Well the antibiotic for my ear infection hates my stomach, but I called my doc more than two hours ago and still haven’t heard back (sigh). A gift my husband and I had sent to some good friends was supposedly delivered Friday (according to usps tracking info), but has not been seen. Not that this surprises me mind you–I still remember the time last year when a postal delivery person lobbed a small package into a snowbank in our lawn and walked off. If I hadn’t seen it I wouldn’t have even known it was there until Spring. It was soaked by the time I got to it, and to add insult to injury, it was meant for our neighbors across the street and a house or two down, not us (and no, the address wasn’t wrong or illegible). I’m still waiting to hear back from customer service at the company I ordered it from. I’m a huge fan and long-time customer (as in I think I’ve been buying from them for at least 15 years), but I don’t know how much they can do if the post office claims they delivered it.

I did manage to get a couple new designs up at cafepress, but then my computer locked up (I swear this thing is dying a slow death), so I think I’m going to quit while I’m ahead. Here are the new designs:

Technorati Tags: holidays

Well the vet said Selene was looking a lot better last night; of course that was before she somehow managed to slip her collar this morning and start pulling her scabs off. (Sigh.) They estimate another two weeks before we can take it off of her; I figure in another week or so she’ll try to murder us in our sleep.

Thanks to a combination of reward cards from our credit card company and a wonderful holiday gift from my mother we got a new fridge! It’s ostensibly the same size as the old one, but it’s laid out so much better that it fits a lot more, and of course it doesn’t have the problem of going warm/cold/warm/cold since the compressor isn’t ailing.

We’re also getting a handful of books, including another core D&D set so my husband and I don’t have to keep trading them back and forth while we game. Of course in the middle of all of this we’ve both come down sick; hopefully I’ll still get some work done today.

Legendary Coffee Mug of Restoration!

Is it possible to be addicted to design? I never knew I’d end up having so much fun designing shirts & stuff when I first started that cafepress shop with my husband and our friend. I’d never done this kind of stuff before, and I’ve been stunned to see how well things have taken off (this month we hit the tier one volume bonus on THE FIRST DAY of December) and how much fun I’ve had with it. I’m getting more proficient with GIMP, although it still confounds me at times. It’s certainly helping me to design better items, even if the design takes longer. For example, the Epic Raiment of Holiday Cheer:

And of course, yet another new writers’ design, “write with curiosity:”

Among others. Yes, among others. Sigh… The Coffee mug of ultra-caffeination has also been selling like crazy, often 2-4 at a time.

Sure, it isn’t enough to live off of. But it supplements my husband’s income a lot better than the AdSense ads do, and it’s easier on my tendonitis than almost anything else I can do. It also dovetails perfectly with my ADD/bipolar/PTSD, because it’s easy to do in short bursts as the mood takes me, and I can apply it to almost any topic or interest–which means that restlessness and an inability to focus don’t keep me from accomplishing quite a bit. I pretty much despaired of ever finding anything that worked this well with my particular disabilities, so I’m going to let myself go nuts with it!

Technorati Tags: cafe press, cafepress.com, meerkats, Warcraft, World of Warcraft, writers, writing

I’m officially taking today off after spending the last few days cooking (and eating, of course). Phew! Tired but happy. And we have a fridge and huge freezer full of awesome food. All we needed to pick up this week was some milk, pretty much!

Tomorrow I’ll start in on the rest of the cookbook reviews; I’m looking forward to this. I’ll get them up hopefully over the course of this week–in time for holiday shopping!

Also, we have a couple new designs up at cafepress in addition to the new Epic Coffee Mug of Ultra-Caffeination:

I managed to write my review of Alison Kent’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Erotic Romance largely before the anti-allergy meds kicked in. But if you see anything that looks odd, particularly toward the end, please do tell me!

In allergy news, it’s looking more and more like I’ve become sensitized to corn, of all things. Now, just to make it clear how annoying this really is, I should explain that my reaction worsened a bit again this morning, and my current guess is that it’s because I had dessert last night–ice cream with cool whip. That doesn’t seem related to a corn allergy, huh? Well, the second ingredient in the cool whip and the fourth in the ice cream were–have you guessed it yet?–corn syrup.

Yes, corn syrup.

I even noticed this morning that there’s corn syrup in the fat free half and half I put in my coffee. ARGH.

My current hope is that if I lay off the corn long enough–which at this point is going to mean eating virtually no pre-made foods and not going out to eat–I might at least get back to the point where I can have things like corn chips or corn syrup in moderation. After all, when it comes to food allergies, mine don’t tend to be all-or-nothing; I just tend to get sensitized when I have too much of something (it’s just never been this bad before).

At least it wasn’t wheat. That would have sucked a lot worse.

So, this morning I took my benadryl, atarax, zantac, and prednisone (three antihistamines and a steroid) and rushed to get my review written before the doped-up feeling sank in. Blargh.

Technorati Tags: Alison Kent, allergies, book reviews, books, erotic romance, erotica, romance, writers, writing

I look kind of human today. I’m probably even recognizable. I’m back to having racing stripes on my forehead instead of looking like I have a caveman’s protruding brow. Excerpt from the visit to the ER:

Doctor walks into the room looking down at the chart. “So, what’s going on today–” She looks up in the middle of “today” and stops speaking. “Oh.”

I just smile ruefully.

We’re out of easy-to-make food in the house, except for a few things I mostly shouldn’t have any more, and I’m so doped up that anything that requires effort just makes me want to go back to bed. Hopefully we’ll manage groceries tonight. I am a coffee-powered machine, particularly when I’m this sleepy from meds, and I’m pretty much out of coffee.

I should finish my latest review book this afternoon, but we’ll see when exactly the review goes up. On an ideal day I’d write it this afternoon, since I already know what I want to say. But I’m so sleepy I’d be lucky if I could string two coherent paragraphs together, and I’d want to wait and re-read it when I was more awake anyway just to make sure something… strange… didn’t find its way in.

I’ll start putting exercises up in the Epiphanies again as soon as I can think straight.

I’ve got charisma Jr. Raglan

I’m not sure whether I look more like a Klingon this morning, or the results of some mad scientist’s experiment to see if he could affix a tomato in place of a person’s head. Apparently my first set of guesses as to which foods to eliminate from my diet to relieve my allergic reaction were incorrect, at least guessing by how much worse the reaction is this morning. Time to find out whether my doctor’s clinic is open on Sundays, and if not, decide whether I need to hit the hospital.

And for god’s sake, MUST NOT SCRATCH MY FACE. So, yeah, not much useful getting done around here for the next couple of days, I’m guessing.

Traditional edit: The nurse on the phone made it clear that waiting for tomorrow to see a doc was right out, so in I went to the emergency room. Now I’m all doped up on steroids, two antihistamines (one prescrip, one otc), and an anti-itch drug. And sleepy as all hell, but that’s better than feeling like I want to rip my face off. They have nice people at the hospital ER near us. I like them. Maybe it’s just me, but I always end up feeling like I’ve gotten better care when I’ve ended up seeing a physician’s assistant/nurse practitioner, instead of an actual doctor. They seem to take more time to carefully ask questions, and they seem to care more. But maybe that’s just the folks I’ve happened to see.

Technorati Tags: allergies

Okay, don’t expect anything useful from me today. I just love it when I wake up with mysterious allergic reactions. (That was sarcasm, in case you missed it.) Benadryl makes me very sleeeeepy, so I expect to be doing a lot of, well, sleeping. My upper lip is rather puffy and I have a hive or two on the back of my right hand. And since I have no idea what’s causing it, I can probably expect it to get worse before it gets better.

Tomorrow we take Selene in for her distemper booster shot and a microchip. She has vaccine allergies, so she gets a Benadryl shot before her vaccines. Last time she got this done she kicked during the shot and ended up lame in one leg for months and taking steroid pills. Hopefully that won’t happen again…

Later I’ll post about the wonders of the current microchipping program for pets. It’s awesome.

Traditional edit: AAAARGH! I was really hoping to nurse my ailing computer through another year, but I’m seriously starting to wonder about it. I’m now going to stop doing just about anything on it for the rest of the day until I can back it up tonight. Yes, it’s acting that flaky. As much as I’d truly love to run out and replace it, well, the furnace, A/C, and breaker panel were more important.

Mistletoe Value T-shirt

I’m underslept (it’s 2 am and I’m awake because post-nasal drip nearly drowned me in my sleep), my head is pounding for no good reason, and I’ve been cranky all week (also for no good reason). But writer unboxed has saved you from having to endure an insomnia- and crankiness-inspired rant. They liked my review of Novelist’s Boot Camp, which pleases me, and that’s enough to make me less cranky and tip the balance away from ranting.

I get kind of punchy at 2 am. I really don’t have much tolerance for lack of sleep.

We had quite a storm last night. At some point there was a thunderclap so loud and close that I don’t mind admitting it scared the hell out of me & the cats. Later I think I found out just how close it was–there’s a big ol’ tree in our neighbors’ front yard that overhangs the road and our driveway. A very large limb split right off into our driveway and the road. If it had been a limb just several feet to another side it would have taken out all the power lines, etc. on the pole that goes by there.

In a way I’m surprised we didn’t lose power last night. Between the torrential downpour and the high-force winds, we really should have. However, we almost never do. We get a bunch of very brief “outages” when we get a storm–on the order of a few seconds long–and that’s usually it for about a block in every direction, while most of the other streets in a mile’s radius or so will go out entirely for hours. Someone once wondered aloud what important person lives near us that the infrastructure has been built up so nicely here. We just guess that we happen to live at the juncture of a couple of systems, such that when one cuts out another cuts in pretty quickly.

I should review the Senseo today, but I’m feeling very restless, so it might wait until Monday.

I do have to say that I continue to be in shock at how well the cafepress store is doing. We sell at least one out of mana item alone every day, on average, and of course there’s all the other stuff too. I was surprised to do a search for “world of warcraft” on CP the other day and find several of our designs on the first page of results, ordered by best selling. (Just checked again, and there are five on the first page of results today. Whooo!) However, I do have to say that if I were inclined to put bumper stickers on my car, I’d get this sticker from someone else’s shop:

Traditional edit: Restlessness has driven me to find a whole new hobby: reading the saga of AFK gamer. It’s like a soap opera for Warcraft geeks! I’m going through most of the archives now, reading about guild dramas of all kinds. The guy who writes this thing has a hysterical style and actually knows how to use the English language and all that, so it’s a ton of fun to read if you play the game. After all, guild drama can be a riot when it isn’t your guild.

Technorati Tags: bumper stickers, cafe press, cafepress.com, gamers, games, gaming, Warcraft, World of Warcraft