Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Sunday, Apr. 22, 2007 - 8:12 p.m.

So, the trip to the Sac went well. We had 3 successful showings of the movie and met a lot of people, many of whom also bought the movie. :) I didn't get much sleep at all for 3 days, but it was still a fun trip, and Jonny-C and his Sig O treated me like a rock star, which, frankly, was really neat and very, very nice of them. :) It was gratifying to see how well people liked the movie, because they've spent 2.5 years of their lives and a lot of money on seeing it to completion and finally distribution. It's a labor of more than just love for them, so I'm glad that people who see it really dig it. I think it will be Clerks for the gamer set, once the word gets out there.

I've been having serious car trouble since I got back. The igniter switch or whatever on my car seems to be going bad, so the car frequently won't start. It will make the rr-rr noise, but it won't turn over and catch. Or it does and then immediately dies. If I let it sit for a while, then I can generally start it, but it's getting harder and harder, so I took it into the shop on Thursday, where it promptly refused to reproduce the problem for anyone in the shop, starting easily and promptly for them every time they turned the key, frigging car.

Since they can't really track the problem when it's not in evidence, they sent me home with my car at the end of the day on Friday, with a notice about a recall from 1993 wherein the Honda Civic and Accord were found to have faulty igniters, and told me to try taking it to the dealer and seeing if they'll replace the thing, otherwise my mechanic will just have to start replacing parts until they solve the problem. Since the first part he'll try (as it's the most obvious) is a part that STARTS at $275 (that's his price, not mine), and I'll have to pay labor and tax on top of THAT, and since I'm unemployed to the friggin' max and can't seem to land a job to save my freaking life, I frankly can't afford the guess-and-replace method of car repair. So let's hope the igniter switch or whatever the hell it's called on my car is a) the original, b) covered by the recall, and c) eligible for free repair. Since I did not own the car in 1993, I have no idea whether it's already been replaced, though I don't think it has, because the little lady who owned the car the 9 years before I bought it doesn't seem to have ever replaced anything on it. It even had all it's original hoses until I replaced them the week after I bought it. Despite being 10 years old, the car only had 86K miles on it, and she left it parked in her garage most of the time, so I'm guessing all she ever did was change the oil and put gas in it. It still smelled like a new car when I bought it. I'm also concerned that the dealership won't fix it since I'm not the original owner of the car. I would take it back to the same dealer I bought it from, but that's in Dallas, so the drive is a little prohibitive, what with me being in LA and all. I'm taking it in tomorrow and crossing my fingers, because I do not have the money to fix it, otherwise.

I'm also confused as to how it went from being something the mechanic could fix for $100 (but for some reason DIDN'T) back in January, but now it's a $500 problem at least.

I have the worst car karma of anyone I have ever known, with the possible exception of Em and her hubby. Who the hell else do you know who can buy a car and before they've even had the chance to make their first monthly payment on it, the freaking transmission goes out 600 miles away from home? Seriously.

Aside from dealing with the car, I have been making body powders and talcum-free "talcs" to sell and dealing with a payment processing gateway from hell that costs me $600 year and trying to replace it. I'm happy to tell you the post office finally found my missing box rental payment, and it only took them a little over a week to do so, so at least I don't have to worry about that for another year, at which point, I will be sure to pay at the window, as I always had before the check fiasco. But I digress. I love the scent combination I came up with for the scrub, if I do say so myself. It's comprised of bergamot, lemongrass, clary sage, cedarwood, and ylang ylang, and it smells heavenly. Now if I could just get the texture down, all would be awesome. It's too dry, but if I added more oil, it would be way too oily, not to mention salt does not dissolve in oil, so the oil would just pool up in the bottom of the jar and go to waste, and who needs that? I need to get some glycerine or maybe beeswax or shea butter and see if that helps. I think glycerine will do the trick, but a lot of people are allergic to it, so I really kinda hesitate to add it. Body scrub that falls apart in your hand is kind of a hassle though, no matter how well it works. And it does work, it's just kind of hard to use. :(

The talc smells good too, but it's lacking clary sage and cedarwood. I may add some to the next batch though, because holy moly, do they smell good in the scent combination of the scrub. Ylang ylang, btw? The strongest scent ever, next to rosemary. Seriously, adding one drop of Y2 to anything just floods the air and gives me the worst headache ever after about 30 seconds. Rosemary just makes me want to throw up. Y2 makes me want to throw up AND causes my forehead to throb.

I'm building a website for someone else, and I think it's going to be really nice when it's done, if I do say so myself. I shoulda charged a lot more for it, as it's turning out to be a LOT of work, what with building everything - including graphics - by hand. The original deal was not to have to do anything but plug her content into a template, so I underbid the hell out of it, and in true design fashion, the job immediately doubled to what it was supposed to be that I'd only bid half-cost for anyway. So I'm doing it now for 1/4 what it should cost, which is causing more than a little bit of strife between me and TB, who feels I am being taken advantage of and letting the person walk all over me. It's not her fault I underbid so badly, but it IS a massive pita that I am having to create graphics, and that was defintely NOT part of our agreement. I'm at a loss as to what to do about it, though. What I've learned is not to ever do this again without a contract. Which Em's hubby told me, and which I should have paid stricter attention to. I will also never again build a website for anyone for less than $5-600, template or no. I've already put at least 12 hours into it, and that's before the content even arrives, because I have to create a new template for every page and manipulate every single image, as they're all raw and have to be resized, color-corrected, and then spiffed up for presentation. Live and learn, right? Live and learn.

I got nothin' else, really. It's cold and grey here today, which is just crummy. I wish it would either rain or clear up and be warm. We're getting the weather we would normally not get until June, and it kinda bites it. I'm ready for sun and some nice warm 80 degree days. I'm also PMS'g, so maybe I should have waited to post...

All I really have to say about the Virginia Tech thing is that the news outlets make me sick for giving that as much coverage as they did. That little puke never should have been accorded the priority and importance he was given. Yes, it was horrible, yes, it was a tragedy, yes, it sucks it, and yes, some of the people who died (ie. Liviu Librescu) were heroes and deserving of recognition. For that matter, everyone who died is deserving of some sort of public memoriam. But the little asshole who perpetrated the incident is deserving of NOTHING. And I am beyond aggravated that he got even a single second of notariety out of his self-centered bullshit. Someone brought up the point that when some idiot jumps onto the field during a baseball game, the press does not show it, because we've all agreed not to play to idiots and assholes like that. But someone commits an act of narcissism this big, and we plaster them all over the place. It's counterproductive and stupid. Give coverage to the thing, but quit showing the little dick's face and video, the publicity shots he took of himself, and his name. He deserves NOTHING. Not even infamy. He couldn't even get NBC's address right. *I* know that frigging address, and I'm not out grandstanding and killing people for public attention; he couldn't be bothered to frigging look it up on Yahoo before he went out and killed 30 more people to gain himself some pathetic notariety? He really makes me sick.

I also think it's frigging ridiculous that while the Attorney General of the United States was speaking before a Senate investigative committee and blatantly lying over 70 times, what the press chose to concentrate on instead was a single event 3 days old, Alec Baldwin's abusive phone call to his daughter, and Sanjaya getting voted off of American Idol, and hardly anyone seemed to blink. Are you kidding me? We so deserve the government we have.

Katie

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