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30 second synopsis of my fiction

27-May-09

I’ve mentioned to some people that I’ve been writing some fiction. All my attempts at explaining the surface plot have sort of failed… there I am stammering like “well, I’m trying to express blah blah…” and “I’m trying to make you feel like blah blah”.

Well, you’ve waited long enough!

Here’s the 30 second synopsis of my fiction project:

The only two nations that exist on this fantasy-ish planet have been at war for pretty much all of recorded history until the son of the emperor of one nation learns how the war started in the first place (sorry, no spoilers), decides to try and stop the war by taking human form and seducing the queen of the other nation. He hopes she’ll love him, understand, bring peace, etc. However, she finds out who he is prematurely (due to her form of innate magic), immediately distrusts, fears the worse etc, and decides “fuck my life” (only more melodramatically) and when their halfbreed daughter is born, she sends her into hiding and disappears herself to go form some kind of underground resistance to the tyrany that she thinks is her in-laws’ people.

This changes the form of the war, but doesn’t end it. Boo fighting. And no one can find or kill John Conner I mean, mommy dearest, the leader of the human resistance (not to mention her disappeared kid).

My story begins about 16 years later when her daughter finds out that not only was she adopted, but she’s also the daughter of this woman all her school teachers are told to say is a crazy insurgent nutjob (and probably dead). She goes totally emo (also her form of magic is waking up, and going haywire since she’s zomg only half human) and she runs away.

Her younger adopted brother, who loves her to death regardless of how fucked up she’s becoming, is the “main” character of the book I’m writing now, and he’s run off to find her and restore her sanity/stability and help her on her quest to find out who and why she is (uncovering all the backstory and history and politics along the way). Eventually it becomes their job to clean up the mess left behind by the previous generations.

At some point, the story will loop back to the origins of the war once daughter and father meet up, which is tied to the “genesis” of humanity on the planet (all of which is lost to human history). If I ever finish it, it will be a several book series… somewhat epic. OR, I could simplify it quite a bit and it will just be a young adult coming of age novel from either the brother or the sister’s point of view.

Okay that’s it! No stealing my ideas! Feel free to laugh at my silly summary. :)

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The geek shirt that made me laugh the hardest today:

18-May-09

Heavy Metal

Edit: Link fixed. Don’t know why it worked one day and broke the next.

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Test drove a civic

16-May-09

I went and test drove a newish (’07) Honda Civic today. Unfortunately it was not nearly as fun to drive as my STOLEN 98 Civic… so it may be that my very STOLEN Civic will be the last Civic I ever own. *sigh*

Okay… I’m open to suggestions again. I want a car that’s reasonably small, FUN to drive (manual), and NOT obnoxiously sporty.

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Boo car theft.

14-May-09

So, very close to exactly 2 years ago, I had my first brush with scary crime about 2 weeks into my new life in the Bay Area. My car got broken into and my stereo was stolen. And, within about a week, someone came to my apartment pretending to be a friendly neighbor and attempted to expose himself to me and force himself into my apartment. Those were not the best weeks evar, and definitely not the best introduction to the area.

Needless to say, I moved out of those cheap apartments and moved somewhere I felt was much safer. My new apartments are off the street, resident parking is locked under ground, there are lots of families around, the managers all live here and are always around, etc.

So, I’m glad I’m not about to say that my car was stolen from my apartments and now I’m afraid to come home etc. No… my car was stolen from work.

If you know me, you know -where- I work… and apparently, this is the first time ever that a car has been stolen from one of our campus lots. There are nice, friendly, plainly visible surveillance cameras all over the outside of the buildings, so I’m sure that’s a deterrent. But… not deterrent enough apparently.

Here’s what happened (according to the security folks telling me what was on the video):

9:45am – I arrive, I park my car in the usual space. I enter the building and go about my work day.

9:45 – 8:25ish – My car is there, perfectly fine ALL DAY LONG.

6:45pmish – I started to think about going home, but decided to stay and finish the last 2 documents I was working on reviewing. Little do I know, a dirty car thief is on his way to campus driving a stolen car.

8:00pm to 8:25pmish – Thief pulls into the driveway in a beige Nissan and parks next to me. He sits there for a little while, then gets out of the car. He walks straight to my car, unlocks the door, gets in, starts it up and drives away as if it belongs to him. The cameras apparently didn’t show any forced entry.

8:30pm – I decide to leave. I pack up and head out to find my car is gone. I apparently missed him by about 5 minutes or so. When I first realized this, I thought “oh man, I could have avoided the theft if I’d just gone out there 5 minutes earlier.” Then I realized… oh wait. If I’d gone out 5 minutes earlier, the thief would be sitting in the car parked next to mine, with god knows what kind of criminal intent. It’s pretty dark out at that hour, and I’m not exactly a big strong person.

Yeah… after thinking about it like that, I’m SUPER glad that it was just my car that was stolen.

I read online a few people in various forums talking about how “zomg my key opens my boyfriend’s car and starts it! wtf Honda?!” so I’m guessing I just have one of those cars that are really really easy to steal. (98 Honda Civic, to be specific)

The story goes that the Nissan was apparently stolen 3 days ago, so this person is switching cars and moving on apparently. Not sure how FAR he moves on before dumping a car… The sort of cool part about my whole experience was I got to watch the cops dust the car for prints. I think I even muttered “it’s like an episode of CSI” or something. hehe.

Anyway… my insurance company is covering a rental car until it’s recovered, or until 21 days pass… at which time my claims person says they’ll make an offer and I’ll give up the rental and have to buy a new car.

Good times. Good times.

Regardless of if my car is recovered, i’m about 99% sure I’d like to buy something newer and a little harder to steal. I might even go for a brand new car of some kind.

Any suggestions? I like smaller cars, compact, reliable, etc. I DO like Hondas, and if I could find a new Honda that wasn’t a giant boat as pretty much all the new Hondas seem to be, I’d probably go for that. I’m sort of infatuated with the idea of getting a mini, but I’m open to other suggestions. Got any?

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registrations closed

29-Apr-09

Not that any of you registered for a pennyhero.net account (why would you? Comments are open), but just an FYI: I closed registrations on my site because spammers were registering.

We now return to your regularly scheduled internet.

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Food bank work and wine tasting, yum!

24-Apr-09

A small contingent from my team at work spent about 4 hours today sticking barcodes on cases of gatoraid and chips, then loading them onto pallets at the Second Harvest Food Bank in Watsonville today.

I’m a whiny bitch, so I was very unhappy about getting up SO FREAKING EARLY for a work-related activity (I’ve been whining to the bf about this for weeks), but as soon as I got into the car, all grumpiness FINALLY went away (partly because the particular team member I was carpooling with is pure awesome) and the rest of the day was great.

This is the second time I’ve gone with my team to volunteer there, although I think other team members have gone more than that. My first time going was during the Christmas donation season, and we packaged up about 16 tons of food! (Not joking here! We did the math on our iPhones and stuff).

Anyway, today we did what I’d consider “light” work… we took barcodes and labeled cases of food while Only The Men loaded them onto pallets (Ms. Drill Sergent in charge of us would not let The Men touch the barcodes or let The Women load the cases. She was hilarious) .

Very worth doing, and easy to get involved with your local food bank if you’re interested. :) And, if you work at a company that has team off-sites, it’s a really great experience (and costs your cost-center basically nothing but gas and lunch if you’re expensing your off-site).

Afterwards, another team member and I stopped on the way home and did two wine tastings (don’t worry, we’re not expensing that!) I bought a Bonny Doon Angel Paille (browse their flash animation menu to find it if you’re interested) which is a yummy light white dessert wine where the grapes are apparently dried on straw before made into wine. It’s tasty. I also bought this tasty tasty apple cider brandy (which I can’t find a link to… and yes, I know that’s not a wine.)

We also stopped at the Santa Cruz Mountain Vinyard tasting room but I decided I had spent too much money on booze for a work day, so even though their apparently big award winning 2006 pinot noir was amazing even by my “I suck at wine” standards, I didn’t buy anything else.

Anyway, overall, it was a good day “at work”. Time for a nap. I’ll have to catch up on non-fun work this weekend. good times. good times.

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wordpress themes for v2.0?!

22-Apr-09

Grr… I don’t have time to upgrade wordpress yet and I want a new theme right now.

How the heck do you find themes that are compatible with 2.0?! No one puts this in the description and you can’t search the theme directory in any useful way.

grr. arg.

Edit: Upgrade complete. Theme installed. Mah werdpress is purty now.

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The world without warcraft

21-Apr-09

What I’ve done since UNINSTALLING WoW:

  • I fixed pennyhero.net! omg! (and made two posts! omgx2!)
  • I found, registered, and started Networking Essentials class
  • I started Intermediate drawing (photos of art at some point soon)
  • Holy crap exchanged facebook emails with a cousin I haven’t seen in something like 18 years!
  • I’ve danced every day because I’m not playing WoW

On the to-do list for the rest of the quarter:

  • Upgrade website to wordpress 2.7 and get a theme that plays nice with sub-categories Done!
  • Finish reading Finding Time and End of the World Blues
  • Lose 5-10lbs (i.e. work out and eat less.)
  • Finish Metroid Prime III (ow this game hurts my wrist) and Zelda TP
  • Get back in touch with some friends and try to go hang out with them more (you’ll know who you are shortly)
  • Go to the Oregon Brewers Festival
  • Go visit my mom in Utah looks like this will be next quarter.
  • Go to the dentist
  • Dance every day because I’m not playing WoW!

If you’re curious why I took a break, all the usual reasons apply: I wanted to focus on “real life” and get a healthier perspective on things… fix some priorities, get back into reading for fun and drawing again.

The first week of the break was everything I hoped it would be; I was super energetic and happy to have all kinds of free time. I kicked serious butt at work, I read half of an ENTIRE BOOK, and started on a second one. I did all the research into taking advantage of education benefits at work, signed up for one class (lined up a second one too) and started attending, and I got brave and asked my manager if my “I feel like a slacker at work” feelings were visible to anyone else besides me (No, he said they weren’t.).

However, now the honeymoon is over and I’ve got to make a conscious effort to keep working at fixing my brain. I know there’s a real chance I’ll get sucked into some other addiction… Even “reading the internet” can be a dangerous activity for someone like me. But at least I’m conscious of it and actively working to refocus my sanity. There’s hope. :)

Anyway… time for sleep.

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hacked website resurrected!

15-Apr-09

Pennyhero (dot) net has been resurrected. Thanks Doug for holding my hand. And thanks Graham for the sql cheatsheet.

Woo for me. Woo for the site. Yick to the default theme (must…fix…soon).

Eventually I’ll write about what happened and what we did to fix it, but I’m kind of sick right now so I think I’ll go back and take a nap or something.

It’s just nifty to have pennyhero.net back again, no matter how ugly it is.

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Phone banking for Obama (highlights!)

04-Nov-08

I volunteered for the Obama campaign and called voters in swing states yesterday and today. I really wish I’d gotten involved sooner! It was actually a lot of fun, and it was amazing to see the huge diversity of people who showed up at the headquarters to help. I wish I could have taken pictures!

Highlights:

I called maybe 70-100 people in Illinois, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. I talked with a LOT of answering machines and a good number of people too. I didn’t get a SINGLE McCain supporter!

One of my favorite calls:

Me: Hi is Justin* there?
Him: No he’s not, can I take a message?
Me: (*sort of flustered*… do I leave a message with this person or not? I decided to introduce myself) Okay sure. I’m Emily, and I’m a volunteer for the Barack Obama campaign and I—* (he cuts me off)
Him: Oh! It’s you guys. Yeah nevermind. This is James. Go ahead and say what you were going to say. And good work!

* = name changed

Needless to say, “James” was an Obama supporter. hehe.

Another woman I called also interrupted me after I said “Barack Obama” and seemed really excited to hear from me. Apparently she’d been volunteering and phone banking for Obama for months and was really excited to hear from us. She asked where I was calling from and we had a neat little chat. I don’t even remember what state she was in but that was a good call.

My VERY favorite call was to an older woman (I think the sheet said she was in her 80s. I’m not sure). She answered the phone and when I was done introducing myself, she said she voted early this morning, and that today was also her birthday! She said “And all I want for my birthday is for him to win!”

I wished her a happy birthday, and that I wished the same thing, thanked her, etc, and all the other people around me making calls laughed and a few clapped for me. :) It was great.

I guess a lot of other phone bankers didn’t have quite as uplifting experiences. There are a lot of people out there not voting for Obama, and even a seriously undecided and conflicted man my co-worker spoke to. He was still unsure who to vote for because he had specific questions related to the military (he was about to join). She did the best she could being sympathetic and giving him the hotline number so he could talk to actual real people (rather than a website or something) and hopefully he’ll find the answers he needs.

Anyway, it was a great experience. Very uplifting and inspiring to see crowds of people showing up to sit on their phones for a few hours. Volunteers opened up their homes to host phone bankers and train people. Some restaurants nearby also gave us space to sit. And then of course there were the lines of chairs on the sidewalk!

Not sure how to end this blog entry… Just wanted to share some of that. :)

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