josie

My friends who know little of Star Wars said it was fun but with horrible pacing/plot holes, but overall enjoyable. My friends who enjoy SW but share my hatred of TLJ said it was... 5/10. But they all said the best part was being in a theatre full of die hard Star Wars fans who were beyond angry and hating every minute of it...

Ugh. Artists. The worst.

In just a hair? Weren't you cold? Didn't people stare?

Wow, it has been awhile. So... that bachelorette party was actually incredibly relaxing. With the exception of me and one other, everyone was married, so everyone was super chilled out, we did goat yoga... and it was the most beautiful fall weather in the finger lakes that whole weekend. Everyone was in bed by 1am. Such hard partiers (these folks USED to be party hardy, so I was worried). Goat yoga. Yes. Most millennial thing I've ever done but also really wonderful. The homestead it was on was amazing- I could live out with some goats in the hills and be pretty happy. But in current news, figured out some previously impossible moves on trapeze, coding is sort of making sense, and I have xanax to get me through thanksgiving if need be...

The trouble is I'm stuck until I learn a lot more... because as I learned the hard way, no one wants to hire an illustrator. My talent is worthless as far as most places are concerned. It's all good, it's a catalyst, I'll be ok but ugh

haaahahahaha most of my department has quit and i'm somehow going to learn a whole new career in the next two weeks before the latest person's last day in addition to all the stuff I already do (which is like 3 people's jobs in its own right) I better get an effin' raise

This is a lifelong dream of mine. Will I ever have the money/time to go? probs not. But maybe.

Oh my god has anyone posted this article about NHL dentists anywhere yet? It's gleefully gory and a horrible joy to read. I love these "behind the scenes" looks into sports. https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/27851359/the-ugly-gory-bloody-secret-life-nhl-dentists

lol it's acro- aka people stacking/balancing. She's balancing on his feet. There was another picture I took where they were starting to get into position and it was totally dino sex

Our company is having problems and us creatives turned our little room into a haunted house. It was a nice morale boost. And then my boss at the aerial studio somehow managed to do stuff in her costume... I didn't get home until 10 (as usual for Tuesdays and Thursdays) so I missed trick or treaters, but glad we got some spooky silliness in.

Bachelorette Party this weekend. I need 3 days of sleep, not partying, and since I don't really drink anymore... I'll be the one snoozing in the corner of the winery. Say, do you think they'd make fun of me if I showed up with heating pads and icy hot patches and my foam roller? We're getting too old for weekend long bonanzas. By the time I get married we'll be to the werthers and polident gift bags...

s t r e s s

Because right now there's fires everywhere and you can see fires everywhere.

My good friend lives in Cloverdale, CA. He currently has his car packed, ready to go- the Kincaid Fire that exploded overnight is 10 miles south of him. His wife works at a winery 5 miles south of the fire. The highway is single lane either way right now and I'm just hoping they don't get cut off from each other. He can see the fires over the next hill, and says there are firefighters wandering around his street, setting up stations to fight if necessary. I'm absolutely terrified for them. Wind is gusting up to 80mph and it's dryyyy dry dry. He says it's "very disaster movie". I grew up with tornadoes, but there's something insidious about a firestorm. A hurricane is horrifying, but man... I think a wildfire might scare me more. I'll take the great lake blizzards. You couldn't pay me to live in CA.

I'm still "mad" at dark for letting me try on brand new $999 skates at his job at Pure Hockey. They were so light. Like wearing nothing at all... nothing at all.

Your shaming worked. Dark put the game on while he cleans.

Y'know, I'm not honestly sure I can differentiate between replica/bootleg. There was a noticeable difference in quality on some of the jerseys (and there were a ton, because Tuch is from around here and an army of folks supporting him were present). Now whether those were cheapo bootlegs or simple not the super duper official version, I couldn't tell ya. But I could tell which ones cost big moneys, and which ones most likely didn't as they were visually inferior based off the gold fabric alone. Maybe that won't be the case with the Sabres 50th. But the gold strikes me as a finnicky special fabric that's difficult to imitate.

When we saw Vegas play the Sabres, I remember seeing a ton of the VGK jerseys in person. The gold striping was really easy to use as a tell between authentic and knockoff. The authentic gold has a rather smooth/luminous look to it, while the knockoff looks crunchier/didn't lay as well- like a roll of ribbon you'd get at Michaels for your fall crafts. Dark and I both remarked that we were surprised to find that we actually rather liked it- but I'm also a huge fan of black and gold together. White and gold, maybe not so much, but Eric Bodamer's work on that detailing of the bison's withers on the crest tied it all together/sold me. It's a good detail- the smart move is as you said- they used it as a minor feature- an accent. Gilding the silver linings of the last decade of Buffalo hell hockey...

sUPerStiTIon Is dUmB call it what you want, you superstitious so-and-so but yeah the first NHL game i ever went to live was sabres v florida and it sucked I'll probably be working tonight since I had to take time off yesterday thanks to a busted neck/over-exhaustion wheee

I'm sorry, man. And yeah, I'm sorry to everyone who is dealing with the c word right now- I hope my aggravated posting doesn't come across as insensitive to you. As I said in my first post- it saved my sister's life and others close to me. I'm just in awe and horror of whatever ineptitude took place in this situation. And scared.

Yeah I didn't want to get into that angle on this board, even though it is a big part of how I feel about it. Typed it out a few times, deleted it. Been through enough of it myself to know the bias is real, but if you haven't experienced it I doubt it sounds believable and we're all borderline hysterical bored housewives getting all hyped up off each other's misfortune. I don't know man, 6 separate women in the Rochester area who met in chemo and all found out they actually weren't ill with cancer is a pretty scary high number. I guess if that's normal that's... really disturbing. Their stories all had differences of course but the overlying reality was the same- they were diagnosed, sent straight to chemo, and only found out the results were not that serious much later. My friend's is by far the most egregious example of this, but god.. that's just so wrong. sorry for snapping, i'm just angry. I guess they're just busy. Human bodies are weird.

Chemo is horrific. I've always had nothing but hope and respect for oncology- it saved my sister's life, and that of many others I know and hopefully all others to come. However, on her post on social media, a startling number of women came forward with similar stories. I say women because ovarian cancer seems to have more of a "is it isn't it" difficulty in diagnosis. There appears to be a "salt the earth and ask questions later" approach to this particular family of illness- I get it, it can metastasize quickly and be fatal, and it has a very high reoccurrence rate. But when half a dozen women share their experiences of "I went through x rounds of chemo and surgery when it turns out I really didn't have to" you have to wonder. Ovarian is one of the more terrifying cancers in my opinion- and I know it's greatly affected many people in this community. To add this to that diagnosis is just... what do you even do? What if you can't afford a second opinion? Hell, she couldn't really afford treatment as it was (yet another gofundme we're all helping with). I really want to believe the best, that it was an honest but horrible mistake, a series of failures not unlike the highly unlikely sequence of events that leads to a plane crash, but my god it's confidence shattering. You can't help but question/be cynical. She's a hell of a fighter- she'll go to war over this with a lawyer whose armor she trusts.

I got the most infuriating good news yesterday. A friend of mine was diagnosed with stage 4 of a rare form of ovarian cancer around early Spring this year. It had been 9 years since she'd been to a gyno, and ovarian cancer is "the whisper killer" since it's hard to detect, and she went through utter hell. 6 months of chemo. All the hell associated- her children, loved ones- all preparing for what we assumed was the inevitable. She finished chemo October 2nd, and 2 days later had an appointment with the leading specialist in this type of cancer in the US/world in Houston. He sits her down and calmly explains that... U of R had misread her biopsies. Multiple times. She never actually had cancer. She had benign growths. They can become cancerous- she will be seeing this doctor every 6 months to ensure they're not becoming serous- but they never were. At no point did she actually need to go through the chemo. The fear. The absolute utter hell that has torn her world apart. I just have no words. Second opinions. I guess I'll never let my anxiety get in the way of asking for one.

ew

Honestly... this is exactly the kind of stuff dark and I talked about on our first dates. He had specific interests about things I knew nothing about, I like design and find implementation processes fascinating... guess there's a reason it's been 8.5 years and we've survived my Red Wings love and his need to put the heart attack inducing life sized Bruce Smith poster up at the top of the stairs