Alexx's Journal

Now that we're out of crunch at work, between comp time and replacement holidays, I had a bit more than a week off, yay!

I had a big list of things to accomplish, and actually did a few of them. Less than I had originally hoped, due to the last-minute addition of one especially time-consuming, though quite enjoyable one: reading the last Harry Potter book aloud to kestrell. This took roughly thirty hours, so was a big chunk out of the week.

This story required *lots* of different voices. Luckily, only Mad-Eye and Fenrir seemed to demand the growly voice which, though I quite like the effect, is hell on my throat -- and neither of them had a huge amount of 'scren-time'. I tried out lots of variations for the goblin characters before finding one that seemed to fit, and it was one I may add to my repetoire: sort of high and croaky, in the back of the throat; very distinct, but not wearing on the equipment.

I got about 80% done with another project: computer archaeology. The upstairs storage room had seven ex-computers in it, and a lot of miscellaneous parts. I have now done data salvage from all the hard drives which were functional. and brought down five of the big boxes for disposal. I still want to make one complete 'emergency' backup computer out of the remaining parts, and also hook up an ancient Zip drive to see if I have any useful data remaining on my small pile of ancient Zip disks. But a lot of progress was made.

I finally got around to updating The Dragaera Timeline for the latest book, _Dzur_. Part of the reason I hadn't done this earlier was because I had fallen woefully behind on the Dragaera mailing list. I plowed through a lot of it, though, and have reduced the backlog from 1600 messages down to a mere 300. A few more hours should do for the rest.

Unaccomplished projects: room cleaning, and finishing off the Sandman paper (though I did acquire a bunch of the research materials I'll need). Well, I'll be taking another week off in September, so maybe then...

Very little WoW playing. Partially due to wanting to work on other projects, partially due to the heat, and the lack of AC in the computer room.

Saturday was 43duckies Harry Potter birthday party, which went quite well. She had made loads of HP-themed food, and brought some decorations as well. She also brought a HP Trivia/Quidditch board game. We didn't play, but I looked through some of the rules, and it seemed even more arbitrarily over-complicated than 'actual' quidditch!

We watched movies 4, 3, and 2, in that order. I had never actually seen 2, so was glad to finally do so -- though being an even-numbered one, it wasn't all that good :) Seeing them in that order was weird, as everyone kept getting noticably younger.

It being very hot, Kes wore the particularly skimpy version of her Slytherin schoolgirl outfit. This is one of the few times I have seen herooftheage acknowledge a top as low-cut enough. Indeed, when asked what he thought of it, his immediate response was "Ten points for Slytherin!"

In the few days after the party, I kept staying up too late for one reason or another, and got pretty sleep-depped. Started catching up on Doctor Who S3, watched about five eps.

Today, I am not on vacation, but taking a sick day -- time for dental fillings :( Tomorrow, back to work. It's time, I'm ready to dig back in.

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Note to self: Novocaine *does* work on me -- eventually. But it needs a bigger dose and a longer wait than the average person. Ow. Well, not any more, but there was considerable ow earlier. Now, the lefht shide of my mouf ish totally numb, whish jusht feelsh *wrong*.