Hallo! I am still alive. I know sometimes, that may be in question, LOL.

Have just returned from a week with my parents which did several things for me: distracted me from Mr B's driving off into the Memphis sunset, allowed me to reconnect with some high school friends that I love dearly and miss terribly, let me do a little bit of job networking, and made me wonder how it is that I am even in any way able to form healthy relationships of any kind because my parents, dear god, my parents. What a hotbed of toxicity that house is. How I grew up remotely normal, I will never know. Mom may not be drinking, but she's still raging. Dad's a pothead. Sister is ... well, she just is. Spoiled and self centered. Whatever. There are reasons I moved 350 miles away and those reasons haven't changed.

Meanwhile Mr. B is settled in to the new Memphis properties and is beginning the arduous task of sorting out the mess the bank made in the last year that they have owned the buildings. Plus our financial partner knows a lot about making money but not so much about operations, so there are some just generally dumb things in place that will be quick wins as soon as he gets them righted. I'll go down and join him probably sometime in September, as soon as he gets the security sorted out - right now it's not really a haven of good citizenry, if you know what I mean.

And I was not sure if I was going to say anything about this part or not, but I guess I sort of have to - with the financials now being as tight as they are, I've canceled my trip to Vividcon. I twisted and poked and prodded the books and the money just isn't there. Not only the outlay for the trip, which was totalling around $800, but I also don't have child care for the week now. IT SUCKS. Also I need to save my vacation to get down to Tennessee every other month at least for a while. Short term sacrifice, long term gain, just keep saying it over and over. I will still get to see the DVDs, although not getting to see my vidder posse is really a huge bumer. :(

I don't wanna go back to work tomorrow, for sure. Not AT ALL.

Maded Shepherd does some of the most beautiful fantasy avatar photography in Second Life, as well as expressive and tasteful nudes. This is part of his current LOTR inspired series, recently posted to Flickr, uses his extraordinary photographic and post-processing skills to construct stunning works of digital art. What are you doing with your Second Life?

Spending a little more time in SL lately than I have for the past few weeks; work has settled down to a normal level activity for a beehive instead of a beehive on crystal meth like it was since early May. Have met a handful new people including a delightful Portuguese jazz musician, a charming and funny California housewife, and the inimitable gweneiriol :D I've been hanging out at a help site for new players during slow moments of boredom and I find that it brings a little extra fun to the day. I also found a Jurassic Park sim and I'm in the middle of a scavenger hunt for dinosaur eggs. I dunno what the prize is at the end, but I feel a sense of well being every time I find an egg or a half-hatched baby dinosaur, gather it up into my scavenger hud, and it thanks me profusely for finding it because it feels safer now. (Awwwwwwwwww) But if you go to Dinosaur Park and do some hunting, watch out for the Velociraptor. He's a horndog. O.O

In other news, the sun finally came out IRL after weeks and weeks of rain. Oh and Mr. Baru has taken his first trip to Memphis, that major decision is looming large in our worldview, so he's started to hang out with me in Second Life sometimes (when I can pry him out of Mafia Wars on Facebook :P ). We've been dancing and exploring and freebie hunting, and he did a modeling gig for MrZoe which was a lot of fun. Already I made him go shopping for dinosaurs with me. The things men do for love.

W. T. F.

Suppose you invite a Jewish family to your dinner. They will be seriously offended if you don’t offer them kosher food but insist that sliced ham is perfectly reasonable and healthy to eat; it’s just their prejudice and superstition that makes them believe that pork is “impure” or “unhealthy”. In fact, in Palestine 1000 BC, conserving pork meat was hard, and it spoilt too quickly, compared to other types of meat; so it was perfectly reasonable to create a superstitious rule that told them not to eat pork “because God doesn’t want it”. In fact, it was pretty sound advice — for 1000 BC. In the 21st century, of course, we have refrigerators and vets monitoring the health of pig farms, and sterilised procedures to deal with ham manufacture. Thus, a 3000-year-old superstition (which originally was founded on a real problem!) doesn’t make any sense today, does it?

Well, no. But it’s still not polite to offend other people who believe in silly superstitions. Etiquette, or the notion that to live better in a more friendly society we ought to adopt a polite form of addressing others, and tolerating their quirks and superstitions, tell us that we would be very, very rude if we offered non-kosher food to a Jew. So we don’t. We know it’s silly. Even most of them will know it’s silly, too. But none of us violate the social norms that rule our society.

I can't even. I mean WHAT?

I've been mainlining Inland Territory, Vienna Teng's newest album, for days. She's coming to NYC on Friday and I'm wishing I'd thought in advance enough to get tickets. Her shows are always intimate, warm, thoughtful, her voice is rich and beautiful. Anyway I was looking up something else and stumbled over a free mp3 download of a live version of one of my current faves from the album: Kansas. Give a listen.

ETA: And look, look, a whole bunch more!

Sun sets in an ocean of brown farmland haze
Power lines draped across roads you could drive on for days
Well it's all too perfect
Time to look back at us now
Endless and empty like Kansas
Our cities of clouds
Flat on the table like Kansas

I lay down in sheets suddenly worn threadbare
Every wall I lean on transforms to sliding doors and thin air
Well I hope yours is kinder
Let go of this when you find her
Bury this heart
Down underneath your white canvas
Our houses of cards
Flat on the table like Kansas

It's not regret
Just an unexpected accounting of debts
Only now called
No it's not regret
Just remembrance is all
Of how close we had come
The war almost won
But I sent up our flag and moved on

You and I
Lost to the winter like Kansas
And all my goodbyes
Flat on the table like Kansas

I am home, I am home, returned from the balmy oceanside and tropical breezes (and rum, omfg, I forgot that I used to like rum A LOT). I return to find that some of you are having good days and some of you having not so much of the good times ... and that I am woefully behind, and shall likely never catch up. So if I missed it and I shouldn't have, you'll have to email it to me or else I shall never know of your joys and sorrows.

From this trip, I bring you two reasons why fandom is once again my salvation:

1) I brought the first three Temeraire books with me for a re-reading extravaganza in preparation for book 6, but I underestimated (or should I say, mis-remembered) how engrossed I would become, because by Wednesday I had nothing left to read.

2) By some stroke of good fortune I found that I had the podfic of Resonant's Transfigurations on my iPod, and that got me through the remaining days as well as the long trip home.

Thank goodness for technology, I tell you. I was almost forced to buy some awful Dan Brown novel or something just to keep from going insane having to sit still for 3 hours on a plane.

P.S. I missed you!

Thanks for all the emails and IMs and calls and stuff. It's humbling when you remember that people care about you. <3

Something just kind of snapped in me, probably something I was repressing or denying or medicating myself out of facing. This journal is my space and sometimes I use it to purge but that isn't a pretty sight for a bystander. I know some of you are the same way; thanks for sticking through this roller coaster ride with me.

Anyway, I'm going to the Bahamas tomorrow :D So there will be radio silence for a bit; didn't want anyone to worry. Jose and his family aren't using their time share this week so back in the fall he offered it to us. Of course we took it. An unanticipated and positive outcome of this is that Jose and I have been talking on the phone again a lot the last few weeks - about Idol, about sun block, about all sorts of stuff. We'd stopped talking while I was going through all my crap last winter, and I've missed him, so that's a good thing.

Bahamas, then work like a crazy madwoman until the first of August, then Chicago and Vividcon and friendsssssssssssssssssss yay! It's going to be a good summer. I have hope.

bonibaru: HALP HALP I AM WEBBED IN BY MUTANT SPIDERS

Helix Constantine: Just a second while I take this screen shot and then I will save you. If there's anything left after the SPIDERS ARE DONE.

I love my little cartoon girl.

Walt Whitman, and Second Life.

NOTE: Vienna Teng's new album (Inland Territory) is made of awesome.

Have some musics!

Adam Lambert studio recordings:

Mad World
Black or White
Tracks of My Tears
Ring of Fire

Yay, I have a Dreamwidth code - thanks, benefactor :D

I'z plurkin:

http://plurk.com/bonibaru/invite

Plurk is similar to Twitter, but with threaded conversations. They had me at "threaded".

Why is it always MY lawn?

Rough night last night. Therefore in lieu of actual content, I bring you other people from my friends list saying things about last night's Idol:

Ryan and Simon apparently heard about Jared and Jensen this weekend and decided to step up their game. - barkley

I think Lambert/Kris Allen is the poor man's David/David. In fact, I'd also say this season is the poor man's season 7. -- snackbreak

You could cast a half-way decent remake of Rocky Horror Picture Show with this year's American Idol finalists. Adam as Frank, of course, and Danny as Brad and Alexis as Janet. Allison as Magenta and Megan as Columbia. Any number of the left-over guys could probably muster the wide-eyed naivete to play Rocky (Kris? Jorge?), though I'm not sure I want to see any of them in gold undies. - loligo

I could not stop laughing at Scott's hair. He's progressed from a 70s style up to an 80s. Baby steps! - k2daisy

And -- well, actually this kind of IS still a trainwreck in some ways because NO ONE should sing Play That Funky Music as a performance except in a nightclub, but it is the giant special-effects trainwreck from The Fugitive movie where the second locomotive comes BOOM off the train tracks and races right at you with the headlights blazing and you go "AAAAA, run Harrison Ford, run!" It is a trainwreck of awesome. -- astolat

But Adam. I'm sorry if it's the popular thing, but I lurve him. There's nothing that hooks me more than cleverness. That arrangement KICKED SERIOUS ASS. (Also, Kris. Hi! Hello! You are every teenage niceboy crush I ever had!! Welcome back to my world!) - dierdre_c

Kris's appeal? Rainbows, puppies and kittens. He's floated on stage by little cartoon birds. He and his super-adorable wife have matching aprons. I'm not sure how that would translate to him as a character interacting with other people, but it makes it pretty impossible for me to hate him. - workinprogress

...why does Osbournes Reloaded exist? *weeps softly* - svmadelyn

Right on, mads. I weep with you.

Also please to be taking Clio's poll? Which is like, mandatory after every Idol episode. I log in just to take the poll every week.

Also, I gave in and set my Tivo to record GLEE. Because the promos they are showing on Fox makes me believe that this show could be made of awesome. Also, they are singing Inspiring Journey Songs (tm barkley). Journey's Greatest Hits never gets dusty on my CDshelf, so, there you have it.