My big pet-peeve right now? ING Direct only allows a person to have one checking account, even if one is joint and the other individual.
I can have a million and one savings accounts with them, but only one checking account. Aside from the line-of-credit aspect to their overdraft, it’s unclear to me why that is.
I’m looking to open a set of individual bank accounts (checking and savings) by the end of the year, and am conflicted. Keep reading >>
I’m now fully in the flaky phase of the tattoo process, and am losing large black/grey flakes at a pleasantly quick rate.
It’s really, really hard not to encourage the process, though, especially when (squick alert!) attached flakes are catching on my shirt at work.
Grody!
Sleeping has been rough since Saturday. When it was all raw and fresh, it just (ha!) hurt badly. Once it dried out, it hurt to do anything that stretched the skin, like lie on my stomach. Or lie on my side. Or relax my shoulder.
The winning solution for sleep so far is to use a small pillow under the front of my tattoo’d shoulder so I can sorta sleep on my stomach and keep the shoulder propped up. It’s not unlike my sleep solution for when I first hurt my shoulder, except that was on my back.
An even better solution (thanks, Angi!) was to switch from using lotion to using vitamin E oil. So soothing. Difficult to avoid overuse, though.
I’ve been conflicted between wanting all this to be over with–to just have a damn tattoo already–and enjoying the strangeness of what’s happening. Now that the pain’s mostly abated, I’m feeling more in-the-moment.
Anyway, in the midst of all of this, I’ve finally caught up on some innernet reading:
Keep reading >>
With my contract at Big Corp coming to a natural close (they’re shutting down the site completely), I hopped back into the job market back in mid-February and landed myself a sweet position at Mid-Corp.
I start on Monday!
There are a lot of things I’ll miss about working downtown: it’s a thriving area, full of people and energy. I also liked taking the bus, despite the occasional shenanigans. Needing a tank of gas once a month or so ain’t bad, either.
Upon reading “The Biggest Stock Scams of All Time” (an ambitious title, perhaps), I decided to update my non-existent knowledge of these scams and failures—including the 2008 business failures.
Holy crap.
I know, I’m so late to the party. I get the housing market failure. As Elf says, it’s not rocket science.
But when Enron occurred (2001), I was a junior in high school, immersed in the IB program, and only cared about grades and college, not about the business/financial world. Reading up on Enron and WorldCom/MCI (who blatantly put expenses on the books as income) was only the start. (MCI was taken down by a little team of auditors working in secret at night who uncovered the $3.8 billion USD in fraud. Seriously.)
Then came Arthur Andersen, the auditing company that participated in the fraud of Enron. They exist online now as a single-page presence, created in Visual Studio 6.0 with no tracking code. They don’t even care who visits. Or about lower-casing their HTML tags.
According to Wikipedia:
From a high of 28,000 employees in the US and 85,000 worldwide, the firm is now down to around 200 based primarily in Chicago. Most of their attention is on handling the lawsuits and presiding over the orderly dissolution of the company.
This is what happens when Greg asks, “What’s the Harlem Shake?”
I just about feel off the couch. Especially when I realized at about 2:40 that that’s a DVD in his belt, not a buckle.
Greg may never ask me another dancing-related question ever again.
A few other nuggets:
And one more awesome (no, really) video: Splinter Cell: Lightbulb Assassin:
Keep reading >>
One (of a thousand) things I’ve let slide in the last year of struggles is one of my most favoritest: dance.
I haven’t been to belly dance class since at least last summer, haven’t learned any new moves or choreographies, and have barely practiced on my own.
I told myself that “when everything was more under control”, that I’d go back.
Well, that “everything” got under some sort of “control”, but then recovering from that was exhausting, and then healing stuff that’s been askew in my life forever is too all over the place.
The thing is I know not to wait for life to get to back to “normal” before living it. I’m already living it, however it comes. Live it like I want it to be.
So when a buddy said, “Hey, let’s try this West African dance class,” I said, “Sure!”
My passport has arrived. My Amazon cruise fell through due to concerns of sketchiness. Where was I going to go for my first trip out of the country?
My colleague has picked a marathon… in Iceland. I need no such excuse–I’m just going to Iceland because it’s Iceland.
End of August, five nights, right before DragonCon. Lagoon and coastal tours are already planned, and restaurants are being picked.
I can’t even read the street names on the maps of Reykjavik. This is going to be awesome!
(This is fourth in a series of posts about Atlanta Poly Weekend 2013.)
Now for a downside of my APW 2013 experience: ableism.
I didn’t perceive very much physical ableism except for an awkward-as-hell “lame” reference in the closing ceremonies. I don’t think anyone even laughed. Then again, I know I’m also less sensitive to physical ableism than mental, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more.
For the mental ableism… it was everywhere. Therapists there used the word “crazy” and people talked about their “crazy, bipolar” exes. One person even said their ex was so crazy “they shouldn’t have been allowed to date.”
(This is third in a series of posts about Atlanta Poly Weekend 2013.)
I was utterly delighted at how many panels and discussions touched on questions of identity and codependence. I mean “identity” here as a self-discovery and self-listening process, rather than the external application of labels.
I’m early yet in my own exploration of codependence and the unhealthy behaviors I’ve harbored for many years. One of the things I’m focusing on is (re)discovering my own life patterns and identity. It’s a large component in why I moved into my own apartment.
When I saw a 5-7 adult family (with kids!) at APW, my first thought was, “Holy fuck, how do they stay themselves?”
(This is second in a series of posts about Atlanta Poly Weekend 2013.)
Puck: Hi, I’m Puck.
Me: I’m Melissa.
Puck: What’s your preferred pronoun?
Me: Um? “She.”
Puck: Mine’s “they.”
I’ve never been asked my preferred pronoun before.
Jackie wished she could have gone. She’s poly, too: she loves everybody.
APW–or “Ay Pee Dub”, as the kids say1–is Atlanta Poly Weekend (SFW), and I went to it for $50 and half a hotel room.
Holy. Shit.
I’m going to a conference this weekend, so I’ve been preplanning all my time slots (double- and triple-booked, of course, as I do). My last conference was DragonCon, and it used a DragonCon-branded mobile app that was built using Core-Apps’ EventLink and FollowMe platforms. It really struggled to keep up with the heft of DragonCon–every load of or task-switch to the app checked the servers for event info and friends’ statuses, I don’t think Twitter postings worked, and the app crashed pretty frequently on my iPhone 4, particularly when network conditions were bad.
I really, really hope DragonCon switches to Guidebook this year.
The conference this weekend is much smaller than DragonCon, but Guidebook is already a much smoother experience just for preplanning. The UI is clean and unbranded by the con itself, I can have multiple cons (or museums, or schools, or associations) in my guidebook without having to have separate apps for each. It’s quick and easy to see my personal schedule, and the app is fast and feels lightweight.
I want to see more apps this cleanly designed.
Irrsinn.net by Melissa Avery-Weir is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. The fiction segment of this site is driven by Elf Sternberg's Narrator system.
