(no subject)

The last few days have been busy, but I've felt that I've gotten very little accomplished. I suppose that, when I write about it, it'll amount to more than I expect.

At the moment, I'm rather concerned because somebody seems to be using one of my e-mail addresses, the one I use on the fanfic website and on some Yahoo lists, to send out messages. I've changed the password and notified Earthlink about the problem, but the password change doesn't seem to have helped.

Of course, I only know this is happening because I keep getting "undeliverable" messages returned to me, ones I never sent. So far as I can tell, the contents seem harmless, but I've no guarantee that will continue. Besides, one of the bounced messages was addressed to a Yahoo mailing list. I don't at all like the idea of someone else using my identity.

Beyond changing the password again, I can't think what to do about it. I don't want to change e-mail addresses, but I suppose it may come to that. But whatever address I change to will still be on the website, and I suspect that that's where whoever it is found the address. If the problem's address forgery rather than password theft, then changing the address won't help in the least.

Scott has no advice on this subject beyond stating that the e-mail program we use ought to be secure in terms of how it sends passwords. It's frustrating to be so helpless.

I've almost finished my large afghan. All that's left is the border and, after that, weaving in the ends. With luck (and perseverance), I'll have it entirely done by Thursday when my brother-in-law and his wife arrive to spend a couple of nights. The afghan ought to be the right size for the guest bed, and since the bed's now in the basement, they'll be wanting whatever we can come up with in the way of blankets.

(no subject)

Friday, Scott and I ran an assortment of errands. We took several items to a frame shop near our house. One item, a gift from LunarGeography and Badmovie, needed matting and framing. We wanted to be careful about that one because it's a Foglio bit, one of the pages from Buck Godot, that they found (on E-bay, I think).

Then we had two large pieces that my mother had given us from the house in Knoxville. Back in the 70s, she took a summer and went to Europe (I was about 6. The whole thing was very odd because my father moved back in for a while, and we had a couple of students living with us that summer who got their room in exchange for looking after me and my sister). While she was in England, she did some brass rubbings, and she brought two back and framed them. When Scott and I got them, one frame had started to come apart, and the other simply looked poorly put together. We thought we should get them properly put together now while we've got the money to spare.

The final item didn't need much work. It's a largish photograph of me from a play I was in during high school. I played the Wicked Witch of the West in a production of The Wizard of Oz. It was great fun, and I have some very happy memories of that period. At any rate, my mother had framed the photo in a nice white oak with glass. The only problem was that nothing kept things from falling out the back (well, Mom had put some smallish nails in, but they kept falling out themselves). I'd tried everything I could think of (at least that wouldn't damage the photo) with no luck.

Then we donated another couple of bags of clothing. That nearly became unnecessarily difficult because Scott somehow decided that we were trying to go some place quite different from where we needed to be. He'd missed my emphasis on "the corner of Platt and Packard" and wanted to head for a convenience store further up Packard. He'd turned before I asked him what on earth he was doing.

The next thing we'd planned to do was get the car washed, but it had started to snow. Scott felt that there was no point so long as we were that close to rain, so we just went on to the next errand and bought some groceries, mainly the supplies we needed for our contributions to the family gathering the next day. We were both rather hungry, so we ended up buying rather more than that, but we managed not to be extravagant.

From there, we went to a craft shop so I could select the yarn for the trim on the afghan. I didn't like any of the choices particularly, so I let Scott pick. I don't think he did too badly. The body of the afghan's a sort of multi-colored blue thread with lots of gray overtones, and the trim's a gray with green overtones. While we were in the craft store, I picked up a small painters pallet with six cups for mixing paints; the paint by numbers things I've been working on requires quite a lot of mixed colors, and I'd previously nowhere to mix them.

(no subject)

After running the other errands on Friday, we went to Borders. As part of its cash back program, Discover has started offering Borders gift cards, a $40 card for $20. Not too surprisingly, both Scott and I like this option. As per usual, I ended up grabbing more than I really meant to. I got a Lori Foster romance that I haven't really looked at yet and a 2003 Aubrey Beardsley calendar that was on sale for $3. I plan to put the calendar up in the basement by my desk. I'm not sure how I'll fasten it, but I'm sure I'll think of something.

I got some manga. Normally, I feel like it's too expensive, but with the gift card, I was a little more willing to experiment. I got the first volume of X/1999 and read it pretty much immediately. This is the first time I've seen volume one in the store, so I was a bit surprised to find it. I was also surprised at how well I managed to follow the story. The bits I'd read from later in the series had been confusing, and I'd found it difficult to tell the characters apart. I think that having seen the first two DVDs of the anime helped, too, since the stories match pretty closely.

I also grabbed volumes 1 and 2 of Cardcaptor Sakura, Master of the Clow. I felt a little strange skipping the first series, but they didn't have volume 1 of that, and I more or less know the story. I thought I'd grab these while I could find them and maybe fill in the first series later. I've read the first half of volume 1 already (I actually read it in the store while making my decision and waiting for Scott to finish browsing the computer books), and I think I'll enjoy it.

I got two other paperbacks, Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled and Liz Williams' Empire of Bones. I've finished the Gilman book already and found no surprises. I rather regret that because, while the books are still reasonably fun, there just hasn't been anything memorable about the last several. I really loved Mrs. Pollifax when I discovered her back in the 80s; I even went so far as to recommend the books to one of my grandmothers. It just feels like there's less substance to them than there was. (I don't plan to go back and reread to test that. I'm afraid I'd end up frustrated with the early books and so lose the good memories I've got of them.)

I'm frustrated with Empire of Bones for quite a different reason. Williams seems to be one of those authors whose books I'm destined never to finish. She writes well. Her characters, alien cultures and plots work. I just bog down a few chapters in and can't get started again. I have the same problem with Sarah Zettel's stuff, and I'm inclined to think that it's a problem with me rather than with the authors in question. I suspect that my difficulty is that part of the complexity of these works is a certain amount of, for want of a better word, pain. As I read, I see the inevitable arrival of that pain and can only face it if I'm in exactly the right mood. Sigh... I guess Liz Williams may end up being another author I collect but don't read.

Alessar has lent me Jim Butcher's Storm Front. I'm enjoying it reasonably well given that I'm not big on PI mysteries, even when the involve the supernatural. (Come to think of it, that may be yet another reason I'm so indifferent about the Anita Blake books...) I don't think it's something I'd be likely to buy, but I might check out other books by the author if I found them in the library, might even seek them out there if I'm not finding anything that appeals more.

I'm not certain what it is about PI mysteries that puts me off, but there's very definitely something there. I think that some of it is the perpetual sense that the world sucks, that it hates the main character. The rent's always past due. The hero always gets the crap beaten out of him. The apparent good guys seldom are, and the apparent villains aren't any better.

(no subject)

Saturday, we got up earlier than normal because Scott needed to bake an apple pie for his family gathering (I'd done the loaf of bread the night before). I'd meant to sleep in, but Scott's alarm went off about five minutes after he got in the shower. I just gave up on sleep at that point. I had a nasty headache, so I wasn't too happy about life in general.

Then Scott's sister called to tell us to turn on the TV. She knew that the shuttle accident would be very important to Scott, given that his ambition for many years was to find a way to work on the space program. We managed to get the pie baked and the dishes washed in spite of the distraction of the news coverage (and the need for a trip to Kroger). It just took us longer than we expected, even once I'd pointed out that we weren't going to get anything new by continuing to watch the CNN loop.

We picked up Scott's brother, Jeff, and his wife, Gale, at her parents' place and proceeded to Scott's sister's house. Scott spent a while playing with legos with our nephew (Scott even built a version of the starship Enterprise) while everybody else but me (and the 1 year old niece) played Pictionary. I fell asleep on the couch in spite of the noise around me, something that I can almost never manage. At least the headache was mostly dead when I woke.

After dinner, we did a gift exchange. We gave Gale a Borders gift card and three "hair gloves" (They're bits of cloth designed to wrap around a ponytail and snap in place. Each one is several inches long, and the owner is expected to trim them to the correct size. Gale found them online and mentioned them to me). She let me try one of the hair gloves, but my hair was too thick for it. We gave Jeff several things, some sort of Lord of the Rings computer game, a Monty Python day calendar and a stuffed exploding penguin (sadly defective in the exploding department...). Scott got the four DVD version of The Fellowship of the Ring, and I got a copy of Monsters, Inc. and a copy of P.C. Hodgell's Blood and Ivory.

Scott's sister sent us home with quite a bit of baby stuff. I haven't had time to go through all of it yet, so I can't give much in the way of details. She's also offered to go with me and Scott to Babies R Us to help us make some decisions on strollers and the like. I think that part of it is that she realizes that, left on my own, I'll put off registering as long as I possibly can.

Sunday was a lot quieter. We started out with good intentions but ended up not doing a lot. Well, I made a lot of progress on the afghan, about three skeins worth. It's just that we'd planned grocery shopping, a trip to the mall, cleaning the basement and further work on the soon to be nursery. We did get the grocery list made, and a couple of boxes migrated from the spare room toward their eventual final destinations, but... Mostly, we watched the actors' commentary version of FotR.

I did attempt to do some writing, but I keep crashing into one bit that I need to make work. I hate doing visual description, and that's absolutely what's needed there. I want to make things look unusual and high tech while avoiding clichéd images and stuff that will feel too alien to the reader.

(no subject)

WARNING: The following may be TMI for some people. If you think that might include you, I suggest you bail now. I'm going to be talking about bras and breast pain for the rest of this entry.

Apart from not writing, the trip to the mall is the thing I'm regretting most about Sunday. We'd put it off from Friday because we were both too worn out to attempt it (that and Briarwood's a long way from everything else we needed to deal with). My intention was to make a trip to the maternity store there and look at bras.

Basically, I haven't worn bras for years, not since some time during college when the FMS started making such things very uncomfortable. My cup size hovered on the border between B and C, but I was lucky enough that not wearing a bra wasn't uncomfortable and that I didn't jiggle painfully when moving. I know some women who find going braless quite unpleasant.

Well, if I'm going to be honest, I've worn bras a few times in the intervening years, at my wedding, for example, and with certain dresses on very special occasions, but I've always found doing so uncomfortable at best. Sports bras tend to give me less trouble generally, but they're not really designed for fancy dress occasions.

After I got pregnant and started reading pregnancy books, I noticed that the one piece of advice that seemed universal was to get myself into a heavy duty bra and wear it 24-7. I bought a couple of different bras to try out and found that they pretty much made the pain worse. I had two types of breast pain, one occurring at very specific times (basically only when I sat up or stood up from lying down) and passing quickly that was helped by bras, and one longer lasting that resulted from any sort of ongoing compression of my breasts. I decided that easing the former pain was not worth the resulting agony.

I brought this topic up the last time I saw the obstetrician, and she more or less shrugged and said that breast pain's a part of pregnancy and that I should deal. She also said that bras were only necessary if I found them helpful, particularly since I'm not getting back pain from the increased weight. So I decided that I wouldn't worry about the whole bra question until and unless something changed.

Sadly, something has. The compression effect is still there and still horribly painful, but I'm getting something else now too. My breasts have started to become sore just from normal contact with my shirts and with other parts of my body. When I wear an elastic waist dress, the elastic pulls the fabric in enough to provide protection, but everything else in my wardrobe... I can tell that wearing a bra would help this if I can find one that doesn't cause me other problems. I don't know, however, if such a piece of apparel exists.

I need to avoid lace, hooks, wires and braces because they all cause me problems. That leaves sports bras, but their level of compression tends to be higher (Hey, anything that says A, B or C cup must smash things down pretty well).