Feel Good Inc.

Allow me to tell you about the dreams I had last night.

The first one was, apparently, supplying proof that Chris Evans is super gay. IDK what brought it on or who I was even proving this to, but I was basically like, "No, check this out, dude is super gay," at which point we watched a home video or low-budget movie or high-budget porn where Chris was play-wrestling with one of his buds in somebody's den, as dudes do, over his being "gay." Except at some point between the start of the wrestling and his taking off his pants to sprawl across the sectional sofa in his lovely undies, it became really obvious he WAS.

All in all, not a bad dream. The next one is the really bizarre one.

I was visiting a church, apparently to see some kind of program, which would be incredibly odd were I not trying to politely escape the whole time. Out front, who do I see but Gary Oldman, my old friend and teacher! (IDK IDK. I blame this particular combination on a HP thing we're playing right now at TR.) Gary had been in an accident and was recovering in a wheelchair. I stopped to talk to him, and we decide to leave together. I make the really bad decision to let him drive.

First of all, he's a HORRIBLE driver in general, and I start to think he might still be on some kind of pain killers because he's swerving around but acting like he's doing it on purpose. For some reason, there are animals all over on the side of the road and in the median: Deer, bears, shit like that. So Gary just randomly decides to cut completely across the opposing lanes of traffic and park (badly) on the shoulder so that we can see a black bear over there. And he just sits there kind of smiling, all self-satisfied like, "Look at what I am showing you, a bear!" And I'm going, "Holy shit, a little warning, Gary!" as I am furiously cranking up my open window because a BEAR is already on the hood of the car.

After that, I went back to the church to get my own car. I'm never letting Gary drive me anywhere again.

Skins, I don't even know what you are anymore.

I am genuinely baffled.

I'm sure I've mentioned before (although maybe not here) that my husband and myself have our priorities completely straight and have a seriously impressive home theatre system in our tiny, under 900 sq ft house.

I just put on the Blu-Ray of Thor I got for Xmas for the first time, so I could watch it while I was eating dinner.

Whole house, shaking. It's like the fucking Bifröst is about to come through the ceiling into my spaghetti.

(Awesome though this is, it is also why I can't watch anything on the TV during the day while Lacy and Megan are sleeping. Life is hard~)

As an aside and at risk of stating the completely obvious, Tom Hiddleston, you are FUCKING PERFECT.

► I am very hungry right now, but I am literally covered in cats, and I am the sort of catmother who hates disturbing them. Life so hard~

► I spent about an hour today going through all the course material for my current new classes and yes, this really is going to be an easy semester. As my Computer Literacy class allows for students to work ahead, I am considering simply doing all the assignments in one or two goes once the book gets here, and just being done with it. Also, my geology class and lab literally finish days before my script analysis class begins. This was accidental, but man, if I could lay out my classes this way every term, I absolutely would.

► Current favorite beautiful person: Nicholas Ripoll. This boy, I seriously cannot even. He has the sort of glorious face that makes me desperately wish I had someone to use him for a PB. Do any of you ever come across people like that?

► Note to self: Take down the Christmas decorations this weekend, lest the situation start bordering on pathetic.

Why hello, new journal layout, aren't you just fucking beautiful?

Simple though it is, I cannot recall being this happy with a layout in a long, long time. Each layout I do gets me better at learning the DW CSS, too, which is wonderful. In doing this layout and the one for whatwedo, I've come to realise that I'm going to have to take the_blank_slate's layouts pretty much back to scratch so that I can get them properly coded, but that's okay. I wanted to get something functional up that looked like our old LJ layouts, and I managed that in record time.

Nix, you may yet discover some quirks in your layout, but I am hopefully becoming a bit better at identifying and correcting them.

I didn't style the comment pages on this new one, mostly because I'm lazy, but I might do that eventually. How much do I love that DW allows the manipulating of the mood theme image without an additional theme layer? Seriously, the coding and application of id/classes is so much better here. It makes coding more fun than frustrating. I'm so looking forward to creating more layouts to share once I have more time.

In other news, I didn't get as much sleep as I should have last night, principally because my internal clock now gets me up around 10 everyday regardless of when I go to sleep. This isn't a bad thing, it just means I might not be as savvy about multi-tasking (read: RP) as usual.

School begins again on the 5th. One of my classes this term is Computer Literacy, god help me. This is actually the second time I've taken this course, as it is apparently required everywhere but it didn't count in my transfer credits. Because really, I'm obviously the sort of person who needs to take Computer Literacy twice. :P Also taking Geology, which is…well, what it is. Required science credits. Story Analysis for Film and TV doesn't start for another month yet; it looks to be a relatively relaxed term. Fingers crossed.

Does continuing to cross-post to LJ make anyone else feel vaguely skeevy?

Lacy and I went out this afternoon as I needed to buy some shoes and earphones. It's an absolutely beautiful, SoCal sort of day here: Cloudless blue sky, very warm, genuinely glorious. I was glad to get out of the house.

The really notable part of this jaunt, though, is that I spent $16 on a bottle of ketchup. Lacy wanted to stop at Good Dog to eat, but I'd already had lunch, so I just shared some of his fries. I cannot express how fabulous their curry ketchup is. They make all of their ketchups by hand, and $16 is so completely worth it. Certain types of little things can make me inordinately pleased, and this (along with the champagne cupcake I bought from the store next door) definitely did it. Truly, I am thrilled with this ketchup.

All of this is good, because I was feeling pretty apathetic yesterday in general and outright depressed by the time I went to bed. I've pretty much decided to not bother with TR's NYE stuff outside of the one or two threads I need to do for plot stuff; I just don't have the spoons for it right now. I'm also going to FTB on Shari's EP, as it just irritates me beyond belief to use LJ anymore.

I started a new layout for this journal yesterday that I am REALLY pleased with, so I'm going to spend some time working on that and possibly correcting TR's layout code this afternoon, and later in the evening I'm going to get to my open tags. And that will be enough.

This morning I'm putting together a much-overdue sampling of my favorite Rufus Wainwright songs for my friend Kevin, who, along with his husband Nick, was all but completely ignorant of who Rufus was until I brought him up a couple of years ago. (Still WTFing about that.) I went to check something on Wikipedia, and this happened:

Anita: OMG
Anita: Not to interrupt you
Anita: But my mind has just been blown
Anita: Rufus Wainwright's new album next year is going to be produced by Mark Ronson
Anita: STARS IN MY EYES
Ruth: :O
Ruth: it's like two of your favourite people are having a baby :b
Anita: YES
Anita: I want to roll around on the floor
Anita: Like a dog
Ruth: AHAHAH
Ruth: the cats will judge you
Anita: Probably
Anita: I think they judge me anyway

DO I USE MY RUFUS ICON OR A MARK ICON? IDK IDK.

If you can't see this post, please let me know, it means you're not on my TR filter.

We had our "Christmas" this morning. We (meaning Lacy, Megan and myself) go out to eat every Friday morning when Lacy gets home (It's the start of his weekend), and most of our gifts were either unwrapped or something we already knew, so we just went ahead and opened them all when we got home. We normally open gifts on Christmas eve, but we're going down to Alabama tomorrow evening to visit with some friends who are in town from L.A. With Lacy's parents moved to NC, we don't really have anyone here to do Christmas with, so. It was nice, though, if a bit impromptu.

I really made out in the media department this year. I had a bunch of titles I wanted on Blu-Ray on my wishlist, and I guess it's easy to buy that, so including the one Megan bought for both Lacy and me, I got 7 Blu-Rays. I also got a bunch of amazing over-the-knee socks, because I'd added a bunch of items from Sock Dreams on my list. Like Dumbledore, I'm really happy to get socks as a gift.

the_blank_slate's move to DW continues apace. We're finally getting some posts up in the communities, people are settling in, feeling the place out. It's going surprisingly smoothly. The last two days are pretty much a blur for me, I've had so much admin stuff to do, and there's still TONS more. Today I'd like to work on my tags and make an EP for high_king, but I really need to get the layouts done. It will drive me batshit until they're up and functional.

On a related note, it's so encouraging to look at my reading list and see it filled with people who have firmly migrated from LJ (As opposed to people just making one or two posts to "try DW out" and never using it again). I think that having an active and familiar friends list is going to be what makes the transition to DW easier for a lot of people.

I feel like I had other things to say, but I really need to get cracking on those layouts while I'm in the right headspace to code. Randomly, if you're looking for a clean and functional yet pretty layout, even just temporarily, I humbly submit my Leaving for Paris series. I'm going to use it on most of my pup journals because I'm still really pleased with it. I keep getting asked to submit them to dreamscapes, so that's on my to-do list for the new year. Maybe someday they'll be official DW themes. :D I'm excited to get back to doing layouts for DW in general, too. The styles are so much easier to work with than LJ.

Anyway, gotta dash. Love to you all.

Also, just as an FYI in case some of you were unaware: You can currently create new accounts at DW without an invite code. I think they're doing this through the end of the month. I stopped cross-posting from there for practical reasons (I don't do much non-RP journaling anymore), but I can firmly say their customer service is top notch and my not updating my personal account over there has nothing to do with the service.

I just created several of my RP accounts over there just in case, you might want to do the same. For the time being I'm waiting to see how LJ responds to the outcry, but I want to have all my ducks in a row. TR is the only reason I'm on LJ at all anymore.