A running log, but not of the physical sort.

Three states, one day (Nov. 18, 2004, 15:45)

Indiana:

Lissa: No, I didn’t get a lot of sleep, either. My dumb ass went out to get food.
Kitty Cat: With a boy? How long does it take to get food?
Lissa: Apparently about three hours. I very much should have known better.
Kitty Cat: How late did you get back from hanging out with “the boy”?
Lissa: About–wait a minute. What? Boys.
Kitty Cat: Damn [disappointed at the lack of gossip]. You a pimp?
Lissa: Ha. Only of the intellectual sort.
Kitty Cat: Ah. Well, go Lissa!
Lissa: Um, yeah.

I don’t think she quite got my reference… I should have freaked her the hell out with an “a href” tag in my speech. She would have put me out of that car so fast…

Ohio:

Kitty Cat: … I was telling Jeff that if I put on country music, you’d slaughter us while the car was still moving.
Lissa: Well, actually, I went to a concert not three weeks ago…
Kitty Cat: ?!?

Trump card, biatch. That’s right up there with, “But my best friend is [insert race]…” in complete lack of meaning… (Not that I don’t like country music, but, you know…)

Kentucky:

(As I’m getting out of the car…)
Kitty Cat: If I get lost, I’ll just call my dad. “Um, Dad? I’m lost.” “Where are you?” “Um, Cincinatti.”

Mapquest did very much fuck up the distances, particularly as we got nearer to Cincinatti. Three tenths of a mile (per the sheet) is not equal to six miles. They need to work on that shit.

The beautiful people, the beautiful people… (Nov. 19, 00:30)

One of the things I lovingly hate about the people around my age in my family is that they’re all so damned beautiful. If you look at a lot of my cousins from a few years younger than me to about 10 years older, you’ll see these nice, beautiful, smart, hard-working people that make me feel even more awkward and ugly than I do generally. Ugh.

But honestly, I can’t hate, because they’re just so cool…

If not one, then the other (Nov 19, 12:00)

One minute I look just like my mother, the next I’m just like my father. Awesome. How ’bout I be just like me?

And they’re already planning for when the family moves up here, as though I’ll be spending significantly more amounts of time in the area now… That possible trip to L.A. during Spring Break is looking even more attractive than it did before…

My aunt talks… a lot. Around 22:00 last night she was talking about everyone heading off to bed, and the next thing I know it’s after midnight and I’m hunting through family documents and birth records trying to nail down discrepancies and reasons for them. The problem with having a huge family of people as secretive as you are is that when someone wants shit to be hidden or mistold, it is very well hidden and mistold.

At least now I know where I get it from.

How now, brown cow. (Nov 20, 19:00)

I feel like all I do is eat. Aunt Peaches is stuffing me with food at least three times a day and giving me sugar (Heath bars and/or Raisinets are so the way to this girl’s heart–right up there with chocolate and peanut butter). I don’t know if I’m trying to gain back weight–I recently had a complaint about ribbage–or if I’m just being a guttonous bum because it’s not campus food and I’m not eating in public (which I strongly dislike to do). I do feel somewhat better in that I’m paying for the bulk of the food, because the last thing I want to hear from the Old Lady is how I ate Aunt Peaches out of house and home in the week I visited…

Hint o’ geekiness. (Nov. 21, 18:00)

So I’m making time for coding on the research project–don’t tell Dr. M!–and am finding myself doing all sorts of very manual things to get the latest version of Eclipse up and running in Windows. All I installed was the base binary and an extension for FTP, and I thought that was all I’d installed before. But here I am having just spent an hour manually setting up Eclipse to be able to build and execute my project when I know good and damn well all this was automated when I last installed this crap in Linux. Grr.

(And plus, the longer I hide up here hacking away, the less my auntie can talk at me. She talks over the television, over music, over other people, over my thinking… Whoo.)

Library day! (Nov. 22, 22:50)

Yay for libraries with Internet access upon the usurpation and use of my auntie’s library card. Boo on proxy servers that prohibit the forwarding required to access Banner to get my damn grades.

But major yay for e-mail access which allowed me to send a frustrated rant to my usual sounding board. I feel better.

They’re he-e-ere… (Nov. 25, 10:47)

Saw the parents for a few hours yesterday. Their lease on their new apartment has already been approved.

I also got my grades, but I haven’t been able to check my e-mail (damned Exchange app and damned PDA IE), so I shan’t speak of them until a potential bet/wager has been handled…

I think I’m going to drive everyone nuts for the first week I’m back, because my speech-pattern sponge-like abilities mean that I’m talking more and more like my auntie, which annoys the shit out of even me.

Still whittling away, ever so slowly, at schoolwork for next term and my NaNoWriMo story. This is the worst piece of shit I’ve ever read, but damn if it’s not fun to write…

Am I going to hit 50k words in the next five or six days? Hell, no. But if I can hit 25k, I’ll be proud of myself. And it does get easier with practice, so maybe I’ll do better next year.

More writing (Nov. 25, 14:36)

I wish my extended essay in high school had come this quickly–over three thousand words in four hours.

Too. Much. (Nov. 25, 21:28)

I haven’t had a Thanksgiving dinner like this since… hell, probably since the last time we did one here at Aunt Peaches’s. I chilled with Cousin V–it is so easy to talk to this woman, it’s unbelievable–ribbed on some of the other cousins who hopped from house to house eating entire meals each time they stopped (greedy pigs), and helped my auntie’s kitty cat hide from the Rat. Poor cat stayed under the bed the entire time the Rat was there. It’s okay, though, because I run from her, too.

I’m going to be chomping on left-over Thanksgiving food until I leave, most likely. Yummy.

My parents are heading back to Charlotte tomorrow. My mother is fairly convinced that I have a tattoo, that I’ve had sex, that I’m an alcoholic, and that I’m going to be telling her soon that I’m pregnant. Although the sex thing sort of precludes the pregnancy thing in most cases…

She was about to pull my shirt up in the middle of my auntie’s house to see if I’d acquired a tattoo on my boobie.

She also left her ankle-length wool coat with me. I don’t know what I’m going to do with this coat; Mother-dear suggests I just wear it casually, but it’s not cut like a modern wool coat–the sleeves are pleated at the shoulders, and it flares at the hip, which gives it an old-school classy look that just doesn’t quite match my usual attire. It’s also a little big for me (noticable particularly in the sleeves), because my mother is taller than I am. So I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but it’s an interesting thing to have, because my mother wore it when she was my age or not much older. It’ll probably get passed on to any female offspring the Rat has (lol), or to my already existing nieces, should we be close when they get older.

Uh-oh. Now I’m in trouble. (Nov. 26, 12:09)

My cousin G (son of auntie Peaches) had come over to get something to eat before heading to work, and he’d been acting goofy since he’d gotten here. I was just trying to watch the train wreck that was Star Trek: Nemesis (how are they going to kill off Data?!), and he’s goofin’ around, talking about how Vin Diesel sounds like he’s been eating glass (“Hey. I ain’t had nothing to eat all day. Hand me that lightbulb.”). So he’d eaten and started getting sleepy, and I’d waited until he’d gotten settled to remind him that he needed to get his ass up and go to work, which he didn’t appreciate. His response?

G: Oh, oh, I got you. See, I’ll get you. Just wait. The next time we have a family reunion–all those black people around–I’mma tell ’em you voted for Bush.
Lissa: What?! [I’m laughing too hard to really protest.]
G: Uh-huh. Let’s see you try to explain the good things about Bush and stay objective around a bunch of poor black people while they look for that noose to put around your neck…

So… looks like I’m going to be skipping the next few family reunions, since they’d more than likely believe him…

Ah, well. Back to NaNoWriMo. I got in about 6 hours yesterday, and I’ve got a few more to get in before my auntie gets off from work today, hopefully. If I can just get this sex scene written, the plot can progress… (*smirk*)

Word count (Nov. 26, 14:43)

Just under 8k words in a total of probably about nine to ten hours. Not so efficient, but ridiculously addictive.

Making a list, and checking it twice… (Nov. 26, 17:07)

Now who’s been naughty? (Cuz they’re the ones getting gifts…) Christmas shopping time, and hell if I know what to get anyone. But cousin V and I are going to a tree-lighting in downtown Cincinnati, then we may hit a mall. To shop, not rob, of course. But I very much need to start shopping. There’s folks at home in Charlotte and folks in Terre Haute and family, since they’ll be living all close now (grr). Too much, and I have no idea what anyone wants…

Back in the Haute! (Nov. 28, 11:48)

I output 18k words in four days of work (addictive, addictive; I think I’m going to keep working on the story past the end of the month). I read through two of my books for my Contemporary Latin America class (really just a review of the history I had in high school). I read some of the Operating Systems book. I ate. I slept. I watched television. Break was good. I am back.