We really hadn’t realized how much we rely on a group of online friends for support until we could not have access to them. It’s like having ipods and then losing all your music, in a way, maybe that’s a bad analogy. I mean, I know the friends are still there, but I can’t talk to them. We no longer have a phone that can call some of them given they’re in other countries, and others don’t have phones or we don’t know the phones and snail mail letters take so long to get to them. We have local friends and family, of course, but there are some things that just can’t be discussed with them the same way, because it would take too long to explain all the back history and the back story which the online ka-tet already know.

Anyway the end of the week has seen things coming together a lot better, which is good. We managed to finally get the taxes filed and had the pleasant surprise that rather than only getting $30 back we’re actually getting around $200. The paperwork has already been approved by the IRS and we should get our refund around our wedding anniversary which is nice. Then an online friend has offered to help me out with the computer issue, so I should only be without a computer for a couple of days which is just so wonderful; and right now I’m catching up on things before Kore takes her computer up to G’ville for a week given she’ll be on spring break as of Monday, and a friend is over working on our tile.

Mum and I got to have a nice lunch out yesterday. She wanted to go for sushi so I recommended Kiku Steakhouse where my FIL had taken us several days earlier for his birthday, and I must say we had the best gyoza I’ve ever had and the sushi, well the last time I’ve had sushi that good was when we went there the Monday before.

I’ve found out that our old desktop may yet get fixed, but I’m not holding my breath with it. It tends to give the illusion of working and then die again a few short days later, at least we may be able to get the rest of the information off it before it does. Fingers crossed. It’s just a matter of having the money to pay the guy who is trying to fix it ;_; if that’s the case. Given what little we had left this week has gone for grout and tile spacers and twelve 16-inch tile squares.

I know that I’ve complained before about support groups and their drama, and that’s not what I’m talking about needing here. I’m talking about friends on livejournal who understand not only the multiplicity aspect, but also the past lives aspect of things that we relate to and have interest in. For I can discuss things with them when Kore’s in school or busy with assignments and things.

On the upside knocking the computer down to essential use only is helping in other aspects, it’s forcing me to do the actual weaning away from Facebook games distraction and things like that I’ve been trying to do previously and failing miserably at, because whenever I’ve gotten stressed I’ve gone right back to it, and let’s face it day to day you deal with a lot of stress. Now I can’t because if I try it slows the computer down on it’s back-up process or it is too frustrating due to the way the screen reacts. The only thing I’ve allowed myself to do is periodically check one game known as “country story” to harvest the trees, but as they die off I have not planted any more.

I’ve been transferring a lot of the urgent email I might get to my gmail accounts so they can be checked from my phone. So the tarot business now has it’s own gmail account and I’m going to look and see if there are any groups I need to switch to that, but I doubt it. I weaned off a lot of the groups and only added one support forum back which I’ve been meaning to ditch again, but can’t get into the groups setting to do so.

As you might imagine the site re-design for here is only hold until further notice. I’m glad I managed to get A Joyful Path done before this started. However, the charity features I’ve been planning to do and the other things have to wait until the computer is working better.

I’m more than a little stressed out.
Here’s hoping things work out. Wish me luck!

I can get perhaps a sentence of typing done and then screen starts scrolling like a computer possessed, and I have to tap random keys on the actual laptop keyboard to get it to stop so that I can continue writing on the plug-in one. On the up side I found my old copy of Nero 7 which is really helping me back up and burn the contents of the hard drive even if it is slow. Slow is better than nothing and the interface is a lot easier than the generic windows one.

A friend had said he would help us with it. He had drawn hubbie in our secret santa draw, so he pledged two days of manual labor as the gift, which were to be used for the tiling, given we know that we would just make it worse if we tried to do it by ourselves.

So, last night Max vocalized to said friend that we had been rumbling about the tile again and he said, “I was just waiting for you guys to tell me when…” so that is that, and it’s scheduled to start next Saturday and go on to next Sunday. Not only is it going to get done, but he has several pallets of very similar tile leftover from his house and some water proof epoxy grout that he is bringing to help us out.

We did some measuring last night and working out an estimate of how many tiles we’d need and we should have enough, especially as some of the tile taken out is still fairly intact and can be cleaned and cut to fill in the areas that are too small for a full size piece of tile. We didn’t need to do cad drawings but we will have to take a leaf out of those when it comes to walling off the loft to turn it into our future house mates room.

I will probably have to get another bucket of thin set and will probably have to get some blades for their tile saw, but things are looking up. I’m definitely happy about this. To have the house back together will really help my frame of mind.

I also don’t wear make-up very often. I’ve worn it at friend’s weddings, at my wedding, and a few other times such as job interviews, but from day to day I don’t wear it. I don’t ex-foliate, I don’t bother with face wrinkle cream. I wash. I shower. I do shave my pits and legs, but those are about the girliest things I do, occasionally there is some flirtation with lip gloss, and I do love painting my nails bizarre colors, and dyeing my hair the same way; but overall my beauty routines and morning ablutions take very little time. Hubbie has often expressed great appreciation for the fact that when we go out somewhere and I go to the bathroom it doesn’t take me twenty minutes to get back out.

I’m sure there are other females who are the same way, but given tendencies of certain alters I find myself wondering some times if I would have been one of those girly girls were it not for the fragmentation; but then to wonder about things like that could get redundant.

Then munchkin broke the laptop. Yes…the keyboard and mouse no longer work. Joy. Joy.
So, there was a frantic half an hour spent trying to fix things to no avail, and then trying to find the receipt and the warranty paperwork, because I thankfully purchased the warranty. However, neither of those could show up.

So, I called the place I bought it and they said to bring it in and see if they could fix it. They couldn’t. Yes, it’s a hardware issue, they say. The woman who I bought the computer from knows me well, because I’ve been in there a lot with the munchkin and usually check out with her at the register and she confirmed to the tech guy that she knows she sold me the warranty because we had a discussion about the munchkin and his propensity to break electronics. He’s broken a printer, several keyboards, at least one of our mice and one of Kore’s, a cell phone and a house phone. So, that and the fact that it’s a lot harder for me to fix a laptop than to fix a desktop I added the warranty.

However, I admitted I had not been able to find the receipt which I hoped was just because I was panicking. Our desktop computer is dead, not dead-dead, but it refuses to boot past the screen where it offers you to F10 or F2 to go into different boot scenarios, and will not recognize a keyboard so I cannot F10 or F2. I need to have a computer for work, given I work from home, online. So, my mind was full of panic-driven scenarios of us getting foreclosed on without the extra $2-400 of income per month.

Anyway, I was assured that I could get the receipt from corporate, given the store only keep receipts for 30 days after purchase, but corporate would still have it especially as I only bought it last November and that even if I haven’t activated the warranty, the warranty company could activate it then and there provided it was still valid. So, that’s something. So far I haven’t been able to find the receipt or warranty booklet, so I got in touch with corporate. I’m still hoping it will turn up here somewhere, but I figure if it doesn’t I get it from corporate, if it does I have a spare copy.

In the mean time I have some wonderful friends who are supplying me with a keyboard port keyboard so I can try to fix FrankenStan (the old desktop), and I’m backing up everything on the laptop that I’ve added since we got it so that if they have to do something drastic to it to get it to work we don’t lose any files. I’m making sure to back up the music files too, hubbie’s been very put out that previous back-ups I’ve either forgotten to back up the music or not been able to because I get the most urgent files first, things I need for work, family photos and then the computer died before I could get to the less necessary ones such as the music and the game saves.

Wish us luck.

Me: Gods, I’m tired…
Max: I’ll do it!
Me: uh…okay…*gets shoved back*
Max: Do do doooo….

*insert an hour or so of playing with munchkin attempts to make food with asides of um….what do I do noooooooooooow??? *wail* and are you sure you don’t want me to? No I has to learn!!!*

*insert also the fun of putting the munchkin to bed and the Hunt for Lucky (his dalmatian plush who he has a new LOVE for given Gran loaned up 101 Dalmatians*

Then…

Max: Ooooh ff12–again? where you at?
Me: Miriam…but I’m stuck, hey wait you played this before didn’t you?
Max: Yeah, but…HUNGRY!! I want burgers…(outside) K—, I’m hungry but I don’t know what I want…
Kore: Um…okay? Leftovers?
Max: Actually I do know what I want…
Me: We are on a diet…
*affirmative nods from the rest of the head*
Max: Actually I do know what I want. I want a burger and fries.
Me: *head-desk*
Rose: NO! We don’t have any anyway…
Kore: You’re out of luck ’cause we don’t have any of those things.
Max: *pouts* *explores kitchen* OOOOH!
Me: No no no no no
Rose: What did he? Oh, no!
Kore: What?
Max: Lookit! Look what I found *holds up pack of brownies*
Kore: If you’re going to make those make them cake-like please?
Rose: what the…why didn’t she?
Max: Oh, ’cause I thought…who am I kidding I’m gonna make ‘em
Kore: s’why I didn’t even try?
Rose: Those are those chocolate square cake things right?
Me: Why do I even try? Why?
Towers: Leave me out of it.
Me: :p~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ all of you.
Max: Do-do-doooooo makin’ the brownies, makin’ the brownies.

*Brownies get put in oven before it reaches temp because he didn’t set the timer, and couldn’t be bothered to wait*

Max: Okay…stillshrine it is…hm…oh, yeah, there are these things you have to turn and stuff to face the sword and then…*explains a bunch more of the game*
Me: Okay, so where are those things?
Max: Oh, I don’t know. Ami had to get us through that part last time it was all puzzle solving and stuff I got bored.
Me: *head-desk* shouldn’t you still remember anyway?
Max: I guess…
Me: *slam head on metaphoric desk several more times* wake me up when there are brownies.

To understand Dollhouse I must first explain the way the dolls work. The idea behind the actives or dolls is that they are blank slates enable to be loaded up with different personalities to perform certain functions, granted most of those functions involve romantic engagements. Som one wants a goofy, perky, adventurous party girl to go out on the town with, there you go. Someone wants someone who acts like their late wife, there you go. A dominatrix to punish them, there you go; but there are different means also.

In the first episode we’re introduced to Echo, who has been implanted with a personality which will enable her to be a hostage negotiator so that she can help rescue a kidnapped girl. Other actives later in the show are imprinted with the knowledge to be SWAT team members so they can sweep in and rescue Echo and the girl. Initially when I saw the show it made me think of our past lives.

During the course of the first few episodes you see Echo the hostage negotiator, the adventurous hiking, archery capable survivalist, the blind girl infiltrating a cult, the romantic, the hedonist. All these things and the way they’re implanted and taken away and the sort of tabula rasa state that the dolls exist in when they’re not in service reminded me of reincarnation. The idea of the between life space as the calm, peaceful, cleansing, relaxing and purely joyful time where there are no demands on you and you just exist. Then when you’re ready or needed depending on the belief structure you are ‘downloaded’ into an existence once more, for many this means picking a template out and deciding which lessons to learn for others there might be a necessity to learn something or to be somewhere to do something specific, and thus we become “active” we are born and we grow and when everything is done we come back home to wait in calming peacefulness until we’re used again.

However as the series went on a different parallel became apparent because Echo was retaining memories and personas of her different active lifetimes in her mind even within the “doll state”. She could occasionally flash to different skills that she shouldn’t necessarily have, which would help her out and protect her. Later on you’re introduced to Alpha who escaped because he was retaining different memories from his various different life times and the belief is that it drove him mad. He became obsessed with Echo and wanted this same transcendence from her. As interaction with him progressed he reacted and acted very much like a multiple might, having internal and external conversations with himself, forcing switches where he could to be able to complete different tasks. His interference with Echo enabled her to more fully realize the different personalities, despite multiple attempts to “wipe” her, she was apparently still able to experience the different identities that the Dollhouse had given her over time and became able to switch to them at will, through practice and exercises.

I found more and more parallels between her and the way we are striving to be. We do not wish to integrate for many of us have been around so long and existed this way as long as we can remember that the idea of not being this way seems more detrimental than being so. Instead we seek co-consciousness, the ability to communicate between us and decide which of us is best at a particular task and therefore which of us should do it; the ability to share information back and forth so that there is no ‘down time’ and no ‘loss of data’ and thus Echo became an ideal for us just as she was in the television show.

In the show also there was a lot of talk of “Caroline” which was who Echo was before she became a doll, and the idea of restoring Caroline to Echo was a source of much debate, because Echo was developing as a person in her own right and many were afraid that the restoration of Caroline would prove a detriment or too much for her to handle, that Caroline might not wish to exist as part of the group and throw things into absolute chaos and un-make Echo’s whole existence. This echoes, ah, I crack us up, issues that many multiples feel when it comes to integration. Many see it as killing off the alters, and thus avoid it at all costs, for my part I see it as more of an evolution, you don’t have to lose anything when doing it but instead can gain a lot, that’s not to say it’s without issue, considering the problems I have had with coming to terms with my own existence. Still, it is not a choice that everyone wishes to engage in, and that I understand, especially as I believe we have done all the integrating that we’re going to.

As a side note we began calling ourselves the Echoes based on a poem that we wrote several years before the show came out. It was just further kismet that Echo was called Echo.

However, I also realized I needed to challenge myself, do something different, shake things up, and that opportunity presented itself the other night when my good friend Huushi who runs Saturn Faerie asked me if I could redo her LJ layout. We were chatting about what she wanted and I started to get ideas and see patterns and overlays and some nifty ways of doing things, and I actually began to get excited. This was new. This wasn’t just mimicking Ami, this was something *I* had come up with, and I’m very pleased with the way things turned out and also very pleased that Huushi really likes it; you can see it in action here Forest Life.

I can’t take credit for making the faerie because she was designed by Moon Childe and the forest comes from some stock photography of Joanna Star but the layering, the effects, making the faerie’s wings semi translucent and making the forest sparkle, and the animated friends banner and the faerie based icon those were all me; and it has me extremely excited to do these things again, for which I’m very grateful.