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Originally published at Rivkah.com. You can comment here or there.

November 6th. Three days in New York, so far. Sunday, I move into my new apartment.

What a harrowing journey this last month was. And yet, what a blessed one. Never have I felt more the breath of G*d lingering over my shoulder. Yes, it was a lot of work getting here. Yes, is there still work yet to be done. But every bend and corner, every hill and valley, no matter how steep, has never been too sharp or too steep to get around again.

I’m in Windsor Terrace right now. A little cafe called The Oak and the Iris. Coffee is a dollar thirty-five, sixty cents cheaper than anywhere in Austin. The barista speaks broken English, and half the conversations around me I’d need a translator to interpret.  It’s a brisk, sunny 65 F out, and the coffee is delicious.

Six months ago, I made a decision that I would move to New York. I needed comics and I needed friends. This move from the college town I grew up in to one of the most populous, diverse cities on earth has helped me to realize that I need never be truly stuck. If I find myself in the mire, I can swim free again. I needn’t fear stagnation or despair.

So how appropriate to have my first set of keys in my pocket with the key chain given to me that says simply:  New York.

Welcome to the next stage. Welcome to the place I can never say I didn’t have the opportunities. Welcome to my new home.

This is going to be a fascinating journey, and I hope a few of you who’ve seen my posts wane over the course of the last few years will stick around to watch, be it on livejournal, twitter, facebook, flickr, or the face of my new site and blog (mucho tweaking to follow). But no matter what happens, this chica is going to finish another book and get published again. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Love and Kisses,
Rivkah.

I picked up Where the Mountain Meets the Moon at the library the other day, and took it to work today to read at lunch. By the end of lunch, I was 3/4 of the way through, and just finished it off, and am now in the bittersweet place, where I am content and happy that I've read this wonderful book, and sad that I've read this wonderful book and now it is over and I can't look forward to sitting down and reading it for the first time again.

Minli is a young girl in a poor village. Her father tells her stories constantly, and her mother bemoans their poor fortune. One day Minli, inspired by her father's tale of the Old Man of the Moon, decides to take matters into her own hands and travel to the Old Man of the Moon to ask how they can change their fortune. The story is a fairy-tale quest of the best sort - the quest itself is mythic, and every character in the book stops and tells another tale, each of which bends around and comes back later on.

It also contains wonderful illustrations by the author. Highly recommended.

Crossposted to my Dreamwidth account at http://telophase.dreamwidth.org/1624297.html. You can comment here or there.

papersky has posted her elf policy as a poem. Do also read stakebait's "Elf Insurance" in the comments.

Crossposted to my Dreamwidth account at http://telophase.dreamwidth.org/1623953.html. You can comment here or there.

Have solved part of the mystery of why our first water bill - for a month in which we only lived in the house for a week - was $350. And why our second bill, while still unreasonably high, was about $150 less. You see, sometime during the first nights we were in the house, myrialux woke up, heard that it was pouring rain, heard also that the sprinklers were on, and ran outside in the pouring rain and shut the whole system off, because there's no point in watering the grass in the pouring rain. And we never turned it back on, because it's been raining enough not to have to. The significantly-smaller bill clued us in that something must be wrong with the sprinkler system.*

So yesterday afternoon after work and before dark we went outside and I turned on each zone of the system while myrialux went and inspected the sprinkler heads. On zone 15, naturally the very last zone programmed in, it turns out that we have a quite spectacular fountain gushing into the air a good ten feet from one of the sprinkler heads. Yeah, I think that answers that question.

Still haven't worked out where the rest of the water is going, but at least that one will be fixed.

--
* We did get plumbers in to look for leaks in the house, and they found nothing, but replaced the toilet innards anyway Just In Case. As they left, one remarked to myrialux that well, Fort Worth water prices were just higher than Dallas, and that might be it. Until myrialux informed him that our meter claimed we used 48,000 gallons of water that month.

Crossposted to my Dreamwidth account at http://telophase.dreamwidth.org/1623731.html. You can comment here or there.

Why, if the comments on this page doesn't make you laugh, I don't know what will.

Helloooo!

I figure I should get this started now, so I won't be rushing around later. It's time for... Christmas cards!

I do enjoy sending them, so if you like getting them, reply with name and address plz. \o\ /o/ \o/

Comments screened!

EDIT: It's no problem sending cards internationally, mmkay?

Yo bitches. I'll be frolicking in town on Thursday as in all the years I've lived in Cambridge, I've never bothered to partake in the festivities on Midsummer Common. THIS WILL BE RECTIFIED THIS WEEK.


(flyer nicked from raggedy_man XD)

Just came back from a long overdue vacation to Tokyo! :3 I spent waaaaay too much money, but I regret nothing. I never knew how cheap Harajuku could be! Unfortunately, the cheaper something is, the more you buy, haha. But I got so many cute clothes, I'm just so happy. ;_;

I also went with friends to B. Lily Rose, my favorite butler cafe where girls dress up as guys (since it was on Halloween they were all dressed up as vampires and the like--very awesome) and Edelstein, the cafe where the waiters pretend to be boys at a German boarding school. It was ace. We were served by a 'first year' who was all nervous because apparently this was his first time at the place (whether that is true or not is up to debate, but it was cute so I don't care hahaha). Though I think he might have been a bit nervous because we were foreigners. XD; Nonetheless, it was a lot of fun!

Now I'm back at home preparing for my lessons tomorrow. Planning on teaching my kids about family members so I'm drawing pictures of a "mother", "father", "sister", "brother", "grandfather" and "grandmother". Though I'm a bit meh about tomorrow since it's at my least favorite school, I figure you can only dread so much--it's better to take things into your own hands. So hopefully with that in mind tomorrow will go smoothly. We'll see, I guess.

Also working on a belated Halloween picture for Overland, which won't see the light of day until I can finally buy that scanner I've been planning on getting my hands on. Oh well, next month.

Good afternoon, all! What a beautiful first of November here in Seattle.

Well, my Halloween was spent working on track 06's cover page. I actually finished it too! Took me almost the entire day, with some breaks and with the usual housework that needed to be done. Tsukasa had to work, and since we had done our "celebrating" the day before, it was a pretty uneventful Halloween. I was an emo kid, so I loaded on the eyeliner and tried to appear as if I was contemplating suicide. ^^; Tsukasa was a disgruntled Macy's sales associate. :3

So anyway, I just got home from church a little bit ago and wanted to see if track 06 had gone up at Wowio.com yet or not, since I submitted the PDF last night. I was so happy to see that it had and that I already had some views! PLEASE check it out and download the PDF to help support me financially!

http://www.wowio.com/users/product.asp?BookId=5977

I was feeling a little bit depressed today at church because Tsukasa had to go to work, so I was there without him. We actually attended the Normandy Park Ward's sacrament meeting, so that at least he could have the sacrament before going to work (which started at 10:45, and our meeting starts at 11). We make do as best we can.

Not much else to report... I'm just too hungry right now to think (fasting). I'm going to my mom and dad's house in a little bit for dinner. Anyway, enjoy track 06!

Okay, Halloween's over, but I'm gonna keep doing these cuz it's really fun. also they are cute. ^^;

... give me something good to eat!

More FF Hetalia

Final Fantasy Hetalia

Last weekend it was Boeuf Bourguignon and stuffed peppers (not the same day). This weekend, Coq au Vin (today) and Sausage and Potato Ragout (tomorrow). I am not actually intending to cook French, it's just working out that way. :)*

We bought candy, and had no trick-or-treaters until about 7:30, when 3 showed up at the door. I gave them each 3 pieces of candy, because I figured they'd be the last. Ah-ha-ha-ha. Fifteen minutes later, a gaggle of about 20 descended onto our doorstep, so I handed out most of the candy, and then myrialux and I decided that we wanted to keep the rest of the candy, so we shut the door and turned out the porch light.

I take it from this that there are no local children trick-or-treating - it's not like the neighborhood is set up for safe walking because it's a busy street with no sidewalks and hilly lawns - and judging by the parents with cars shepherding the kids around, I suspect they're what I call professional trick-or-treaters. The kind whose parents drive them to hit every single neighborhood within a five-mile radius, instead of sticking close to home and extorting candy solely from your neighbors.

The amusing part is that they descended upon us shortly before the coq au vin was finished, so all the kids were going "Oooh, your house smells good! What are you cooking?!" I made the spur-of-the-moment decision to translate the name of the recipe, as the kid ranged in age from about 5 to about 12, and I thought "Coq" was going to provoke far too many sniggers. :)


* It has more to do with having about a jillion bottles of red wine that I keep buying but not drinking. Have to get rid of it somehow.

Crossposted to my Dreamwidth account at http://telophase.dreamwidth.org/1623109.html. You can comment here or there.

Happy Halloween, babies!

Or if you're me, happy load-stuff-into-the-car-because-you're-moving-tomorrow day!

I'm pretty sure I've linked to this before, but here are some rockin' halloween mashups that I still listen to frequently:

The Bride of Monster Mashup

Enjoy!

So every year Dock runs this crazy artwork swap where we draw each other in silly outfits. Last time I got in on one, this happened:
Halloween 2007 - dock.livejournal.com/214122.html

This year, he gave me this:

Me as Sherlock Holmes

And I in turn gave him this:

Dock as a flasher XD

If you would like to see what he drew for everyone else this year and what they in turn drew for him, please check out his journal: http://dock.livejournal.com/263595.html

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE!!

Does anyone here know anything about XML and XSLT? Specifically, how to use functions?

More specifically, I've got an XML file (Atom feed) that contains this:

<published>2009-10-29T21:11:09Z</published>

I need to turn that into something human-readable. My knowledge of XSLT extends solely to the ability to select pieces of text out of a string like that: i.e. I can make "2009-10-29T21:11:09Z" appear on the page. If I want to get ambitious, I can put HTML tags around it. That's it. And an hour and a half of perusing the Web has done nothing but start to bring my migraine back.


And I'm now off to puppleball's birthday celebration, and will return at some point. Anything anyone knows would be helpful - I can find lots of lists of functions for XSLT, but not a single word on HOW to use them.

Crossposted to my Dreamwidth account at http://telophase.dreamwidth.org/1622950.html. You can comment here or there.

Some quick sketchwork I did to use as our avatars on FFXI forums and sites etc.