For a fleeting moment I knew what key my tinnitus[1] is in and bolted out into the living room to grab one of the electronic keyboards and a set of headphones to confirm it. Unfortunately Vogon was asleep and Laurel was watching TV, and its horizontal scan rate noise throws my perception. I am ready to unplug that irritation box. Vogon assures me LCD television sets do not make that noise (the one we own is in his study and not the living room), but the harmonic between the TV and my tinnitus has been annoying the crap out of me since I quit watching TV last month. DO NOT WANT that noise.

I'm going to hole up in the bedroom again with more soothing BBC World Service and get back to reading Oliver Sacks. I smile every time he references Jourdain and all the mentions of plasticity. Does neuroplasticity count as a fandom?

I am tired of the TV-noise and need to either cajole Vogon into enabling wireless connectivity or just run a network cable into the bedroom so I can have internets without the torture of TV-noise. I keep having good ideas spoiled by hearing the same few episodes of iCarly, Hannah Montana, and Wizards of Waverly Place. Sufficiently annoyed by TV-noise, I would happily beat up all of their casts and knock Billy Ray Cyrus about the head until he stops using that dreadful "cuntry" (misspelling intentional) dialect.

Good noise was on Selected Shorts this week, though; Percival Everett's "The Appropriation of Cultures" read by Ruben Santiago-Hudson. I laughed so hard I almost peed myself. The next time I see the Confederate flag, I will hear the story's main character say "That's the black power flag, brothers."


1. If I heard a high A continuously as Schumann did late in life, I would sell everything I own for any medical intervention to make it stop.

Apparently my problem stems from thinking negatively, which would explain why many of the responses to my previous post were that I'm not perceived as negative.

( an example from yesterday )

After moving past that, we had a very nice time running errands afterward. We now have pop-up hampers for everyone, Laurel showed us how she can run in heels (a pair of sparkly dress-up shoes), and we hit Blockbuster for movies to watch this week. I think it's time to get a Movie Pass with them and a 3-at-a-time NetFlix subscription so I can see more movies I'm interested in since I've gone through most of what I'm interested in at our closest two stores.

In other news, the nighttime/weekend noise here is about to get interesting -- the previously empty apartment across from our downstairs neighbors is now occupied by a couple that started playing thumping music around 1130 this morning (stuff that sounds like "me and my homies gonna roll and get some booty") and just switched to some whiny-quasi-rock stuff. In case they weren't winning our hearts and minds, they also have a Rottweiler they let run around outside off-leash. Now our downstairs neighbors are playing their craptastic bass in response and I'm cheering for them for two reasons: their music is less annoying and they don't have a behemoth of a dog.

Vogon complimented me earlier today by telling me I was the most utilitarian person he knew. I quickly replied that it was because I had read too much John Stuart Mill as a child, but I was quietly pleased.

It stuck in my head so well that I just crawled out of bed to trim my fingernails. I'd left them untrimmed this week because he had surprised me on Monday by trying to give me a manicure with no advance warning. He left my left pinky nail oddly shaped because I kept squirming. (I didn't like the scratchy feeling.) It apparently takes a couple of hours to do a proper manicure, so it's been left since and my uneven nails have been annoying the bejeebers out of me, not that I had much in the first place. Since my nails would break anyway when I move some boxes around tomorrow, I decided to trim them back to how I normally keep them, only a little shorter to compensate for fixing the fussed-with nail. He says fingernails shouldn't be cut straight across, but I'd rather have my nails be plain and not break than sit through the uncomfortable scratchy sensation for hours and have them look terrible the day after all that fuss because I did what I'm supposed do and worked more on Laurel's room.

Now that I'm awake and still cold (can't get warm today, that's humid cold for you) I think I'll get some cleaning in while everyone else is asleep.

I finally hit my sensory tolerance for disposable diapers. I've always hated the texture and the smell, but they were cheaper -- financially, not morally -- and I've been trying to nudge her gently in the direction of wanting to use the toilet since ~18 months. She's now a few weeks shy of 3 and I've hit my limit. I am not touching them anymore because they make my skin hurt. (I have sensitive skin and a developing latex allergy, so gloves aren't an option until I shell out for reusable latex-free ones.) She's going to have to suck it up or start using the toilet. We have cloth training pants, so I can only hope she'll learn quickly.

That said, no-one's coming over next weekend unless they go home at a reasonable hour. I'd like my weekend back since I'd rather have a few hours alone with him (and awake) than any of the random stuff we've done or picked up this weekend, although it is swell to have a printer again.

auntiesiannan, do you want just the Sesame Street designs in cross-stitch book or the plastic canvas one too? I finished cleaning up my scans of the former this weekend -- the PDF file of the book is 5.67 Mb with 100 ppi images, but I also have 300 ppi PSD files of each page.

I'll have to get my hands on a copy of the book sometime before I say anything about it. So far, I'm not impressed.

( Who's Crazy Now, by William Speed Weed )

I finally got tired of Laurel accidentally closing herself in her room. The door has too much space at the bottom to wedge a doorstop in there (it's just over an inch short of the frame, hung flush at the top) and it's such a cheap hollow core I was afraid to pick up one of those nice catching doorstops. (It's two sheets of woodgrain laminate with pressboard around the edges, and they separate regularly.) So today I picked up a hook-and-eye latch while we were out running errands and installed it, screwing the eye through the door into its framing so it *should* stay.

I'm half-afraid this makes me a lazy parent, but between the frequent shutting herself in while playing in her room (the knob's hard to turn _and_ the door constantly sticks) and the teeth-hurting noise the door makes when it's stuck and I'm trying to open it, it was either find a way to keep it open or remove it entirely.