Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Rachel's LiveJournal:

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Friday, July 14th, 2006
9:42 am	Quick Update I'm getting weddinated. Marinated? Married, I guess. Tomorrow. That is all. :) (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 8th, 2006
3:55 pm	My friend Wren told me about myself via this meme, so I'm fulfilling my contractual obligation. If you comment on this post: I’ll respond with something random about you I’ll challenge you to try something I’ll pick a color that I associate with you I’ll tell you something I like about you I’ll tell you my first/clearest memory of you I’ll tell you what animal you remind me of I’ll ask you something I’ve always wanted to ask you If I do this for you, you must post this on yours. Since she's already completed it for me, I'll reciprocate: I’ll respond with something random about you - kettle corn I’ll challenge you to try something - Do it. Pursue your dreams. Don't let the complications of life keep you from doing what you love. I’ll pick a color that I associate with you - vivid, fiery red-orange I’ll tell you something I like about you - Your command of imagery, of the vivid voice of words, is astonishing. Also, you can tell a hell of a story. I’ll tell you my first/clearest memory of you - Not my first memory of you by any means, but I've been thinking a lot lately about making soap with you here in Austin. I've been making soap with my prairie boy lately, and every time I heat the soap or pour it, I think of you. I’ll tell you what animal you remind me of - A fierce mama lion. I’ll ask you something I’ve always wanted to ask you - Do you wish this little interlude in your life had never happened? If I do this for you, you must post this on yours. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 16th, 2005
6:47 pm	Just a quickie... Say I were to enter some photos in a contest... which ones should I choose? If you have any ideas, either leave a description of the photo you have in mind in the comments below, or peruse my photolog. There are lots of categories for entry, so the topic doesn't matter much. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 22nd, 2005
11:21 pm	Finding Words It's a balmy evening in Texas, humid and quiet without even a hint of breeze, under a waxing gibbous moon. It's a perfect evening for a barbecue, for stargazing, or for cold drinks with friends. It's strange to remember that it was only three weeks ago, exactly three weeks ago as I write this, that I was shivering on a chilly hill country evening, counting shooting stars, and speaking of everything and nothing. Time has a strange way of expanding and contracting at will. I'm struck by the ephemeral nature of it all. Memories can be so fleeting, and even the ones I've learned by heart have this tendency to morph into something slightly different, into some imagined reality, not so far from the actual one, yet not quite close enough to suit me. I can still remember the taste of his lips, but it's fading much faster than I'd like. I have photos to remind me of the contours of his face, but they don't show his expressions, or the way his eyes light up when he smiles. I have this sense lately that even when I'm all by myself, I'm never entirely alone anymore, as though I'm carrying with me an extra set of eyes, to which I wish to show everything I see. And in my imagination, at least, I can do that. I can explain the relative comfort of a balmy May evening when sweat drips down my back long after nightfall, and how much of a relief it is after the heat of the day that precedes it, and how the salt on my skin is tied to the salt in the Gulf that I call home, and the salt in my blood, and how it's all part of me. In my imagination, this is all sufficient, but I can't explain it in real life, not with all the words in the world, from two thousand miles away. The challenge in all of this is learning to embrace the present, to live fully and learn from today, instead of wistfully longing for the future or trying to recreate the past, but realizing that makes it no easier. So I've been planning, I, who hate to plan anything, lest I box myself into a corner. I've been planning three months ahead, six months ahead, a year ahead, because it gives me a sense of control over all the uncertainty, and it gives me something to do in the meantime, something to make me appreciate the present, as I look ahead to the future. For now, impatient and restless though I am, I can let that be enough. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, May 20th, 2005
8:34 pm	What I wrote at 4:00 this morning It's one thing to look forward to something when you have no idea exactly what to expect. It's quite another to look forward to something when you know precisely what you're waiting for. August is too far away. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 17th, 2005
1:38 pm	Planning I've been adding onto my Impractical Life Plan -- the one where I retire at 30 and go gallivanting about. In a whimsical and impractical sense, my amended plan is looking pretty doable, though it's still very much in the early planning stages. More to come, I suppose. (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 5th, 2005
7:52 pm	The Spaces Between Notes Truth be told, it was a few days before I knew it for sure. In the weeks leading up to that evening, I'd alternated between overplanning and underplanning, but going to Enchanted Rock for an evening of camping and stargazing remained tentatively on the agenda, even while I was sick. And so it was that after an afternoon of chatting with the Texanest Texans ever to populate Texas, we found ourselves worn out and a bit vertiginous on the smooth granite dome of Enchanted Rock at dusk, where we gazed out over the rolling hill country and watched day fade into evening. And so it was that we descended the dome as shadows began to fall upon the land and made our way back to the campsite, where deer lined the path so numerous as to be almost unbelievable, and we stopped to gaze at them quietly before heading off on our way. And so it was that we opened a tarp out on the ground, on a little clearing nearby, and spread out a sleeping bag and gazed up at the night sky and the ever-growing number of stars as a chill spread over the land. Between us, we counted seven shooting stars, making little wishes for each of them, each of them morphing into tiny prayers that seemed to float upward and into the infinity above us. And we sat there, wrapped in bunnyhugs, talking of everything and nothing until the Big Dipper had rotated in the sky and our eyes would stay open no more. And that's when I realized that it was the perfect evening, that for that amount of time, there was no place I'd rather be and no one I'd rather be with, even as I shivered in the chilly night. That's when I knew it for sure. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 4th, 2005
8:19 pm	opaque reference I had a better week than I'd even hoped. It was good. Stuff is good. Thanks for your good thoughts. (If you don't understand the meaning of this paragraph, please ignore.) The carriage has turned back into a pumpkin, I'm sorry to say. It's back to the grind tomorrow, and it's really really quiet here now. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 25th, 2005
10:29 pm	Happenings (or a lack thereof) I've been sick off and on lately. It isn't a particularly remarkable state of affairs -- people get sick, right? But I get sick so rarely that when I do, it's suddenly reinforced how much being sick sucks. I caught a cold or something on Easter weekend. It wouldn't've been so bad, except I had a fever at one point, and felt so icky-groggy-couldn't-do-anything that I just had to stay in bed. The cough that went along with that lingered for a while, especially at night, but eventually, it all went away. About the time I was finally getting over that, I left work early last Monday because I was feeling sort of nauseous and gross. Sure enough, it was a stomach bug, with all the gastrointestinal loveliness that generally accompanies something like that. For the record, I generally have a stomach of steel. I'm meant to get stomach bugs only once every five years, but my bout with norovirus was less than a year ago, so this was rather unexpected. I haven't eaten at Chipotle since the last pukefest, so we can't blame them this time, and it's hard to know what caused it, but I missed two days of work and have had more than my share of miserable since then. After all that sickness, I hadn't really spent much time outdoors lately, except to do some laundry, and I'd been noticing that something smelled a bit off out there. There's a drainage pond on the side of my house that's been full since last fall, and it's finally drying up, so I figured the sludge might be causing the smell, but last night, it occured to me that something was rotten in the state of Denmark, and that it was far more sinister than pond sludge. I figured it was a rat or something, caught up in the little washer/dryer closet, and I set out after work this evening to investigate. If only it were a rat. Turns out a possum had died (he was definitely not playing possum) on my back patio, and was now in an advanced state of decomposition. My neighbor Chris, who deserves sainthood, helped me clean it up, and let me tell you, the foulness of the situation defies description. I have never seen (nor smelled) anything so awful in my entire life. I kept breaking out into dry heaves, even with my shirt over my nose to filter the air before I inhaled it. Chris was a good sport, but it was awful, in the awfulest way possible. I bought Chris a case of beer, but I think I might owe him my first-born child, as well. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 17th, 2005
12:52 am	Cat Stories In memory of Marlys (1990-2005), I offer two cat stories. 1) Ani. Ani Banani has a sink fetish. She loves sitting in the bathroom sink, and she loves drinking water from the sink faucet. There is so much love in her little tortoiseshell heart for the bathroom sink that I didn't think she could find room for more sink love, but... I was wrong. My mom has a shedding blade just like this one for her long-haired cats that does a remarkably good job of pulling out all the old fur from their undercoats. Almost as much as she loves to sit in the sink, Ani loves to be combed, so I got one of these shedding blades to try out on my cats. So it turns out that the magic combination of the bathroom sink, water dripping, Ani, and the shedding blade is her little peanut-brained equivalent of nirvana. Her eyes nearly roll back into her head in ecstacy. 2) Liam. Liam is a clown. He always has been, from the time he was a little kitten. If anything goes crashing to the ground, even if I don't see who did it, Liam is the one who gets yelled at. No, I don't feel bad about that -- I'm pretty certain it's justified. The other day, I was getting ready to take a shower, and Liam was playing between the fabric shower curtain and the clear shower lining. I got into the shower, expecting him to run away when the water came on, but he didn't. He sat on the floor and watched me shower. There's an old Paula Poundstone routine where she talks about her cats getting really freaked out when she took a shower; they'd look at one another and say, "She must've been really bad to get punished like that." It reminded me a bit of that, Liam watching me in the shower. He just stared, fascinated by the whole process. It was a bit creepy -- I've never been stalked by one of my cats before. (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 14th, 2005
8:15 pm	Your Linguistic Profile: 60% General American English 30% Dixie 10% Yankee 0% Midwestern 0% Upper Midwestern What Kind of American English Do You Speak? (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 27th, 2005
4:54 pm	DNA My dad dropped in to visit me today. It was nice, as it generally is; we went to eat vegetarian food at West Lynn Cafe, then came home and had a long, rambling conversation on Buddhism and reincarnation and DNA and spirituality and uncomprehensible connections and profound moments in life. And then, just before he left, I took a look at him and realized that we were dressed almost identically: hiking boots, jeans, gray t-shirts. We were semi-facing each other in identical positions, as well: slouched, with our arms on our knees and our hands clasped. And through my mind, though I didn't mention it to him, was the spooky voice that he always uses to tell my sister and me, "DNA..." It's the key to genetic immortality, and I'm way more like my dad than I'd generally want to admit. The rest of it, I need to process a bit longer. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 26th, 2005
3:49 pm	Working From Home (Taken from my main weblog): February is almost over, and I have written not once this month. It's a short month, so I've got that excuse, but we're up to the 26th day of it, and that's hard to excuse. I'm not in Mexico. I haven't been in Mexico since December. That's all unfortunate -- I really wanted to go, and goodness knows, I'm overdue for some travel. The class I had planned to take was cancelled for low enrollment, and I was unable to reschedule to an alternate class because of work conflicts. And maybe that's alright -- I'm a bit overwhelmed, what with the work conflicts and running a project and short timelines and the distractions of a certain person. Which has all culminated in my sitting on my couch on this rainy Saturday, working on my work laptop with the SXSW mix playing on iTunes. I'm pretty effective at distracting myself in the best of situations, but I forget how many distractions I have at home. If it isn't surfing the wireless internet I've stolen from some neighbor or other, it's having a cat come sit on my laptop or perching on four very pointy feet on my hip, or watching the water drip down the window, or watching one cat stalk another as casually as possible, trying to disguise it as a stretch. I find it astonishing how appealing housework looks, compared to refactoring Java on a Saturday afternoon, or writing up documentation, or writing official e-mails to IT folks at other colleges, but there you have it. Liam managed to turn one of his front paws all sooty gray. I'm not entirely sure how he achieved this, but I found a leaky pen in the kitchen that might hold the answer. It's cleaned up now, but his paw is still black. Ani can't tell the difference between me typing for work and me typing for play, and she can't understand why I can't pet her right this second and lose patience when I Just. Need. To. Finish. This. Paragraph. Crazy cats. Dumb work. I'm still looking for the key to independent wealth. ...And there go the cats again. I'm out. (Comment on this)
Friday, February 25th, 2005
3:54 pm	I'm into Black Sabbath? o.O Yeah, I'm not so sure about this meme. Based on the lj interests lists of those who share my more unusual interests, the interests suggestion meme thinks I might be interested in 1. black sabbath score: 7 2. movies score: 4 3. rock score: 4 4. trees score: 3 5. pink floyd score: 3 6. drugs score: 3 7. bob marley score: 3 8. ozzfest score: 3 9. lsd score: 3 10. music score: 3 11. poetry score: 3 12. candles score: 3 13. computers score: 3 14. writing score: 3 15. marijuana score: 3 16. sleeping score: 3 17. singing score: 3 18. sublime score: 3 19. sex score: 3 20. the other side score: 2 Type your username here to find out what interests it suggests for you. coded by ixwin Find out more (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 24th, 2005
10:37 am	Recent Eye Candy Here are some recent-ish cool pictures I've posted, for those of you who don't subscribe to my feed. Click the thumbnails to see the full-size images. ( More behind the cut ) Ever onward... (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 15th, 2005
10:08 pm	For the record? Y'all are nuts. All of you. :) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
12:32 am	'Fess up. If you woke up and I was in bed with you, what would be your first thought? (Now post this in your LJ and see what people would say. Yay.) (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 12th, 2005
4:06 pm	Friends Collage Meme stolen from elemmennope ( See my friends collage, behind the cut ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 29th, 2005
11:49 pm	Love is... ...cooking the only three things that you know how to make that happen to be vegetarian, so that your daughter will have something to eat in the house for once. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, January 28th, 2005
12:22 pm	On Writing From my main journal Lloyd asks: How much of yourself do you think you have revealed in your weblog, over the years? And is it an accurate (as opposed to idealized) version of yourself that your reading audience sees? Finally, do you feel that you can continue sharing your life in this way, for the foreseeable future, and what consequences might you face down the line, if you continue to do so? As seldom as I post, it should be fairly obvious that there's a lot that I don't write about in this weblog. It was a conscious decision, truthfully. I had an anonymous journal that I kept for a couple of years before I started this one, that covers a pretty difficult part of my life. And while it was therapeutic for me to record my journey through (and out of) depression and transition, it wasn't the sort of thing I cared to share with people I interacted with on a day-to-day basis. This journal? It's PR, in a sense, I guess. I created it so that people could read it to keep up with me and what I'm up to. I never publish my full name here, but it could be found by someone looking for me fairly easily -- coworkers, exes, family -- so I write stuff that I don't mind them knowing. A lot of what I filter isn't because of any sense of perceived self-censorship -- it's more because it isn't anything that I think people would care about. My job isn't the sort that would be particularly compromised by my writing about it (within reason), but I don't. It's none of your business really (and probably not of much interest to you anyway), where I work or what I work on, but within the context of my working environment, it can be political and fraught with conflict, so I don't generally even bring it up here. I don't write a lot about people who haven't agreed to let me write about them, because I think they deserve some privacy. (That's not to say I won't occassionally post a picture, though.) And realistically? My life lately is pretty quiet. Claudia has been in Romania (did I ever write about that? Who knows...) since May and won't be back until August. I work a lot, play a lot, and take lots of pictures. And for now? I'm happy with that. If I were committed to posting daily, as Lloyd does, I'd probably delve into the minutiae of my day-to-day life, but for now, I'll just write when I have something to say. (Comment on this)