Below please find the LJ of Jenny Rowland, who fears no Google.

Dateline mid-April '09:

Free userpics here. Credit anyone who I note the art as belonging to.

Four Panels is still on hiatus. I know, you are all so sad and such. Meh.

As of July 2008, I am working at Epic Systems Corporation, outside of Madison, Wisconsin, as a software dev. You can Google Epic if you want, and read all the horror stories, but if they're all accurate then I guess I must've gotten hired in an alternate reality. I'm well aware that we individual employees are mere resources, to be used for the good of the company as a whole at the expense of our own personal time and lives; that we are expected to work ten, twelve, and occasionally, if we are useful enough to our evil overlords, even 24 hours straight with a smile and see a plastic-framed award certificate as full compensation; but, um, hello and welcome to the entire software industry? Next perhaps we can complain that sure, water keeps us from dying, but GRR IT IS WET I HATE THAT. Every morning I get to go to work in a t-shirt; every night I get to go home knowing that I've helped in some teensy-tiny way to help millions of people get cared for a little better by their friendly local doctor types. I guess what I'm trying to say is, neener.

I've also totally found the Nerd Mothership. It's like being raised by wolves, and then finally being rescued by your tribe, who on the way back to the village proceed to talk about how this is totally like that one episode of Star Trek. Then they ask you if you have your towel.

We gave up on fixing my old computer, and now I have a monster of a laptop and wilsonator's drive in an external drive housing dealie. My laptop is a Toshiba Satellite named Osterman. Naming a Satellite "Osterman" is a two-layered reference that you probably have to be me to get. Hint: one half is musical, one half is a major motion picture. But anyway! I now have access to all my old files and things! This is good, even if I do have to put up with Vista on Osterman. But I guess it's worth it, since now I can come home from my job programming healthcare software and spend my evenings programming hacked objects for The Sims (that would be The Sims I). I fully intend to get a working set of bunkbeds in the game eventually!

There, that should take care of the twice-yearly-if-you're-lucky top-of-the-page update. Dash dash dash. Dot!

Randomness from this weekend and today.

So we have a new developer on the HIM team today! I am his mentor. We spent like two-thirds of the mentor/mentee lunch talking about GTA San Andreas, so, you know, that was awesome.

I'm at Epic's Verona campus most of this week, instead of the building on Tokay Boulevard where my office actually is, so I get lots of opportunity to check out the construction site where they're busily constructing Campus 2. The most-complete building is shaping up nicely, although I don't know if it'll be ready for my team to move in next month like supposedly we will be. The next-to-most-complete building is coming along too. I keep wanting to go up to the construction workers and tell them that they amaze me, you know? They take all these piles of unassociated stuff, I-beams and concrete and whatever, and they go out there, do a bunch of hard work, and turn it into a coherent whole. That is incredible. And yet there's basically no way I could ever tell them that without them thinking I was being sarcastic. I'm not! I am amazed and grateful. Someone should write some notes to tape to the heavy machines.

THERE IS A ZOMBIE CONVENTION IN MILWAUKEE HOW DID WE NOT KNOW THAT BEFORE. Then again this might be the first one ever. It's hard to tell, as their site is kind of crap when it comes to actually telling you things. Can *you* find anywhere on the front page where it says *when* the convention is? I can't! But it's in October.

On Sunday we went back to Kopke's greenhouse, mainly to replace my coleuses as I, er, mumblemumblemanagedtokillthemallmumble. Or at least all the wizard roses, and one of the four black dragons might pull through, though probably not the other three. It turns out that prefertilized soil mix is not the best things to transplant little plants into! So we went back to get better soil, another four-dragon pot, and another three-strip of wizard roses. And we did get them. Plus some other coleus plants. You know. One or two. I repotted the old ones, then potted the new ones and added them to my plant table. After moving the old ones elsewhere. And finding places in the living room for the new colei that didn't fit on my table. And uh.



Do you think I have a problem?

So I'm finally going through the boxes that I hauled home from West Virginia, putting the books on shelves and flipping through the old papers and folders. There is a picture of all the kids who were at Camp Oakes the one year I whined my parents into letting me go, which would've been the summer after fourth grade. I am the palest kid in that whole damn picture.

The thing that caused me to wash the paperdust from my hands and come over here and start typing, though, is an old manila folder stuffed full of a variety of papery things. It's actually school-related things, homeworks and report cards and rewards and forms, for me and my sibs, apparently collected by my dad, given the dates and brief notes penciled on many of them in his handwriting -- not sure how it wound up in the same box as my junior-high yearbooks and one of my notebooks from college, but wind up in there it did.

One item from this mysterious dad-folder is the rough draft of a story I wrote in high school (linked from here as "The Experiment", but also pretty lousy). I know it's a for-my-eyes-only rough draft, because it leaves off in the middle with a scribbled note to "see calc 4" -- I used to use my graphing calculator as a word processor, writing stories and poems using the graphing equation editor, and undoubtedly I wound up writing a chunk of this story on that battered ol' TI-85 as well.

So why did my dad wind up with it? It's not even complete -- the rest would've been in my calculator, and I still have that, so it's not like he ganked that too. I wouldn't have given it to him, perhaps not even if it had been complete, since I packrat my old creative works like some kind of crazy packratting thing. It's got a date penciled on it in his writing, and it's in there with a Xerox of the packet that contained the story's final version, and a poem I wrote in elementary school, and several of the various essays that he made me write over the years on variations of the theme "Why I Should Be Nicer To My Brother." But how did the actual original copy of one of my rough drafts wind up in his clutches (along with a Xerox that's stapled to the other Xerox)? Maybe I left it out on the kitchen table and he ganked it. I dunno. I'm certainly not going to attempt to hunt him down to ask.

It's just weird, is all I'm sayin'.

(Also in the folder: a poem I wrote for an English assignment, involving dead soldiers rotting on a battlefield, together with a sheet of paper where he's written a couple sentences in defense of my having written said poem. It makes me wonder if my teacher didn't get worried and call my parents about the odd trackings of my mind, and I never even knew! Bizarre.)

I am sitting bored in a waiting room, and they have wireless only I didn't know so I didn't bring my laptop. Someone should entertain me, somehow.

Christmas 2002:


June 2009:


See, I told you the hen-and-chicks were going in a very special place.

Mom's now-ex-boyfriend Rich gave me this planter, original plant included, for Christmas in 2002, because he knew I liked snails. When I moved from California to Indiana in the summer of 2003, I believe I left the snailyplant with my friend Becky for safekeeping, and I'm pretty damn sure that I remember her telling me when I was back in California last year for her wedding that it had gotten broken at some point, and subsequently thrown away.

And yet when I went out to West Virginia last month, there it was in mom's garage. Plant dead and gone, filled with grungy old potting soil, but very much in one piece.

I am glad to have it back.


Also: photos from my phone coming soon assuming you can see anything in them! I just emailed them to myself, and when they show up I'll be able to actually look at them on a proper screen.

This was linked to from the intranet homepage at work. I think it's kind of neat.

You know, now that I've started occasionally looking at my LJ friends list again, I should probably get around to adding some of the many people who've added me in the last, what is it, two and a half years? Sounds about right. Three years this December since most of the stuff I once cared about stopped meaning quite so much to me anymore. MY SOUL IS DARK LIKE A DARK DARK THING.

So yesterday we went to Oregon!

Oregon, Wisconsin.

It's about 20 minutes from here. One exit east on the beltway.

We went there because Ed Shultz keeps telling me to go to I wanted to go to Kopke's Greenhouse and get a coleus plant. At the go-live I supported a couple weeks back, one user had a coleus plant in her office, and it was the first time I had ever seen a coleus, and I thought it was the awesomest plant ever. I was wrong, though, because at Kopke's they had an even awesomer one! It is mine now.



The pictures from my ancient crappy camera totally do not do this Black Dragon coleus justice. The leaves are a purple so dark they're almost black, shading to a vibrant, fiery sort of color in the middles. It only cost like five bucks, too.



Three little Wizard Rose coleuseseses. They're so pretty, I couldn't resist. Like little watermelons in leaf form. One of them isn't doing so well from when we left the plants in the trunk of the car for an hour while we had a supremely underwhelming lunch in the splotch of commerce that is Oregon's Main Street, but the others should be okay.



And some Hens And Chicks, which will shortly be transplanted into a very special place.




The three wizards and the one giant dragon are going to fight. Wizards and dragons are natural enemies. IT IS A FACT.


Coming eventually: a couple more pictures that I need to get off my cellphone!

So we bought a half-share in a local CSA. Today was our first shipment.

We bought a half-share.



A: A bag of spinach.
B: Two-thirds of a bunch of radishes; the other third is either in the fridge or in me.
C: Rhubarb.
D: The Chinese Cabbage That Ate Chicago.
E: Green garlic.
F: Baby turnips.

The Mountain Dew can is for scale. Seriously, that chinese cabbage is going to DESTROY US ALL.

I fear the full share!


ETA:


I'm not kidding here. Chicago is doomed.

Also: turns out rhubarb tastes just like the clover flowers kids in Orange County used to eat when I was one of said kids! I had no idea.

Best Halloween costume ever? Possibly!

The lady across the hall is not making herself any friends this weekend.

This is a no-dog building, and she keeps shutting two dogs in her apartment and going away over the weekend -- it's thought that the dogs belong to her boyfriend who's visiting her, which holds up given the fact that I saw a man and a woman walking two large dogs out the front door when it's only a woman who's there most of the time. This is the third such weekend we've noticed the dogs, and while it's unlikely that they are capable of being quiet for an entire day, let alone a weekend, it's possible that they've been here other times and simply escaped our notice.

Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark.

The first time we complained to management, whose name is Steve. Turned out Steve was kind of ticked at Dog Lady, because he hates having to manage pet buildings. He knew there was a dog here, since there was a big wad of dog piss in the snow right outside the front door (classy!), but he didn't know who had it -- until we clued him in.

The second time we complained again, and Steve was again also upset with Dog Lady, who had been ordered to Knock It The Fuck Off and hadn't. Presumably more letters and possibly phone calls were sent.

This time, when mecha went down to complain, the first thing Steve said -- before mecha could even open his mouth -- was "I've already had calls about it."

Turns out that in addition to barking, the dogs also run around like lunatics all day and night. The guy who lives under Dog Lady, who is a professional Dean Martin impersonator who I call Deano (not to his face, as I have never actually seen him), tends to be gone on tour a lot, but he's home this weekend, and apparently on his last nerve. Steve even says that Deano tried to talk to Dog Lady about maybe not being such a total assbutt, but Dog Lady appears to not care.

She's also stopped answering the phone when Steve calls, which is such a good idea for people who want to not be booted out of their apartments.

So Dog Lady's got us annoyed, she's got Deano annoyed, she's got Steve furious and is ignoring both written and spoken orders to get rid of the dogs... I've taken to running over and peering out at the hallway whenever I hear someone in the hall, to see if it's someone coming to yell at Dog Lady and take her dogs, and so just a few minutes ago I got to watch her next-door neighbors come home, glare at her door for a minute while the dogs barked psychotically at them, then go into their own apartment. So basically everyone hates her now.

Steve told us to call the emergency after-hours maintenance number if the dogs were still here tonight, so someone could come over and... I'm not clear what, exactly, take the dogs or something. I'd honestly rather wait and give Dog Lady plenty more chance to keep digging her grave deeper. She's not quite to the mantle yet, but she's gotta be close. And the thought of her getting evicted and taking a ding on her credit report over being too cheap to pay for doggy daycare warms the cockles of my black, festering heart.

Yeah, that's a hyperintelligent talking koala. It's a thing.

(Image is © 2009 K. B. Spangler, Creative Commons license, blah blah. I share, you go read perhaps yes? Hooray.)

Yay for dirty laundry that's been in a bag since Tuesday.

Also, this is making me want to play Sims 3. A neighborhood where you can actually visit other houses instead of having to invite people over? Yes please.

Then again, I still haven't squeezed all the entertainment I can get out of Sims 1 yet.

LAUNDRY LAUNDRY LAUNDRY

I am back in Madison!

My luggage, however, is not. Where is it? No one knows. Where is 75% of my clothing, including most of my "business" clothes? No one knows. Why did I have to be so stupid as to pack both my Snakes Flying A Plane t-shirt AND my Support All Our Troops t-shirt, neither of which Jeffrey Rowland sells anymore?

Pity when I had the choice to change into either Support All Our Troops or Franklin And The Dead Presidents last night, I chose the former. The latter made it home safely upon my body... and is still quite available for sale.

But, uh, for the first time ever a go-live involved enough sitting that my feet were not screaming in the type of agony that twenty aspirin can barely touch, so, uh, I guess the lesson is I shouldn't expect too much?

Don't mind me, I'm just "last night I got seven hours of sleep and that was a huge improvement over the two nights previous" levels of tired! That makes me whine a lot. Seriously, though, Continental, what the fuck?

Hrm. I am disappointed at the Electric Amish selection available on the You Tubery. Although they do have a minute-long snippet of the song from my post title on their website.

I am going to Vermont now! I will be back late Wednesday.

Doublehrm. I just randomly decided to read some of my earliest LJ entries, and now I am depressed. How very much younger I was, and how very much more innocent of how much it could hurt just to go on living from one day to the next, and how very much less aware of just how useless hope is. And yet I'm still ignorant enough to continue to hope that late 2006/early 2007 will be as low as I ever get, so there ya go.

Oh, yeah, that's right. Vermont.

I now have a phone with a qwerty keyboard, just like the kids these days with the Twitters and the hey-hey. Now I shall post to LJ with it!

We have lived in this apartment for not quite a year. In that time we have experienced:
* Air conditioner that stopped working right after move-in.
* Dryer that started snagging, tearing holes in and burning clothes.
* "Repaired" dryer that continued snagging, tearing holes in and burning clothes.
* "Repaired" "again" dryer that tore even bigger holes in clothes, mainly because maintenance guy forgot to put a fairly major part back in.
* Heater that started randomly setting itself to 80 degrees.
* Phone lines that didn't actually work anywhere in the entire apartment, because someone had managed to wire in the master jack upside down.
* Ceiling light in my room tore right out of the ceiling when we tried to change the bulb, mainly because it is of the "pull down on the globe to remove said globe" variety and it turns out the ceiling lights in this place are glued to the nubbly-stucco-style ceiling.
* Pipe in the bathroom wall that leaked at a moderate pace until the maintenance guy who "fixed" the dryer got to it, at which point it exploded and sprayed water everywhere.
* Pipe in the kitchen sink that was leaking, and had obviously been leaking for a good while since there was a huge swollen waterlogged spot in the bottom of the undersink cabinet.
* Oven that started getting within maybe 100 degrees of desired temperature on a good day.
* Fridge that started freezing things in the fridge portion at the same time that things in the freezer were melting.
* New washer/dryer unit to replace the old one, where the spinning washer drum snagged on and severed its own electrical cabling.

And now that same new washer/dryer unit is malfunctioning again -- the washer portion does nothing.

We've joked several times about this apartment being built on an ancient Ho Chunk burial ground, but I'm starting to wonder whether we maybe weren't right. I'm also wondering whether we'll be able to get someone halfway competent in to fix the washer this week, seeing as I have a go-live to go to Sunday through Wednesday and they kind of frown on you showing up to the hospital in soiled clothing.


Also, did you know that the game Kudos 2 is surprisingly addictive? It is! I am glad I finally succumbed to those Project Wonderful ads on the 'mudge. Now I just need to wait till next month when we haven't already spent pretty much all of our entertainment budget, and then I will have to buy it. Even if mecha disapproves of the way I go from playing The Sims to playing a different variety of life-simulator. "You're never going to be a well-rounded gamer," he laments. I should pick up GTAIV again, just to prove him wrong.

We saw the new Star Trek movie last night. I guess the people who liked it also think that what the command center of a spaceship needs is more tiny, bright spots of light, to dazzle the eyes of all who are trying to view the instruments and control panels.

Also: Nokia will exist and still have the distinctive Nokia ringtone 200 years from now.

At least Simon Pegg is awesome.

Abortion doc George Tiller gunned down at church

WICHITA, Kan. - The attorney for George Tiller says the late-term abortion provider was shot and killed at his church in Wichita, Kan.

[...]

The clinic run by the 67-year-old doctor has repeatedly been the site of protests for about two decades.

A protester shot Tiller in both arms in 1993, and his clinic was bombed in 1985.

[...]

Let's play the happy fun game, Who Needs Logic When You Have An Imaginary Friend Telling You What To Do?

Major premise: Murder is wrong.
Minor premise: Abortion is murder.
Conclusion: Murdering abortion doctors is right.

Somewhere, Aristotle is sobbing incoherently from beyond the grave.

Good on Tiller, though. He got bombed and shot and still kept at it.

I think it a fundamental goal of the highest importance that no child ever be forced into existence without there being sufficient love and support present to give that child a decent shot at life. Once there are no more children starving to death because their families just can't scrape together enough to feed them, fine. Once there are no more unwanted children languishing until adulthood in an impersonal foster system, good. Once every family has enough money, and every woman sufficiently good health, that having a child is not a dangerous proposition, excellent. Then let's talk of outlawing abortion. But while there are still women who will go dead if they try to carry to term? While there are still little children who legally cannot be hugged by their guardians unless the children initiate that hug, because nobody wants to adopt said children when they can just crap out their own? How damned selfish do you have to be to declare your morals more important than the happiness or continued lives of people, not hypothetical future poor widdle dead bay-bees, but actual people who exist and are suffering today? What the hell, man?


This message brought to you by Jenny, the Pro-Abortion Liberal Elitist.


(That whole "go to jail if you hug the lonely orphans" thing still freaks me out, but it's at least true for emotionally-not-right-in-the-head kids in Indiana. I bet the person I know who used to work at a group home, and thus be subject to the law in question, would know like the actual statute number or something. I should ask her.)

PROMOTIONAL FEE PAID BY:
"Ouchies"
The sharp, prickly toy you bathe with.

I'd buy one.



Oh, and I am back from West Virginia, by the way. Since Thursday evening! I still haven't gotten the half-dozen boxes of books, stamps, and My Little Ponies out of the car.

I am currently in Indianapolis! I drove here yesterday from Madison ALL BY MYSELF. That is a long drive. It went pretty much without incident, if you ignore the fact that I got within about three miles of the toll near the Wisconsin-Illinois border before realizing I didn't have dime one in cash. (Besides the dime laying on the floor in the back seat, but I forgot about that.) So I had to get off at a gas station and pay $3.50 in ATM fees and buy a bottle of tea to get singles. Then I had cash for the toll! Hooray.

Today I will be driving all the way to West Virginia, except mechamom will be there too. Which is good, because if I had to do another seven hours of driving by myself I'd probably wind up sporting this year's jacket-buttoned-up-the-back look. Why have we not invented teleporters yet?

Seen yesterday in... I dunno, Urbana, Illinois or someplace... a family of five geese calmly crossing the highway right in front of cars moving 70+mph. The guy in the lane beside me had to slam on his brakes hard enough to make them sing. It was funny, once it became apparent that all involved were going to survive.