Below please find the LJ of Jenny Rowland, who fears no Google.

Dateline late May '08:

Free userpics here. Credit anyone who I note the art as belonging to.

Four Panels is still on hiatus. I know, you are all so sad and such. Meh.

I haven't heard otherwise from IU, so even though the diplomas haven't been mailed out yet, I'm assuming I am now the owner of a BS in Informatics. Soon we will be moving to Madison, Wisconsin so I can put that shiny new degree to work for Epic Systems Corporation. This is a good thing.

I still don't have my computer up from when it died last July. Any emails to me, sent to anything with "xidus.net" in it, will just sit unread until I have my own copy of Thunderbird again. If you really need to get in touch with me, commenting to my most recent post is a fairly good method. I also regularly check my yahoo address if you know that. (The email on my LJ profile page was actually an @napoleon.xidus.net addy until just now; fixed, now, so I can actually be contacted from said profile page.)

If anyone wants to give me lots of money so I can fix my computer, I will not complain.

This entire entry is almost completely unchanged from when I last edited it in December, and then again last month, but I figured an update of "more of the same" couldn't hurt.

Fnord.

Being old and having to go to bed by 10 means I have to settle for watching the Yesterdaily Show instead. And the Colbert Re-report, I suppose.

I yet live. I also drove by myself with no one else in the car a couple times this week. Granted, it was a thirty-second trip out the hotel parking lot, down about a quarter of a block, and into a grocery store parkin glot, but hey.

n foo
f  s foo=$o(bar(foo)) q:foo=""  d
. w !,foo ;I have no idea what this would actually print, since bar() is a figment of my imagination
q

Toes.

Well, here is my first weekend as a working type person. Not counting when I worked at Menards, because I didn't work much each week due to the ow ow my feetsies (plus I often had to work nine hours on Saturday), and not counting when I was a student assistant at CSUF, because it was only eight-to-five during the summer and then only half the summer 'cause my mom asked me to start work later in the day so she could actually do her job which was at night.

But anyway. I survived my first week at Epic, and while technically I have still done absolutely nothing useful, I still made me some moneys. Every day when mecha picks me up (I usually drive myself to and from work, but he's in the car with me so he can take it back to the hotel and thus have a car all day), I cheerfully announce "I made [REDACTED] dollars today!" (I crunched the numbers during some downtime, and 50 weeks a year is about [REDACTED TIMES FIVE] dollars a week, and thus [REDACTED] dollars a day.) All we've done so far is really high-level, nothing-is-graded orientation type stuff. Next week I start my months of actual technical training. At some point during those months, I will hopefully be to the point where my team lead can pass on small tasks to me, and I can do those tasks, and thus, again, the whole "doing something useful" thing.

I had about a fifty-fifty chance of getting assigned to a team that works on the lovely new campus in Verona, which is a suburb of Madison; sadly, I actually got assigned to a team that works in one of the old rental properties in Madison proper. All training is done in Verona, so if I have to do anything in my office then I have to take a twenty-minute-if-no-traffic trip across town, which essentially means that when the Verona kids are done for the day -- having zipped over to their offices between classes or during lunch -- I still have at least an hour of travel and working ahead of me. But at least I get to take advantage of the insanely delicious and cheap cafeteria food that Verona employees get while I'm in training. And every day I can use my breaks to watch the construction crews as they busily erect a new set of office buildings. They have very big cranes. One of them moved four port-a-potties yesterday.

I share an office with someone, but I've only been in the building (it is called Tokay because it is on Tokay Boulevard) early in the day or late in the day, so thus far I haven't seen him.

Epic is full of nerds who wear xkcd shirts, discuss the relative merits of different tabletop RPGs, and have conversations with me about which Star Trek is best and why Tolkien is no fun to read. I have finally found the mothership.

I still haven't really seen much of Madison -- I spend most of my time in office buildings over in Verona, after all -- but so far I like it. There's enough hills to keep me happy, there's pretty pretty trees everywhere, and there's a liberal talk radio station.

Also? Lots of cheese.

We are in a Steak-N -Shake in Urbana, Illinois, on the way to Madison! I start work tomorrow. Also, pancakes are tasty.

I'm sure I originally intended to post lots about Madison Trip the First (there will be a second soon, hence the numbering), but I really can't remember much anymore. Basically we went up to look at four houses managed by this one company, intending to pick one to rent( ... )

Then, of course, there was the flooded attempt to get back to Bloomington from Indy, and then finally we made it and I got my driver's license FINALLY HOORAY. And then on Monday the 16th I flew out to California to hang out with Becky and go to her wedding. Becky, for the uninitiated, is some lunatic who I've happened to know since high school. We hung out together all my junior year. That would have started in September 1997. Oooooold.

She and I and her now-husband all went to Disneyland that Wednesday, where I found that they have taken my favorite parts out of the Haunted Mansion AND Pirates of the Carribean( ... )

Becky and I did plenty of other things too, like eat red carnations and say hi to Lizzie. This makes no sense to anyone else but us. And we went to the Brea Mall to sit by the crazy sculpture of two dogs and a lobster, as of old. I slept on an air mattress on her bedroom floor the whole time I was there, the better to facilitate the doing of stuff. After the first couple days, her brother got a hotel room so that their mom's friend Teri could stay in his room while she was visiting from Texas. Teri turned out to be kind of insane and also fun. She was also obsessed with this one flower that is often used in landscaping in southern California; I didn't even know what it was called, it was so tune-it-out-normal for me, but it turns out to be an agapanthus. And yes, that picture was taken just because when Becky and I saw the truck we knew Teri would be thrilled.

And then, of course, there was the wedding, i.e. the main reason I was even out there. Becky had her cousin Sarah, her friend and former coworker Kristy, and me as bridesmaids, and perennial tiny cute friend Katy as maid (technically matron, but dammit, she still looks about sixteen and you just do not call a sixteen-year-old a matron) of honor. She was marrying a Mister Cash, who apparently can pinpoint the spot where his family diverged from the Cashes that went on to produce the Man In Black, and who had some of his friends and Becky's brother as groomsmen. On the one hand, they didn't have to wear dresses; on the other hand, they had to wear wool suits. I'm not sure who got off better, really.

The wedding was brought to us by the letter J, and by butterflies. Lots and lots of butterflies. Everything that could be butterfly-themed, was; the flowers, the aisle runner, every piece of paper involved with the whole shebang, the ornamentation in the bridesmaids' hair and (so I was told, though I did not see) the mother-of-the-bride's shoes. You know how after a wedding, traditionally rice or birdseed is thrown? At this wedding, everyone got a little box, and when they opened it, a live monarch butterfly escaped into the sky. INEXORABLY ADVANCING BUTTERFLIES.

Becky was always the type to plan out her wedding, apparently going back to when she was little, and so everything a wedding could have, this one did. And all of it butterfly-themed. THEY HAUNT ME IN MY SLEEP, I TELL YOU. And it all went off quite nicely, right down to the four-year-old flower girl doing her job adorably, though when Becky views the videos she is probably going to laugh at how much I tripped over my dress when I came in and went up to stand on the steps. Apparently when a dress is to be "floor-length", that really means it should stop about four inches from the floor? I guess if I were a real girl I would know these things. As it worked out, that poor dress got stomped on by more people by the end of the night than, uh, a really stomped-on thing. Especially since I swear it got longer since the last time I had tried it on. INEXORABLY ADVANCING HEMLINE, perhaps?

After the wedding and the release of the butterflies, the bridal party got into a limo and everyone else got into normal boring cars, and we all went over to the receptiony place. I had my first champagne in the limo. It wasn't bad at all. Then we sat in the "bridal room" while everyone else was seated, and then we were introduced and did the walkity in our assigned pairs up to the head table where we were sitting. And then there were the standard things like the first-one-as-a-married-couple dance, and the Becky-and-her-dad dance, and so on and so forth. And dinner. And then just general dancing for whoever wanted, while the new Cashes wandered around and mingled with everyone.

At some point I realized I was the only one left at the head table, because everyone else was either mingling, dancing, or, in the case of Kristy, gone home to sleep because she was pregnant and the babies did not believe in her sleeping past 2 AM which meant bedtime had to be early if she was to get any sleep at all. And at that point I was like "yeah heck with this" and so I left the head table and squeezed past the dance floor to go sit with Teri at one of the normal-people tables.

Eventually I was convinced to do one "stand in place and bop around like a doofus" dance with Becky, Katy, and Beckycousin Sarah, which allowed me to not die of a dress-related incident while still being able to participate in the fun. It also did not matter that I dance like a non-dancing thing, because of that whole "like a doofus" part. Case in point: I took the shawl thing I had, that each of us had so that my arms wouldn't have to be naked in the strapless dress and Katy's back tattoo wouldn't show, and tied it around my head like a blue-dress-wearing ninja. Or like in Puzzle Pirates.

Then I went and sat down with Teri again, until Becky's brother came by and asked if I wanted to dance. Which I of course refused, since dancing with a boy means you have to move around, and I neither knew how to do that kind of dancing, nor wanted to give my dress more chances to murder me.

But then Teri talked me into it.

So, yes, for all of thirty seconds until the song ended, I danced, in a dress, with a boy. And not even a bad-looking one. (You'd almost think I was a real girl or something.) After I sat back down again, Teri claimed that he had asked me to dance because he was Teh Likes Me, but I remain convinced that she was simply trying to drum up another Martz family wedding so that she would have an excuse to come back out from Texas and play with the agapanthus plants again.

After the reception, I helped clean up a bit, which mainly involved running around in sneakers and a dress pulling covers off chairs. This was surprisingly fun. Then I said goodbye to an obviously-exhausted Becky, and they went off in the limo while I was driven back to her now-former house with a cake layer on my lap. I changed back into normal people clothes, pulled literally over seventy-five pins out of my hair (I kept them, and counted just now), took a shower to get most of the hairspray out, and went to bed at 2:30 before waking up to be at the airport at 6.

And then I came home. The end.

It was a lot of fun, although I kind of re-acclimated to southern California while I was there, and so now I am all over again weirded out by Indiana's flatness. Being in Orange County is like being surrounded on however many sides (depending on what the day's smog lets you see) by a huge, mainly-brown security blanket that's lumped up kind of funny around you. The horizon is just way too empty without it. Also: no agapanthuses.

And now we're just sort of continuing to pack so that we can move into our temporary housing and hopefully within a month or two find an actual place to live.

I am hungry now. I should eat breakfast.

Well, I got back from Becky's wedding in California to find out that there are no property management companies in Madison that will let us lease a house without a cosigner, because I am not yet working. And mechaparentals can't cosign because their credit is non-accessible due to an identity theft incident that happened like a year ago. So basically, we don't get a place to live. We get to move up and stay in temporary housing for a month or maybe two if we can manage it, and then hope that we'll be allowed to lease cosigner-less.

Also, the one quiet set of neighbors we had here, who recently moved out, seem to have been replaced with yet another set of partiers. Their music was going earlier, and I can hear them giggling madly now.

Gooooood times.

I was planning to post about the California trip, and about the Madison trip a while back, but now I really can't be bothered. I think I'd rather sleep about six days straight instead.

I am 27. I never learned to drive when I was a teenager, because my parents said we couldn't afford the insurance hike. For four years, my mom drove me to college every day. For three years, I took the bus to my college classes here in Indiana. If I ever went anywhere any distance away from home, it wasn't under my own power.

SUCK IT, UNIVERSE.


(I will have no accusations of aiding ID-forgers on my watch.)

Now, not even the dark can stop me! Bwahahaha!


Gonna post about last weekend eventually, honest. Although at this rate I won't get to it till after I get back from California on like the 23rd. I'm gonna be a bridesmaid! It's the first time I've worn a dress since the first day of my freshman year of high school, over a decade ago. YOU OWE ME, BECKY.

Huh. No wonder I couldn't upload an image to my xidus.net space. There were over 25,000 emails sitting on the server, eating up all my space.

Good thing I figured out how to sort pine by subject line. Whittling that mess down to 16 would've been brutal otherwise.

Also, it is raining again. Guess it's time for a few more towns to get washed downstream. Not Bloomington, of course -- it's about as high in elevation as this state gets. It's just about to be surrounded by a moat, is all.

Still gonna write about the trip to Madison eventually; I just hafta work on mecha's blog layout some now, and also write an email.

So, uh. It's apparently national news here in the ol' U S of Toes that Indiana is currently working on becoming an Indiana-shaped lake. We tried to get back down to Bloomington last night and couldn't -- every single route was completely flooded. The way through Martinsville was closed, and for good reason, as from the pictures it seems they had chest-high water there. Columbus was a lake. There was just no way to get to the southern part of the state from the middle. (If I see any "Stop I-69" people any time soon, I am going to strangle them with their own intestines. NO WE DO NOT NEED BETTER ROADS IN THIS STATE, WHATEVER WOULD GIVE YOU THAT IDEA)

This morning we tried again, and after about three hours, some guy came up to where we were pulled over near the closed bit of 37 and told us about the unlabeled detour around said closed bit. He is my hero for the day, so thank you, unknown guy with a dumptruck. 37 down near Martinsville was apparently opened not long before we tried to get through, and huge chunks of road along the shoulder were torn up.

Local radio station WTTS apparently thinks all this is funny, since last night they wittily played "It's The End Of The World As We Know It" followed by Blind Melon's "No Rain". This morning the DJ said that they are still going with rain-themed music.

Check out the front page of the Bloomington Herald-Times website to see what's so hilarious.



You've got a real great sense of humor on you, WTTS. Tell me, if this were Southern California and thousands of homes were going up in a forest fire, would you be playing "Burning Down The House"? And hey, if you want, we can probably help you dig up some Aryan/white-supremacist music for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Ever heard of Prussian Blue?

As mecha says, "If we're going to have light-hearted musical programming based on loss of human life and mass destruction, why not go for the gusto?"

Now, I am going to maybe get a shower and thus get out of the clothes I have been wearing since Madison.

More on what actually happened in Madison later. Short version: if we do not get to rent this one house we toured then I will be very very sad.

All roads to B'ton flooded by yesterday's rain. Trapped in Indy indefinitely. WTTS thinks playing rain/disaster-themed music is funny.

Not that I'm e-around much even at the best of times, but mecha and I (with mechamom and Quentin) are disappearing mysteriously for a few days to go up to Madison to look at houses and hopefully find one which we desire to rent. We'll be doing other stuff, too, like driving around and trying to convince the old people to eat at random ethnic food places and failing (old people are boring and would rather get McFood than try one of the two Afghani places almost across State Street from each other (or was it Nepalese...?)). But it's mainly about finding a place to live. Twill surely be a cavalcade of phantasmagorical delights.

I was packing the stuff on the desk that I have not used in months, and found a small pile of drawings that I executed at some point last year and then forgot. One of them made me laugh, because I consider it delightful. It is on the topic of "behold... PIE!" However, my lj-scrapbook is disabled because nobody, including me, has bothered to reinstate my paid account status. If someone does that while we are gone, then I will scan and post that picture when we are back on Sunday. If no one does that while we are gone, then... probably I'll just throw in five bucks myself, really. So, y'know, whatever.

Now, off to Indianapolis and thence to Madison.

PHANTASMAGORICAL I TELL YOU.

My paid LJ status expires today. Who wants to fix that as a late birthday present?

PS I turned 27 on the 27th. It was my birthday squared, and I didn't even realize it until the next day. Dammit.

PPS yesterday was the one-year anniversary of me having my mp3 player, Eustace. Happy birthday, Eustace! I wuvs yoo.

To paraphrase what mecha said to me a few minutes ago, there are so many comics that were made before the Interwubs, before black-hearted, sarcastic bastards like us had a way to connect with each other and share the bizarre things we came across in our everyday lives. There must be so many hidden gems languishing in boxes somewhere, just begging to be brought to light...

So hey, I'll do my part. We own this thing now.


How is it that we did not really notice the boxes and boxes of fifty-cents-apiece comics at the Vintage Phoenix until just today? I mean, I only looked through two of them, and I think mecha only looked through one, and we made off with the above wonder, some classic 80s Power Packs which mecha likes for some reason, a bunch of "INSERT_MARVEL_CHARACTER_HERE 2099"s, and four issues of my new favorite thing in the world, "Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld".

Old comics moldering in a box, carted off cheap, ftw.



I should probably scan the rest of Aunt Tina's Secret Cookbook, too, but meh.

Someone should send these first two to Spamusement, if it still exists.






First of all, PFHAHAHAAAA

Second of all, update my what now? Are the 2009 models out already?

Quick COmcast update, since there are yet more exciting developments.

I begin with excerpts from an email conversation between mechamom and Mister Comcast Frank, which she forwarded to me and mecha:



..."other" account?

Mechamom's response to Mr. Comcast Frank (on May 21) touches on this question, of course; everyone on this side of the dispute is woefully confused as to what "other" account this could be. Mecha and I have had exactly two accounts with Comcast ever: the one when we were living in Indianapolis in 2005, and the one we have now, which started its life as an Insight account. The first account was closed, and then, when we wouldn't pay for the cable box that we had already given back to them, sent to collections. We then paid the collections agency. Granted, I'm not the sharpest crayon in the socket, but as far as I know, if Company A turns an account over to Company B, and then Defrauded Customer C pays the bill, then I'm pretty sure the account should be closed.

If I am wrong, I invite correction.



WHAT.

The Indianapolis account. The one we CLOSED? And then you sold it to a COLLECTIONS AGENCY? Which we PAID?

That account?

That's the one you figure we still owe you money on?

Gotcha.



You and me both, mechamom.


Here, though -- and I'll embiggen it for those who are skimming -- here is the part that made me decide to post again.

I mentiond on the 20th that we got a bill and a note that we would be charged $500 if we closed our account without returning our cable box.

Today, mechamom got a bill for $500. For the cable box. Which is "overdue" I guess? Even though our account is still open, and as far as I know they didn't actually tell us where to return it? Plus, when you think about it, they already owe us a cable box. We returned the old one, and then paid for it because our receipt apparently meant nothing in the magical fantasy world where Comcast corporate is located.

We're working out a plan for when we return this box. Obviously, it doesn't work for mechamom to just take it over, clarify with the nice lady behind the counter that yes, this really will end the madness, then get a receipt and leave. This time, we'll bring more witnesses, certainly; also, I'm pretty sure there's at least two cameras between all of us, and possibly three, and mine takes video. A receipt might not be proof that we gave them back their equipment, but perhaps a dozen photos and some video will. I suggested bringing along a notary to notarize signed statements by any employees who're there, stating that yes, it is RETURNED, we do not OWE anything more for the love of GOD, but mecha says that actually outside of a few narrow areas, notaries don't have any real legal weight. There's gotta be someone we can bring along who can act as an independent witness... a paralegal, maybe? I'm not sure. Thoughts?

Of course, we could have hi-def footage, shot in front of a live audience consisting of a busload of nuns, narrated by Morgan Freeman, who was THERE IN PERSON AND SAW THE WHOLE THING, and even that probably wouldn't be proof enough for Comcast. They want more of our money, and more, and more; and therefore they shall have it. Reality is for other people.




It turns out that someone else of mechamom's acquaintance is having Comcast woes right now, too. Here is how mechamom tells the story:


Hands up, anyone who figures that cash would've disappeared mysteriously, certainly unbeknownst to the innocent folks over at Comcast, if Person had been as stupid as Field Guy apparently thinks his marks are. Me, I'd raise mine high, except I need it to type.



I'm really starting to feel like I need popcorn in order to properly enjoy the way this little drama is continuing to unfold.

Part 1, with the first six pages, is here.

Featuring more scans of my 24-Hour Comic Book Day attempt of 2005!

( Aunt Tina's Secret Cookbook, pages 7 and 8 )

So who wants an update on the Comcast situation? (Spoiler alert: they're still thieving bastards!)

Last week, a voicemail was left up at mechamom's, from a Comcast person who basically said "call us back tomorrow and we will TOTALLY get this thing resolved". The next day, mechamom talked to five different Comcast people over the course of a few hours. Nothing was resolved. Our cable is still out, as it has been ever since April 2, even though April's bill was paid.

I just got off the phone with mechamom; she received our "final" Comcast bill in the mail. (The quote marks are because I am sure that Comcast would continue squeezing mystery payments out of us for a thousand years if they could find a way to do it.) Since we are cancelling mid-month, they helpfully prorated our cable payment for the month of May! How generous. So we only owe eighty dollars. For the cable that, y'know, we aren't actually getting.

I guess they're selling a lack of cable now? A cable-shaped void? And that's what we paid for in April, and what they want us to pay for again?

Also included in the bill was a friendly note that if we didn't return their cable box, they would charge us $500.

Who wants to take bets that we'll return the cable box, GET A RECEIPT PROVING WE DID IT, and then be forced to pay for it since we "didn't return it"... AGAIN?

We're probably going to write this all up a bit more coherently and send it to the Consumerist. Apparently they love humiliating Comcast.

Also, to Mr. Frank, or anyone else from Comcast who might wish to comment with promises of resolution: I'm afraid my credulity can only be stretched so far.

I tried my (metaphorical) hand at 24-Hour Comic Book Day back in 2005, and managed twelve and a half pages before my (actual) hand hurt bad enough to combine with my natural laziness and make me give up. I think at the time I didn't have a scanner. Later, scanner-enabled, I couldn't actually find the comic to scan. Then I found it last year, but most of the time the idea of sharing old art only made me sad and curl-up-in-a-corner-y, because I knew that if only I had shared it earlier then Chris could've boggled at the weirdness of it, too.

But then, it isn't like ANYTHING really matters, let alone that, eh? So here's some scannin'.

This piece is entitled Aunt Tina's Secret Cookbook, because that's what I got out of a random title generator. I've retexted with Arial to replace the chickenscratches; I'd use my usual comic font, except I don't think it ever made it off wilsonator, and thus I must do without it for a few more months. The pencils are mostly untouched, except a bit of whiting out here and there to make something more clear. I never did ink it, and am not going to bother now, because c'mon, why don't I save my inking for art that isn't three years behind what I can do now.

This is just the first six pages. I'm tired of scanning and editing now, and will do the rest in the next few days. And then I can put the hardcopy back in the pile of old drawingy crap, and not have to worry about it anymore!

( Snip. )

So in the game Portal, there is a crazed AI sort of computer thing, and promises of future cake.

This reminds me of a webcomic that existed many years ago, whose name I have long since forgotten. It was kind of a fucked-up, weird-looking thing, with multiple things going on, and one of them was like an evil corporation or something, and the corporation or whatever had an AI that was a giant glowing woman's head and I think her anme started with an A, and she would say things like "WE WILL DESTROY ALL OUR ENEMIES WITH FIRE AND SO ON and then there will be cake".

Also, at some point I think there was a squirrel.

Anyone?

Meanwhile, zzz.

Although I do have to comment on the Cafepress vendor, which claims to offer "funny original tees". I certainly see what they mean... why, skimming through the "Unique" category, I see a t-shirt that says "Can't Sleep / Clowns Will Eat Me", one that says "Jamaica Me Crazy", and one that says simply "#1 Grandpa". Then, in the "Political" section, there's the "Ayatolla Assahola" option. How do they think of these?