I owe everybody an update to this I think. I am getting closer to finding a place. Just to give you all a general idea of the type of place I am looking at, and what I think of it:

http://www.elitechicagorentals.com/listings/details/36 (2415 W Palmer)
- acceptable, too far East for what I want, price must come down a little but IME this is normal.

http://www.homeaway.com/vacation-rental/p211715
- this is the house I want, but the owner won't respond.

http://www.elitechicagorentals.com/listings/details/183 (3123 N Clifton)
- perfect location but would have to come down $100/night in price. EDIT: nevermind, it is the correct size.

I'll post when I have a final update on location.

Aaaaand let's talk turkey. It's likely that the house will come in under $450 a night. For four nights after taxes and other misc, let's just say that the house would be $2500 total. Kenn has offered to put up $300 to have the festivities there, so that leaves $2200 amongst 9 people, roughly $250 total per person or $500 per couple, aside any adjustments for fairness such as arrivals/departures or people adding themselves to the mix, or potential sleeping on couches. You get the point.

Based on these rough calculations, is this doable for everyone?

And it may be the only hope for Detroit? Kind of an awesome article. I am tempted to go find these places.

There are spoilers for the rogue city elf origin story under the cut.

I did end up choosing my usual elf rogue instead of the human, despite the shortness. I went ahead with the City elf, despite the obviousness of the coming storyline, because the forest elves sounded too twee. So, I can't claim that I didn't know what I was in for, story wise.

( Origin )

There's not much else to tell, except that Allia thoroughly explored the Grey Warden's camp this morning, picking a lot of elfroot (Tom "Fidgit" Chick tells me it will be important), promising to find another plant for a very not-cute doggie, and talking someone else into feeding a prisoner. Haha, Mike, I get to persuade people. Maybe I will even be a bard.

Tonight it will be Ritual Time!

I went downstairs this morning and fired up my almost entirely unused account on the Windows 7 box and created my Dragon Age character. I waffled a lot, mostly because I've watched previews and read the website before diving into the little demo. I still don't know if I'll change it.

Basically what I did was my standard RPG thing with one little change - I created a female rogue whose name is Anne because I have no imagination for names whatsoever. I chose human rather than some form of elf as usual, because I didn't like the look of the elf option. They are apparently short? This is one point on which I waffle.

The other is actually the rogue part. The previews I've watched have two really cool looking female party members, and they look like a rogue and a mage. Of course I'll have to leave one of them behind if I'm going to keep the rogue class. I waffle but lean toward thinking this is a stupid reason to waffle, I like playing rogues and always enjoy it, and it will be FINE.

Plus, it seems as if I'll get less of that ubiquitous blood spatter on me if I'm standing back and shooting arrows. Seriously, on the website? The loading graphic is a head sliding down a sword squirting blood. It's a little bit ridiculous. No, it is a lot a bit ridiculous. I could do without all the squirting and don't really care if it is more realistic.

No, not The Girlie Show, thanks very much.

( SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE THING )

Is it POSSIBLE to write a chapter of this book without mentioning spanking? Seriously.

Yes. On the subject of Lucifer's Hammer, I am a terrible writer, since originally I did not mean to just focus on the feminist aspects of the Way Things Went Down. The rest of the stuff was depressing as well. I prefer, most of the time, to think that humanity is better on the whole than people think they are, and kind of hate to imagine that in the event of such a terrible catastrophe that everyone would so damn quickly pick up their guns and start shooting people who weren't theirs.

Then again I remembered that.

Civilization! Let's make sure it doesn't go away.

Second, on the subject of Dan Brown. As I was telling Sparkles in another entry, I kind of wish I had the print version of The Lost Symbol so I could sit down and quote for you two awesome bits - one about IP addresses and one about Twitter that had Mike and I crying with laughter. So great. And really, most of the entire book was great for hilarity, since we find it very amusing to mock the fake suspense, and yell out the obvious at the book when it insists that what it is discussing is a Very Difficult Puzzle. For instance I believe Mike shouted "It's in the Fucking Washington Monument!" at least 4138 times from about chapter six on. Then again the chapters are only about a page long - also giggle worthy - so it might have been chapter twelve.

BUT at the end it descends into non-giggle-worthy woo-woo-nonsense that I DON'T find funny because I actually think it is dangerous and terrible. What I am referring to is the woo-woo idea that if you just try hard enough and have the proper mindset you can make anything happen, and all good come to you. Dangerous, dangerous stuff, and people keep trying to peddle it - The Secret, some forms of Protestantism, many self-help seminars, etc.

The reason it is so dangerous is that there's a grain of truth to it. If you have a positive attitude, well, yes, you're going to have a better life. IT TURNS OUT that people like positive people better than negative people! I know this is shocking news. And I'm sure it is also shocking news to all of you that managing your expectations of life correctly has a large impact on your ENJOYMENT of said life.

HOWEVER IN REALITY. Shit happens to people that don't deserve it. What's dangerous is that this woo-woo type thinking makes people more likely to blame the victims - you're sick because you didn't trust god enough. You're poor because you're not working your brain waves hard enough. Your house burned down because you didn't think hard enough about your prosperity. In other words, if ONLY YOU WERE BETTER this wouldn't have happened to you. IF ONLY YOU WERE A BETTER PERSON you would have more stuff.

Is this attitude at the root of all evil? It's certainly at the root of some.

So shut up, Acclaimed Writer Dan Brown. Write your hilarious nonsense about Freemasons and the Divine Feminine and the Illuminati, but don't peddle this crap to all the credulous people that like your books.

Sometimes I like to take old familiar books with me on vacation, and other times I like to take a bunch of old books I haven't picked up yet but should have for whatever reason. This vacation was one of the latter and I managed to actually read two and a half of these actually on vacation.

Leguin's The Left Hand of Darkness is obviously a really great book. It really struck me how true it is, if you're unable to put someone in a specific gender box, if they are neither, how you'd probably be unpinned from your moorings and uncomfortable. And end up putting them in a box anyway, of your choosing.

Dean's Tam Lin was alright. It's a kind of meandering thing that hints halfheartedly at mystery and doesn't really get started until the last couple chapters and the people in it are the sort of people that I want to like but who actually just irritate me most of the time and it's quaintly very nineteen-seventies. I think. Despite all that it's also about going off to college and having that weird family of friends that morphs and breaks and mends and is very temporary, and I could relate to it and enjoy it on that level.

Then there was Lucifer's Hammer. Oy. On the apocalypse[1] porn level this was a really awesome/exciting book, although I kept being jarred by Niven and Pournelle's contention that Southern California would house [one of] the last safe space[s] on the planet after a comet strike. On the feminism level I wanted to punch the book in the nose. A lot. One could make a case that the authors wrote the book solely to provide a scenario under which "all this women's liberation crap would be over." (an actual sentence from the book; I think it was one of the good guys that thought it) Therefore I was constantly jarred by the fact that I didn't WANT to believe that this is the way it would really turn out. The women in the book who I most related to, who fought all their normal lives to be their own people, ten minutes after the comet falls decide the world has changed, pick a man, hang on, and send their men out to git 'er done.

So reassure me. We wouldn't have to go back, would we? If most of the world was gone and we were fighting just to survive, we wouldn't have to go back in the kitchen and rely on our big strong men to protect us? Right?

[1] if you've recently been lectured at by Dan Brown, AS I HAVE, you would know that this word actually means "lifting the veil!"

I've been rolling around this article in my head since I read it yesterday.

For those that don't feel like reading an essay on the obvious possible pitfalls of fundamentalist Christian-sponsored "crisis" pregnancy centers (CPCs), I'll explain briefly: The article describes several horrible experiences that women had when visiting CPCs to research and find support for their unexpected pregnancies. These horrible stories include coercion, isolation, open-adoption bait-and-switch, failure to advise birth mothers of their rights, shaming, chastisement, etc, it goes on. The article also zooms back to the big picture to talk about a certain CPC's low ratings among birth mothers. It discusses the fact that many of these CPCs are affiliated with megachurches, and have policies reserving assistance only for mothers that chose adoption rather than keeping a baby -- which obviously needs support as well!

The starring CPC in the article is the center that arranged the open adoption of my child into a good home when I was eighteen years old, Bethany Christian Services.

Before I get into my reaction to the article, for the record: I am now an atheist, I believe in legal access to abortion, and I was raised a Christian Fundamentalist.

That all being said, my first reaction to the article was anger. Hey! I said. My experience was absolutely nothing like that. Sure, they didn't give me any information whatsoever on abortion, but I went to that center specifically because I thought abortion was wrong at the time. I knew they wouldn't. I also can't imagine anyone sane thinking a center with "Christian" in the name *would* give advice for abortion. But they carefully explained the adoption process to me, explained how open adoption would work with them as a mediator, and carefully explained to me my rights up to the year's grace period. They offered me a grief counselor prior to the birth, held grieving birth parent group meetings at their center every week, arranged a time for me to see my child when he was six months old, and faithfully passed on communications from the adoptive family up until the time the adoptive family decided they were comfortable with all of us knowing each other's particulars (when the child was about five years old). They never once made me feel like a shameful person for accidentally getting pregnant[1]. It's been a long time but I don't recall a single coercive statement.

[1]unlike SOME of the Christians around me.

And the end result is wonderful. I've just met him, he's great, his family is nice, and there's a lot of joy involved on all sides.

So clearly, the experience must differ quite a bit from center to center. Perhaps even social worker to social worker. Nice of the article, I thought, to cherry-pick only those experiences that illustrated their point.

Upon further thought... also clear is that an organization that allows the kind of experiences retold in the article is at some fault. It is clear that that kind of thing is Not Okay and should be changed.

In order to change it, is it necessary to write a skewed outrage-provoking article like that? I'd like to think that one could simply say what I've said instead; it feels more true. But that is, I expect, naive and woo-woo; not the way the world works. Here's hoping that someday all CPCs would provide abortion-free pregnancy counseling (as is their right) without coercion, denying a mother agency, or shaming her.

From a recent description of Fallout 3 on Tor.com:

You play yet another Vault Dweller, this time the son of a prominent scientist.

*cough*

So, I have an account that I never use. But I did think of something I'd like to use it FOR, but I'm not sure it will work.

See, I really like to write about the traveling that we do, but I just can't get motivated after we get home. Also I always feel like I forgot a lot of the important things I thought of while we were on vacation. And we're going on Vacation in a few weeks.

I was thinking that "tweeting" (*twitch* *hate*) might be the solution to this - like, the fact that people might read it would motivate me to say stuff at all, and then tossing off quick thoughts WHILE I was doing the stuff might actually get me a record of the vacation, which would be awesome.

It's that record that is the sticking point. Lazyweb, is there a way to export all those tweets, or something, so that I can at least save them (probably here, but NOT in real time, so that ljtwitter thing isn't what I want) and at best annotate and flesh out my comments afterwards?

No spoilers really, but probably in comments.

Holy holy christ on toast. That was five hours of the most brutal television I have ever seen.

Most of what can be said was already said, but I'd just like to add that I am indescribably happy that a character like Rhys was written and acted fearlessly and well. So, so awesome.

Would a male candidate for the Supreme Court ever be asked if he thought he had a temperament problem?

that there is a certain kind of giddy mood that can only be produced by at least four hours on the phone being escalated through five different levels of support with two different vendors and hearing the phrase, "Huh, I've never seen it do that before" at least three times.

I volunteer to smash every blackberry on the planet with a hammer, if someone will go round them up.

On the other hand, maybe I could be like that alien that goes about insulting everyone alphabetically in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I could pop out of a magic spaceship all over the planet with my trusty hammer, yelling "Ha!", as I snatch the Blackberry from its owner, throw it on the ground, and then yelling "Wham!" as I pound it once for great justice, and then yelling Shazaam! as I pop back into the spaceship and vanish.

Basically, I would spend the rest of my life popping out of the air, smashing blackberries, and yelling a lot. It sounds kind of awesome.

A girl can dream.

Update to previous entry here.

Definite Schedule:

Friday: Arrivals
Saturday: I will be going to the Eastern Market for a brief visit and from there doing a short-attention-span-driving-tour of parts of Detroit if anyone is still interested.
Sunday: I could be convinced to go to the zoo if at least two other people are in.
-----------Dinner at Gauchos, I believe, unless people have serious objections to rum and meat.
Monday: Grilling and Departures
Tuesday morning: Last trip to the airport

Other trips to wineries, shopping, or museums are possible and directions can be provided, you would just be going without me. My husband expects to keep the home fires burning the whole weekend.

If you have not given me your flight info yet, please do so in the comments[1], and if you've thought of any more snack or drink you want, leave a comment here. Otherwise you will eat and drink what we have and you will like it.

Phone number and address in this friends-locked entry. If you can't see it let me know.

Also friends-locked: The House Rules have been edited.

[1]ESPECIALLY IF YOUR NAME IS MEL. You're going to make me use my phone to transmit the sound of my voice if you don't. HORRORS.

So, I just noticed that this party is four weeks away! Time for a planning post.

AGENDA:
Friday, May 22: Arrivals, Games, Eating, Drinking, General Being Merry, Fire
Saturday, May 23: An Activity of Some Kind (see below), Also Second Verse Same as the First (see Friday)
Sunday, May 24: An Activity of Some Kind (see below), Third Verse Same as the First (see Friday), Dinner Out (see below)
Monday, May 25: Outdoor eating (weather permitting), destruction of property (probably), drunkenness, song, and departures (sadly).
Tuesday, May 26: Final departures

POTENTIAL ACTIVITIES:
1. Shopping Trip - Somerset Mall. For those who love the shopping, directions will be provided to the fanciest mall in the Detroit area.
2. Wine Road Trip - For those that love the wine, a road trip to the wilds of Michigan for wine tasting and procuring.
3. Eastern Market - flowers, produce, quirky shops, and barbecue (oh, the barbecue)
4. Tour of Detroit - for those who might be interested, I can be induced to provide a guided tour of the sights of Detroit before it finishes its 40 year decline into complete ruin. Would include famous ruined buildings, gorgeous mansions in the middle of devastation, various statuary, and a museum or two.
5. Various Attractions - The Detroit Institute of Art just finished a renovation, the Black History Museum is always cool, and the Detroit Science Center (think COSI) still has the Star Trek exhibit on. The Detroit Zoo is huge and elaborate, and the Henry Ford museum and Greenfield Village are famous.

POTENTIAL DINNER OUT:
1. Gauchos - Meat and Caipirinhas. We did this last year, and it was good.
2. Slows of Detroit - This place is excellent, if small. Heavenly barbecue and awesome beer selection. I'm not sure if I can get us all in at once but we can try.
3. Mezza - new Mediterranean place opened near us. Mike and I scouted it a few weeks ago and it was delicious. Replaced La Shish, if you knew it.

OTHER DETAILS:
There will be Oberon, wine, brats, chicken salad sandwiches, potato salad, and god help me, pie. I'll accept donations of food! Food all weekend will be a buffet of various things that may or may not go together, eaten extremely informally wherever one can find a seat.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO:
Leave a comment, if you're coming. Or if you're not! But if you're coming, include:
1. Your arrival and departure times, flight details if relevant.
2. Your vote(s) for activities. Staying at the house is always an option, I'm certain my husband will keep you company.
3. Your vote for Sunday dinner out.
4. Your snack and drink wants, and what if anything you're bringing (nothing is perfectly fine).

Come celebrate the ashes of the fandom that died (*wink*), Towel Day, Nerd Pride Day, the Glorious 25th, whatever you like. Hard boiled eggs, towels, and Exclusivist Asshole buttons provided free of charge.

Wow! Um. Buh? Did he-? Was that-? *monkey organ grinder music* Jesus. oooooKAY. HELLO.

Jim Butcher has probably endeared himself to me for life for twice using the speech, "The plan is insane. You are insane. I'll need some pants."

It is possible that on Saturday I may not wear pants.

Having read over a dozen Jim Butcher books in the last two months, I have Opinions.

There's really only one thing that still bothers me about his stories, after all these words, and at this point it doesn't seem likely to change. What is with the constant barrage of Mortal Peril? I mean yes, it wouldn't be a story without some danger, and obstacles to overcome. But seriously. He uses his characters up to the last drop, and in fact goes to great lengths to discuss how they are exhausted, both mentally and physically, and cannot possibly overcome the next horrible thing that is coming at them. And yet, every time, they do. Granted, occasionally there is a deus ex machina to rescue the poor heroes, but often there isn't.

It bugs me, and as much crack as the books are, occasionally makes me go OH FOR CRYING OUT LOUD GET SOME SLEEP, HARRY or OH FOR THE LOVE OF JESUS JUST LET HIM DIE, ISANA.

That being my reaction, clearly they are all crack and I am reading them until my eyes bleed. I like them, but I think I love the Codex Alera a little more than the Dresden Files.

I have not read the fourth book yet, so if you have and you spoil me I will be furious. Furious, haha, get it?

( Other thoughts - Spoilers for The Codex! )

Chicken Salad Recipe (crossposted to df_recipes)

You will excuse my recipe writing, which is rambling and unnecessarily conversational.
( Read more... )