the girly who shall end all girls

the moving comfort cara sports bra is brilliant.

no contortion required to get it on or off.
no uniboob.
no flesh squeezing out around my arms.

sweat wicks away. while it and my shirt may be soaked when i take it off, my skin is always nearly dry.

i've been running it through the washer and dryer with no ill effects. yay!

this year, it was easiest to schedule wedding anniversary festivities a day early.

this happens to be ( wagyu beef dinner )

followed by a stay at a nice hotel.

this conjunction was completely accidental, and i am amused.

request thusly in comments, and i will pick seven of your interests. you then explain them in your journal and iterate the meme.
questions from buhrger

bad religion
this is in reference to the band. i was introduced to them my freshman year of college by my first roommate; i'm a fan of what wikipedia calls the "reunion" era, from Suffer until they left Epitaph. the music is what it is; i like the band because of the lyrics. i first fell hard for Entropy (it's a song about entropy! it's matter of course) and i was generally into their...earnest cynicism. i'm a bit less cranky now, due to living in a "blue" state and getting laid regularly, but sometimes i need to crank up the volume on 21st Century (Digital Boy) or No Control or I Want to Conquer the World and scream along.

dice
shiny shiny plastic dice appeal to me. i think maybe this is my expression of the chicks dig jewelry thing. (my sister says that a gift of fine jewelry is always appropriate. i'm not interested in that sort of bauble, but the gift of a die or a handful is always welcome.)
i used to love to play with the pieces in the board games my family owned, not doing anything related to the game, just fussing with the little plastic/wood/metal parts. don't know why.
sometimes i choose weapons in an RPG just to get a more interesting assortment. the only kind that don't interest me are opaque single colors. one of my favorite D20 sets is nearly clear, with a smoky orange swirl inside. but i love the green ones that look like marble. and the glittery gold ones. i'm not quite as obsessive as B in my Friday game; i don't need them to be made of brass or meteorite. that's just silly.

equivocation
this is one of the ways that i manage being a Sagittarius in a thin-skinned world. elaborating more will only get me in trouble.
it's something i love about the ambiguity of online communication. it's also a big part of the kind of wordplay that goes on in my house when it's just me and C. (C - it's a group of German guys who are all in the 501st legion. J - German Storm Troopers? C and J together - eeeeew.) it's the kind of subtlety i had to kill in my daily life when i worked with actors. (or not. see above.)

playing in the rain
1988. i was away from home for the longest time yet in my young life. i was completely crushed by a *class* for the first time in my life. (the greatest gift of my first year at CTY was surviving failure.) and i had the freedom to get soaked to the skin and covered in mud, and then do my own laundry. that's what being an adult is about; you get to jump in mudpuddles all you want as long as you know that no one else is going to rinse the dirt out of your socks.
i like the feel of rain in my hair and on my face and if there were more hours of sun in the day winter would be my favorite season in Seattle.

say anything
this one has layers on its layers. it's about the movie. (and i was going to throw it on while i was writing this, because it's major comfort food, and couldn't find it. if i have loaned it out to someone reading this, please get it back to me. The Blues Brothers is working okay, but it's, um, tonally different.)
i don't know where to start. i've been Diane and i've been Lloyd. it's about loving your Dad best. it's about falling for the guy who is genuinely nice to you. it's about being the poor kid. it's about not knowing what to do with your life. it's probably the first time i was aware of Seattle as a place. it's Cameron Crowe when he was fresh. the guy put his finger on so many things.
"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."
"...you had sex. No matter what you might think, nothing will ever be the same between you two. You might be 60, you might be walking down the street, and you'll talk to her about something, whatever. But what you'll be really thinking is: we had sex."
"No. The world is full of guys. Be a man. Don't be a guy."
"The rain on my car is a baptism, the new me, Ice Man, Power Lloyd, my assault on the world begins now."

superiority
i can be a bit of a snot. if i act like i think i'm better than someone, well...i probably do. the level of shame i have about that varies. i have a chip on my shoulder about my K-12 education; most of my teachers were great, but i certainly didn't get positive reinforcement from my peers. i may have gotten to the point of what Adler called a complex. and i *mostly* got over it. rural smart kid either goes that route or engages in some elaborate dumbing down roleplaying. i've seen both. the roleplayers tend to implode.
i also tend to seek superiority in the military sense when playing strategy games that i can shape, like crafting a Magic deck.

washington state ferries
coolest thing ever. the Bainbridge run was one of our cheap thrills during those first broke-broke-broke months in Seattle. i suppose it's especially cool to me because the ocean was a treat that took three hours to drive to when i was a kid. (yes, i know the sound is not the ocean. they touch, it's made of saltwater, bite me.) you can make any trip more appealing to me if a leg of it involves riding a ferry. they have comfy seats and tables! there's bad convenience food, wine, and beer! they have great views of the mountains many days, and sea life every day. the runs from Seattle all offer great views of the skyline.
i also really like that they are part of the state highway system. there are some places that simply aren't connected to a bridge. so it's like driving somewhere, but everyone who would be in a passing car is hanging out near you. the kids on the way to the prom, the workers coming back from the shipyards, the tourists, the truck driver, the girls' volleyball team. i have pictures of half a modular home driving off of one onto San Juan Island. their house, it came on a boat.
i like to roll the ferry names around on my tongue. i just got lost on Wikipedia reading about the different size classes and why certain ferries can only be on certain runs. they have a green stripe on the side and they run on biodiesel. they're awesome.

after another Friday of The Long Goodbye, complete with midnight cheeseburgers, M&C departed for Ashland, and C and i settled into a couple days of relative quiet.

Saturday was the two year anniversary of our arrival in Seattle. it's still funny to think that the 2001 attacks set off the chain of events that led us to pack our bags and go west. i've finally stopped feeling like we're on vacation and will have to go home. this is home, these days, even if the fair food is lame and there's no Yuengling. as i said to Dad the other night, well, not quite everything is better here. but almost.

i spent the day gently, quilting and chatting with C broken by a lovely lunch and some shopping with scarletbronte. i managed to sell two copies of The Shadow of the Wind, and one of Set This House in Order when we stopped at Queen Anne Books. sometimes i think i should be working in a book store, except for the retail thing. and all the bad books out there. i had a wonderful phone conversation with my parents (during which i sold another copy of Shadow of the Wind), and played a round of Diceland.

we got up early to catch the last day of the Van Gogh to Mondrian exhibit at SAM. even before 9am on a Sunday, the line was out the door to the corner (of course, i wanted to go down around 1 am, but C vetoed that). Mrs Kroller-Mueller was my kind of lady - as soon as Mondrian departed completely into abstraction, she stopped supporting him. my favorite pieces in the exhibit weren't the advertised ones; one was a dark art nouveau scene of three brides, another a vibrant oil of a cyclops falling in love with a sleeping nymph. there was just something fabulous about the soft look of devotion in his one eye and the tilt of his head. the real highlights for me were the quotes in the audio tour (reminding me again how much EMP fails to satisfy) of Van Gogh musing on his mortality as a rationale for all those self-portraits. it was an odd blend of periods and styles and even furniture and architectural drawings. there was even a stained glass window featuring scenes of the Kroller-Muellers' businesses - stained glass engineers on the phone and miners using jackhammers, yeah.

today was unremarkable, except for the perfect Seattle weather. and i have triumphed in making reduced carb no sugar added scones. take the Joy of Cooking recipe, replace all purpose flour with 1 cup bread flour and 3/4 cup almond meal, sub splenda for the sugar, add dried cranberries to taste. they're much better than i ever imagined, moist and pleasantly nutty without being mealy or gritty.

( girl parts TMI )

i forgot that without artificial hormones, PMS makes me maudlin. i'm not sure that being unable to send C to Gen Con is a viable trigger for a critique of what i've done with my life for the past ten years, but there i was last night, in tears, feeling trapped and ineffective, yet blaming myself for everything i could think of. not that it's all invalid, but stupid hormones. at least i'm not mean, nor do i suffer cramps. just tears and acne.

*sigh*