12:27 PM 3/17/2011
Wearing: Green skirt with all the cord embellishments and the velvet stripes, black shirt, black sweater, green, orange, and black rubber bracelets, my star (very pointedly, without the other necklace I usually wear) and my snake ring. Also lipstick (magenta) and eyeshadow (green). HAPPY ALL SNAKES DAY. Someone on twitter mentioned that today is in fact a Thursday. I passed this advisory along to Amal, because apparently we are still fifteen. :D

Picked up packages from office. SO MANY PACKAGES. There were only two things in that whole Amazon order that were shipped together. Also, the package from nnaylime! Complete with photo of dog! :D

Went to farmers' market with aunt. Cabbage, cauliflower, onions, strawberries, limes. I'm thinking that it's a good day for sangria.

There was a stop after that, and I looked at luggage but today was not a good day for it, and got a laundry cart.

Unpacked, the packages proved to contain:

BPAL from nnaylime, with the aforementioned photo of dog. I shall squee with my aunt later, also.

The book from Amazon, one that someone had recommended.

Extract of violet, for the cunning energy drink scheme. Though I fear that this one is more for the herbal benefits of the violet and less for the taste. May have to order something else.

Liquid B-vitamin. Alas, it is cherry-flavored. We shall see if that upsets the balance.

Pure anhydrous caffeine powder. I tend to find out about the world by sticking my nose in things. It occurred to me, as I was bringing the bottle to my nose to see what it smelled like, that vigorously sniffing near white powdered stimulant was just an all-around bad plan. So I very carefully and delicately inhaled, careful to not create a breeze big enough to pick up much in the way of particulates. No particular smell of note. Tastes fucking nasty, though.

A little scale, on the recommendation of the bodybuilders who tend to buy caffeine and taurine and liquid B-vitamins, because getting the wrong amount of whatever you're measuring is just an all-around bad plan. The scale is small, adorable, and most worryingly, extremely -- one might say excessively -- portable. It looks as if it was designed by a reputable scientific electronics company who nonetheless were aware that this was probably going to be used by drug dealers as well as health nuts, and designed it with their needs in mind. It's really clever -- the box it came in is hard, stiff cardboard with embedded magnets, and a foam pad that holds the scale and its accessories in place. So you can just basically leave it in the box and use it. I find the extent to which the portability concept is taken to be vaguely disturbing, as I do the likely assumptions of Amazon's computer system after I visited it and bought it.

(Previous boxes had contained the Roomba filters, the taurine, and the set of itty-bitty measuring spoons that the bodybuilders had also recommended. They are wee, and perfect for dumping tiny but measured bits of white powder onto the scale. Oh god. I am going to have to tape a note inside the scale box with the weight/substance pairs that I have found best for energy drink composition, so that if someone ever does notice that I have a bitty scale with traces of white powder, they will come to the correct conclusion, not the obvious one.)


1:43 PM 3/17/2011
I mixed up a drink with all of the energy and flavor components that I was planning to use, and it tastes sort of like [metaphorical] ass. (Also, it looks like pee, and that is a worrying color in a bottle of liquid.) The taurine has been previously tested, and does not impart any noticeable flavor that my taste buds (semi-supertaster for the ick in cilantro) can discern. The caffeine is strong and bitter, but I think the ringer is the B-Complex. (Which is definitely the component responsible for the pee-like color.) So that's out next time. Failure is always an option!


9:52 PM 3/17/2011
I have figured out a hilarious costume for Halloween or some costume party or a convention. Today I was wearing green eyeshadow (not subtle) in honor of the holiday, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in the kitchen (not hard, the whole blamed closet door is mirrored) and observed that my eyes looked like something from a Boris Vallejo painting. I'd used lime green, bluegrass green, and as close to pumpkinfucker orange as the set of eyeshadow had (more of a bronze). I decided that should the opportunity present itself, I should dress up in some fantastic costume, and paint every inch of exposed skin in pearlescent eyeshadow of various supersaturated and slightly improbable colors, and attend the masquerade as a Boris Vallejo painting. amberfox found this just about as hilarious as I did.

Amber and I did not get to talk on the phone as much as we would have entirely liked, due to both of us keeping getting calls of the kind we could not ignore. In my case, it was $AGENCY-related (yay!). But other than that, I sliced strawberries and limes and chattered with Amber.


11:24 PM 3/17/2011
Discovered that my bag of potatoes had grown tentacles. I'm a touch on the exhausted side, so going out tonight to get more is not on the books. Tomorrow, though! I have the boiled-cabbage part of the colcannon-in-potentia boiled and sealed up awaiting the potatoes.

Also, there is strawberry-lime sangria steeping. I use a ridiculous ratio of fruit to wine, and I can only imagine the SIZE of the batch that would result if I used a whole $20 or $30 on it. (One $10 gallon of wine, the sort that comes in a carboy and leaves it stained when it sits after opening. A half-flat of strawberries is $10 this time of year. Four limes are $1 if you're paying for them, $0 plus transit if you know someone who has a tree and needs to do something with them. Sugar is cheap. Soda is cheap and you can use the inexpensive stuff.)

Tomorrow: shopping shenanigans scheduled.

Saturday: see seanan_mcguire's journal for details; hilarity is to ensue at Borderlands. I will be part of the adoring crowd of fans saying "Yay!" at all sorts of moments, both the appropriate and inappropriate. (Seanan has a book coming out in the fall? Yay! Seanan would like to unleash horrible bloody viral death upon the world? Yay! We are ... somewhat disturbing.)

Crossposted. comments.