, and that's the last bit of nervousness I have for this thing. He says it's probably going to come back fine, but until those results are in my hand, I'm still a bit twitchy about it.

More weird things from downtown

This is a fairly normal sight here in the Oldest City

midweek gripe session

I feel like I'm doing everything wrong. Scheduling, sticking to the schedule, keeping up with stuff, communicating with people. I keep forgetting things that need doing, and winding up doing them crappily at the last minute. I keep saying I'll do things I don't really have time for, and then being way late. My stupid computer lags more and more no matter waht I do. I can't get my external HDD to register. I don't have time to exercise, and when I do, my knee hurts. I have this stupid mole making me paranoid and enough flea bites that I am far too aware of every single thing that bothers me about my skin. I'm forever behind on everything. I just want to quit it all and crawl into a hole and never come out.

But I'm too damn stubborn to be a quitter, especially when I've put this damn much effort into school and stuff.

But I still hate being late on assignments. And I still am so freaking tired of arguing genre and critiquing things that don't really need my input. And I'm so tired of being awake so damn much. I want to sleep more, and not have to start working as soon as I wake up. I want to not have to worry about money. I want to get on with my life already.

It's too late. I'm going to  bed.

This is my newest project

...that I probably don't have time for. A gift from J.