Check out these Mario-inspired cocktails. They’re elaborate, but pretty well done.

I’ve never been one for complicated drinks, although many of my friends are. They’re all making things with two different types of juices and syrup, and I start to lose patience putting vodka and tonic and (oh god when will it end) ice in a glass. You should hear the whining if I decide to add a dash of lime juice.

Mind you, I’m like that with food too. With the recent and notable exception of curry, which is too delicious to deny, if it doesn’t come from a bag I want nothing to do with it. Frozen dinner from a bag. Pre-mixed salads from a bag. In my defense I have come a long way from university and my “one pot stroganoff”, which included the time saving technique of boiling the frozen ground beef and the pasta at the same time! Mmmmm. You can taste the saved dishwashing effort!

Anyway, I’m too impatient to cook fancy dishes, I’m too impatient to drink fancy drinks, and if I could I would stop sleeping too because it just seems like a waste of time. So what glorious activities am I undertaking to fill my life with such meaning? Nothing really. Y’know, just stuff. But man, when that one exciting, life-changing opportunity comes up let me tell you I won’t have to miss it because I’m halfway through some crockpot dish. Oh yeah.

So about a month ago I was struck with this urge to get a tattoo. I really don’t know why. Usually I feel kind of smug that I managed to make it through my teens and 20s without getting one, and I’d hate to have something permanently inked on my body that I would regret. (You see people now who have this rueful grin when asked about their sweet tattoo for a sports team that no longer exists, or those poor suckers with meaningless Chinese characters. “This symbol means: one who follows trends without much thought.”)

Anyway, I put it out of my mind until inspiration smacked me upside of the head suddenly one morning, as it’s wont to do. A pilcrow! It’s unique, it’s literary, and the idea of it makes me very happy. I’m going to play with fonts and shading and colors, but I like this idea. Maybe a pilcrow with a halo…

—

Word of the day: mor·dant (adj.)

1. 1. Bitingly sarcastic
   2. Incisive and trenchant

Where has this word been all my life? How have I not discovered it before now?!

A friend told me the other day — in context I should add — that I would probably be less easily hurt and anxious about stuff if I wasn’t so self-centered at times. Believe it or not, I am not always the cause of other people’s unfortunate decisions, and they are not always doing things to spite me because I am a terrible person. (While possibly true, I still hate you for saying this. You know who you are.)

Anyway, I thought about it and figured that one way or the other I could stand to be less self-centered in life. So then, obviously, I set about thinking of ways to be less self-centered. Twenty minutes later it occurred to me that maybe sitting around thinking about myself was in fact self-centered. Maybe the way to be less concerned with this stuff was not to think about it at all. Maybe I was just actually going to make things worse by addressing it! Then I started to get anxious, and tried to just sit still and think very hard about NOT thinking about myself.

Then I decided to screw it and go get an iced capp.

So… this weekend I kind of dyed my hair the color of ketchup chips. I’m not sure if I’m going to keep it for work on Tuesday or not yet. They’ll have a cow, which is almost worth it. Anyway, an impromptu photo from when we were out in the car this weekend:

I actually took a day off work today so I could stay home and.. get some work done. Being constantly interrupted by tech support questions is not conducive to programming.

Speaking of technical support, yesterday one of the more irritating recruiters in the office got quite demanding when her email stopped working for a few minutes. (We have a crappy email provider which I have no control over.) So I told her to shut down all her programs for 10 minutes to let them “reset”. When she called a few minutes later to say she didn’t think it was working, I replied that she hadn’t waited the full 10 minutes, and now she had to start over. Man, I love being an evil geek sometimes. (This is the same person who said that she didn’t like going to the local aquarium because there was “too much literature to read”. WHY MUST YOU BE SO RELENTLESSLY STUPID?!)

Long story short, I could use a new job but that would require me to work on my resume one weekend and not just get drunk and play video games.

Which reminds me: Wikipedia Wine Descriptors. This weekend I learned the difference in taste between “oaked” and “unoaked” Chardonnay. Well, that’s the official story anyway.. it’s a classy way of saying I drank almost two bottles of wine. Yay, grapes.

A friend linked me to this highly suspicious news article about a quarantined train. It just screams, “zombie infection outbreak”!

I am a strong believer in having a zombie apocalypse plan for most situations. Where there is no more room in hell, where will you get your fresh drinking water from? Yeah, just think about that.

The elevators in my current condo need a key fob to operate, and no stairs that go onto the floor, so I figure that’s pretty good initial zombie protection while I assess the situation. I’m also very high up, so nothing is going to come in my windows, and I have an excellent view of the status of the city. So the plan is this:

1) Secure the floor. Kill anyone on the floor that has been zombie-fied (wear goggles, go with a team), then block off the stairs and elevators with furniture.
2) Fill sinks and tubs with water. Who knows how long we’ll be there, and water is essential.
3) Just chill in our secured floor for a couple of weeks. The initial spread of zombification will be exponential, plus there will be madness and chaos from the survivors on the street. Let it die down, and give the world governments and armies a chance to find their feet.
4) DO NOT DO ANYTHING DUMB. You’ve seen the movies. Kill anyone who is infected, don’t open up our barricades, don’t bicker with our fellow floor survivors.
5) If there is no sign of an organized rescue process after a couple of weeks, we need to get out of the city. Cities, generally, are bad news. Band together, gather weapons, and in broad daylight walk the 6 blocks or so to the busy harbor front. Steal a boat, a barge, anything that floats, and head out to one of the little barely inhabited islands in the area. Clear it of undead, and then hunker down to rebuild society.

This month my World of Warcraft guild turns three years old. I have to be honest — I had no freaking idea what I was getting into when I created the guild. I had never really played an MMO before, never been in a guild before, but I had heard rumors that people needed to group up to do things later in the game, and it seemed like a good idea.

And this is going to sound cliche, but it actually did change my life. Being a guild leader has made me be brave, it’s made me appreciate making tough decisions, how to get along better with people, how to believe in me and convince others to believe in themselves. I don’t do things by half-measures, and I’m a control freak. I hand picked everyone in the guild, and I spend absurd amounts of time pondering policies and social constructs. And I won’t lie — I chuckle when I think that I, weird Canadian IT chick, can tell a group of grown people to be on time, where to stand, when they’ve been ‘bad’, and so on.

I’ve met some awesome people too. Really, it’s all about the people. They started out as abstract Internet figures, and some of them have turned into concrete friends, the kind that know secrets and make me laugh and have seen me drunk. I adore some of these people, and thinking of having to go through my week without hearing from them makes me sad.

I mean, some days I want to kill everyone. “Why are you asking me this? Why do I care? What the hell is going on?” Sometimes I take a step back and kind of get concerned that I’ve poured so much care and attention and work and effort into this ephemeral thing that will disappear all day, as guilds do. One day I’ll wake up and the friends I’ve made won’t be there, no one cares about my leadership ideas, and I’ll have to figure out something else. I guess until then, we all just keep rolling along.

(Writing this reminded me of what one of my guildies would likely say: “Less QQ, more killing shit.”)