wherein Liz hates colds

Even when I'm not sick enough to justify staying home from work, being sick still sucks. Especially when I run out of NyQuil. :-(

Fortunately I have Saturday off so I can get to the grocery store for medicine and juice, but unfortunately I signed up to help at my church's service auction a while ago and I'm on the cleanup crew, so I can't just sleep the evening away. *sigh*

I am up now because I slept about six hours from 8pm to 2am and woke after a rather upsetting frustration dream -- I was at some church function in an unfamiliar, huge, and overly elaborate building and the woman in charge of some committee decided that it would be marvelous fun to play hunt-and-chase and designated me as the target for her committee members without so much as asking me, and nothing I said would make them realize I hadn't agreed to participate (remember, this was a dream! UUs don't act like that in real life! ...which is probably a good two-thirds of why it upset me so much, come to think of it) -- and needed a break before going back to bed.

...

I came down with this cold on election night and have been trying to keep it from crossing the border between pain-in-the-neck to knock-you-flat ever since. It is a delicately balanced struggle. :-/

And on that note, I think I will attempt to get some more sleep.

Livejournal, Dreamwidth, and spam

One thing I really like about Dreamwidth is the lack of spam comments. I think that, in the 3+ years I have had a DW account, I have had maybe two spam comments. Possibly as many as five -- my memory is notoriously fuzzy -- but certainly no more than that.

By way of comparison, I just got five spam LJ comments within the span of two hours this afternoon, all from different bot accounts, all with exactly the same text, on five completely random posts from the past few years. And this is far from an isolated incident. I get spam flurries like that at least every other month, and sometimes in a more sustained way -- three to five comments per day for several days running.

I am really glad that LJ flags and screens "suspicious" comments. Yes, that policy occasionally snares perfectly legitimate comments that just happen to contain a live link to an article or picture somebody wants to share, but mostly it snares phishing scams and skeezy, manipulative ads for dating sites or cookware sites or who the fuck even knows what the spammers are actually trying to sell. And it's pretty easy to unscreen the non-spam comments.

But it would be so very nice if the spammers couldn't even get accounts in the first place.

(And now off to the service auction. Modified excitment?)

Service Auction

Service Auctions are a common UU congregation fundraising method -- I am unsure if they are common among Protestant Christian denominations in general, but I would not be surprised. I know that my current church and the church I grew up in both hold service auctions each year.

The basic idea is that members (and sometimes community businesses) donate items or services which people then bid on. All proceeds go to the church.

The First Unitarian auction has three parts. First is the dinner (which you pay to attend) at 5:30pm. Then the silent auction at 6:30pm, where a whole bunch of smaller items are set up on tables with bidding sheets in front of them, and you write your bidder number, name, and offer. People can then choose whether to top your bid or not. Finally at 7:00pm the main auction starts in the sanctuary, with the big ticket items bid on in a traditional live auction style. Anything not sold on the night of the auction gets listed on the church website and newsletter for two weeks to see if anyone will take it.

I signed up to do cleanup this year, so I showed up at church around 6:45pm figuring that as long as I had to be there at all, I might as well sit through the live auction and see what it was like. I also got a booklet and a bidder number mostly for the heck of it... and then ended up spending over $100 on various items I had not initially meant to bid on at all. *headdesk*

That is what community enthusiasm will do to a person.

I ended up purchasing a dozen homemade muffins of my choice, two tickets to a spring Cayuga Chamber Orchestra concert of my choice (at my church!), two tickets to the NYS Baroque production of Fleurs De Lis (presumably also at my church; if it turns out to be elsewhere transportation may be an insurmountable obstacle and I will have to renege), two loaves of fresh home-baked bread of my choice, and a seat at a Mardi Gras brunch on Sunday, February 10, 2013. That last is my birthday present to myself for next year. *grin*

I also cleared a bunch of tableclothes and bidding sheets, gathered a gazillion pencils and pens, took down and put away a bunch of tables, cleared some dishes, and vacuumed part of the floor, because that is what cleanup crew means.

All in all, it was a successful evening. :-)