Ron and Hermione was a mistake, and it should have been Harry and Hermione instead.

Really, JKR? Really? Now you say that?

Settle in, kids. Some old wounds are about to be opened, and some interwebs is gonna blow up.

After a taper that managed to be both rather quick and excruciatingly slow, I have now been off Paxil since Wednesday of last week.

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Two weeks into Project: Rehydrate Me. Not having to use the loo every ten minutes anymore, which is good.

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Straight to the cut this time.

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That's a good question. The answer is a long one, though, and deals with lots of stress and brain stuff, so I'll put it under a cut.

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You get used to the earthquakes when you live in California. You kind of have to. But when you're at Easter with your extended family (at your aunt's house, which is on the side of a hill, overlooking a canyon), and the house starts shaking, and it freaking doesn't stop for a good thirty seconds or more? That's exceptional.

No damage here, happy to report. Nothing even off the shelves when we got home. Callisto didn't come out of hiding until we'd been back for a while, but other than that, we were untouched. When we bought this house from my father, we saw a geological survey of the area that shows our house to be at relatively small risk for earthquake damage -- whereas almost every other house on the block was in the red zone. Whoever built on this very spot was perhaps smarter than we know.

One noticeable aftershock so far.

Meanwhile, the kids had a lovely Easter. Maggie is in the process of sorting all her candies. I'm not sure if she's going by content, flavor or size, but she's definitely got a system going.

In four simple steps!

1) Place a call at 3:53 on a Friday afternoon saying that your computer is Slow and sometimes does Funny Things. Add that you need it fixed and working perfectly Now rather than on Monday because you need to come in on Sunday to work on payroll.

2) To that end, ask the HelpDesk to make it an Urgent ticket, meaning the technician does not get to go home until it's finished.

3) Leave for the day at 4:00 pm, locking your office door behind you.

4) Leave your computer turned off so that tech support cannot remote control it in order to try to figure out what exactly is wrong with it.

Try it! Your technician will love you!

Last night we lost Goliath, who left us at the ripe old age of 21.

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Made the call yesterday afternoon to get my old Nissan pickup truck taken away. It will be donated to the local PBS affiliate. It hasn't run in ten years, and has just been taking up space in either the garage or the back driveway for all that time while I've clung to a faint hope of one day fixing it back up or even converting it into an off-roader. But that's so far down the list of priorities it's not even funny (even if it would be possible after all this time), so the decision was made some time back to donate it. Then I just never got around to it.

This was my first vehicle. It ferried me across the entire state of California several times during that second year at Humboldt State. It was the conveyance with which I got Michelle out of a bad situation in Arizona, only to, at her request, deliver her right back into it a month or two later (those trips were really the ones that broke its back, as it never ran right afterward). It covers a very strange period of my life, from the break-up of the first truly significant committed relationship in my life to the beginning of my years with the Sylph. Many, many memories tied up in this little truck.

So it's a little weird to know that it will be gone this Thursday.

Is it just a guy thing to get so attached to a vehicle that it's this hard to let go of it?

Today I called Cox and had the second land-line cancelled, as well as two movie channels we never watch. Lost the bundle savings, and our Internet goes up by ten bucks a month as a result, but the net savings will still be more than $40 monthly. Cha cha cha.

Got a haircut. A pretty severe one, at that. I guess as I get older, my patience for that in-between length (always in my face, not yet long enough for a ponytail) wears thinner and thinner. Almost makes me miss the days when it was more or less acceptable to wear a mullet in polite company. (And Lord knows I wore one of those way longer than was acceptable.) Less effort to take care of, less having to deal with it. Boom. No net savings, though.

Pretty much decided on the not-buying-comics thing. That'll likely be $100 monthly or more at the rate I was going here at the close. I may keep going back for New Mutants for a while (because hey, it's New Mutants), or I may wait for the inevitable trade paperbacks.

Very edgy about going back to work tomorrow. There's nothing like taking two vacation days (the last I'm likely to get for a couple months due to a co-worker going on paternity leave) only to get (what was now almost certainly) food poisoning the night before your four-day weekend.

Still looking for additional ways to simplify, save and de-stress. I'll see what I come up with.