the deep moans round with many voices

1. I made some edits to Undertow, based mostly on Jade Rozes's review, and the revised version is now up on ff.net. Hopefully the changes reveal Team 7's employers, clarify Tsukimaru's motives, and make Mikatsuki's character more consistent.

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2. I am now caught up on season 4 of Heroes. Hulu is a wonderful service. :-) Now I need to find time to start watching season 1; I have the first disc from Netflix, but I keep getting distracted by other things.

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3. Vathara has an amazing talent for dragging me into new fandoms. I have a sinking feeling I will end up finding and watching Avatar: The Last Airbender now, after successfully avoiding everything beyond the random fringes of the fandom for several years. *sigh* Oh well, at least I am told it's a good show?

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4. We are selling office supplies at the smoke shop now. WTF???

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5. In other smoke shop news, on Monday night a customer named (so ET tells me) Mary Beth Fitzgerald shoplifted a pack of foreign cigarettes. I had brought up cigarettes and tobacco from the basement, and I left the box with the cigarettes on the pipe case while I put the tobacco supplies away. Then, as I went to the counter to throw out an empty bag, this woman looked furtively around, grabbed a cigarette pack from the box, and then distracted me with questions about Djarum clove cigars.

I know what she did because we have her on tape from two angles. Also, as soon as she left, I went to put up the foreign cigarettes and noticed a pack was gone. (I have to count them before I go to the basement, so I know how many packs to bring up, and then I count what I am bringing up so I can adjust inventory levels on our tally sheet. It is really obvious when the numbers don't add up.) Because I am not MS and do not have nifty psychic shoplifter radar, I did not immediately jump to 'OMG, shoplifter!' -- first I checked the basement to make sure I had not accidentally left a pack down there -- but then ET told me the woman was a known suspicious Commons rat, and I said, "I bet she stole it!"

We did not report it then, partly because we were busy, and partly because we didn't know how to make the security system replay the video of the relevant time. On Tuesday, PM showed me how to get a replay (I am not at all sure I remember the steps, but I can probably figure it out again if necessary), we called the police, and we gave a full report of the incident. Since the woman has most likely smoked the cigarettes by now I doubt much will come of it, but she is now banned from the store and if she comes in again, we can call the police and report her for trespassing.

Apparently we can do that for all banned people. I was unaware of this. The next time Criminal Brendon tries to sneak in -- as if getting a haircut will make me forget he shoplifted! -- I am totally calling the cops on his ass.

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6. My mom is coming up to visit this weekend, via a trip to Misericordia to collect a bunch of magazine boxes that the Drew library uses to file their political pamphlet collection (or related items). We originally planned this visit for September, when the weather was warmer, so I am not sure our plan to visit the Montezuma Wildlife sanctuary still holds. Perhaps we will visit the Cornell ornithology lab in Sapsucker Woods instead. And we may go to Bellweather Hard Cider as well; we've always skipped over that on our vineyard tours before, but I have recently become interested in cider.

My schedule for the coming week:

Thursday: work 7am-12noon; finish packing; flight to Twin Cities (via Detroit) departs 4:25pm; sleep at Ardis's house

Friday: breakfast w/ parents & Ardis; drive up to Cass Lake; dinner out to celebrate Dad's birthday

Saturday: lake!

Sunday: lake!

Monday: lake!

Tuesday: leave lake noonish and drive down to Twin Cities; dinner and visit w/ Ardis, Aunt Jan, & Uncle Bob

Wednesday: breakfast w/ Ardis & parents (maybe also Jan & Bob, depending on timing and his health); flight to Ithaca (via Detroit) departs 10am

Thursday: clean apartment; buy groceries; work 4-9pm


...Theoretically, I may get some writing done while at the lake, but I wouldn't count on it. My main plan is to sleep a lot, hike a bit, hang out on the dock, and do some chores around the cabin. I think that will be quite enough for me to handle. *grin*

And now I am going to watch a couple episodes of Heroes on Hulu, because they are changing the available ones every Wednesday morning and I doubt our lake internet access is good enough to handle streaming video. (I jumped straight into season 3, since that was the only one up, and have watched 15 episodes already. This is more tv than I have watched in, oh, years. ...Well, no, I lie; I did watch three seasons of new Doctor Who last year, as well as a bunch of the old serials. And some Merlin episodes a few months ago. But still. I haven't owned a television since 2000, and it wasn't until last year that watching tv online occurred to me as something I might be interested in doing.)

I just realized I haven't posted for a week now. Where does the time go?

Anyway, my computer died last Thursday and did not resurrect until Saturday night. It's still being intermittently glitchy, and I still have no real idea what the problem is. *sigh*

On a happier note, my friend Susan arrived Thursday night and I was consequently occupied on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning. We did a walking tour of parts of Ithaca on Friday morning (Ithaca Falls, my old neighborhood, a section of Cascadilla Creek), did one wine tasting just after lunch (so Susan knew what to expect on Saturday), and went to the Corning Museum of Glass on Friday afternoon. We ate at Sushi Sake for dinner (and I forgot to bring my leftovers home, bad Liz, no biscuit).

Saturday morning we went to the Farmer's Market, where Susan bought a bottle of wine and I bought a cheap pair of black earrings. Then we drove up to Seneca Falls to visit the Women's Rights National Park. (Hurrah for the Declaration of Sentiments!) We toured Elizabeth Cady Stanton's house in the middle of a blistering thunderstorm, and then drove back to Ithaca on the shore road (Rt. 89), stopping at four wineries along the way for wine tastings. Then we had dinner at Moosewood. (This time I remembered my leftovers!) Susan then used her impeccable aesthetic sense (she is a freelance artist/illustrator by trade) to help me figure out where to hang my posters and pictures. I have not yet gotten around to banging the actual nails into the walls, but at least I know what I will be nailing where, which is really the hard part. *grin* The actual nailing is just busywork.

Sunday morning Susan came to church with me, and then headed back to NJ around 11:30am. I took a brief nap and then went in to work. And that was my weekend.

Since then, I have been very busy writing various and sundry things (which I may or may not talk about in more detail later on), and also taking a brief immersion tour of Heroes fanfiction. I still have practically no interest in watching the show, but some of the fic is pretty cool. Also, I have developed a possibly unhealthy interest in Sylar. What is this fascination I have with (fictional) vicious, mostly-unrepentant killers???