Hot 'n Cold

Today was productive, but for only two hours. That's all it took to complete my tasks for the day. It was very anticlimactic. I had to go to class, get my absentee ballot notarized, and get my roots done. I left the house to catch the bus a little before 11:30 and was home no later than 1:30. There's no satisfaction when it's that easy! It is still nice to have two nagging things on my week's to do list finally done. I've voted for Obama and I'm full on blond again! (Actually, it's starting to look a lot like the new doctor's hair on Stargate: Atlantis...)No, the two don't go hand in hand. Oh, and if you happen to skim this Nana: You'll get a discount should you go into Hair Quarters again. They appreciated the referral.

So how else have I filled my time? Well, in a stupid way that only I would: Organizing my music collection. I never used to be quite this anal about my digital media, but after upgrading from my semi-brick of an IMB Thinkpad to a hey-look-it-works HP Pavilion, nice folders and file names alone didn't cut it. For the past year and change I've been slowly working my way through my entire collection of digital albums and singles, setting every song title, album title, artist field, genre, and album art to the proper one in the proper language and with consistency across my collection. Of course, though, after living with Sari I caught the Discography Disease and have been adding massive chunks of the collections of others into the mix all during. I've finally made my way though all of Akane's, Mai's, Megan's, and Anne's contributions to my drive and am down to the contents of the ol' IBM that housed my former collection from 2006. I'm up to about 1300 albums containing 12,000 mp3s. I've got 200 more albums containing about 1,200 more mp3s to sort before everything I have is completely squared away. Then I can start filling in the gaps! I'm more excited about this than about... Most things in my personal life at the moment. I would be finishing faster, but the internet keeps getting knocked out. I have about as much luck with storms as Akane these days.

Though I have had the time and motivation to do things besides take the digital pliers and broom to my hard drives, I haven't had the will to leave my heating blanket to do so. It's been cold here. Real cold. First floor, poor babies, get kudos from me. I thought it was just me who was woken up by the arctic chill yesterday morning. Nope. The pair downstairs has been in hoodies-winter coat combos in their own apartment since the cold front came in with that storm a few days ago. The heat doesn't get turned on by the landlord until the 1st. They've been sleeping in their living room to be close to the oven that they've been leaving on to keep warm at night and they're sick of it, so they've been pestering the landlord to move up the heat turn on date. Oh, the joys of vintage housing.

Speaking of the house, or the apartment, I've come to the realization that I have the dumbest flies in the world here. The spiders are so-so smart. The silver fish are so few it doesn't matter. The bees are finally gone. And, the lady bugs only came en masse once or twice. But... the flies! A bunch got into the window in the bedroom and would have been driving me nuts if not for how amusingly dumb they all are. None can fly in a straight line for more than a few inches. The few that make it out of the window and into the living room can't even find the trash can to get at food. They mostly go straight to the lamp and fry themselves which is hilarious. And, they're so slow and deaf/blind/dumb that they can be snuck up on and hit/smashed/flicked/caught without much effort. I killed three in the bathroom without even trying. I felt like a ninja! It's the little things in life, isn't it?