Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

This is our first holiday season in our house and new neighborhood. Yes, it’s still new, because I was totally not expecting the near-life-size Nativity scene to pop up across the street on our neighbor’s lawn!

Instead of the molded plastic light-up Nativity, this one is made up of white wood cut-out silhouettes that are lit up with flood lights at night. There was no skimping with this scene, either. It has everything but the Bethlehem kitchen sink. I should take a picture and post it… it’s daylight now, so I’ll try to get a snapshot of it tonight.

I am of the camp who really doesn’t care if you say "Happy Holidays" or "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Hannukah" to me, and am equally perplexed by huge lawn Nativity scenes as I am the huge light-up candy cane archways such as the one also across the street.  The silhouettes appeared the day after Thanksgiving while my sister was still in town. I said something about the scene even including camels, and she made me proud to be her sister by saying "You know, Christmastime is the only time when it’s normal to have camels in your front yard." 

It’s true! And now I’m seriously considering getting some camels for our front yard. Forget the rest of the scene. I just want the camels. How fun would that be? 

Wired is asking for submissions to determine the top 10 sexiest geeks of the year:

http://blog.wired.com/biotech/2006/11/2006_sexiest_ge.html 

"Helsinki Complaints Choir." What a great name for a song, video, book, almost anything. This is a lovely music video to watch as winter sets in that you may watch more than once. I know that I have! Link snitched from Neil Gaiman’s blog. Enjoy!

The new Toyfare magazine (#113) came in the mail today. I started to browse through it after dinner while I was eating a cookie and drinking some soy milk. Ben looked over my shoulder when I called "Transformers!" and scoffed at Hasbro’s "A Blast from the Past" ad for a redesigned Megatron. "That’s not Megatron," he said, and walked away.

I ho-hummed a lot of the Incoming! annoucements, but perked up at the news of a new series coming out next summer from DC Direct: Fables! I love that series, so of course I put down my cookie and starting gushing about the new toys to Ben, who was by now sitting at his computer absorbing remnants of the 2006 baseball season. He (predictably) rolled his eyes, called me a geek and said that we didn’t need more toys, but that didn’t stop me from squealing and gushing, nor from giggling about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the next page.

Then I called "Transformers!" again and quoted from page 53, "New Transformers Classics run rampant over Kentucky at BotCon 2006!"

"New Transformers Classics?," he hissed. "They all suck."

I brought him the magazine and he did his whole spiel of "they’ll never be as good as they used to be, these aren’t real Transformers, etc." peppered with a little "Why didn’t I know there was a BotCon in Lexington when we lived in Cincinnati?" I said that I would be happy to take the magazine back, and he said "In a minute." He turned the page and giggled a little "cool!" to himself and kept reading.

Then he turned to page 58 and I watched my husband (a self-proclaimed Not-a-Toy-Collector, except for model railroads which don’t count) turn into a nine-year-old boy. 

"SOUNDWAVE! The ORIGINAL! They’re re-releasing it just like they re-released some of them a few years ago!"

(I bought him the G1 reissues of Jazz and Optimus Prime to his pure, unabated delight) 

He proceeded to read me the blurb about the reissue as well as the captions… "And then Soundwave says ‘My crotch says ‘STOP’ but my heart says GO’ and Ravage, the cassette, says ‘…what does an MP3 look like?’ Tee hee! This is a GOTTA have. I have to have this! I can’t live without it! SOUNDWAVE!" 

I smiled as he geeked out and reverted to little boy excitement. "When does it come out?" I asked, taking the last bite of my cookie and a swig of milk.

"Let’s see… Spring 2007." Wait for it. "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

I knew it wouldn’t be out yet, and I knew he wouldn’t like having to wait. Yet I sat there with my mouth on my glass and inhaled with laughter at his reaction… then spit, as in near-vomit spit, all over the table and across it, all over Ben’s jacket that was hanging on the opposite chair.

I started choking and crying and when Ben came over and asked if I was okay, I nearly peed myself. I haven’t laughed that hard… ever, actually! It was a mix of pain and trying to gasp for breath with some milk still in my mouth and that cookie, that precious cookie that I did not want to lose.

I ran to the bathroom to let loose the flood of urine that threatened my dignity, laughing and crying all the way. It took me about 10 minutes to recover, and my chest still hurts. None of it came out of my nose, but wow.

Thank you, Transformers, for making my night.

You can find it here: http://suicidegirls.com/news/geek/19048/

As Thanksgiving approaches, I am thankful for Wil Wheaton.

My life would be much different if I had learned about D&D in high school or before, but right now I feel like Wil did many moons ago with no one around to play D&D (except my husband, but I feel like we need at least one more person). There are lots of people playing Warhammer, but I just want to play a good, old-fashioned game of D&D.

NO. I need to be writing for NaNoWriMo right now. 

Here’s a lovely distraction for lovers of D&D: Order of the Stick  

http://www.bnlmusic.com/splash.asp

This mish-mash of music videos submitted by BNL fans turns into an amateurly delicious collage to the tune of "Wind it Up."

Featuring naked ladies (censored, mostly), lots of air guitar and my friend Noah Ginex’s puppets! 

The novel isn’t coming along so much right now. I went to bed early last night and feel somewhat refreshed, aside from the fact that I somehow pulled a muscle in lower back and it still hurts. Also, I broke my alarm clock this morning.

Ben was already gone this morning when I hit the snooze button for the third time and the whole button caved in without making the noise stop. I had to flip the button to off and actually drag my ass out of bed so I wouldn’t fall asleep again. Did I just say that I was feeling refreshed today? Well, I mean that in comparison to yesterday, which was also better than how I felt on Tuesday.

Anyway, Ben wasn’t upset about my alarm clock being broken because, in his words, I can finally replace my "1984 standard."  Yeah, it’s like the ones you get at Wal-Mart for five bucks and has the most annoying sound in the world.

Maybe I’ll hunt eBay for a flip-time clock like my parents had when I was growing up. You know the type? Before the digital age, they looked somewhat digital. About as digital as fast food joints’ signs that they change infrequently outside of their stores, even though they say "ish san  ich is her !" 

Right, so that novel I’m working on. I’m taking it on a flash drive to work just in case, though I doubt I’ll get the chance to write much there. Tonight, however… I’m going to make the mad typing fiend come out again.

I’ve been hunched over at one of my two desks–home and work–for seemingly forever. Sure, it’s easy to sit up straight for a little while, but once you’ve misbehaved and your neck and shoulders start to ache, it can only go downhill until you rest more, exercise and stretch more. 

Great, it’s only Tuesday. I doubt this whole neckache thing is going to get better before Friday with all the time I have to put in at the computer. Grrr.

When I was a teenager sitting in front of my parents’ awesome Mac Quadra, I never imagined that I would complain about getting too much computer time. Of course back then, it was Crystal Quest or bust.  God, I miss that game.

Great, I just did a search to find that link for Crystal Quest and discovered that you can download it for the Xbox 360 (informational link). We have only the first Xbox.

The Mac Quadra is actually sitting in my basement and is still functional as far I know… but I can’t seem to find the keyboard, mouse, or power cables. There is a floppy disk somewhere with Crystal Quest on it, too. 

Not that I should be doing anything right now but writing a novel, relaxing my tense muscles and practicing my fanfare trumpet and wooden recorder for a Medieval music demo at a local school tomorrow evening (my fellow SCAdians will also be playing).

Heh, feeling a little more geeky after writing this post. 

I’m way behind, but I think my story is strong. 2,412 words. 

47588 to go.

The truth is that I am overwhelmed by the number of things in which I have fallen behind, ranging from projects at work to trying to get settled into my house to keeping up with everything I want to be (or think I should be) online and with my website.

I am also torn with not wanting to be too personal on this blog or my website, and yet feeling that I am being dishonest to my readers (assuming that there are still any of you out there) by censoring the raw me writer inside who is too afraid of being exposed and vulnerable to the outside world.

I have a voice that I want to get out there. And at the same time I want to selfishly keep it to myself. There’s also a fair amount of "will people like me?" that any writer, no matter how much of an egoistical narcissist they are, cannot avoid feeling.

Does it really matter if you like me?  No, probably not in the scheme of things. Going public with a blog is like standing up for karaoke or running in an election. I’ve done both a couple times and failed. It sucked. I also submitted an essay about my journey and self-realization of what it means to be geek to potentially be published in a book. I cut the deadline too close, probably. I was rejected. Was it because of the narrowly missed deadline (two hours, we’re talking) or because my writing and/or story wasn’t good enough? Was it not what they were looking for? I don’t know.

That book, called "She’s Such a Geek" is out now. I don’t have a copy yet. I’m not sure I want to read it yet. I would like to appreciate the stories in the collection and not be overly judgmental or critical for the petty reason that my essay wasn’t selected. I think I have to get over myself and maybe learn something from the whole experience.

I am also already behind in my fourth time trying to write 50,000 words in thirty days. November is National Novel Writing Month: nanowrimo.org. My buddy Brianna, whom I had to coerce to try again, even though she made it past 50,000 words last year, is about 9,000 words into it. My other buddy, Erica, is about that far along as well. I have a story line and notes, with very little actually written. I have the house to myself tonight while my husband is out playing poker. I’ve already spent most of the night playing Simpsons Road Rage on the Xbox and giving the cats treats and attention and just dilly-dallying in general.

Yeah, this is True Confessions.  It’s time to come clean. I haven’t updated Geek of the Week in a while and haven’t been staying up with the forum on my very own website. I haven’t really even been responding to email or sending good wishes and gifts to my friends in Cincinnati who recently got married.

 
Here’s the stuff that I’ve been procrastinating with:

www.LibraryThing.org – I’m vetters if you want to look me up and see the hundreds of books I’ve cataloged and tagged. I love that fucking site. It’s been a very satisfying distraction for me.

Reading – probably directly related to cataloging my books. I’ve read a ton of the short children’s books that I recently cataloged. Here are some others:

The Wakefields of Sweet Valley Oh, yeah, believe it! It’s in my collection. Never a huge fan of Sweet Valley High books, but I always wanted to have a twin and I loved historical fiction from an early age.

Mendel’s Daughter Much different that Maus, but very good. I’m fascinated by my Jewish Heritage. It’s removed by a generation, and I didn’t ask enough questions of my grandfather before he died.

The Scent of God A memoir of a Catholic nun who fell in love with a priest. I’m fascinated by my recent knowledge that both of my grandmothers considered becoming nuns. Obviously, I wouldn’t be here today if that had worked out for them. Today is my maternal grandmother’s birthdays. She passed away last June. Saturday was my paternal grandfather’s birthday. He would have turned 100 years old if he were still alive.

And that leads into the other thing keeping me busy – family and genealogy.  My dad revealed a dozen or so photo albums I had not seen before from his mother (yes, if you’re counting, all of my grandparents have passed away).  I have more than my share of heritage photos and documents that I volunteered to scan and catalog for my mother’s family and I’m very far behind. Now all of these new heritage photographs from my dad (which are thankfully better labeled) go directly to my "to do" pile. Not to mention the research I’ve been half-heartedly trying to do for the novel that I’m supposed to be writing right now. I want to include some specifics of doing genealogical research in it.

So naturally, when I tire of playing Road Rage and I come upstairs specifically to start writing that novel I promised myself (and Brianna) that I would really write this year, here I am writing a long-ass blog entry. I’m going to post it now and get to the novel. It’s 10pm and I have a full day of needing-to-concentrate at work tomorrow… I guess I’ll just see how long I last this evening.

Thanks to anyone who made it all the way through this post. I’m sorry it’s so long. As always, I will express my intention to write in this blog more frequently so that my posts are shorter. For the most part, anyway. 

That was 943 words. I guess it’s not so hard after all….