Mortaine’s Blog

With all the coverage of the tsunami, there’s a story that you probably should hear this holiday season but might not. As in every year, blood supplies around the holidays dip dangerously low, due to increased holiday traffic accidents and a reduction in donations due to illness.

If you are eligible to donate blood, please do so soon.

My appointment is this Friday in Ben Lomond at 9:15 AM.

So, while working on my “Opportunity Does Not Knock” scrapbook today, I discovered that calligraphy ink will bleed right through origami paper when glue is applied to the back of it.

Which is unfortunate. I need to do the title page for “Intoxication” (a coming-of-age/coming-out short story I wrote in 1995) and I really wanted to use the hot pink origami paper for a triangle on the cover page. Ah, well.

In related news, I did the pages for the rejection slips for “Intoxication” as well as the back page, which describes the story and it’s history and has a little envelope and card for writing down its submission history.

If anyone is wondering what the heck I’m talking about, I started a scrapbook this year for my rejection slips and discovered that I don’t have enough rejections (i.e., I don’t try hard enough).

I have about 10 more stories to put into my scrapbook, all with 2 or fewer rejections, and one with about 4 or 5 rejections, because I’ve been more steadfast this year.

Anyway, I should probably get a point. Or a clue. Or something….

And, for no discernable reason, have a cookie icon.

I (finally) beat Final Fantasy X today. Go me! Yes, I cried at the end sequence. You would have to be a stone not to.

And I re-started my FFX-2 game today. Last save was 12/26/03– exactly one year ago. When I realized that the game really would continue the storyline, and probably be a little spoilerish, I wanted to finish FFX first before going on. Now if I could only remember how to load my existing Al Bhed primers into the game…. I have a lot more than I did a year ago.

Other gifties under or in the general vicinity of the tree this year:

A popcorn kernel sampler from my friends Ken and Jill (also a large plate which I think might have been mis-delivered….)
A gift certificate from my mommy (my mommy is great!)
A promisary note for a 4-hour video of my neices and nephews from my sister
A gift certificate to Barnes & Noble from my dad
A flamingo watering can….. from grandma, in case you couldn’t tell (we have a flamingo thing going on)
A sausage and cheese gift pack from my brother Mike and his family
A bottle of wine from John’s friends Al and Alison
A mystery gift (we haven’t picked it up yet) from and his lady

John and I went geocaching this morning and found 3 caches. Hammer’s sore on his leg broke open, which was a bummer and required attention (and cleaning of my car’s backseat….)

And I spent the rest of day playing Final Fantasy X, which was great fun. Obviously when people were telling me “oh, yeah– it’s really easy to defeat the Big Bad Guy from where you are right now– you must be dumb for not having beaten him yet!” what they meant was “you need to spend another 20 hours of game time to get the special secret weapon for one character, or you haven’t got a chance. Oh, and no, there’s no possible way you would have found it without looking for cheats and secrets online. Too bad.” For over a year I’ve been *this close* to defeating the Big Bad, but I just kept *dying* in one round at the worst possible moment. Well, now I know better. Hah. I’m not dumb, just unprepared. I guess it’s just not possible to beat video games without having the secret knowledge of the Internet.

Anyway, Merry Christmas to all my friends out there in LJ-land. I hope you’ve had a lovely day. I know I have, and tomorrow is special post-Christmas Sunday (which is to say– absolutely meaningless except it’s another non-work-day, which is yay!)

That’s what I got for Christmas.

Guess why.

Technically, it’s kitten food.