That’s the verdict. 4-6 weeks of twice-a-week therapy and adjustments, then PT until I’m no longer bent and I can feel again. Yeesh. All this from having Zoolander Syndrome (I can’t turn left, although it’s actually right, so maybe it’s reverse-Zoolander syndrome). Or maybe Mister Spock and I have some unfinished business.

It’s a pinched nerve, and it’s up near the top of my spine, so my neck and back have twisted in knots, and my vertebrae are out of whack. Long story short, it sucks to be me right now, because I’m doing things with bags of frozen peas that ought to be illegal–and not in a good way.

Now what’s aggravating the condition (which I really didn’t know I had until it started to really friggin’ hurt), or at least, not helping it, is my new toy. Our new family toy, ahem. We prowled and waited and checked prices and got a nice Xbox360 over the holiday. The Spawn drooled so much over Halo 3 that the move came partly to preserve the carpets, and Mr. Xandra found it in himself to embrace the 80’s in a way we never did when they were actually here via Rock Band. Yes, it’s like Guitar Hero only it’s more like…Guitar, Bass, Drums, and Vocals Hero all rolled into one. There is nothing more hysterical than watching your friends, one by one or maybe in twos if you’ve got an extra controller do their impersonations of Axl Rose on nerve stimulants…except gathering around the ol’ green ring to engage in arthritic finger contortions, smash on a practice pad of giant, color-coded circles, and screech into a microphone in a manic breed of mutant karaoke

In addition to the freakin’ cool songs you get to unlock on Easy setting (like Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper, which is made of win and more cowbell!), you get to create your own rawk gawd (or gawdess) and customize your pixelated self-insert into the music scene with hair, eye, and skin color (including all the eye-cramping shades found in the Manic Panic line), styles of head-hair and face-hair for the guys, and you can even pick your rocker’s attitude (I’m a little in love with the “goth” ‘tude because it makes your rocker do funny ‘woo-woo’ things with his or her hands). There’s also a stunning array of ink styles by some pretty big names in the tattoo world, and even face paint, if you don’t want the students at your day job knowing the vice principal rawks out on the weekends with groupies.

So besides the fact that I could get lost in picking out clothes, shoes, hair, and makeup for my rocker (I have a chick with white and blue anime buns for my primary rocker–she’s a cutie), standing hipshot with a guitar controller slung over one shoulder and hunching over it while twisting my fingers into knots is not helping my posture any.

But that’s what the groupies are there for.

I’m a technerd. I admit it. I don’t have many of the trappings of overt technerdity as one might expect, but rather, I’m more of a ninja technerd type–I prowl and stalk the gadgets until I can no longer resist their siren call…and then I haunt the sales so I can get ‘em cheap. I count on the cost of expensive toys as an effective prophylactic against my need to acquire immediately.
But when it comes to open source…well, let’s just say the condom broke on that one, because OPEN SOURCE IS FREE, BABY! Which is why I’m running a Linux rig all day, all night, and twice on the weekends.

So I finished NaNoWriMo and produced 50,000 words of utter craptasticness that will someday be edited into something fit for human consumption. But to celebrate, I gave myself the gift of Nerd. I finally got Compiz-Fusion up and running on my rig and boy is it sweet like honey and chocolate and oral sex with a coffee chaser. Now for those of you who speak Geek, I’m a recent convert to Ubuntu from Gentoo Linux (oh, so, customizable, but when my laptop had hard-drive death, I did not have three whole days to customizably build it from the screws up…and well, Gutsy Gibbon had just come out and even though Gentoo is a kickass distro when it comes to powerful custom rigs, Gutsy was new and pretty and the Ubuntu forums are a very well-stocked place in the tweaking department and…).

So anyway…enough with the geekspeak…on to the screen shots!

I have the ability to “zoom out” to view all four of my virtual desktops and rearrange my apps between them. I keep email and net stuff on one desktop, Writer’s Cafe on another, graphics stuff on the third, and media on the fourth, so that my desktop at 100% zoom is not cluttered, giving me a lovely working space in which to play.

This is a shot of the desktop cube. Linux has the capability to make your desktop larger than your monitor screen–mine is 2 screens wide and 2 screens high, giving me 4 virtual desktops to spread out all my apps. I switch between the desktops using this awesome cube. The cube exists in a skydome, with graphical caps on the top and bottom surfaces. Freakin’ sweet.

My app switcher isn’t just alt-tabbing–I page through the apps on a desktop in this nifty little ring thingy that cycles them around each other. It’s like having a little circus that features geeks. Well…not real circus geeks, because my laptop apps don’t bite the heads off live chickens. Although I bet I could find a widget that features virtual chickens, with and without heads. I bet I could.

If I don’t feel like paging through my three-ring circus of apps, I can window-switch ‘em if I want using different keys. My apps page through like 3d cards. Much like Windows Vista’s 3d eyecandy rendering. However, of the few people I know who have actually been forced to upgrade upgraded to Vista have turned off their eyecandy because it’s a friggin’ resource hog.

After a month as intense as NaNo,  I take a bit of a well-deserved break due to temporary burn-out, and what better way to rest my brain than tweaking my workspace.  Eye candy, yes.  Brain candy, too.  And all free.

At the risk of having tomatoes tossed at me, I use Wikipedia a lot for brief reference look-ups and starting points from which to jump off when I get a bug up my ass about a subject.  I also cruise Wiki’s homepage every so often, and today’s random “On this day in…” selection proved to be something rather fascinating.  Today, in the year 1384, a young lady named Jadwiga, at the age of ten, was crowned the King of Poland.  What’s more, she did this with the blessing of the Polish nobility, who negotiated with her mother prior to their declaration, and crowned her King instead of Queen so that no one would mistake her for a queen-consort.

Now, I’ve taken some history classes, and read some history books–enough to know that there’s a crapload that I don’t know about the Middle Ages, and enough to know that I consider myself just ignorant enough to not be able to do them justice in fiction–I’m caught between some of the realism I know would just suck to have to live in, and the romantic fantasy that continually draws me to places like the SCA’s Pennsic War in the hopes of capturing just a whisper of that magical feel.  But for the most part, I get that a woman’s lot was short, brutal, and over too quick.  Especially a monarch woman’s.  But the fact that Poland actually picked a queen and afforded her power in her own right is astounding.

Interestingly enough, the crown brought several suitors to her doorstep, and in true medieval romance fashion, one of whom planned to pop the princess and present himself as husband accompli.  That plan was derailed, however, and the princess married a Lithuanian twenty-plus years her senior but apparently a monarch with Poland’s better interests at heart.  Her position likely held little power due to her youth, femininity, and the Polish system of government, but she was able to use her influence to benefit her people.  Not the least of this was restoration of a university, and the translation of Latin books into Polish, thereby bringing books to her people.  Alas, the perils of the medieval health care plan recognize no regency, and the young queen was a month past giving birth to her only daughter when both mother and baby failed to recover.  Jadwiga was twenty-five.  She survives as St. Hedwig, patron saint of queens.

So today, I learned something new.  Part of Eastern Europe had a government with checks and balances present, and an attitude with the beginnings of gender equality (tempered heavily by the whole hereditary kingship thing).  And that the definition of “benevolent medieval queen” includes “try to find your people something to read.”

Wow. Just wow. It’s a long watch, but oh-so-worth it.

Yes, I know. The site suffered through several schizophrenic episodes over the past week while I putzed around with my new layout. There are several reasons, one of which has to do with me simultaneously cursing and loving on widgets with the hate/love of a thousand burning suns. Or at least a 60-watt bedside table lamp as I burned the midnight photons trying to hack graphics and reverse-engineer a stylesheet written originally in Portuguese.

Normally, the last thing I want to do is give up on my lovely website graphic design (devised for me by a dear friend with an incredible eye for design and an awesome sense of humor), but I’m working on a WIP right now and I have determined that I need some immersive therapy for getting into the universe I’m developing. Contrary to the appearance and first impression of my new layout, it’s not an historical. I’d call it feudal punk space opera.

I adore using WordPress as my CMS, and I adore the flexibility in both design and functionality. But much of it makes my damn head hurt, and as a result of me not being a full time web designer/developer, I spent a good week and a half on this when I only wanted to spend about three days.

So…I’m moving to the Boonies (TM) next week. We didn’t originally call it The Boonies, and it really isn’t as full of Boonie-goodness as it could be. I mean, we still get city water and the trash gets picked up. Plus, we got us one of them indoor-outhouses. More’n one, in fact.

Now, life in a small town just outside a major city is a pleasant dichotomy of rural practicality and easy access to big-city culture. I can get sushi in my local grocery, along with farm-fresh bacon that still oinked last week. And within city limits, my town was one of those rare small towns who wanted to attract the exurbs, so in addition to having little old ladies who still give you free trashbags when you pay your utility bills, and an automatic subscription to the weekly newspaper, we also had a killer telecommunications department, which included digital cable, HDTV channels, and broadband internet through the city utility commission.

Now it is exactly five miles from my old doorstep to my new doorstep, two and a half of which are still within city limits. So last week, when I arranged for Internet services at the new address, you can imagine my surprise when I was handed the welcome package of two Dixie cups and a string. It’s kinda scary to realize that even the Borg Time-Warner won’t really venture out to where I’ll be living. My nights are now being filled with nightmarish scenes from “Scream” where I’m the big-busted babysitter who’s just discovered that “ZOMG the killer is in the house!” and I have no way to Instant Message anybody about it.

But perhaps I should count my blessings. I saw someone else leaving, who lives further out, carrying firewood and wet blankets…

I’ve been grilled!  Over some Smokin’ Hot flames.  :D  Actually, by a Smokin’ Hot erotic romance writer.  Fellow LSB author Kate Willoughby regularly interviews authors at her blog, and to celebrate the release of “Hounded” from “A Witch In Time,” Kate put me to the grill. :D  Hop on over and check me out, along with some of the other intriguing authors of sensual and erotic romance Kate interviews, as well as the books she’s releasing and stories she reviews.

In addition to being on the barbie, I’ve been participating in National Novel Writing Month.  Not that I don’t write every other month in the year, but for November, I use the “blast through and write like crazy” technique characterized in NaNo participation.  I turn off my internal editor and write just to start and end a story within the allotted time.  Since my laptop’s wireless card unexpectedly died last week, though, my great start fizzled out.  I’m still operating at half-impulse as I get things straightened back out (for the g33k squad out there, my old laptop used Gentoo Linux and Gnome desktop, my new lappy had a great start with Ubuntu linux and KDE desktop.  Long story short, I like Kdesktop, but Ubuntu just had too much of a learning curve.  Its package management system just wasn’t as robust as Gentoo’s is.  So back to Gentoo, but this time with dual-boot KDE/Gnome, for whenever I’m in a mood for a change of environment.  Thus endeth the g33k segment of our show).  So for the past week, I’ve had to choose between trying to catch up my story-writing, or doing internet things like blogging.  And since my internet time was exceedingly limited, I wrote…

…and yes, kept serious tabs on the midterm elections, because I have this inner political junkie that loves to watch how politics plays out.  I still love the first four seasons of The West Wing and could watch them for hours when Bravo runs the marathons.  I so wish Martin Sheen was president for realz.

But after the edge-of-the-seat night of watching CNN’s tallies scroll endlessly across the bottom of the TV screen, I realized I’m in Week 2 of NaNo, which is traditionally when people drop out of NaNo, because life intrudes, or they think their story sucks (of course it does–it’s in draft form…you’re vomiting words on the page at a reckless pace about twice as fast as a prudent person would–the idea is to revise and edit later). So the words are coming more slowly, and the time ticks by, and a rare summery day in November just can’t be wasted.

I’m a big sucker for goalsetting. Sometimes I’m an addict–I set so many goals and micromanage them that I don’t actually get anything done. However, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is different. There’s such energy–such knowledge that about 70,000 other people are doing the same damn thing as you–that you just can’t help getting caught up in the crazy.

I’d like to thank Annie and Eveline from Euro-Reviews for popping in to say, “Hi!” in the comments of my last post.  Annie–I’m just incredibly glad you liked the book!  I love writing about the future, where anything’s possible–and if that possibility includes hunky men, all the better!  Eveline, I envy you your chocolate.  I once had the chance to work on a consulting project in Belgium, but had to turn it down because right when the project was due, I’d be due, myself, and flight attendants get nervous when they see very pregnant women boarding airplanes for transatlantic flights.

For those of you who’ve made comments and wondered why your comments don’t show up immediately, it’s because I have comments set to moderated approval.  I’m fairly new to the back-end of blogging, and I don’t have all the filters set up yet that would allow me to open up comments and not worry about spam from online casinos, online pharmacies, online diploma mills, and or online whackos in general.  So while I learn, I moderate.

In case you dropped by sometime yesterday or today and noticed the place was a little snarly, I had to tinker with some stuff under the hood. Not to bore you with uber-g33k stuff, but I upgraded the WordPress engine that runs my little G-spot here (yes, that was a pun–flog me with a wet noodle, ’cause I’m all about flogging the blog), and put up a static splash page, so the site has room to grow.

Anyway, things should be shaking down just fine again from now on. The upgrade went smoothly and I learned that my HTML skillz, while not so mad anymore, are still adequate enough for simple stuff. This from a former hard-code head who believed that using anything other than notepad to code the page diluted the purity of the code, man.

Of course, I make no promises about the blog skin. I’m still playing around with blog couture. If I’d had a WordPress blog when I was nine, Barbie wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much of my parents’ money as she did. I’d much rather play dress-up with my blog than with my Barbies any day.  And your pervy little brother can’t put your blog in compromising positions with GI Joes.  There’s always a downside.