Mistress of my Domain

It’s been ages. My last post was five years ago. Every year, posting here was one of my New Year’s resolutions. I wanted to post the first day of the year, but the longer I went without posting, the more I altered my goals to just posting at all. Last year, I didn’t even include it in my few resolutions.

I guess I’ve finally been pushed to do it because I really am trying to change things up. Last year was a fairly mundane year for me, but what sucked about it was how it felt like a carbon copy from the year before. It could be worse - never changing is better than things getting worse, but still, I would like to change some things up and hope things can get a little better.

The worst thing that happened last year was almost the same thing as one of the worst things that happened in 2022. I got into a car accident both years. The car accident from two years ago so far is slightly worse because it happened right after we had finished paying off the car insurance. We went from fully owning our car to it being totally undrivable - even though the accident didn’t seem that bad at first.

Last year’s accident was more embarrassing because it was completely my fault, given I hit a parked car. Right now, the car is at the mechanic’s to be fixed (though apparently, there’s some issue with our insurance company, and they haven’t started working on it yet.) We’re lucky and have an old car of our in-laws to use for now.

Our financial situation has gotten slightly worse. It seemed to start off okay, but lately, we’re basically living paycheck to paycheck. I’m thinking of either trying to find another job and leaving my old job or finding something that would be a second job. I’m hating my job more and more lately. But on the other hand, I make more than minimum wage at my current job. The problem is the lack of hours.

Two of my longest-standing resolutions are losing weight and managing my time. I still have to work on both - to varying degrees. My weight loss journey for the last couple of years has been interesting. I lost about 35 pounds in the last two years. I've gotten so many comments about it. Like, "Wow, you lost so much weight. You look great." I know people mean it in a positive way, but it makes me feel the same way it did the last time I lost a lot of weight and got the same comments. It makes me think, "How bad did I look before?"

When I looked at my body, I didn't really notice the change. I could tell in certain areas — like my boobs were affected. I got my first mammogram last year, and the tech asked if I lost a lot of weight. I was shocked that she could tell, but then she said when people lose a lot of weight, most lose it in that area, and you can see the difference. I've joked with my husband for a long time about getting a breast reduction (which he vehemently opposes) because I feel like one was bigger than the other, but I can't say I'm happy losing so much in that area.

But in most of my problem areas, I can't tell as much — especially my thighs. I can tell I've lost a lot of weight in my stomach area, but there's still a belly, which is the most important for me to lose because I've read about how that's the most dangerous area to have fat. However, recently I took some pictures, and when I looked at them, I could definitely see that I am so much tinier than I was. In fact, I actually started to wonder if I lost too much weight — which is something I never thought I'd think. But I don't think that's possible because I'm nowhere close to a small weight, like 100 lbs. So, I don't know.

When it comes to time management, I realized that as much as I hate having schedules and putting a timetable on things, having no structure at all wasn't good for me. For the last couple of years, I've tried to use my organizer and reminder apps to set goals — overall goals and day-to-day goals. It's been hit or miss — mostly miss. I'm fairly good at keeping up with household duties, especially cleaning the bathroom. And I've caught up on a TON of TV shows on my watch list. There are still a lot of things I've tried to make time for, but I'm still woefully behind.
I barely read anything — not even fanfic — last year. That's definitely something I want to rectify.

While I've been better at catching up on TV, there are still a lot of movies I haven't caught up on.

One of my biggest resolutions is to make more time for writing. Over the last few years, I started trying to write every day. While I hadn't missed too many days, I was getting frustrated that most of the writing I was doing was for like five minutes at the end of the day for like a few sentences — or just editing. I got to the point last year where I thought it was pointless, so I stopped for a few months. Then, I realized that even five minutes of writing was way better than nothing, so I've gone back to that. Still, I do want to accomplish more than just five minutes. It's something that's been on my schedule that I haven't made time for, but I'm going to try and do better with that.

Right now, that's all the resolutions I can think of. I'll try to do a mini-recap of the last few years. There haven't been too many major events, so it shouldn't be too long. It will probably be mostly pictures of our new animal menagerie at home.

Stacey

We survived the hurricane! Thank God! :) My luck with hurricanes thankfully continues. *knock on wood* Though reading the news it seems like it was luck all around that it wasn't worse (for us anyway) than it could have been.

By Saturday night, I was calmer than I'd been - drinking sangria probably helped. I still could barely sleep but I felt better on Sunday and I was starting to make my peace with us riding out the storm at home. Of course, that's when Jean texts me. She asked when we were coming. That surprised me because as far as I knew Mike hadn't changed his mind about staying home. I asked him about it and he said he had no idea which is right when she called him.

She basically did everything she could to get him to come over, including guilting him about making his mother worry. A lot of times when she does that it annoys me. Mike's a bit of a pushover at times and laid back and tries to avoid confrontation so usually when she nags him about things he'll give in just to get her to stop or because he doesn't really care either way.

He didn't give in but he told her that as long as wherever he was had beer he really didn't care where he waited out the storm. So he said the decision was 100% mine. He does that a lot. When we were deciding to move, he said the final decision was mine. He's basically said I have the final word on whether we have kids or not. While having that kind of say so can be kind of nice, I'm not one who makes decisions very easily, so it annoys me a little when he does that.

I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought about it for ages but knew a decision had to be made soon before the weather worsened. Finally, I told him I couldn't decide by myself and he had to give me something. He said that he wasn't scared about the storm at all and part of him would like to stay at home. But he said another part of him knew that I would sit there and worry all night about whether we should have gone over there. I laughed and said I'd probably still worry even if we did go over there, but I said we should go. So we packed up as quickly as we could. We unplugged most of the electronics and turned off the A/C and left.

I felt a little better when we got to the house because they had boarded up the front windows. Unfortunately, when we got inside I saw that most of the rest of the windows were completely uncovered including the window in the room we were supposed to sleep in. My worry increased when I went online and we started watching more hurricane coverage. There was a Senator being interviewed and he said the wind didn't really concern him much, but it was the potential storm surge. On Twitter, people were posting pictures of areas in Tampa at the beach where the water had completely receded. They said when it came back it could be like a tsunami. I saw The Impossible and the thought of that freaked me out for the rest of the day.

While I was freaked out, Mike was the complete opposite. He was not kidding when he said he wasn't scared at all. He was having fun with it. He loves the rain and he said he would be outside if he could and he was excited. On Saturday he had me take a picture of him with two cases of beer in hand while he was wearing a life jacket and posted on Facebook that it was his preparation for the storm. On Sunday, he changed his Facebook profile picture to a shot of Bill Paxton from Twister and his cover photo to a tornado from the movie. I suggested that maybe a perfect job for him would be as one of those crazy hurricane chasers.

As the night wore on I got less and less panicked. The lights only flickered and the electricity turned off a couple of times very briefly. The news got a bit more encouraging. The hurricane was moving away from the gulf so that decreased the potential storm surge significantly. Plus, by the time it got to our area, it was "just" a category one storm. As much as I had been dreading it and as much as Mike had been looking forward to it, we both slept through the "worst" of it - though that made sense since the highest winds didn't really start until 2AM.

When I woke up, my phone wasn't working properly. My mom said she had called me and Mike a couple of times and we didn't get any calls and we couldn't make any. We had to turn them off to get them working. I wasn't sure if we could use the water but forgot and accidentally started to brush my teeth with water from the sink and then once I started watching tv I saw there was a boil water advisory for the east part of my county because a tree fell on a water main, but I wasn't sure if we were in the east or not. When we went outside, there were a lot of branches and leaves all over the back. We helped them clean up and then went home.

We also had very minimal damage at our house, just some leaves and a few branches. It's a good thing that the storm was not worse because Mike's idea to put cardboard on some of the windows wasn't a great idea. All of the cardboard was on the ground in a wet clump and the wind wasn't even as bad as it could have been.

A neighbor came over and she said that she had stayed through the storm and other than the lights flickering a couple of times, we didn't lose power. That was something that Jean mentioned, and I'd read about on Pinterest, that the closer you live to a hospital the faster your power comes back after an outage. We didn't live directly next to a hospital, but we're about five minutes away from one - plus the electric company is across the street.

I was still a little frustrated for the rest of the day for a couple of reasons. I was worried about the boiled water advisory and wanted to know if it was for our area. I called several different places and they were either closed entirely for the day or closed by the time I called and I couldn't find out anything specific online. This morning, I finally got a hold of somebody and they said my area probably wasn't included in the advisory, but if I was close to any of the other areas it was probably better to be safe than sorry.

Also when we got home, I turned on the A/C but it didn't come back on. We already had issues with it a couple of months ago and I was worried that it died completely because it was off for so long. I couldn't get it to work all day. Then finally at night, I put it way down to about 70 to see if it might start working, but when I went to bed the temperature was still at 81. When I woke up though it was freezing and, I have no idea, but now it's working thankfully.

Ugh, and there's still at least a couple more months of hurricane season to go. Hopefully there will be no next time this year, but hopefully, if there is we'll be slightly better prepared.

Stacey

I'm in Florida (around West-Central FL) and waiting around for Hurricane Irma. I've definitely spent many parts of the last couple of days in a near panic and close to tears. I barely slept last night. We don't have cable, but I've been watching some coverage on YouTube and reading about it. At certain points, I just want to stop and bury my head in the sand because all of the news is freaking me out more. But I can't do that because have to know what's going on. I've taken a lot of breaks though.

( Hurricane preparations )

Stacey

Mike and I have been in the new house for close to two months now. I feel like I'm finally starting to get settled in the house like I don't feel strange in the house and I'm getting used to being here. Of course, I still have brain fart moments where I reach for something where it used to be, like toilet paper for example, and suddenly "Oh, yeah it's not there anymore. Different house."

When we were first moving in, Mike joked that the house was a fixer upper - though not as bad as his friends, Tom and Sean's house. They bought a house a couple of years ago. We stayed there the last time we were in Maryland. There's a huge area in front of the house that is completely gutted and it's basically a ditch. Their basement's a mess. They told us nightmare stories about lighting issues and having to replace the wiring and other problems. Our house is definitely not that bad, but we definitely have our own issues to deal with here.

( Bug issues and other problems... )

Stacey

I meant to post this awhile ago and forgot.

Michael and I saw Beauty and the Beast a couple of months ago. At first, I wasn't sure I could get him to see it. I try not to drag him to see anything I know he might not like (we have a running joke about me making him watch Brokeback Mountain which he absolutely refuses to do.) We've watched Disney movies together, but he's not a really big fan of romance films, so I thought he could possibly like it, but wasn't sure.

At first, he suggested we see Kong: Skull Island. I told him I was interested in it, but I suggested we see BaTB. He said he was interested in it, but he wanted to see K:SU more. I laughed and said I felt the exact opposite. Over the next couple of week, I think he came around to it since he knew how much I wanted to see it.

We definitely made the right call because we both really loved it - though I do remember when it started being a little nervous because I realized I forgot to tell him it was a musical. He doesn't hate all musicals (I got him to watch Chicago and he liked it for the most part) but, like with romantic movies, it's not a favorite genre of his. But, like I said, he ended up loving it. When I asked him after the movie what he thought he said he'd give it a ten out of ten. He also joked that the one thing he wished it had more of was someone taking a chainsaw to the face (he's a huge fan of horror movies.)

He told me that his favorite part would end up being obvious to me, but would be hard to guess because it was such a small part of the movie. It took me awhile to figure it out. A lot of the time he's drawn to the scenery in a movie, so I guessed that and he said I was close. Finally, I figured it out and laughed because his favorite part was Belle's garden. Michael loves gardening and growing things and his eye tends to be drawn to that in movies. He actually talked about specific things he saw in her garden he wanted to grow in a garden of our own.

As far me, I just thought the whole movie was just lovely! I wasn't holding on to any nostalgia from the original. I don't remember it that well. Of the Disney movies of that era (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Lion King, etc.) BaTB is the only one I can't really remember when I saw it originally. I know I must have seen it at some point, but the only parts I really remembered while watching the new version was the opening song about Belle and Gaston's song. It probably helped that I wasn't judging the new version against the original.

I just really loved the love story. I don't know if I was abnormal as a kid, but I was never the hugest fan of fairytales. I think Cinderella was one of the first stories I read when I learned to read and I just didn't get how someone can basically fall in love at first sight. I've never been a big lover of that trope. Sometimes I'm okay with it (like with The Little Mermaid) but most of the time not. That's why Ever After: A Cinderella Story is my favorite Cinderella version because we get to see them fall in love. It's something I appreciated about Tangled. I liked it about this version of BaTB. We don't spend a lot of time on it, but with the montage we get to that Belle and the Beast get to know each other and it makes their love story believable and very sweet The chemistry between them was great, which sort of feels weird to say since the Beast was partially CGI (I know Dan Stevens actually acted with Emma Watson, but the Beast's face was CGI) so I don't know who to credit with the chemistry - though at the end when he's transformed back to human I thought the two of them had nice chemistry.

The music, the acting, the story, the sets, the costumes were all amazing. I can't even remember the last time (if I ever) I felt like this, but I literally felt like dancing out of the theater when we were leaving.

We did end up seeing Kong: Skull Island a couple of weeks later. I agreed with some of the reviews I read which said the movie didn't reinvent the wheel and is not necessarily original, but as a popcorn movie, it does what it does well. It is exciting in places and sometimes funny. But I am glad I saw BaTB first and definitely liked it better.

Stacey

#mylivejournal #lj18 #happybirthday

I didn't realize I'd made that many comments.

Stacey

Movie meme stolen from lots of people

•Pick 15 of your favorite movies.
•Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
•Post them here for everyone to guess.
•Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie.
•NO GOOGLING/using IMDb search or other search functions

( Quotes within... )

Stacey

WOW! I can't believe it's been a whole year and I'm not just talking about since my wedding - since my last real post as well. I've posted a couple of stories, but other than that nothing.

I chalk it up to some business, laziness, and my usual practice of procrastination, procrastination, procrastination. After the wedding we were all so tired. I had wanted to do a recap of some kind, but just decided to wait to do it. I didn't visit LJ or twitter or keep up with my mail. After a couple of months I had about 400 e-mails I needed to reply to. I finally started visiting Twitter again and LJ again.

Once I finally came back, I wanted to get to doing the wedding recap, but I tend to get very word-y (see this post for example LOL) and I knew talking about the wedding would take forever so I just kept putting it off. At one point, to try and motivate myself I made the decision that I wouldn't post anything until I posted about the wedding. That...clearly didn't work. I had to break my rule and post my resolutions after the new year, but I just got too busy and didn't get around to it.

What's funny, to me anyway, about not posting for so long is I used to not post for a long time with no problem. When I first started on LJ I was really just a lurker. I didn't have a lot of friends or a lot going on in my life. But now that I do have a lot of friends and do have a lot of stuff going on in my life, I don't post in forever.

Though not posting on LJ isn't the only thing I'm behind on. I've never gotten the dress that I wore to the rehearsal dinner dry cleaned. I haven't cleaned my wedding dress. They had this wedding dress preservation kit thing at David's Bridal, which I wasn't sure if I wanted to do, but I need to do something. I haven't gotten the pictures my aunt took at the wedding rehearsal. I still haven't got our wedding album. We got all the pics from the wedding (over 800) on discs, but the album hasn't been put together. It's been horrible trying to communicate with the wedding photographer. It takes him forever to answer e-mails.

So, anyway, I've decided to do a wedding recap - for anyone who still cares - and post some pictures over the weekend. This will also be a kind of nice way to relive the wedding before our anniversary.

Things between Michael and I are going alright. When it comes to our feelings for each other we're still just as in love as ever. I've never been in a relationship before, so I have no real frame of reference, but it still surprises me how after six years together we're still so crazy about each other. He still texts me that he misses me on occasion. We're still ridiculously affectionate in public (which is never something I thought I would be.) We don't make out in public or anything. But he puts his arms around me and we hug. So, yeah, still in love. :)

( This is long... )

Title: Cinderella Wasn't a Clotpole
Author/Artist: geekslave
Pairing(s): Arthur/Merlin
Characters: Merlin, Arthur, Gwaine
Word Count: ~9500
Rating: R
Summary: When Merlin wakes up in Arthur's bed wearing nothing but an apron, he has several questions. How'd he get there? Where did his clothes go? Why is he wearing an apron when he doesn't even cook? The most important question is what exactly happened between him and Arthur. Merlin just has to work up the courage to ask him.
Disclaimer: Merlin characters are the property of Shine and BBC. No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended.
Warnings: Dubious Consent issues.
Notes: Expanded version of story originally written for 2014 summerpornathon's week one challenge - Sexpistolary. For merlin_writers Tropes Bingo. Tropes used - secret crush, friends to lovers, and amnesia/memory loss.

Big thanks to bluemoondreamer for her quick and thorough beta job!

On AO3


( Cinderella Wasn't a Clotpole )

Still haven't been able to find a shoe for the wedding. Jean and I went shopping again last week. I didn't think there was a point in going back to the stores we'd already been too, but since that was months ago, I hoped that maybe they got new shoes in. But it seemed like they had even less to offer than before. I talked to one of the salespeople and they mentioned that one of the problems was that a lot of modern shoes are so narrowly pointed and they have such short toe heels that barely cover any of your toes.

( Shoes & Feet )