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Jan. 6th, 2010 @ 07:01 pm
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After a legal name change, you're just getting started. You have to inform a million and one different organizations. Many are easy. Just tell them the new name and tada. Others require sometimes ridiculous methods of proof. I've gotten MOST of these out of the way, but there are a few stubborn stragglers who just do NOT want to listen.
In this case, it's about loans. Of course they want to make sure I pay, so it would make total sense if they wanted a more sure form of proof. But no. When I went to update all my info, they made it clear they'd be passing it by social security to verify everything. So along with everything else, I gave them my current name, hoping they would get the picture when SS approved it.
So a while later, they send me an email informing me, CHLOE (they love all caps), that SS has verified everything and I'm good to go. I log in, and find my old name still there. What do they want for names but no other changes? A copy of drivers license, count order, or whatever. A photocopy. A very easily faked photocopy, when they just verified it through social security? Really!?
tl;dr Congratulations, federal student loan, security division. You're officially retarded.
~Chloe ♣
PS: I usually sign with a ♥, but I think you deserve a beating.Current Mood:  frustrated Current Music: The Bird and the Bee - Fucking Boyfriend |
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Strange dream.
I dreamed that I was a young man, and recently I had been having some very strange experiences. I would have bouts of super strength or speed, not quite like Superman -- uncontrollable and erratic, but much faster than a normal person. One night I walking home and found myself running and jumping to the top of an apartment building. I hadn't particularly meant to jump up here. What was happening to me?
A little girl was playing with a radio up on the roof, and when I appeared, she came over to me. She looked into my eyes and saw my eyes go from brown to grey-white, and then back to brown.
"You merged," she stated.
I raised an eyebrow at her and she shrugged, turning back to her radio. "I can tell when someone is different like us," she explained. "It's like you send out a signal that I can pick up. And somehow, you always manage to find me, as if I'm sending a signal back out to you." She glanced at me as I stared, blank faced. I'd been on my hands and knees since my leap onto the roof, and realizing this, I stood.
"So... what are we?"
She shrugged. ( Different. )
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I've seen several of these types of memes around the internet, but I swiped and modified this particular one from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) glockgal:
( The last year in artwork! Somewhat large image behind the cut. )
jan. = A commissioned piece of baby Harry, his parents and the other Marauders. I'm quite proud of this one.
feb. = Kidding season and lack of drawing space at the farm prevented any art save a doodle of the Other Father from 'Coraline'. Never did work on this one any more.
mar. = Zero artwork accomplished due to kidding season and no space to draw. :(
apr. = Tribute to Kandi & Vanilla Bean, two goats who died from painful 'blue bag' infections of the udder. Love this piece, though am haunted by it's subjects.
may = Nouveau Nubian, first in a hopeful series of goat breeds in this style.
jun. = Nouveau Boer, second in the series.
jul. = Doodle of Nefertete eating some grain.
aug. = 10 of Wands tarot card featuring Hermione and her Time-Turner. I am fond of this one.
sep. = the Lovers tarot card featuring Harry & Ginny. I'm also very pleased with this one.
oct. = 4 of Wands tarot card featuring Harry and his Hogwarts Letters. Not as happy with this card. *shrug*
nov. = Fan art of a funny scene in 'Ghostbusters' - the style of this was lots of fun.
dec. = I doodled this caricature of the Professor from 'Gilligan's Island' literally a few hours before I left for the airport to go to WA for Christmas and didn't have time to scan it. I'm hoping to refine and finish it soon! :B
Art Drawn: A truly sad year art-wise, approximately 20 arts done in total, including sketches... at least, that's all I decided were worth scanning and posting - but I doubt that there's more than 30-something in existence for this year. :(
High Points of the Year: Some excellent goat art: the start of a hopefully marketable series of goat breeds and my Christmas cards (which I will scan & add to my website soon). Also completed a decent number of tarot cards - the most in one year for a long time!
Low Points: Several months of zero to only 1 art or sketch worth mentioning. Ouch.
What I'm looking forward to in 2010: DRAWING MOAR.
What I missed in 2009: Hmmm, artwise? I guess just having a nice place to draw for most of the year and lacking the energy to do more.
Best Art for the Year: I am most proud of and enjoy looking at 'Kandi and Vanilla Bean's Blue Bags'. I think it's my best piece of the year.
Worst Art: 'Coraline's' Other Father. It's unoriginal and unfinished and just overall unremarkable.
Art Resolution for 2010: To start taking commissions once again and make more progress with potentially sellable artwork.
So, back home in Cali and excited for 2010! I feel the urge to do some major online redesign, but I don't really have the time for that right now. Back to work tomorrow and Sunday, then back to school on Monday with several tests waiting for me. It's going to be a crazy first few months till graduation in March!
Happy New Year everyone!Current Mood:  sleepy |
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I was tempted to wait on this since next Wednesday is the six month anniversary of my last post, but I gotta give New Years its due. As I mentioned on Twitter, my resolutions are to read 52 books, write 1 book, exercise 156 times, and listen to 17885 songs. So I figure to help keep me on task, I'll report back here every Friday morning with my progress in the hopes that avoiding shame will be a powerful motivator. If I fall behind, or I neglect to report in, feel free to mock and point in especially degrading ways to get me off my ass. ^.^
So there you go. My resolutions and how I'll stick to them. I'll even try to post mini reviews of what I read, but we'll see how that goes. Reviewing is hard! My target on the writing part is ~250 words a day. I'm new and slow, gimme a break. ¦∙Þ
~Chloe ♥Current Mood:  optimistic |
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So 2009 was a pretty good year. I got a good agent, sold a novel, and made tons of new friends. A year ago I wasn't sure if The Rise of Renegade X would ever find a publisher, and since then I've held it in my hands as a real book. Crazy sauce!
In the last year I also:
Discovered the Vampire Academy books by Richelle Mead, and now I'm not sure how I ever got by without them.
Watched all of Arrested Development, The Office, and Community (I may have watched all the episodes of Community three times now...) and ABSOLUTELY LOVED all three, so don't bother telling me The Office is stressful or that Arrested Development got canceled for a reason, because I'm not listening.
Became brave enough to take pictures of the books in the store. I used to be terrified of this and thought it was illegal somehow or that I'd get in trouble, but now I just flash my "Official YA Author" badge and everyone leaves me alone. (Lies.)
Finished reading 45 books, which once would have been a low number for me but now is sort of large.
And that brings me to 2010, which is going to be a big year for obvious reasons. My book's coming out and I'm going to BEA and probably lots of other stuff will happen, too. I don't usually make New Year's resolutions, because I tend to fail at them, but I'll at least admit I have goals for 2010.
I want to read 100 books this year.
I didn't finish writing any books in 2009--that needs to not still be true this time next year, or I will go crazy. I'd like to finish at least two books, and since I'm in the middle of two right now, finishing them would do nicely. Ideally I'd like to finish them up in the next couple months, then take some time off and write another one in the second half of the year. (But even just finishing one will send me into fits of ecstaticness and relief.)
I'm going to at least try using my drop spindle, even if it's terrifying. (It's not really *that* terrifying, it's just a wheel on a stick, but I have a feeling there will be a lot of failure involved before succeeding, and also the magic of turning wool into yarn with just a little wheel on a stick seems too good to be true, even though I saw someone do it.)
I'm going to finish up the knitting/crochet projects I've been working on for other people.
And I think that's it! Sounds doable, right?
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And finally the personal stuff.
This was the year I got together with Miles. He is quite simply the best thing that has ever happened to my body. The man against whom all other men will be measured and found wanting. He looks and smells and feels so good to me.
And I am going to leave it at that.
Happy New Year. |
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Events:
I got to see Leonard Cohen in concert. That was one of those once in a lifetime things, I would say. It was an amazing show, and he sang nearly every song I wanted to hear and then some. He stayed onstage for at least 3 hours, and it was a phenomenal show.
Ever since I moved to Seattle and Harvey Danger reunited, I went to see them as often as possible. My favorite band, and they turned out to be local??? And...then they broke up again. But thanks to my living here in Seattle, I got to see their final two shows, and thrill of thrills, they actually played Carjack Fever, the song I had requested at every show I'd seen of theirs.
Glenn took me to an incredible surprise show down in San Diego: the Battlestar Galactica Orchestra. That was one of the coolest things I have ever seen. Bear McCreary is not only a pure genius of a composer, he's kind of ungodly hot. Some performers have presence, but a special few have this extra thing about them you can't take your eyes off of. The score from BSG was some of the most amazing music I've ever heard, but seeing it performed live was just glorious and mind-blowing. Gorgeousness and gorgeosity.
Speaking of San Diego, Comic Con was again an awesome experience. Christos Gage, one of my favorite writers, actually recognized me from Seattle and said hello. Peter David, another writer I greatly admire, recognized my costume and greeted me in character, then posed for a picture with me. The whole week was great fun, a geeky mecca of excitement and laughter. |
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And then there were comics...such wonderful comics.
I made one hell of a discovery this year. I mean, I had heard the name before, and I knew he wrote comics, but they weren't comics I was reading, and no one had ever recommended him to me. And let's face it, the fact that I had heard the name before was not really much of a draw, because, even though I certainly remembered thinking well of him within the context of the season of early reality TV he was part of, the years since then have poisoned my mind against anyone whose resume includes the term reality TV.
But I was just getting into DC comics after a few years of being solidly Marvel, and I kind of randomly picked up an issue of Batman. It was written by that guy from the Real World San Francisco, Judd Winick. And holy shit, it blew my mind. That one issue I grabbed on a whim had me more invested in Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne than the several issues of Grant Morrison's Batman & Robin title that were out at that time, and I was really excited for the next month. Winick's run on Batman proved to be sadly brief, and I was in love with the way he wrote Dick Grayson, so I went looking for more of his DC work. I read his Green Lantern and fell in love with Kyle Rayner completely. I read his Green Arrow and found Oliver Queen compelling and believable and deep. I've now read almost everything he's ever written, and this man writes superheroes in the most amazing way; they're complete people, and I believe in not just Green Lantern but also Kyle Rayner. It's been really exciting discovering this man's work, and I'm just hoping there'll be more new stuff before too long, because I'm almost through his back catalog.
Which brings us to Barry Ween, Boy Genius. It's Winick's creator-owned series from Oni Press, and it's some of the most fun I've ever had with a book. I laughed out loud so many times reading that series, and I wanted to give copies to everyone I knew.
Other than Judd Winick, I did read some other really cool stuff this year. Local and Box Office Poison were two of the most memorable comics I've ever read. Local is a really personal and intense story about a young woman doing some immensely stupid stuff on her way to growing up and learning what she really wants from life. Very relatable for me, I guess. Box Office Poison is one of those involved reads where everything is entertaining but not necessarily connected...until it is, twisting the knife as you suddenly see the strings between the characters. Like the title implies, it's like a sprawling indie film, an intimate character-based drama.
I read probably too many ongoing series that matter to me to go into that, but a couple of the highlights:
Avengers: The Initiative, by Christos Gage. One of the most consistently awesome books out there. With a cast of characters that at times seems to number in the hundreds, he never loses track of the stories and the moments that matter and that define these many people as both heroes and humans. Last year it was the issue that introduced Butterball that made me sit up and take notice. This year, there was a tale of an unlikely hero named Johnny Guitar that about broke my heart. And the latest issue focussing on Taskmaster was another knock right out of the park. It's actually a very rare issue of Initiative that isn't the best thing I read that week.
The Incredible Hercules, by Greg Pak and Fred van Lente. Also very consistent, this title made it feel like an ongoing xmas for several months this year when the two main characters' paths diverged, so rather than stretching out the story for more months, they just put the book out twice a month, taking turns with each storyline. And while Amadeus Cho is one of my favorite superheroes of all time, it was Herc's solo storyline "The Replacement Thor" that made for one of the greatest single issues of the year with its climax.
Mighty Avengers, by Christos Gage & Dan Slott. There was an early issue of this when Iron Man showed up to save the day because he didn't believe Hank Pym was sufficient hero material. The laughs were plenty throughout that issue, and they have not stopped since. I don't read comics to laugh, but a book that tends to make me laugh out loud is always going to rise to the top, and Mighty Avengers is just so much fun. Plus, Amadeus Cho on the team, nothing wrong there.
X-Factor, by Peter David. Jamie Madrox is my big comics crush, and this book has never faltered (excepting the godawful art we had to suffer through for a few months when Larry Stroman was pencilling). Again with the laughs, the concept of a senile Doctor Doom was mined to its full potential for hilarity without showing disrespect for the scary genius of the character.
Invincible, by Robert Kirkman. Every issue of this is awesome (okay, I tend to forget the aberration of the "event in one issue!" experiment). There was a fight scene that went on for like four months, and it never got old. I would not have believed I could be entertained by a fight scene that spanned not just pages but whole issues, but Robert Kirkman and Ryan Ottley are like the Wachowski Brothers of the comics world. Invincible lost the use of both arms during the battle and wound up beating his opponent to death with his own face. Now that is badassery at its finest.
Irredeemable, by Mark Waid. This book is creepy cool. The world's most powerful superhero has turned into a despot, terrorizing everyone on the planet and taking over. He can hear you from miles away, x-ray vision that secret diary you keep, and only two other beings have ever even survived confrontations with him. By the way, he's also got some unsettling sexual fetishes. An excellent story is slowly unfolding in this little universe, and every new slice is fascinating.
Looking back over my Picks of the Week on iFanboy, it really is an almost endless cycle of the books listed above, plus the sadly cancelled Captain Britain & MI:13 and a fair smattering of Buffy and Angel. So I guess I have largely covered my favorite books of the year. |
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Starting with easy stuff...
The best movies I saw were:
Wolverine Origins, which I still don't get why nobody liked--it was kickass and exciting and cool, and the acting was perfect. You take a star as talented and charismatic as Hugh Jackman and give him a role he is clearly passionate about, and then you give him Liev Schrieber as a foil, and there is just nothing not to love about that combo. Granted, you could say I am biased by my love of comics in general, the Marvel universe as a whole, and Wolverine in particular, but I stand by my above statement that this movie was just cool. I saw it with someone who is not remotely into comics, and he was exhilarated by it as well. Glad they're throwing the book at the asshole who leaked it and took the wind out of its sails pre-release.
Watchmen, the comic book movie you thought couldn't be made...and well, it couldn't exactly, because the ending was going to be changed to something else, and you had to know that going in. So you take the glorious near-perfection you got and accept the changes as inevitable. And hell, everything they didn't change from page to screen was incredible. It was a vision to behold, stylish, exciting, and best of all, Jeffrey Dean Morgan made the Comedian come to life so fully that you got why she loved him. An impossible feat if ever there was one, but he pulled it off and was mesmerizing.
Inglourious Basterds, the supercool film that reminded you how much you loved Tarantino after Pulp Fiction. Apparently a cousin of mine was offended by "the revisionist history," which just makes me wonder if he knows what that phrase means.... I went into this movie with almost no knowledge of it and was so glad I saw it that way, so I won't say more just in case among the 3 people who may ever see this post there is one who hasn't seen the movie.
500 Days of Summer, the movie I saw based solely on Joseph Gordon-Levitt's starring in it but was so pleasantly surprised by. The previews had me a touch concerned that the movie might be too hip to be any fun. Boy was that a false impression. The scene which utilizes every classic movie cliche of happiness from the musical number to the animated birds was just one of the many delightful touches that added up to a movie that made you glad to be alive and thrilled to have experienced it. I recall having a distinct spring in my step walking out of the theater that night.
The Brothers Bloom, the second film by Rian Johnson. As Brick was not only one of the best movies of its year but easily of the decade, and actually, a case could be made for of all time, it's not fair to compare them. Brick was unique and lush and ingenious on every level. The Brothers Bloom is almost a sleeper of a film by comparison. But it's lovely, and it takes you by surprise and touches you, and if you're not wiping away a tear by the end, what are you, a Replicator? |
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( As for the rest... )
We drove through Ballard to Magnolia -- a beautiful district of Seattle full of huge houses with great views -- to drop off some movies, and explored a little on the way home, discovering a little park on the crest of a hill over looking Interbay with a perfect view of the Space Needle and Seattle skyline, Mount Rainier, and a collage of other piedmonts and snow capped peaks in the distance over Queen Anne hill. I can't find any photos online that do it justice, which can only meant that on the next clear day I MUST bring my camera to this brand new park and try to capture just how amazing it's views are. This shot comes close (not mine), but as it's cloudy, it doesn't illustrate mountains in the distances:
After enjoying some pretty amazing cityscapes and dreaming of living in some of the big-with-a-view houses, we came home and enjoyed a lunch of lemon and herb marinated chicken breast from my work (with avocado, tomatoes, spinach, pepper-jack cheese on an onion bagel), and some baked sour cream and cheddar chips. Yum. An hour later we made an early trip to the gym, finding two empty cardio machines right next to each other, an exciting find mid-day. And now we've returned home and Brian is enjoying one of his birthday presents while I write about how wonderful things have been lately.
Sigh. When every day starts to feel a little more magical. =)
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It's not that anything particularly amazing has happened in the last few days... it's just that the particulars of each day have been amazing.
I don't know if I've mentioned this yet -- because often once I say, "I've been doing this new thing lately," I tend to immediately stop doing it for one reason or another -- but Brian and I have been going to the gym consistently since Dec 8th. We did all cardio the first week -- running, bicycling, and swimming -- then we took advantage of our complimentary 2 hours of personal trainer time and met with Ross twice. He taught us how to use most of the resistance machines and gave us loads of advice. We've been going 5-6 days per week... and it's been a blast. Brian and I go together, and just being with each other while we run or do reps makes it not a drag. We get to smile at each other, pretend to be competitive, and just spend quality time with each other that isn't lounging around the house.
It's so ( *nice*. )
We tried a crazy new vegetable that's noteworthy. It's called broccoli romanesco (or cauliflower romanesco, as it's apparently the natural outcome of a broccoli dad and cauliflower mom making babies), and it looks like a fractal veggie from a sci fi movie:
We roasted it like we would roast broccoli or cauliflower and it was delicious. It was fun branching out, but unfortunately it sounds like it's not in season any more -- or rather, it's not being sold in the market near our place anymore. Sad face.
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