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!

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 >>

SkiFree was such an integral part of my childhood gaming experience that I couldn’t resist an offer to go skiing for a weekend at Sugar Mountain in Boone, NC. Greg, Deana, Meg, and I stayed in sleepy Blowing Rock (awesome food!) in a cozy little inn/motel.

Unfortunately, I was sick. Quite sick. Snotting and coughing and sneezing. All the classics.

When we arrived at Sugar Mountain on Saturday morning, I was feeling distinctly unathletic. A cold plus asthma generally makes for chill time. Deana was like, “No, no. Skiing isn’t really athletic. You’ll be fine.”

Okay, then!

As I watched people stomp around on their skis, I also got increasingly worried for my shoulder. My pain had generally been at a workable, low level for the month before, but all that poking and pushing with the ski-sticks (technical term!) could present a shoulder endurance problem. By the time we were filling out forms, I’d talked myself out of skiing, but was totally up for tubing.

The ladies (and Greg, although he backed off), made such a fuss about me not participating that I caved and shelled out the moola for skiing. I got fitted for all the shoes and such–the skis were much shorter than I expected–and we hobbled outside.

Greg and I? Never skied before.

Greg? Decided that instead of worrying about lessons, we’d try experimentation first.

By the time experimentation was over, I was sitting over on the deck crying and Greg was limping with a bad knee. We never left the bunny slope.

That was January 21, and my shoulder really hasn’t stopped hurting again since then.

So what happened? Keep reading >>

I spent a fair amount of last week (and all of this weekend) sick, so I spent very little time on the wibbles aside from work. Found a few fun tidbits, though:

• 40 Beautiful Photos of India – See, now I totally want to tour India. All of it.
• How to make doctors miserable people (now with data!) – Read the linked articles as well, especially “Doctors as Martyrs“. Any time I read about the stress chamber that is medical residency, I think of 1) Scrubs (sowwy!), and 2) a high school friend of mine who’s a resident now. Oy, vey.
• Senator James Eastland: The Mike Wallace Interview – From prometheus 6. A surprisingly pushy interviewer, but Eastland (1957) goes so far as to toss out accusations of “communist propaganda”. o_O

Keep reading >>

This week’s internet cruising:

• Big Rocks First: Double Your Productivity This Week – This is an old, old Zen Habits post (and one I read a long time ago), but I’m finding it necessary to think beyond the day-to-day MITs lately to get bigger things done. …Like, you know, the upcoming wedding posts and pictures.
• Reader Story: How I Built My Own House — Without a Mortgage – Sustainability, small and frugal living, and willingness to be nontraditional. I'm still not interested in truly going off the grid, but his solar energy and house design ideas are interesting, and earth sheltered houses are adorable, although me being me, I’d worry about ground-loving bugs. I'm not sure if solar power is as helpful in North Carolina as out in Arizona (if I judged the landscape correctly).
• Should you fly or drive on your summer vacation? – Greg and I have been thinking about planning for future vacations (my family was never a vacationing family). This article hits on some good considerations in flying vs. driving, although it doesn't really address a flyer's resistance to participating the sham of airport "security" as a major deterrent to flying.
• School bans graduation "Bohemian Rhapsody" because Freddy Mercury was gay, but gives in after uproar – Seriously? "Wasilla High School officials said parents had complained that it was inappropriate for the school's symphonic jazz choir to perform 1975 smash "Bohemian Rhapsody" because Freddy Mercury, singer of the bombastic operatic rock act, was gay."
• Jellyvampire :: Bloom Like an Artist – This is very cute and well done. Love the art style.