In case you didn't believe me when I said I was twee...

Yes, that's right.


There are gnomes on the woodburning stove in my new apartment.

I'm probably more excited about this than I should be.

I'm going to give them all names (or gnames, if you will- thanks, Humpback) and backstories.

Because I'm a dork like that. And I love it.

I couldn't help it

I said I wasn't going to, but then I did.

I was going to be patient and wait for October. But then Tamara got in to Pottermore. And then people kept posting links to the site to register on plurk. And then I couldn't resist clicking on it.

So I registered this morning.

And I have to say, while I am excited about that, the name I picked has been on my mind all day.

Unlike other web communities, this one doesn't give you free reign to pick whatever name you want. It gives you a choice of five, all of which are some kind of reference to the Potterverse, whether it's mythical creatures, or spells, or potions ingredients, or some mix of those sorts of things.

And the one I picked is very twee.

PixieGlow, with some numbers at the end that I don't remember off the top of my head. As an aside, I wonder how many other PixieGlow-numbers are out there as well. Anyway. I'm PixieGlow-something-or-other. I could just go double check the validation email I got, but I won't bother, as it doesn't matter that much. It's the PixieGlow part I've been thinking about. At the time I wasn't sure why I was drawn to it, but I was, as soon as the screen loaded giving me my options. The others were FlightSpell, something to do with Snidgets, and two that had Cat in them, which I seriously considered. But I picked PixieGlow. And then spent the next hour or two wondering if it was a bit too twee for me.

And then I remembered. I'm a girl who does things like register early for Pottermore. I knit tiny sweaters out of candy-colored yarn. I write fantasy short stories, and I have waist-length fairy tale hair. I've dressed up as fairies and can-can dancers and fictional characters for Halloween. I sing and dance around my apartment all the time, and play the ukulele.

I myself am rather inescapably twee.

So PixieGlow it is.

Excitement!

My best friend's little sister (which feels funny to say sometimes, because all three of those sisters are basically my sisters) is getting married in December.

Today she called me and asked me to be her maid of dishonor.

The oldest of them is going to be matron of honor, my best friend will be maid of honor, and I get to be maid of dishonor.

I don't know what that means yet, but it's hilarious that she thought of asking me, and I'm excited either way.

Of possibly idle threats, and the affection concealed within them

I find myself today, once again, at work with nothing to do. It has been so, so very slow lately, and it’s sort of exhausting. It really doesn’t help that I’m running on about two hours of pretty restless, not at all deep sleep, and my coffee from this morning has officially worn off. So both in an attempt to entertain myself, and to keep myself from falling asleep at my desk, regardless of the fact that my boss is out today, I am writing this blog post at work. Which is good, because it makes it look like I’m focusing on work things, what with all the typing and stuff.

But I’m not. At all. Every ten minutes or so, I check to see if anything has turned up to do, but usually nothing has, so I go back to trying to entertain myself. As I’m running on the aforementioned very little sleep, I was having more trouble than usual thinking of something to blog about. So I texted my good friend, asking her to give me something to blog about. She said breakfast cereal. Which didn’t thrill me. To which she responded by accusing me of just not being creative enough, which I knew she was going to do as soon as I said it. Or texted it. Or whatever. I’m sleepy. Anyway, after her extremely rude and harsh accusation, she at least amended her suggestion and told me to write about what happens when you sexualize breakfast cereal mascots. And maybe I’m really just that tired, but I just don’t know what to do with that. I have never considered such a thing. Call me vanilla, but cereal boxes just don’t do it for me.

My friends are weird. I like that, honestly. Even when it’s disarming, or threatening some part of my person. Like last night. My cereal-sexualizer (not serial, but cereal) friend’s boyfriend recently got a drastic haircut. He had fairly long, impressively curly hair, as she illustrated on her own blog here. Now he has very short, just discernibly curly hair, as illustrated here. It’s that short, that you almost can’t tell what his hair is like. So last night I saw him for the first time since he was shorn, and he looks very good. He looked good before, but he looks very good now. And I could tell he was thrilled with not having to deal with it, in the summer heat, no less. He was so thrilled that he offered to immediately shave off my own waist-length hair. Quite seriously. When I refused, because it’s taken me seven years to get it back to this length (Since my senior year of high school. Crazy.), he warned me to never fall asleep at their apartment. I believe him.

While most people might be alarmed by that, deep down I found it charming. Mostly because he was so enthusiastic about how great it would be for both of us to shave my head. Apparently I have a nicely shaped head. I spent a good chunk of time later last night thinking how much I enjoy the fact that my friends are all fascinating individuals. Like last week, when another friend and I had an incredibly snarky text conversation that started with him sending me a picture of his sandwich. To be fair, I did bring it on myself, but still. To an outside viewer, I’m certain it would look like a weird conversation, and I enjoy that. I have a lot of those in my life. And I like it that way. They fit well in my world, and certainly keep things interesting.

Sheepishly slinking back into the room

Let me just start by saying that I’m completely aware that it has (as of today) been two months since I posted. I was aware of that even before my mom called me and subtly pointed it out. I know. Sorry. There’s been some stuff going on. Namely, the Boy Creature is no more. He’s not dead or anything- he still exists. But he’s no longer my Boy Creature, just an untethered one out there in the world now, and I shall go on existing ridiculously on my own, and that’s come with some adjustments that I’ve been busy adjusting to instead of blogging.

So far, I actually kinda like it, this living alone thing.

I’m getting better and better at keeping myself busy, and I’ve seriously been enjoying cooking for myself. It’s nice when all the healthy fruits and vegetables you buy for yourself don’t immediately get eaten. Plus, now I can buy the frozen pizza with the kind of crust I love that he didn’t like.

I have been thinking a lot about all this blogging, while not blogging. I think that’s part of why I waited so long to post again. I thought of so much stuff to blog about that I didn’t know where to start. The booklove that’s gone on in the past two months – that alone will make for quite a post. I might have to break that up into a few posts. There’s been that much of it.

So long story short, I guess, I’m not gone. I haven’t abandoned you. There might even be more and more of this. I certainly hope so.

Booklove: now with arts and crafts

I think all the extra-strange dreams I've had in the last week are because of the book I've been reading. I have strange dreams all the time. Pretty much every time I dream. I've decided it's because there's just a lot going on in my head all the time, because I tend to free associate and skip from one thing to another to another, until I have to backtrack just to figure out how I got to the thought that's currently rattling around in there. But this last week, they've been even weirder than normal.

Last night I finished Patrick Somerville's short story collection, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, and every single story in it was very odd, and very sad. There was so much sadness inherent in every story that it took me longer to read than I expected, just because I couldn't take it all at once. But they were very good. Especially the last one. While a lot of the stories did have some note of hope buried in there somewhere, the last one, entitled The Machine of Understanding Other People, was wonderful. Thank god they put it last, or I'd have been even sadder. And I loved Confused Aliens. It was very Douglas Adams.

Plus, the book cover (inside and out) had this fantastic design that included instructions for making the book into a mobile, with little planets you could cut out and tie on and then hang the whole thing from your ceiling. The best part was that the last step of the instructions said to call the publishers and demand a refund when you're done making a mobile, since these instructions will have thus rendered the book impossible to actually read. It's a good think I was three-quarters of the way through the book before I noticed those instructions. Other than all the sadness, which wasn't really so bad, since it was all written so well, I had no trouble reading it at all. Not that I'm the kind of person that would cut up one of my books, anyway.

Moving on...

I FINALLY FINISHED THE BILL BRYSON!

Spending plenty of time this weekend in airports, waiting to board two planes that were both delayed, meant I zoomed through those last fifty pages. Plus, I had my car worked on, and spent some time in that waiting room, too.

It's been a long week.