Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Hello everyone! Sorry I keep being quiet here, but life is so frantically busy, I keep having no time to post. I'm catching up on reading my friends list though! Just 50 more posts to go.

One of the things that's keeping me busy is that my job keeps wanting me to take more classes. I do have my college degree already, but the company is big on always continuing your education, so this year I signed up for an editing class. I thought it would be cake -- I love editing, I think I'm good at it. OH MY GOD. It's the hardest class I've ever taken in my life! It's a 400 level class, which I guess is part of it, but man, there's so very much about grammar that I never knew. Like adverbs/adjectives aren't just simple little things, there are more than a dozen different types of them. All sorts of things that I either never heard of before, or learned decades ago in school.

The odd thing about the class is that I can do the editing, I just flail at explaining the basics behind the changes I'm making -- I know how to fix sentences, but explaining in exact detail why the change needs to be made is apparently another story. I do well on the practical parts of the class, and struggle on the theory.

In other news, California is on fire. I feel bad complaining about the smoke, since people up north have it so much worse -- thousands of homes have been burned. I was thinking about loupnoir this morning, hoping she's still safe and well. Still, I've had a blinding headache for days now, from breathing smoke nonstop. My poor sinuses!

I have a love-hate relationship with Pokemon Go. I really don't enjoy the game, but it keeps me walking, so I keep playing it. The 'hate' part comes in from taking over gyms/trying to get my 50 coins a day. I tend to drive out of my way on the way to work, so I can take over a half-dozen gyms and hopefully get my 50 coins a day. I wish I could be more casual about it, but I'm so bad at being casual about anything...

(This is more a tongue-in-cheek post than a real complaining one. I know this is less than a drop in the bucket when it comes to problems caused by him.)

I keep hearing such good things about the The Man in the High Castle series, but I just cannot make myself watch a show about a world where the Nazis won. It feels way, way, way too much like what's happening in the real world.

I still haven't gone back to watching Designated Survivor again either, because of RL political crap.

I am, however, SERIOUSLY enjoying the A Series of Unfortunate Events series. (Ruin that, Trump, I dare you!) The humor in it reminds me a lot of Edward Scissorhands. The only "downside" of it is that it's so good I can't multitask during it, so it's taking me forever to get through the eight episodes.

In the Pokemon GO world, something happened to my game? Or something. GPS drift is so strong at my work desk, I usually get credit for 2-3 KMs of walking. Today, though the drift seems just as bad (I'm watching myself walk through the building, out to the parking lot, across it, then back, all without leaving my chair), I'm getting not a single step of credit for the movement. I wonder if they somehow closed that loophole? I hope not...

And in other random news, I had a "nightmare" last night, but it was so silly I really was just amused by it. In it, I helped my father (dead RL) at his moving company (wasn't his job at all), and we went to do a move for some woman. Her house was less than knee high, yet somehow when you went inside it was as big as a normal house. "Supernatural" things started happening... but they were so minor it was just plain silly. Like plant roots poked up through the ground and started waving around. Normal plant roots, so a couple inches long and thin -- not exactly threatening! Plus, for some reason, I brought my cat with me to the moving job... My father and I got scared and ran off though, and on the way passed some "priests" (more like MMO priests than religious) who were coming to take care of the supernatural problems. One got in my face all like "This is MY job!" and I was happy to agree and let him take care of it.

I was amused by that all morning. OH NO PLANT ROOTS

Though I've played games for many, many, many years, sometimes I'm a poor gamer. It was only two nights ago that I realized that there was probably a much easier way to find PokeStops than driving randomly around to look for them.

"Everyone must have originally had this problem. People must have compiled lists by now..."

Even better than that, there are overlays for Google's maps that show you exactly where they are. A near-ish park had six of them in it, and with quistie's advice of how she enjoyed discovering one near her, I decided to go check it out today.

If it wasn't the middle of winter, that would have been a great plan.

It was a nice park. Not close enough to walk to, but a short drive. Problem was once I got there. It was 40 degrees out with a brisk wind. Even wearing a sweater and a coat, I was cold. This would be a much nicer game in the summertime...

I popped a lucky egg and an incense. I was intending to use a lure as well, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work. (I googled once I got home, and man, some elements of the game are poorly designed -- if you can't ever use something from your inventory, it should indicate that in some way! I'm looking at you, incubator as well.)

I'm still short on Pokeballs, but I'm going to try to camp out at a Pokestop every day this week for a while to try to stock up on them.

I really like how my character looks. I named him and made his looks based on my MMO character. I don't know anything about the various teams, but red is so the best color. :P