Stochastic Effluvia

My tastes run towards the Gothic Revival in architecture, furniture, jewelry, and the like.   I’d eventually like to get furnishings in this style, but they’re not exactly inexpensive.

There is Whataburger there.  Also, Sonic.

So we finally got everything moved down to my folks today.  I packed the last of the stuff up and brought it down, and Kara cleaned up.  I don’t think it’ll matter in terms of the apartment people–in my experience you could eat off the floor and they’d still charge you for cleaning–but it’s good to be done.

We also put a desposit down with a moving company, which will be great.  This will be much better than a uhaul, since we won’t have anyone to unload at the other end. The game plan right now is to leave on the 9th or 10th of August, take three days to get out to Texas, then use the next five days or so to get all situated in time for the orientation week.

I’m going to try to re-read The Book of Margery Kempe over the next month, too, so I’m doing something useful academically as well.  

I just sold my LCD monitor at 1 in the morning to a couple of college kids.  For probably a bit less than I could have gotten for it, but that’s neither here nor there (I have already decided that since I can’t seem to get anyone to buy my old PC, I might just give it to my folks, who have a monitor).  What amuses me is that they were in a super hurry, and the whole affair made me feel like I was a drug dealer setting up a WoW addict with their latest fix.

Your result for The RPG Class Test…

Smart Paladin

Take The RPG Class Test at HelloQuizzy

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In other news, I’m not liking the new edition of D&D. It feels too much like World of Warcraft, and the main thing that made such a hack-and-slash system interesting–having to play alignment to keep classes–isn’t really there if you can be any class with any alignment. Worshipping a different god is just reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. 

So in the interests of paring down the furniture we have to move and making some extra money we’re having a virtual garage sale.  If you’re interested and local, let me know and I’ll let you know what’s on the chopping block.

I took that personality test that is floating around. I had a very hard time with the last question. First, my result:


If I went the other way, the category was:


What is most true about me insofar as the latter goes are the aspects dealing with other people and punctuality. That’s probably because for a while when I was younger I had a group of friends who were habitually late for everything (to the point that any time I planned anything I would tell them to arrive an hour before they really needed to be there) and it bothered me after a while. Everything else meshes up more with the former, I think.

Remember this entry, where I talked about the bag I wanted?

Today my folks gave Kara and I gifts for our graduation.  Kara got a Garmin GPS, and they got me the bag! Even better, both Kara’s mom and my aunt have offered to help with our move out to Texas (my aunt actually offered to pay for the cost of a u-haul, but I don’t think she realizes how much it is), so I’m feeling a lot better about the logistics of that than I was.  Now we just need to find a place to move to out there, and we’re set.

Commencement was nice, but it was three hours outside in SoCal in black robes, for about 10 minutes of walking across the stage.  I’m a bit sunburned.

I also got my tentative assignment for next year–I’m going to be working on Seventeenth Century News.  I’d rather be teaching, but that’s probably because that’s my comfort zone right now. 

So I mentioned in the post where I announced that I passed comps that I had a bit of weird week.  To be honest, it wasn’t really that weird, other than the fact that I spent about a week down at my folks helping out.  I felt really sorry for the baby we have on a g-tube (who smells like vanilla cake) and exasperated with the seven-year-old who doesn’t know when he’s in thin ice.  What I would really like to talk about is my grandmother, or more accurately, her relationship with me, her passing, and what happened after which made me angry.

My grandfather, as people who have read this journal for a bit know, passed away two years ago after being in a alzheimers care facility for quite some time.  He began to have problems around five or six years ago, and once he was in the facility, my grandmother basically cut off even the minimal amount of contact she had with my brother and I (she already treated my cousin as if he didn’t exist because she didn’t like his mother–for what I can only assume is the sin of getting pregnant with him out of wedlock and subsequently marrying my uncle–and she asked my parents how they could raise someone else’s child in regards to my sister) out of spite for my mother.  There was always a bad dynamic there even prior to all of this, for a lot of reasons I don’t think I can go into.  Suffice it to say that of my generation, I probably had the longest relationship with my grandmother, my brother probably had the best, and neither of those relationships were much to write home about. 

Anyway, what I haven’t mentioned prior to this is that my folks, my uncle, and my aunt had to basically fight with my grandmother to get him into a decent facility (generally paying the difference between the one she wanted to put him in–which was a hellhole–and the one that he eventually ended up in) to the point that they had to take her to court to do this.  In addition, the way my grandparents handled money was odd–they had a communal fund, but also separate funds for each of them based on inheritances they had received.  Once my grandfather passed away, his fund was to go to his children.  This didn’t happen–instead my grandmother rolled the funds into hers, then proceeded to give out almost $400,000 in interest-free loans to people from the money my grandfather had intended to give to his children.  In essence, those people committed elder abuse, but she more or less told her children ‘fuck you’ and more importantly ignored the wishes of my grandfather.  That people (one of which was the teller at her bank, who was able to buy and build on property with my grandmother’s money) would take advantage of her like this pisses me off.

We only found this out because a few months ago my grandmother was struck by a car, and the three children began (in the process of trying to help her in the hospital) to see all the bank records and the like.  That whole saga and how my aunt acted is another story.

Yesterday was the reading of the will.  Of her estate (which is I don’t know how much) she gave my uncle 2 grand and split the rest between my mom and aunt.  My uncle, who throughout the whole saga with hospitals and the like didn’t act my grandmother was a child and tried to show her some respect.  That, more than her inability to show any respect to her other children (who now have to figure out how to make things equitable) or acknowledgement to myself, my cousin, and my siblings, pisses me off.  I feel bad that I’m angry, because she’s just passed away, but to be honest I haven’t had any sort of emotional connection to my grandmother for some time. 

I passed the comps.  I have more to say–this week has been odd and I’m really mad about something–but it’ll have to wait.