chessandlena.com

The Spores of Egon.

Sparkly Vampire Awareness Day.

This is my favorite Christmas carol... and probably my favorite performance of it.

Unexplained Chihuahua Surplus.

First snow of 2009-2010 is on the ground, and still lightly falling. Not much at all, but it's making the park by our backyard look like a park covered with yummy frosting.

Hi, winter! Nice to see you.

In today's issue of up late and can't sleep, instead of venturing down the wikipedia highway, I got a nosebleed.

Now me and nosebleeds, we got us a history. I just get 'em. Always have; always will. I have had hundreds of them, but a few of them have been quite memorable.

In seventh grade, I had a nosebleed that did not stop for an entire day. Well, about 13 hours. I went to the hospital, where they a) gave me a drug called cocaine to stop the bleeding (they said it was "a different salt" than the "regular" cocaine), b) diagnosed me as having blood vessels close to the surface of the inside of my nose, and that I was "just going to get nosebleeds from time to time", and c) pulled out such a disgustingly long and thick serpentlike glob of blood and snot from my nose that I almost vomit thinking about it even now.

In my early teens, I got a nosebleed from the wind resistance while riding a bike down the street behind our backyard. Sam and I were riding bikes down to his house, and I noticed the bleeding when I got to the bottom of the hill. I remember Sam being quite amazed when I showed up at his house, right behind him, face streaming in blood.

In my adult life, I don't have as many memorable ones (thank God), and although they do tend to occur more frequently in winter months, times of lower relative humidity, or when I excessively or violently pick my nose, they mostly come without warning and without demonstrable cause. The only pattern I can deduce from the whole business is that, like an earthquake, if it's happened once recently, it's more likely to happen again fairly soon. Over the years, I've developed a fairly standard method for dealing with them, that has been fairly successful:

1. dry hands and face
2. blow nose
3. tightly pack nostril with strong (if possible) toilet paper (1 sheet of Charmin Strong works best)
4. wait ~5 minutes, repeating packing step if necessary
5. blow nose again, cleanup

Usually one iteration of the whole process is all that's needed. This morning it was not. The packings were soaked through in less than a minute. I resorted to pinching the fleshy part of my nose shut and sticking my face under running cold water for about 10 minutes. It worked, finally, after I had spent a total of 1/2 hour on this nosebleed, which is longer than I have spent on any in quite some time.

Joy.

Words for the day: Epistaxis and Rhinotillexomania.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Lena and I are definitely looking forward to a few days off from the grind.

It's a sad time, though; my cousin, Posy, died this week. She was a beautiful woman with amazing artistic talent, and I'm sorry to say that I did not know her nearly as well as I'd have liked. I have one incredibly vivid memory of her: when we were stupid geeky kids playing Dungeons & Dragons all the time, she came down to our table in the basement holding a drawing-- I think it was colored pencil but it may have been pastels-- of a dragon curling round itself. What I remember most, though, is her face just then. I think she liked that her art made others happy much, much more than she liked others praising her art.

I took a picture of our rose bush beginning one last bloom in November a few days ago-- today I saw that it had finally fully opened. I think it opened for Posy.

And another bittersweet moment, I just hung a painting in our sun room. It was painted by my great-grandmother, and belonged to my mother; we got it from her things when she died in April of this year. It's a beautiful painting. I miss my mother.

We took a whirlwind weekend trip back to the Home Country to see Lena's pen parents in the south of the state. They are the folks who originally brought her over for a visit back in '92, when she showed up in NYC from the slowly collapsing Soviet Union with $27 in her pocket. They're very nice folks, and we hadn't been to see them in about 5 years (which we didn't realize until we did the math... holy crap, how time flies).

So Friday night we're driving through Ohio, south of Columbus but north of Chillicothe, and just had a "local moment," wherein we stopped for gas, and the station cashier, obviously bored, came out to chat. We had a nice little talk about places and getting to them and such... then Lena and I had a subsequent chuckle as we realized that sort of thing is much more likely to happen the closer you get to hills and mountains than in the flatlands of corn country.

We were just getting back to finding some music we both could tolerate on the mp3 player when a pickup truck appeared about ten or fifteen yards in front of us and to the right. It was not on the road. It was barrel-rolling over, airborne, several times as we saw it closing in.

"Oh my God," Lena said, slowing down fast, but not jarringly. We stopped well behind it as it came to rest on the side of the road, rightside up. "Do you think anyone's alive in there?" she said. We went to find out. We slowly approached the vehicle, which, contrary to Hollywood expectations, had not burst into flame. As we got closer, a guy got out of the cab and ran across the road, past us.

"Dude, are you all right?" I yelled, as he was already past me and speeding up. He mumbled something and continued. Something not right here, my mind said... maybe he's running to get help for someone still in the truck? But I was too buzzed up with adrenaline to take that to its logical conclusion. I could hardly believe that I had seen everything correctly... how could that guy have even been on his feet, let alone running away so quickly?

After about a minute, though, when we had verified that there wasn't anyone else in there, and other cars were stopping and asking us if we were all right, and we were replying that we hadn't been part of it at all, another pickup screeched to a halt right next to the wrecked truck.

"God damn it!" the driver said, getting out. Another guy gets out and asks, "which way did he go?"

Okay, stolen, my mind said. I pointed the direction the crashee had run, and the driver got back in the truck and took off after him. The police arrived barely a minute later, and got everything under control. Apparently the would-be car thief knew the guys he stole the truck from. In fact, he told them he was going to do it. So they knew who he was, where he lived, what he was wearing, and probably just how much beer he'd had that night, too. Clearly there wasn't going to be any huge "unsolved mysteries" case here. Good thing too, 'cause when the police asked me for a description of the guy, I couldn't come up with anything other than "white, light build, scruffy lookin'."

Lena and I verify from the officer on the scene that he didn't need anything further from us, and we resumed our drive. Five minutes down the road, we passed a sign that said OUTDOOR DRAMA, NEXT EXIT. We laughed quite a while. Of course, we had more laughter when we passed a sign about forty minutes later that said JESUS IN THE HILLS, NEXT RIGHT. So that's where he's been all this time.

We continued on and had a very nice weekend, catching up with everyone and reveling in the West Virginianess of it all. I do miss me my home country sometimes. Not enough to drive through Ohio every weekend to get to it, though. Sheesh.

introducing name that color. Now you can tell your chartreuse from your electric lime.

So, what do we see now from the Star Trek franchise owners? Did this summer's Series Reboot mean a shutdown on all other timelines? From one perspective (the one that feels that Enterprise the series and Nemesis the movie sucked royally), that would probably be a good thing. From another, that would abandon some pretty awesome potential storylines that have only been lightly touched by the franchise so far.

But one concept, above all others, cries out for a kick-ass trek series: the Borg War. Not the half-assed, one-cube-versus-entire-Federation kind of attempt, but more along the lines of the last episode of Voyager, where the Federation has much better weapons and protection, and can more than hold their own against the Borg as long as they have the right equipment. And there is actual strategy, deception, development!

Read qntm.org's thoughts on the matter. I'm not so much a fan of the Mirror Borg thingy, but the "things we'd like to see" bullet list is dead on.

Particularly these:

• A refreshing absence of time travel
• The rescindment of the Prime Directive, and a heck of a lot of hand-wringing over it
• Cyborg Starfleet guys, who narrow the line between human and Borg
• An end to that Borg Queen rubbish
• A group of Starfleet cadets in a canteen, discussing who was better, Kirk or Picard