aubli

asteroth is dead. he was the black and thorny caterpillar, earned his name only yesterday. i learned from J.O.D. that he's actually got a really nasty poison in those spikes of his, and can make a person's entire arm swell up uber-painfully to great size. which is pretty cool, seeing as that didn't happen to me. it would have been somewhat less cool if it had, but even then you've still got to admit that that's pretty cool.

anyway, i made sure today to walk home from work along the path with the dark-leaved pointy-tipped oak leaves, which seem to be the only kind asteroth would eat. i walked through the door carrying three of those leaves only to find him a stiff and shriveled little husk. bah. i really wanted to see what kind of bad-ass butterfly or moth he would have turned out to be.

fatespawn made me teriyaki chicken again tonight - yum!

was coworker m's birthday at work today... fun-ness! she's i think my wackiest coworker. and there was ice cream cake. also, i found out that UVA subscribes to a cool resource that allows us to access the full texts of bunches and bunches of tech and IT and programming books online. sent out an email to my supervisor and coworkers about it, and it looks like it's gonna be really useful for us. go me!

i'm such a frigging hypochondriac. was in a tickling match and bruised my neck on one side and now i'm having some slight weirdness in breathing... i keep thinking my ear is going numb, which naturally leads me to conclude that some vital part of that side of my neck has been crushed and the blood flow to my brain is impaired and my brain cells are beginning to die en masse. and i won't even know for sure until i start evincing bizarre behaviors and general disorientation. i should stop bruising my neck and spine in stupid ways - it's really stressful.

random thought i entertained a bit the past few days courtesy of asteroth - i wonder if most caterpillars are really only designed to eat one or a few kinds of leaves and can't draw sustinence from other sorts at all... if the other leaves are just kind of like furniture or such to them, and i putting a caterpillar in a container with a few leaves and hoping for the best would be akin to the aliens putting me in a jar with an office chair and a stapler and saying to one another, "don't worry, even if they're not its preferred food, if it gets hungry enough it'll munch on one of those."

as cool as it would be to live among the aliens, i wouldn't want to die futilely gnawing a stapler. that would suck. poor asteroth, i think it was the air conditioning. dried him out unnaturally fast, and he just wouldn't or couldn't drink enough to keep up. that's why ladybugs die so fast indoors, too. they come in seeking the warmth, and can't feel themselves drying out, and so they stay and die and collect in little ladybug huskpiles.

i hope my neck feels better soon. and i think i'm going to go get a drink of water - i suddenly feel a touch thirsty. and i should stop musing about alien pet owners and move on to some other richness.

yay, stephen's getting me some allieve and chocolate milk to make my neck and brain stop hurting. and if i believe that alieve helps prevent brain damage, maybe it'll act as a placebo and restore the bloodflow to my head. heh. okay children, clap your hands...

bah, drinking the milk kind of hurts. numb ear and pooling blood in the head aside, having a bruised neck sucks. chocolate milk is lovely, though.

i think this past weekend was really nice and relaxing, and now that it's weekdays again i'm taking refuge in strangeness. it's not entirely comfortable. i just feel really displaced, even inside myself a bit. called the mother yesterday - she was really really happy i'd called, and it makes me feel like a dreadful person. i honestly manage to forget the fact that i have a mother and father for days at a time, and it's kind of pleasant to do so. oddly enough, this doesn't seem to affect my remembering of xie in the least. it's a confusing situation, and i can never quite seem to figure out how much to beat myself up about it. apparently their three-day-weekend trip to gettysburg was really good, though, and nobody was grumpy except for our little sister a little. so that's good.

in happy news, i'm going to try and make a corset soon. wish me luck!