The State of Things…

• So I moved officially, to here.  Neither of the two most prevalent LJ export tools have worked for me. I don’t really want to move all of that noise here but a non-dubious archive would be nice.  I tried out Medium, and I guess if I were a writer/writer, other kind of writer that might work but the lack of fluidity to read the content of others and the lack of comment driven interface were… not exactly what I was looking for.  So here we are.
• I also re-skinned my writing portfolio since it lives on this platform, but the content is in desperate need of an update. Though… I need to generate more original creative content because I’m not really seeing that as a place to pimp my wares as someone with a talent for style guides, user guides and other techie instructional materials.
• Floodgate 2014 is still puttering along. At this point I am merely grateful that the damage wasn’t in a more problematic area. As I started writing this I stopped to call the insurance company because we’re still waiting on our estimate to be finalized and apparently the *awesome* owner of the unit (and the HOA Prez) has yet to respond to four phone calls requesting information about the cause of the leak, meaning our claim is stuck with the insurance company until he decides to cooperate and provide the details they need to complete the claim with the information about the source of the leak. I’m worried that this will drag on endlessly because of his horribly uncooperative demeanor, once he figured out that I was not going to allow him to estimate and repair the damages outside of the purview of insurance. Keeping in mind that he was never apologetic and has been evasive and passive aggressive as soon as I mentioned our insurance, trying to bully me into doing things his way. He also looked me in the eye after I told him that water ran *through*  my HVAC and I was concerned about damages and said that the unit was “designed to handle moisture and it shouldn’t be an issue”. The HVAC tech knew immediately that there was water, the motor had water spots and one of the electrical panels was friend. He told us it wouldn’t have lasted through the winter and the repairs put us out over $2K. I can’t imagine that the owner of the other unit would have been eager to write me a check come winter when our unit stopped working and we were stuck replacing it. Ugh.
• Prior to Floodgate 2014 was parking brake debacle 2014, which luckily resulted only in the destruction of one portion of a minivan bumper and either our safe driving records are blanketing us, or it hasn’t caught up, but we just got our annual car insurance renewal and it hasn’t gone up. So YEAH, I’ll take that very small victory.
• I renewed for pottery class, I’ve been out of the studio for over a month so hopefully I still have some basic idea of what I’m doing and I can renew my quest to make awesome mugs for people (and then move on to other specific vessels- see also, berry bowls, kittie bowls, anything larger than a medium sized bowl :P)
• I did not, as of yesterday morning, want to drag myself around the city solo to see Amanda Palmer. It’s weird because I have *no* problem doing things alone – if that was my plan. I guess I am just like a fucking tortoise sometimes when dealing with changing circumstances and situations where I had a certain idea of how things would transpire. My inability to roll quickly with the punches can be really frustrating. But I rallied and went. I was able to walk, get myself delicious ramen in a typically crowded restaurant and get in line early enough to get a ridiculously awesome seat and a free cookie while I waited outside. I enjoyed the show and walked out feeling a lot better than when I’d gone in. I have a lot of abstract observations about the crowd, but in reality I was not there for them and I think I’d rather sit on those thoughts some to let them marinate. I will say thought, that when dealing with a truly indie artist you get a lot of interesting people…