It's that time of year where I want a calendar again.

I went through this last year. I spent ALL this time picking out photos (admittedly mostly cosplay) of my friends and loved ones, took a long look at it...and decided I'd rather have a Sailor Moon calendar instead. So I picked my favorite Sailor Moon images that I thought went with the theme of each month, and ordered it...and when I was laid off like the day after receiving it, I never used it. Time and money well spent.

I've missed having a calendar. I've got an okay memory for dates, birthdays and the like, but it's not great--and despite the fact that I enter the date at least fifty times every goddamn day, my brain can't process that, for example, "12-15-09" is exactly ten days away from Christmas (six business days, no less) in any sort of practical way. My PDA tries it's best, but apparently the alarm function doesn't work unless you've accessed your PDA recently (like, that day, at the very least.) This is less than useful. (Plus, my PDA has crashed at least twice now, and I don't trust that it has all of the information I consider pertinent.)

My boss was just out of the office, and I had completed a MAJOR project earlier today, so I decided to give myself a break and give that cosplay calendar another crack. I spent an hour or so searching through photos, making decisions, saving files, and then when I was mostly done I uploaded what I had and created the calendar...and stared at it again. I remembered the two reasons I decided not to go with the photo calendar last year--one, some of my favorite photos don't have high res versions needed for the calendar, and two, I'm in a lot of the shots, and I'm not sure how incredibly egotistical it will look for me to have a calendar that I'm in. Now, at this new place, I have two additional worries: do I really want to open myself up to the kind of ridicule I will face for photos of myself with pink and blue hair and ridiculous outfits? And how long am I going to be here, anyway? Will I leave another job (either by my own choice or otherwise) and have another calendar sitting in a box while I attempt to readjust AGAIN?

It's a calendar. Why do I agonize over every single stupid little choice?

Some things I've been meaning to mention:

I pretty much gave up on ever restoring Chii again; Doc had even told me, when he fixed her the first time, that it was a temporary solution at best and she'd need replacing. And it's not fair to schlep my friends over to be my own personal Geek Squad every time I have a problem, no matter how much tasty sushi I feed them in return, so Marvel offered to split the cost of a new desktop for me as both my birthday and Christmas gift. We picked out this one:

HP Pavilion Elite e9220y Desktop

Specs:

Phenom II X4-910 (D) 2.6 GHz (95W)
AMD 785G
8 GB of memory
1 TB SATA 3G (3.0 Gb/sec) hard drive (sweet Jesus)
Radeon HD4350 graphics card

I don't know if I missed anything else of importance--HP.com doesn't list their specs quite as neatly as they used to, so I couldn't just copy and paste (no one here cares about the motherboard name and power supply, I imagine.)

I named him Hideki because he's basically going to be "holding" Chii, and since the laptop is named Sumomo and the Wii is named Freya and the iPod is named Kotoko, I wasn't ready to start a new theme yet.

I'm having trouble putting everything in the way it was on Chii, I'm probably going to need help with that. Also, purely aesthetic complaint: I can't seem to find this image:

http://gallery.minitokyo.net/view/267282

without either the spine bend in the middle, or--what I settled for--an artistic white stripe hiding the spine bend dividing the image in half. I know a lot of artbooks have two-page spreads, but usually somebody SOMEWHERE has either bought a poster of the same image, or has dissected their artbooks and edited the two pages together seamlessly. I feel like I've looked EVERYWHERE with no luck. Does anyone have any leads or ideas?

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I feel like there was some random conversation or sentence I was going to share with you guys, but for the life of me now I can't remember what it was. So instead, you get another Crissy's Dad story.

When I came home Tuesday night, there was a large Duane Reade bag hanging in between the screen door and the wood door. As I opened the screen door, I learned that the bag's handles were tied to the chain that keeps the screen door chained to the house. This meant that as the door opened outward, the chain shortened in length, and the bag rose. I figured it was some sort of delivery for Dad, so I untied it, and peeked inside. Inside were about, oh, 35 or so large fig leaves. I brought it inside.

"Dad," I said, "What did you do to the Mafia that they're leaving you a warning of fig leaves?"

Dad said, "Oh, wow, you took that down too?" Apparently Marvel had beat me home, and had done the exact same thing I did, and Dad was positively dumbfounded that two people, finding a bag floating in front of their faces (and blocking their entrance to the house) somewhat out of the ordinary, would react the same way.

In case you're curious, the answer to the riddle is that Dad had been outside trimming our fig tree, and apparently fig leaves feature in Caribbean cuisine, so Dad was going to bring them into his office the next morning to give them to people who will cook with them. He didn't want to forget about them, so he wanted to leave them somewhere where he couldn't help seeing them on his way to work the next morning, and with the weather being what it was, he figured that the area between the wood door and the screen door would act as, in his own words, a "crisper". Yeah. That makes sense.

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moradoshinigami and ssfseiyakou have an Etsy shop now! Starnigh Industries Starlit Creations has some really beautiful stuff, especially for the holidays, and even if you don't see anything that captures your fantasy, they do custom requests, too.

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[EDIT]: I remember the random thing I was going to tell you! It actually happened this morning. I treated myself to a cab into work, because it's pretty cold outside, and I'm feeling REALLY run down these days, and I didn't feel like waiting for three buses in the cold. I was amusing myself looking at the window at the Christmas decorations, when I saw an unusual truck merging into our lane. It had no sides; instead of aluminum walls, it had like...shades, that were pulled up, so that I was afforded a pretty good view of the crates stacked inside. Upon further inspection, I noticed that something inside the crates appeared to be moving...

"Holy cow," I said, startled into speaking aloud, "Are those chickens?"

"Yessum," my Hispanic cab driver assured me, "Cheekuns. Dey are on dere way to dere final destination."

I cracked up. This apparently was all the encouragement he needed.

"Dey tink dey are goin to lunch. Dey don know dey are gonna BE lunch."

Totally made my morning. Now I keep thinking the word "cheekuns" and giggling to myself at my desk.

CHEEKUNS!