So the folks at the law firm where I had the awesome temp gig are asking for me back. I start tomorrow.

Nothing like a burst of good news to chase away the mopes.

Today I took pleasure in finding out that they asked for me specifically.

Today I learned how to obtain a college transcript from Emory University.

Didn't want y'all to worry. I'm still not at my best, but I am (to paraphrase Nick Drake) better than my worst.

Today I took pleasure in tater tots with cheese.

Today I learned that the cheese doesn't need to be shredded for the recipe to work.

Depressed enough that I don't give a shit who knows. Running out of lifelines. Not a good place to be.

Therapy in the AM. We'll see if it takes.

Dear 1and1--

May I suggest that if you are going to automatically blacklist an IP address for accessing a given domain too many times, you should allow a given account to also have an IP whitelist, so when your paying customers take to dusting off old websites and trying to add and test new things on them they don't wind up stymied by an inability to see what the heck they're doing.

If such a feature already exists, perhaps you should mention it to the nice folks at tech support, since the only thing the woman I talked to felt safe assuring me of was the that IP address in question would be 'unblocked' very soon. When I asked what it would take to stop the address from being re-blocked, the only advice she could give me would be not to access my website too many times or fiddle around with FTP at the same time. Neither of these suggestions are very amenable to the way I operate, particularly with my preference for editing pages on the fly in TextWrangler and tweaking as I go. I'd hoped to have my pages updated and presentable by now and will now have to wait until I have been properly 'unblocked' before I can see if and how I screwed up.

Please do not make me regret my departure from Facebook. Thank you in advance for your attention in this matter.

Yours,

Sheila O'Shea

EDIT: I can see my own sites now. An improvement. Still awaiting a proper apology for the inconvenience.

Happy Easter to those what that celebrates it and Happy Sunday to everybody else!

I figured that if I was going to remind people of all the other places on the Internet that I can be found, I should probably make an effort to update those places, so here we are.

Easter Weekend isn't much to write home about (if you're Catholic, you know the drill; if you're not, you wouldn't be interested anyway) but the weekend before that I went down to Seale, Alabama for my third go-round at the Doo-Nanny. I left a day early so I could help my friend Lake get set up but her attempts to keep her 1972 Cadillac hearse running faltered a few times on the way down (plus a couple of blown-out tires for good measure) so that I arrived at two in the afternoon and Lake got there at two in the morning on the back of a tow truck.

I made twelve bucks selling drinks, gave away a handful of my ten thousand flowers and didn't sell a single piece of artwork. I've officially given up on all hope of making art as a day job (I'm going to devote my time to writing dirty books instead) so I didn't worry too much about it. I do think if I go back next year, I'll wait until Friday before I head down there--an extra day of camping only left me wanting to stab people by Saturday, which is not the best state of mind to be when trying to sell artwork at a festival.

I caught Palm Sunday Mass in Columbus, Georgia, where Catholic school students recited the Passion from memory and did a surprisingly good job of it. From there I just drove straight home to nap, shower and decompress before dinner, which was much better for me than trying to stay an extra day in hopes that somebody might wander by and buy something.

Monday I drove nails into the wall above my patio doorway and hung up all of the planets. They can stay there for now. I found that all my Etsy listings for word art had expired on April 1, so I let them lapse and only renewed the listings for the vintage things I still have. Soon after, I got another order from Australia for one of my Duran Duran calendars, which is more money in the bank than I made the whole Doo-Nanny. I can take a hint.

Tomorrow I'll be banging around and updating my LinkedIn profile (grumbling as I do so) so I can keep some professional networking options open and maybe even see if I can poke people into finding me a proper job, now that the economy is starting to stumble towards some kind of recovery. (I may also set up a file-sorting/organizing business as a stopgap while I'm looking for proper work, so if you know anybody with a lot of files who would be willing to pay me to put them back in alphabetical order, well, I'm yer gal.)

Today I took pleasure in Eggs Benedict, of course.

Today I learned that Facebook has some kind of archive option that will allow me to download all the crap I've put up there and store it somewhere secure. (Kudos to whoever pressured them into providing that.)

Hey! Just a quick note to let people know that I bought a rename token and I have gone from cyanidefish to wonderbink. I've done a quick remodel of the layout and such and I'll be bashing around with more changes soon.

I'd write more, but I'm on my way out the door to have brunch with some lovely people. But I'll explain more soon, promise.

Today I took pleasure in drinking Coca-Cola from a glass bottle.

Today I learned that my younger brother's address still needed to be put in my phone. (A matter rectified as of today--I shouldn't be using Amazon as my address book!)

So. I got it in my head that I should really re-read The Lord of the Rings because I've had a one-volume copy that I picked up on swap.com and never actually sat down and read. I keep getting all choked up at odd bits and needing to set the book aside and sniffle a bit.

I am Aragorn son of Arathorn; and if by life or death I can save you, I will.

*meep*

Anyway. One thing that's been slowing my progress is the fact that I keep getting clobbered over the head with all these other ideas for a whole other book that is, funnily enough, a subversion of quite a number of quest tropes though I hope subverted in a way that still retains what it is we gain from them. We'll see if I pull it off.

The working title, which I came up with today, is Fool's Chess. I also dusted off my glass chess set, because I will undoubtedly have need of it. Right now I'm sharing a lot of headspace with a manic pixie dream, erm, being called Zinzidor (among other names) who is something like Tom Bombadil by way of Chuz, Lord of Madness with a side order of Pippi Longstocking. Zin also hops back and forth between genders, making pronouns confusing and pretty much marking the work for doom in school libraries. But perhaps it will be a more enlightened age by the time it sees print. It's going to be a long time writing it, I can already tell you that and I've only just started hashing out notes for the thing.

So, er, that's what I've been up to today. Or, by the time I post this, yesterday. It's been a weird day.

Today I took pleasure in coming up for a tune for a song.

Today I learned that insomnia has not yet left me.

The temp-to-perm gig went back to temp, though I am assured that they thought I was wonderful and would love to have me back. Considering I figured I'd be out of there by the end of January, I can hardly complain that an extra month or so isn't long enough. I should at least get a good reference out of it and if another huge project comes down the pike, they know where to find me. In the meantime, I've updated my resume and already started sending it out again.

( Did I mention that I gave up Facebook for Lent? )

Today I took pleasure in the sound of rain and the sight of the sun.

Today I learned that I'd been signed up with that temp agency for a lot longer than I'd thought.

So 2012 is off to a pretty good start. While I was up at Chattacon, I got an email from a legal staffing agency asking if I'd be interested in a temp gig at a large law firm to do scanning, copying, FedEx labels and other scutwork for about a week and a half. I figured hey, that's at least less money I'll have to borrow from Mom and Dad at the end of the month, and I showed up bright and early Monday morning.

I was one of two temps. The immigration department of a large law firm was tackling a labor-intensive project that I will not go into details about because I am a professional. We printed out documents and letters and check requests and FedEx labels and scanned filings that were being prepared for mailing. (The firm keeps most of their files electronically, but immigration law still has a heck of a paper trail.)

The work started to slow down by Tuesday, but I'd apparently made a very good impression and I figured I'd be able to get some better assignments now that I have reminded them how awesome I am.

By the first day of February, the second temp was gone and I was still there. The lawyer in charge of my tempage had me look up patents for an O-1 filing. A day or so after that, she came into the office I'd been using and closed the door behind her.

( Figures... )

Today I took pleasure in switching off the alarm and going back to bed.

Today I learned a much easier way to set up a playlist in iTunes.

January - Started the year in a burst of good intentions and slammed up against a wall of old habits. So, yeah, nothing new there. Attended Chattacon for Sean's Tap and Hammer party. Reveled in the Red Coat of Awesome. Mod Boy told me "Everybody likes you" and I took that moment and pressed it between pages like a four leaf clover to keep.

February - Bought a tarot deck and started learning how to use it, much to the consternation of my parents. Went on a series of online dates that ended with me never wanting to go on a coffee date with a stranger ever, ever again.

March - Went to the Doo-Nanny again. Didn't sell much art, but still had a marvelous time meeting people and soaking in the creative vibe.

April - Celebrated Easter. Continued to look for work.

May - Found out Osama Bin Laden was dead while I was in a movie theater in Second Life. Attended my goddaughter's first communion. Worked as an extra in a Blair Crimmins and the Hookers video.

June - Turned forty-one. Threw an all-day party and watched the Beatles Anthology to celebrate. Drew a card for my aunt Mary Ann who was in the hospital and then got it in my head to scribble and give away ten thousand flowers to people. Put together an inital draft of an ebook called Catbooks and Other Methods.

July - Attended the funeral of my aunt Mary Ann, who suffered a second stroke while recovering from the first one. Met with relatives I hadn't seen in many years. Spent a week at the beach and coded a simple ebook for personal use in dealing with severe bouts of depression. Picked up three T-shirts off of the beach.

August - My laptop died and the hard drive was transplanted into my father's old MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, somewhere in the process, several thousand pictures were wiped from the archive I'd been scanning photos into, which means I had to figure out which ones need to be rescanned and scan them all over again. Continued work on revising and formatting Catbooks and Other Methods and put it up on Amazon.

September - Another convention (DragonCon) another docwhoopee party, another strange flirtation. Received a strange and charming apology. Infiltrated Flux Projects and gave away a stack of my ten thousand flowers there. Oh, yeah, and Doris got totaled.

October - Got a new car, a 2003 Toyota Camry. The steering wheel has 'SRS AIRBAG' on it, which made me think along these lines:



So I have a SRS car now. I've taken to calling it 'Sirius' in my head. By the end of the month, I'd ended up denting the front side in a parking lot mishap after a rehearsal for Defending the Divine Harmonium.

November - At my mother's insistence, I got the car fixed. The people I hired did the job in my parking lot but the work was impeccable upon completion. At my mother's insistence, I also go back into therapy. I dove into NaNoWriMo once more, including doing a write-in on MARTA that was blissfully insane and brought me up to the ten thousand mark. I completed the incredibly rough draft of Dave the Wanderer and the Circle of the Sun on November 30th with a surprisingly satisfying ending.  Meanwhile, Catbooks and Other Methods arrived at the iTunes bookstore.

December - Resumed work on previously started and stalled novel and got some encouraging feedback for the first scene. Continued therapy and kicked myself for not checking in sooner. Had Christmas with the family and stood in a room with all three of my siblings for the second time that year. (The first being DragonCon, when my younger brother dropped by for a visit.)

And that brings me up to about here. And how was YOUR year?