It Started with a Journal

Seahawks vs Green Bay... I don't... I can't... what an embarrassment. Does the team have an "off" switch when they play games on the road? They're 0-4-1 this season with 2 TDs. TWO. WTF. Our offense is offensive to me. Not that the D was that great this game, either. I realize Earl is gone, and that was always gonna hurt. I expected them to lose this game -- they were playing at Lambeau, they've been shitty on the road, they were coming off a big home game, Green Bay has been trending up, etc. But JFC. Oh and they snapped an 85-game streak of not losing by more than 10 points.

Almost as bad as the team doing poorly was the crapshow they made of my fantasy football games this weekend. I managed to squeak into the playoffs in both leagues with a 7-6 record (go figure; I have a whole different cast and play entirely different people, but still managed to get the exact same record). One game is now an impossibility to win, unless Ezekiel Elliot gets like 70 points ON HIS OWN, while the other one will take monster games from LeGarrett Blount and Julian Edelman tomorrow night, which, given my luck with these things, they will not have. UGH.

I even drafted Eli Manning with the intention of playing him in place of Russell Wilson. I don't how he'll do tonight, but it certainly can't be worse than how RW played today, good gravy. I didn't end up playing Eli because I felt that I was not being fair to RW or the team coming off a good game, and I would feel really bad if Eli was horrible (very real possibility) and RW was amazing, for multiple reasons.

Next season, I am not drafting ANY Seahawks in my fantasy football leagues unless it would be absolutely ridiculous not to (like the next SEA player is miles above the next-best). It's too fucking stressful. Every week, I end up not playing FF the smartest way because I have to consider stupid shit like "feeling guilty" if RW has a good game. If I have no Seahawks on the roster, it won't matter who I put in; I just have to pick the best players, and the Seahawks doing well or poorly won't affect my FF games (well, other than when my opponent has a SEA player, of course).

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I was felled this last week by some kind of cold or flu or whatever the hell. This one was brutal. When I got sick in New York, it was like a little baby cold compared to this one. That one I was completely over with in less than two weeks, and never even got to the really bad symptoms. This time has been the mother of all viruses. (And how annoyed am I to get sick twice in such quick succession??) I'm still not fully over it, but am on the road to recovery. A few days ago I was like, LET ME DIE, I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE. I don't even know how/where I got this thing. And if it's the flu, eff you flu shot for not covering this strain.

Oh, and even better? Aunt Flo came to visit. So I had to deal with that on top of body aches and hacking my lungs out.

On a more positive side note, have you heard of Thinx? It's period underwear, to put it bluntly. It's my second month using them (I have a full cycle set), and it's official, I love them. jade_okelani is a fan as well. You can read this article to learn more; I've read several like it where women tried to use them as their ONLY source of protection, and I think they're nuts. Or their cycles must be quite different from mine.

( More TMI. Seriously, I am very frank in here, so don't click if you don't wanna know. )

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I have accomplished the feat of finishing two of my many WIP K-dramas. I finished High School: Love On, which was okay, and Coffee Prince, which was better than okay but had the most boring and annoying side pairing of all time. I've also watched a few more episodes of Oh My Venus, which has gotten to a super angsty part, and I have no idea where they're going to go from here. It's quite disappointing, actually, that it started out so lighthearted and cute and has now brought us to this. Sigh. Henry Lau is still the best part of the drama. Also? Much of it seems to hinge on the viewer finding So Ji-sub brutally attractive. I mean, he IS attractive; he's just not THAT hot (to me).

Because of finishing off two of them, I allowed myself to start a new one -- "Hello My Teacher" aka "Biscuit Teacher and Star Candy." It stars Gong Yoo and Gong Hyo-jin. Gong Yoo is the primary male lead from Coffee Prince that I ended up really loving, and Gong Hyo-jin is the female lead from Master's Sun. She's another one of those actresses who gets a lot of work and critical accolades, and I don't understand why. To me she's basically Korean Maggie Gyllenhaal. Anyway...

Synopsis: Na Bori is a 25-year-old woman who desperately wants to be a teacher at the high school she was expelled from, so that she can work with her high school crush, young art teacher Ji Hyun Woo. However, the only thing that enables her to get the coveted job is by signing a contract to essentially babysit Park Tae In, a 20-year-old troublemaker who starts attending the high school, of which he quickly becomes the king.

I'm sure I found it when looking stuff up on High School King of Savvy. Anyway, Gong Yoo plays the troublemaking high school student. :D I've only seen the pilot, and so far I'm "meh" on it. It seems to have all the stereotypical characters you'd expect of a K-drama, as well as flight-of-fancy fight sequences and such. I suppose such things should be expected, given that it aired in 2005. The content and the format (it's in 4:3 aspect ratio, *shudder*) shows its age. I'll give it a few more episodes to see if Gong Yoo and Gong Hyo-jin can somehow work their magic.

Good news, the lemon meringue pie was a success taste wise, as well! Woohoo! Of course, it's best on the day it's baked... after that the crust starts to get soggy. Le sigh.

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You know what's not a success? The Seahawks. Especially versus the Rams. Gawd they were awful. Other than Rawls and the D, I sat every Seahawk I had in my FF lineups. I know all too well how much they suck against the Rams. I don't know what it is, why the Rams can be so terrible with every other team in the league (getting shut out by the depleted 9ers? Seriously?!), and yet always have the Seahawks' number. Always. This is like the fourth time in a row they've beaten Seattle while somehow losing to worse teams. Rams, you do you. As for the Hawks, well -- I wouldn't have felt good about this game regardless, given the history, but with Russell hobbled, there was just no way.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU HAVE NO REAL BACKUP QUARTERBACK AND YOU INSIST ON NOT PROTECTING THE QB YOU DO HAVE WITH A HORRIFIC OFFENSIVE LINE.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths.

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Okay, but you know what has been surprisingly successful so far? My fantasy football teams! BOTH of them have been doing really well. I'm sure that's all about to change, but for now I'm enjoying WINNING, for once. Last season, inevitably if I won with one team, I lost with the other. Or just lost both. ><

This season, I've won all my matchups thus far (so, 4), particularly surprising because in my ESPN league I'm usually projected as the underdog. But last week I got the highest score among all teams, and this week I got the 3rd highest. I'm really meh about my upcoming matchup, though. It's against the person I'm tied with in the division, so one of us is going to come out being the division leader and the other will... not. Unfortunately for me, they have a really strong team, including Antonio Brown. I hate going up against people who have Antonio Brown. -.- It's like you just sort of have to pray that they don't cream you too badly (or that he has an uncharacteristically bad game, like he did last week, but will that happen twice in a row?!). Also, he has Greg Olsen, who I have on my Yahoo team, so it's like, do I root for Olsen to do well or not?! Urg.

On my Yahoo team, I'm in first place in the standings so far, due to how well my team did this week. Totaled 151.96 points. My matchup was the "biggest blowout" of the week, lol. Second-highest score this week was 127.86, so I was comfortably ahead of everyone else. I DON'T KNOW HOW THIS IS HAPPENING. But I like it. Anyway, the only players on my team to score single digits was my D (Pats -- but they were close, with 9) and Allen Robinson, who laid an egg yet again. Like, you're supposed to be elite dude, stop sucking. I'm going to sit him this week in favor of Stefon Diggs, who has had two strong games (he was the highest scorer on my team this week, not that it counted)... and done me no good at all, since I had him benched both weeks. You know, of course, that this means Robinson is finally going to breakout and Diggs is going to whimper out of relevance. SIGH. FF is so maddening. (Also, I dropped Travis Benjamin to waivers last week because he had a bad first week outing and I needed the space for a backup QB. Someone else picked him up, and OF COURSE he immediately posts a great game. GRRR.)

Anyway, I'm also going up against a strong opponent in the Yahoo league. He has Cam Newton, Matt Forte, and Seattle D. -.- He also has Theo Riddick, who is on my ESPN team. The ideal scenario for me is if Seattle and Riddick do well, while everyone else on his team sucks. At least with Cam, I have the hope of countering his points with Greg Olsen. If Olsen is Cam's target for many passes and especially TDs, I can partly neutralize Cam's outrageous number of points. They're playing against a pretty great D, though, so we'll see.

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Instead of torturing myself by watching the Seahawks vs Rams game, I instead went apple picking!

( So many freaking apples. )

Ermahgerd, I went to the Seahawks home opener on Sunday! One of my coworkers got tix as a thank you for her work on this series of articles that we've worked on the last 3 years, and she invited me to come with. It was a very cool experience to go to a Seahawks game live, even though it's harder to figure out what is exactly happening on the field than on TV. Our seats were in the 100 level, but near the end zone (kind of kitty corner rather than really end zone), so when the team was on the other side of the field, I couldn't see what the hell was going on and had to look at the big screen. Of course the Seahawks had to stretch it out until the very last seconds, just to ratchet up the drama. I brought ear plugs and had them in the whole time, but honestly it didn't seem that bad other than for really critical moments.

And Russell sprained his ankle, so yay for that... not. Not only is that bad for the Hawks, it's bad for my fantasy team, so now I have to try and get Matt Ryan back, who I had dropped for Jason Witten. Argh. But other than that, I won both of my fantasy matchups this week, which is kind of exciting. In one of them I even pulled out a miraculous win, because I was down by like 40 points and somehow came back to win it. (It helped that I had Carson Palmer as my QB and my opponent had the NE defense, so every time I gained points, he lost points. It was another scenario where I got to have my cake and eat it too, because I wanted the Cards to lose, but Carson to do well.)

My friend and I ate in the stadium, at Kraken Congee. Congee in a football stadium! How awesome is that? It's definitely a hipster variation though, because it was NOT traditional Chinese congee. It had aioli, pork belly, and crunchy corn. It was pretty dang good though, I must say! ( Pictures. )

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I now have a butter bell, and I am very excited about it.

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The lye is supposed to arrive tonight, and I'm super excited about making my first batch of soap -- I'm going to do a really standard starter soap, even though I have created my own recipe and I'm eager to try it out.

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I finished Orphan Black S4, so with that, I'm all caught up!

( Spoilers )

I am the queen of the incomplete LJ entry these days. I've started and not finished at least two long posts, only now they're totally out of date. And as time passes, the idea of having to play catch up gets more and more daunting...

The biggest news since my last post, and it's a big one, is that I have bought a house. I know, WHAT??? How can I have made such a major decision in such a short amount of time, when I hadn't even been talking about it before?

It is a crazy fast time. I recognize that. That's been the source of many a second (and third, and fourth, etc.) thought. That said, I really started to look for a new place 2-3 years ago. I had actually been working with an agent and looking at properties when two major things happened to put a halt to the proceedings: 1) my mom had a brain aneurysm; and 2) I was going through a period where I was constantly dizzy and had to get an MRI and everything. So yeah, just not in a good place to think about making a significant purchase and moving. (Too bad, because the real estate market was much better for a buyer back then.)

Basically, a couple of coworkers who recently bought new places kind of inspired me to start looking again. I met with one of their real estate agents, who I liked (her name is Mary), and we started looking. Well, she is really familiar with the areas I was looking at, and the available houses, and she's really good at pinpointing what you tell her you want and matching you with a house. Sooooo after looking at houses for a few days with her -- which is NOTHING -- I found a house I loved. And that was that. I'm actually supposed to close this week. O.o

It's all happened so fast that I have more stress and anxiety about it than excitement! Obviously, I love the house... I was totally into it from the moment I saw it, but financially, it's kind of a lot to take on, particularly because I'm not planning on selling my current home until after I move into the new house, which means for however long, I will be paying two mortgages. Which, ouch. And we're nearing some key U.S. holidays -- are people going to be looking for homes during this time? Plus now there's uncertainty in the world what with all the stuff happening in Europe... I don't know. I have this fear that I will be stuck with two mortgages for months, which would be bad. My current home needs a lot of work done to get it into marketable condition, so some time needs to be allotted for that as well, and the holidays are going to add pain to that.

Now my big stress, in addition to that, is the actual moving. I have SO MUCH STUFF. I'm obviously going to use the opportunity to get rid of a lot of it, but I don't have a magic wand that I can use to just make stuff disappear (more's the shame). It has to be dealt with somehow, and right now it's looking like my choices are to have the moving company take a side trip to Goodwill, where I can drop things off, or have someone come take things away (though the Salvation Army truck apparently does not have availability until the end of Dec). I have a quote estimate from a place adelagia used and liked, but it's quite pricey. They have excellent Yelp reviews, so it may be worth paying a little more. I'm having someone else come out on Wed to do another quote (due diligence!), but their Yelp reviews are much sketchier. The person on the phone sounded perfectly reasonable, though, and I can get a discount with them through work, so I'll have to just see what their estimate is and weigh the pros and cons of going with one or the other.

Meanwhile, the Seahawks are awful, and it makes me sad.

How does time pass so quickly? I swear I just updated this thing!

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One thing is that I'm feeling very run down. I thought I might be coming down with something, but I think it's that I don't get enough sleep, and what I do get isn't very restful. My dog often wakes me up at odd times during the night, my mom gets up way earlier than I do, I like sleeping late, etc.

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A few days ago, my internet went out. This happens from time to time, and usually hard cycling the thing does the trick. Or it's a broad outage, and there's nothing to do but wait for Comcast to fix it. This time, they couldn't reach my line remotely, and there were no outages reported, so they scheduled a technician to come out and take a look. My appointment was for noon-2 on Saturday. For two whole days, I lived without internet. jade_okelani suggested that wild animals might have been the cause, and I replied that yeah, and now they were making me live like one. -.- At 11 a.m. on Saturday -- no joke -- the internet mysteriously came back. WTF? No idea what happened. I canceled the technician, half convinced that at 12:01 p.m. it would go out again. Thankfully, it's been on ever since, but as I have no idea what caused it to go out in the first place, I will have no recourse the next time it happens except to complain to Comcast again. I've been hearing about a lot of people switching from Comcast to something else, but I'm resistant to doing it myself unless something really pisses me off, because I think I'm grandfathered in on some internet plan that they don't offer anymore. My internet bill is significantly lower than what I've heard others having (though granted I only have very basic cable).

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Since it's been awhile since my last update, two more football weeks have come and gone. The Seahawks lost to the Packers, which I expected but was still disappointing. Then they shut out the Bears, but the Bears are super terrible so it's actually concerning to me that we couldn't put it away early. I have no idea how the rest of the season is going to go.

In terms of Fantasy Football, things are not looking great this week. I've lost all 3 of my ESPN league matchups, which is annoying because it's like I'm benching the wrong players every week. It's such a crapshoot! I get FF advice from SB Nation, but I'm starting to think that I'd do better just eeny-meeny-miney-moe-ing it. I'm doing better in my Yahoo league -- in fact, I'm pretty proud of the fact that after 2 weeks of play, I am in first place (as the only girl and only non-doctor/engineer!). However, my lineup this week killed me. Why did they declare Chris Ivory eligible if they weren't going to play him?? Why couldn't Eli get OBJ the ball? Why did all my starting RBs suck so much?? Right now I'm ahead of my matchup opponent, but tonight he has two players playing -- including Aaron Rodgers -- so I fully expect him to pull ahead and deliver my first loss of the season. :(

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I finally finished The Martian. I really liked it, though I thought it ended rather abruptly. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the movie is going to do "the next scene" after the last scene in the book. The voice actually reminds me of Tim Urban of Wait But Why, author of the article about the Fermi Paradox that I loved so much. I'm going to get to see the movie on Thursday at a special pre-screening, because of something I did at work. Woohoo!

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Made zucchini bread this weekend but it was disappointing. :/ The zucchini bread I'm used to having in restaurants is really dark and moist. This recipe, which had such high ratings, delivered a zucchini bread that was light tan in color and nowhere near as flavorful.

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Finally finished The Vampire Diaries season 6, so I should be all caught up now. ( Spoilers. )

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Has anyone heard of the band Right the Stars? I think I heard about them from one of those self-published YA books, and I really like two of their songs. But I couldn't find any of their stuff in the usual places, and they don't even have a Wikipedia page. WTF?? And they have 3 albums out! I finally had to buy their CDs from Amazon. What strange thing is this, that I actually have to buy physical CDs to listen to music? (Okay, they're on iTunes, but it was actually cheaper to get the CDs.)

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Jade and I watched Need for Speed last night. Her first time, not mine. It's not a good movie, but it's definitely guilty pleasure, and as she said, "It's so close to being good!" :)) Love Aaron Paul, and I actually really like the ship in the movie. Dakota Johnson is in it, though at the time that I first saw the movie, I had no idea who she was or what she had been cast to play. I just thought she was a random actress with a "charming" gap in her teeth. Also Rami Malek is in it. He even smiles! Weird. Also we see his butt.

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In going through old LJ posts, I noticed that I used a lot of quotes in my subject lines that I didn't ID, which drives present!me crazy, because it sounds so familiar and yet I can't place it. I've decided that whenever I use a quote in a subject line from now on, I'm going to ID it in the post. That's all; carry on.

"They're really blue" -- Jules to Tobey (about his eyes) in Need for Speed