serinde

So, I've registered for a class, which means I now have a bill. It's free for me, as an employee of a particular flavor, but until the papers are pushed the bill does indeed show my tuition. It also shows my application fee (they don't actually charge it until you're accepted and actually taking courses, which is unusually kind of them), and...the Student Technology Fee.

My salary is paid out of the Tech Fee.

I'm paying myself.

I'm not ready to talk, or think, about Grandma just yet so I've been looking at apartments again. This is twitchy enough to make me start down other avoidance behavior roads, but I'm keeping mostly en point.

( burble burble blort )

Tomorrow, in Cleveland: "Cloudy with periods of snow during the afternoon. Dangerous wind chills may approach -25F."

Oh the things I do for family.

nedlnthred has been sick with death plague all week, and I thought I was avoiding it, but last night I was suddenly slammed by the Bus of Exhaustion; and this morning, though I slept tolerably well (there was one World War Cat taking place across my bed, and the neighbor started chipping ice off his walk at 5am), I'm feeling much the same. With a side bonus of throat tickle and swollenness! Whee!

I really, really cannot afford to be sick this week, which is going to be full of doom and wrath, so I'm trying to sleep it off. This of course utterly derails my plan of going to the Cooper-Hewitt with elibalin today to see the 19th-century interiors exhibition going away at the end of the month. grrrr.

It's a Sherlock Holmes film...

...directed by Guy Ritchie...

...starring Robert Downey Jr as Holmes, and Jude Law as Watson...

...currently filming in Williamsburg...

...with the antagonist being a Satanist peer.

what.

Last night, elibalin and I braved the howling sleet to check out Co. Pizzeria (don't bother clicking today, there's no there on the web site yet) (but here's their menu), which just opened last week and has been getting a fair amount of buzz in the usual places. There was already at 6:15 a line (which was okay, since I was late, thank you E train), but we got seated around 6:40.

The pizzas are really damn good. Eli got their "boscaiola" (mushroom, sausage, onion, chilis), which was delicious, and I got the "flambé" (caramelized onions and lardons) which was the best thing EVER. Service was prompt and cheerful, in spite of the crowding and noise--most of the seating, which there isn't a lot of, is at a couple of long communal tables. The pizzas (4 irregularly-sized slices) are large enough for one if you're awfully hungry, or have a hollow leg like Eli does; I could have been content with half of mine, but went all gorge-y and ate the 3rd slice. The fourth came home with me and I shall savor it tonight.

At the time we left, there was an even bigger mob waiting to be seated. Obviously the buzz is working. But for once it's justified.

Edit for useful information: It's on Ninth Ave and 24th St (generally useless area, but moderately convenient to Chez Panixxe), and it was reasonably priced considering we were full of the gluttony AND had wine.

Context: I'm knitting a baby blanket for incoming spawn of someone in our D&D group, which I'm doing in a vaguely Irish-fisherman-sweater style. I couldn't find a pattern I liked, so I made it up, which always works so terribly well.... Just as with sewing, this turned into a giant pile of math errors flying in close formation. However, now I'm N rows in, so this is what it is going to be:

* 5-stitch garter stitch border
* p2
* 8-stitch horseshoe cable (knit)
* p3
* 13-stitch Aran diamond
* p3
* 8-stitch horseshoe cable
* 20-stitch "Lover's Knot" clustered cable (this has p2 whitespace built in on either side of it)
* 8-stitch horseshoe cable
* p3
* 13-stitch Aran diamond
* p3
* 8-stitch horseshoe cable
* p2
* 5-stitch garter stitch border

I haven't said much of consequence for quite some time (and have been poor at answering email &c, for which I submit a blanket apology). I've been a little bit withdrawn and, hmm, encapsulated for the past month and change, and for the most part felt a strange aversion to opening up the cocoon around my emotional state. Then, while in England, I had a terrible time trying to sleep; I assumed that I was just having time zone adjustment issues, but on the last night of the visit I finally realized I had been sublimating anxiety...I don't think we can call them attacks, per se; a whispering campaign maybe? Part of it is upcoming work drama (we are moving the Help Desk next month, and there is all kinds of ancillary chaos, destruction, and politics to go with it), but most of it has been about me, and where I'm going, and what I'm doing next. See, once it became clear that the housing market was having all the flow of treacle, I put it all out of my head with the figuring that I would deal with it after the New Year; and thus, once the holidays arrived, a giant pie of The Future Is Now was smashed in my face.

So I've been processing all that, and weathering variably-powered attacks of "what am I doing", "am I doing it wrong", and "lo, they shall find my abandoned corpse chewed by wild dogs", which I guess means I am finally taking the training wheels off the bicycle of my emotional maturity. Steve and I discussed the state of our non-liquid assets, and he is encouraging me to go ahead and get an apartment without waiting for the house to sell, so I am shifting into Serious Cat Is Serious About Apartment Listings mode (instead of just casually dorking around on Craigslist, making fun of the shyster listings--hey kids, did you know that Fifth Ave. just north of Washington Square is part of SoHo?).

[Poll #1324721]

So that's what's going on here. I'm still feeling a bit drained and of limited verbiage, but I wuv you all, every one.

...in a minor fashion. I have just received my Official Letter of Admittance from Hunter, saying I've been accepted as a non-degree undergrad student. (This because I'm going to take a language, either French or Italian, this semester; both because I need language, and also to see how well I cope with coursework + normal life. If I perform well in a testing environment, I'll apply to the Grad Center for the fall.) (Note to spride: it doesn't mention MyChoice at all. ^_^)

Mind you, this is some several weeks after I was poking around on the CUNY Portal, testing out new forms of their breakage, and noticed that I'd suddenly had a student affiliation tacked onto my Portal account; so I already knew I was in like Flynn. This sums up operations in these parts, really.

I may be exhausted, frantic, lacking focus, and with a brain of tapioca, but my hair looks awesome.