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his June is our 4 year anniversary of Factory Monday's. Instead of trying to cram as many goodies into one evening to say thank you for making us the largest Industrial night in Michigan we're going for a full month of specials and gifts for all of you.

On June 2nd we're doing our second annual Halfway to Halloween Costume party. The theme for this year is Myths, Fables, The Future and Dreams. Whenever we have a theme for our parties the one that normally wins had nothing to do with our original theme so please just deck yourself out based on your own freakish self. CASH Prizes for best costumes, pics taken for free. As a special treat FREE SHIRTS for the first 300 people and Free cd's for the first 500. That’s right it took us longer to get the shirts done than we would have wanted but THEY ARE DONE!!!! No more delays it is a concrete. We decided to add another design to the shirt so not only will you get a free shirt but you'll have a choice as to which one you want. Both shirts will shirts will have DRINK DANCE FUCK REPEAT on the back. I have a case off 500 Cd's that came in on Tuesday that all I have to do is insert the track listing and a free pass in each one and they will be ready to go.

June 2nd you get a Free shirt, a Free cd and a free pass and of course $2 vodka all night long. Joining me that night on the decks will be DJ Darks Choir. As always the best sound and cheapest drinks in the fucking scene.

2 Weeks later on June 16th Andy LaPlegua of CombiChrist!
Andy will be doing a special set at Necto debuting material from his new EP Frost. We will also be having Draconian Productions throughout the bar, Temporary tattoo/professional body spray painting, a full photo studio set up for pics with yourself and friends wonderfully painted, drunk or with CombiChrist if your nice to him.
WE ARE NOT GOING TO RAISE OUR COVER ONE CENT. All of you have given us tremendous support over the last 4 years for that we are extremely grateful. This event is more about offering you the best possible night full of great memories than trying to make an extra dollar. We'll be having giveaways all evening of music, swag and what ever else we can come up with. The club will be fully decked out to offer you a unique experience that you've never had there before.

2 Weeks later on June 30th SUPER SECREAT NINJA SURPRISE. Another Major DJ set from an out of state artist. You know by now when we bring in someone we go for the best we can get. This will be no exception. I will say he or she is amazing, has a long history in our scene and we're not going to tell you who. Again our cover will be the same as normal but the evening will not be.

Psuedo Birthday Blahs
I felt ill this morning and called into work sick because I DON'T want to be sick for my real birthday when I drive up to justhuman's for my Broadway weekend. Hubby and I had agreed to make today my psuedo birthday for purposes of dinner and gifts since he leaves for Dayton tomorrow. (Guess which one of us actually knows how to have a good time.) Needless to say, I wasn't going to be up for a fancy dinner with the blahs I'm having today (got out of bed at 11:00 and laid around today).

He came home with a big bouquet of flowers, 2 mylar balloons, a Neil Gaiman hardcover and a corsage. Oh how I love that man. Then we ordered take out sushi and he brought it home for me. Ate to candlelight and the end of Sabrina. I love the soppy movies when I'm ill. Still feel tired and washed out but I hope a good night's sleep will put me right. If not, I'll sacrifice another paid day off to ensure my birthday happiness. Wish me luck.

Books: The Touring Option

Movies: Pride and Prejudice/Sabrina/going to pick another out to watch now

Soundtrack: The P&P piano music from the DVD menu is stuck in there good

Current Mood: thankful

A Survey of Opinion Leaders(that's you, folks).

Those of you who have been to the Smithee Awards or heard me talk about them know that I typically dress up as some kind of B Movie archetype when I assist in gathering the audience ballots for favorite bad movie archetype. In the past I have been a ninja and luchadore. Both have been real hits with the audience. The Origins showing of the Smithee Awards looms large before me. It's a new year and I will have a master's degree. Should I do an old favorite or drift where the winds of change blow me? You decide.

Poll #1187923 Ninas, Luchadores, Barbarians, oh my
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

What ballot gathering character should I be this year?

View Answers

Ninja
0 (0.0%)

Luchadore(Masked Mexican Wreslter)
6 (75.0%)

Barbarian
1 (12.5%)

other(please specify in comments)
1 (12.5%)

And, speaking of that master's degree, who among y'all has any interest in coming out to my commencement? It's June 14th in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I can only get like four tickets so act now! Or just send me money/strategic commodities/warm wishes/gluten and egg free cookies.

In case anyone's curious, the barbarian costume would probably consist of a fur cape, horned helmet, ridiculously large sword or ax and as little else as Ohio laws will let me get away with. Think the "Barbarian Brothers" if you can actually remember the worst movies of the 1980s.

Зенит!!!!
ААААААААААА!!!!!!!!!! Это было красиво!!!

Мешки, и всех, всех, всех поздравляю!!!!!!!

Right now I really miss confer. I want to post two serious rants, but I want to do so anonymously, since I don't trust the friends filter here sufficiently.

Wrastling with the pig...

I know, I know, I'm like totally behind in the controversy, but I like to read a piece before I lambast parts of it, makes it more sporting. The author makes several interesting points about US policy, war crimes, the first war in Iraq, he really works himself into a froth. But his major thrust seems to be that the attacks of September 11th were an act of vengance/war/reprisal/response to US genocidal practices in other parts of the world.

( It's probably going to run nice and long... )

It's alive, it's alive!
Daughter and I went out to the garden yesterday with the intention of putting in another round of carrots and greens. Sadly the soil was too wet for digging - it might have to wait for a couple days. I was also a dummy and forgot to check the rain gauge. According to the Weather Channel, there was 0.42" on 5/7/08, 1.12" on 5/11/08, and 0.11" on 5/12/08. I think I might print out their calendar at the end of every month and note observations on it.

The blossoms are mostly off the fruit trees; wish I'd had a chance to take a picture last week. One tree (either pear or cherry - I don't remember which tree is which) has already got little baby fruit on it. Away with ye, birdies!

The strawberries seem happy - a couple more have had flowers, one of the flowers has turned into a fruit, and there's some kind of long stems growing out. All the same, I think I want to put in another half dozen plants. (But my gosh, at $3 apiece...these could turn out to be some expensive strawberries. Must remind myself that the goal here is to end up with quality food, not cheap food - and strawberry plants are perennials.)

And - this was the cool part - some of what we planted on the 4th has sprouted. I have wee tiny baby lettuces and spinach and borage! No sign of the carrots or kale yet but it's been cool enough that they might take a while. And, need I repeat: Away with ye, birdies! Time to invest in that netting. The lettuce and spinach should be ready around mid-June, and the carrots about three weeks later.

Origins event pre-reg opens May 15 -- event grids online NOW
You waited so patiently to see what Origins has in store for you for 2008 -- well, wait no longer!

You can download the event grids and see all of the Origins events for yourself! Check out the event grid files Excel files at www.originsgamefair.com. If the master file (4501 events!) is too big for you, that’s ok – we broke the master out by gaming genre.

Event pre-registration for Origins 2008 opens on May 15 at noon Eastern Daylight Time (9:00 a.m. PDT).

To make your event purchases go quicker and easier that day, create an account on the www.originsgamefair.com site (use the Click to Create an Account link at the top of the page), then buy your show badge. By doing that, you’re all ready to buy events when they go on sale this Thursday.

We’ll see you at Origins!!

Current Mood: cheerful

Ravelry has spoiled me.
The forums on Ravelry are a homebrew system put together by the site's code geek - there's nothing else out there quite like it.

One big point of difference - where some forums have "uprate" and "downrate" features to help separate signal from noise, Ravelry gives you six non-mutually-exclusive categories: interesting, funny, educational, agree, disagree, love.

This has led to some interesting bits of culture forming: the "love" button is used both to indicate that someone's comment has warmed your heart, and as a substitute for a (((hugs))) post. The "agree" and "disagree" buttons make a quick-and-dirty voting system, since there's no built-in polls. The "disagree" button is often clicked to express not disagreement with the post, but disapproval of an off-topic comment (although it has no effect but to raise the tally - comments can't be hidden).

And this morning (and I know I'm not alone in this), I'm reading through LJ, and really wishing I had an "agree" button.

Current Mood: calm

Движение в Москве стоит
Какая-то жопа в городе. Все стоит. Пробки как по утру.
Учтите когда домой поедете.

Remember the Networkers Creed
Since I didn't end up buying the new sectional I've been pondering what to do with all the money I suddenly have. (I got state & federal returns and the economic stimulus check all within a week). On the furniture front, I think I might buy an inexpensive new couch + recliner. I actually looked at Big Lots last night and they had a couple ok pieces for just a few hundred. Probably most of the money will go into the Nocturnal Neon because she's got a few rattles going on. Or, I could save the $ and start building up the downpayment on a new car.

I decided to buy myself a treat so I went to GameStop. Assassin's Creed was down to $30 used so I picked up a copy. I did a little playing on CoV on the test server when I got home then logged off and put in the new PS3 game (the first one I've actually bought). It immediately detected an update was available and then... conked out trying to load it. I have a lot of issues with the PS3 losing connection with the Playstation Network but I can usually surf the net, so I knew something was not happy between them.

I spent over an hour fiddling with the router, I even put the PS3 in the "DMZ" zone. However the router just plain started to flake out and lose its settings, and the PS3 insisted it stopped sending out wireless signal at all. Finally I gave up. I pulled the ethernet cable out of the router and plugged it in to the PS3. The update then took 5 minutes to download and install and up I went. AC was pretty fun, but it was quite late by then so off to bed I went to stare at the ceiling for a while.

Hopefully tonight when I plug the ethernet cable back in to the router it will play nice and if it doesn't, I may just chuck it and buy something else. And then I will take my linksys out onto the patio and hit it with a hammer. Repeatedly.

Current Mood: cold

We're really going to kick this music festival into high gear!

So first off, today's Order of the Stick was really quite tasty, sometimes you just need to go with the flow of the story. Although I try as a GM to not rely too much on the "and then the players get captured" scenario because sometimes they don't. Same with the "and the villian gets away to taunt them again" because quite often, he/she doesn't.

Then of course I read this piece on global warming and the strongly worded concerns of a group of environmental researchers and scientists. Wonderful to see someone saying "We stand on the brink" but the response just made me blink. World changing risk and those who support change are going to make a webpage, have some rallies, maybe a protest march. Meh, I know it is how you build a popular movement, I know it is how you spark change, I just bloody wish governmental leaders would show some forward thinking for once.

Without semi-effective prodding.

Лайнер
http://korrespondent.net/tech/technews/459608

Ох, Китай... прямь дичь какая то...
в мою молодость, цыгане на рынке ковры продавали... китайские...
купишь, повесишь на стенку... днем, вроде ничего... А ночью, ковер зеленым светить начинает! а на ковре - портрет Мао Дзедуна в гробу!!

бу-го-га! коменты жгут, да и статья в общем-то тоже

Интернет в первый раз?
Я первый раз вышел в сеть в 96 году, через Гласнет. Мой первый браузер был текстовым. Основное, что я делал в сети - писал электронные письма, читал новостные конференции и иногда серфил по нескольким известным сайтам, адреса которых, я черпал из бумажных Yello Pages. Но при этом всем я пребывал в такой эйфории, от возможностей, что это трудно описать.

Друзья, у меня тут маленький опросец: с чего началось ваше знакомство с сетью Интренет? А именно, меня интересует год(если помните), в котором первый раз залезли в сеть и провайдер, который вам в этом помог. Ну и какие были первые впечатления?

Current Music: Zero 7 - Simple Things

I totally want to verge that hot guy
Work has been actually busy lately. Bleh. I need this weekend SO BAD. My brain is ready to explode. The next three days, I plan on seeing how long it takes for my butt molecules to begin to share electrons with my computer chair. I've barely played any WoW since Saturday. This situation must not continue.

I found an old friend of mine on Facebook; she was a bright spot from my dark and dismal pre-confer days, so finding her again is a big yay because she is awesometastic x 100. She's a verger for an Episcopal church in San Francisco. She uses "verge" as a verb, as in, "I verged Jim Wallis", which I think sounds kind of naughty. (Side note for

alessar: she explained it to me by saying she does what Alice from Vicar of Dibley does, which, first off, squee!, and second, I thought that was funny because I always heard that as "berger" for some reason.)

And, ahhh, this sure makes me miss Detroit:

A friend is doing something new and awesome. If you use many different social networking sites (flickr, livejournal, twitter, and others?) and would like one central place to view all the activity and to get recommendations of other people you might want to read/friend...

Ask me. I have the privilege of offering some of the one and two digit userId invites. You too could be among the first.

Comments screened; just so I know who gets an invite and don't share your invite with the world by responding.

You are cordially invited....
... to the next Nomadic Jewels performance. Oh, and I suppose you might want to see the world class (literally) bellydancer who is headlining the show - Kami Liddle! Kami is part of the Bellydance Superstars, and is known for her fusion of tribal bellydance and bhangra dance.

Saturday, May 31st
Starring Kami Liddle and other guest dancers
Greenhills School
850 Greenhills Dr
Ann Arbor MI 48105
Seating at 7pm
Curtain at 7:30
$15

Seriously - this is going to be a phenomenal show, with dancers from all over Michigan and Ohio. If you're only going to come see me at one show, this is the one to see me at. :)

Ann Arbor Concert Band at the Michigan Theater on Sunday, May 18!
( This Sunday: Ann Arbor Concert Band at the Michigan Theater, featuring the winner of our Young Artist Competition, Ashley Harris )

( The details in plain text. )

Current Mood: excited

Matt's organizing our song collection in iTunes on his new computer and is singing along at top volume to "Ziggy Stardust". He's also occasionally yelling improv bits like, "And where WERE the Spiders, Tish? WHERE?!?!?" If you can't tell from the fact that it's only Tuesday and my husband's already lost his mind, it's been a bizarre couple of days.

Last Friday was a long end to a long week, but we were able to relax and unwind pretty well. Saturday I cleaned a bit, and then took off to Utica for a relatively informal bellydance workshop session with Carnivale Mijnoon and Czigany World Dance. (By the way, the glittery panel skirts they're wearing in the Czigany video? WANT) The first session was skirt work, which was super happy, as I've been wanting to pick up some l33t skirt dancing skillz. The second was veil, which I need to work on, but that workshop wasn't terribly well organized, so I don't know that I got too much out of it. Ah well. It was worth the drive and the crazy construction traffic, if only for the skirt workshop.

Got home Saturday night, saw

avensdesora and

angry_seamus for a few hours, and then crashed. Sunday was rainy and cold, so I didn't go out to Virus'. Instead, I logged into work to run some necessary processes, and got some long overdue organizing done in our bedroom. Dagny called while I was running the stuff for work, and I was very sad to have to tell her that I really wasn't able to get together. As it was, I worked until midnight. :(

Yesterday was crazy insane, except for the few hours when Mike, Dagny, and Maya came to visit. I know we weren't the best company - we were both wired to the max and Matt kept getting paged to run processes that had to be run RightNowThisVeryMinute - but Mike & Dagny were gracious about the whole thing, and it was very good to see them, although I'm fairly certain Mike's glad he got the job at U-M and not with me. They left around 8 and I was back online running more processes until midnight. *sigh*

Today was more of Monday, with the exception that we didn't get to see Mike, Dagny, and Maya. I'm finishing up one last process, and should be done with the crazy by the end of the day tomorrow. Matt, on the other hand, won't be done with his crazy until May 19th. Ick. Hopefully it'll help once my crazy stuff is done.

Current Mood: busy

Brailler Innards
If nothing else, I accomplished something today: I fixed a Perkins Brailler. None of the keys could be pressed, which is a huge problem.

Braillers look like old-fashioned manual typewriters, only they have nine keys: a "return" key (it drives the kids crazy when I use that old-school term :)), a backspace key, a space key and the six keys that make up the dots that make up Braille. If you take out the five million screws on the bottom, the little plate comes off and you can see the insides of a Perkins Brailler (named for the Perkins School for the Blind, a $30,000+/year school in MA that once upon a time educated Annie Sullivan). I fiddled around and thoink! out came a bead. I wiggled the keys and sure as shit, they were working again. I asked the student about the bead and he said something about a cousin making necklaces. Good grief! So now I have 3 working braillers again. I am beyond thrilled.

In other good news, our annual birds have babies again! Every year, the same bird family (I am ~~delusional~~ convinced) comes back to our house and makes a nest in the same spot. Normally, they bring some friends, but I guess the friends are summering some place else. Anyway, they built their nest and have been busy flitting around the past few days. When I was outside getting laundry this evening, I heard the distinct "tweet" of baby birds. Marvelous! I love spring time! I just hope that the birds don't fall out of the nest. That happened two years ago. Buddy found them, naturally, so I had Jeff scoop them up and I put them in a nest that I made out of a Leopold's six-pack box. They huddled together, but something found them the next day and ate them. I had Jeff get the box down and we had a funeral for them wherein I said the Jewish prayer for the dead (that I grabbed on the internet) and they went to their eternal reward. I think that sometimes, you can't save something, and all you can do is make them comfortable at the end. I hope I did that.

Hello remaining members on this community :) I'm looking for some housing in the fall, I'm currently at Peninsular Place, nice place, high rent. I'm looking to either pay for a room in a house or a roommate for an apt. I've been looking on rent.com, wondering if anyone knew anyone or anyone themselves are looking for a roommate starting mid-August.

Don't let's scare the VI Teacher
The newspaper was all acquiver over some special ed rules changes. Most of the really silly ones were dropped, thankfully. But I decided to look at the rest of them and to my, uh, shock & awe, I noticed that they wanted to monkey with the VI teachers. I ran around like a crazy person (well, ran around the 'net) only to learn that right now, we can have "no more" than 8 students in our room if we are a classroom teacher (like I am) and no more than 10 on our caseload if we are a teacher consultant. The new rules will make teacher consultants responsible for no more than 12. Goodness! I'd hate to see the papers if something REALLY awful was about to happen! Interestingly though, I learned that the teachers of the hearing impaired are limited to no more than 7 kids.

We have our final field trip of the year tomorrow at the Visions Conference up at WCC. I am meeting the kids up there because I have quite the day planned--my tooth is coming out at 2pm. That tooth has been causing me endless problems and I finally got fed up and called my ghetto dentist. The ghetto dentist (not cuz he's IN the ghetto, but because his office looks like it flew in from post-WWII Berlin) had scheduled me for an August extraction. August?!? I called in APRIL, friends. So I called today to fuss, and actually got an appointment for tomorrow! I'm beyond thrilled! I'm eating up a storm today because I know that I won't feel like it tomorrow when I am walking around looking like a hillbilly with no tooth.

ветряки
Вот это дело: США способны довести долю ветряной энергетики до 20 процентов... Стоимость электроэнергии, получаемой с помощью ветра, окажется сравнительно невысокой.

Как здорово было бы иметь, допустим, треть от ГЭС, треть от АЭС, треть от ветра и прочих подобных источников, и на грани погрешности тепловые. У нас на угле, соляре и газе работает 72% электростанций : ( В свете этого внутреннее повышение цен на нефть и газ кажется делом благим... быстрее будут новые блоки АЭС строить и другие замечательные проекты.

Manicures
Is there anywhere people prefer for manicures?

Preferably somewhere that can see me after work hours and will be able to get me in by Thursday evening.

(I have a job interview Friday morning and am effectively unable to do my own nails due to a lovely cast on my right wrist.)

If there are places to stay away from, let me know.