Apparently before 1992, Italian citizenship was automatically revoked if someone gained citizenship in another country. My great-grandfather was naturalised in 1917, and my grandfather wasn’t born until 1927 – so, no Italian citizenship for Grandpa, and thus none for me.

But – if my great-grandfather hadn’t been naturalised, my grandfather would have (as near as i can tell) been born with dual Italian-American citizenship – as did my two eldest great-aunts, both born in America before Salvadore was nationalised. And it strikes me as very odd that the Italian government would revoke citizenship from people who may damn well plan on going back home someday, but grant citizenship to children born in America, as well as to their children… It may be citizenship law really is that quirky. Or i may be reading something wrong.

If i’m very, very lucky, i’m misreading this, and in such a sense that i am eligible for Italian citizenship. Then again, this is government bureaucracy in action. It’s probably really that quirky.

Though there is always a small possibility Salvadore worked out getting dual citizenship instead of automatically losing his Italian citizenship (…i’m presuming Italy had some form of dual citizenship before 1992…)

I’ll probably end up writing a long and well-documented letter to the Italian consulate before i know for sure whether or not i can be considered an Italian citizen.

random other stuff

• I want this railing and i do not care if it does not pass code. Well, the amount of weight it looks like it can support (not much) could be a problem, but it’s beautiful. It hits the perfect sweet spot of natural and abstract, not looking too kitschy-tree-hugger but not a random almost-pretty mess, either.
  There are no stairs in my house for which such a railing could be used, though. *tear*

Novel – i’ve gone through and marked all the things i need to fix, and am starting to slowly go through and actually fix stuff. I still hate editing, but i’m more motivated to do it anyway this time around.
Webcomic – am slowly coming to the realisation this is Really Going to Happen. In one month, if all goes according to plan. It’s at oh-crap-time-to-freak-out levels, especially seeing as this is something i’ll need to update and work on pretty consistently even after it’s up and running.
Bike – i’m… saving for it. That counts for something, right? At any rate, it’s warmed up enough for me to use my regular bike and ride everywhere now, so i’ve got about eight months before i’ll have any reason to ride a folding bike to the bus stop.
Presents – i’m on 2 out of 5 presents actually bought or made in advance (the first being a knitting book i bought my youngest sister for Christmas) – i’m making a present for my mum now. It’s at the über-shiny dammit i want to show it to her right now! phase.
General Research Stuff – My religious research has jumped through Paganism, Vodou, Catholicism, and Buddhism, with a touch of re-learning about my own Protestant religion. Mostly i’m reading Pagan/Catholic stuff – i’m having a hell of a time finding good information on Vodou and nothing Buddhist has really caught my attention any further than ‘huh, i should really read this article… someday… in the near future.’ I’m also planning on spending part of this month researching adoption, which i am in no position to do right now anyway but whatever, reading won’t kill anything.
Back to the subject of religious research, despite my relative disinterest in Buddhism, now that it’s bike-riding weather again i’m going to see if i can find a local temple to visit. I kind of doubt it, as i live in an almost ridiculously Christian-Right part of Pennsylvania, but it’s worth a look.

random other stuff

• Geeky home decor – i’m most fond of the Pantone mugs. Which i can’t use. Because i’m still trying to avoid tea catastrophes.

I put another $50 in my Kiva account and sent it off to a café owner in Armenia and an antiquities dealer in Bolivia. So, except for reloaning money when it comes back, my Kiva goal is met. Yay!

…i probably should have done this, oh, any other week ever. I’ve already spent a bit too much this week (hello, shiny new computer, shiny new external hard drive, and shiny pile of books…) and i’m wanting to start saving up for a folding bike so i can use public transit without being limited to the ridiculous only-twice-a-day route i actually live near. But as i’m going to be spending the Kiva-money eventually anyway… well, why not now. Karmacilly offset half a hard drive or something.

Click for full-size

Timing out how long it takes me to do a comic so i have some idea of how much i can do. This one’s kind of a crappy script but i wanted to time everything, including the writing.

And, yeah, i should probably do a bunch of scripts and take an average, but i don’t feel like timing out a pile of script-writing :P So just the one, for now, and i’ll re-average after i actually know what i’m doing…

The final comic is going to be on a site layout where i can actually fit the whole thing at full size. And probably just lineart for at least the first few months, as adding even greyscale took up about half the comic-making time. I’ll save greys or colours for when i can actually do lineart in relatively brief time.

Ha – so much for reloaning my Kiva funds every time my account gets $25. It reached $50 without me noticing. Ah well.

Also the easiest time i ever had choosing loans – there were only two up when i logged in (probably because it’s 12:30 Sunday morning, and whoever normally adds new loans to the site isn’t up to replenish whatever gets fully funded.) Rather than wait for new loans to be added (and completely forget about them, again) i just funded both the remaining ones – both Iraqis who sell women’s clothing. I’ve looked for Iraqis to loan money to the last few times i was on Kiva anyway, so i’m happy with this.

Something which amuses me more than it should: The #1 lending team on Kiva is, as it has been every time i look, the atheist group. It’s currently lent out $1,498,925.00. The #2 team is a Christian group, at $886,325.00. Maybe i just spent too much time as a kid being told how awesome we Christians are for our generosity, but this makes me outright giddy.

I’m reading Clock Repairing as a Hobby, though i’m not sure i’m actually understanding it at any practical level. It probably doesn’t help i bought the Kindle version, and am thus reading it mostly off the tiny screen of my Touch – which is great for most books but not so great for books with tons of diagrams ending up about five tiny page-flips away from the paragraphs describing them. Still, if i’d bought a dead-tree version i’d just sit it on a shelf to browse occasionally instead of stuffing it my pocket to actually read, and as i have neither horology tools nor spare clocks to take apart i’d not likely retain any of the knowledge anyway.

Despite not understanding most of it, i’m at least thinking about things i’d never considered before. Like chimes. It somehow never occurred to me to wonder how century-old clocks can functionally chime the hour, or even play little bits of music. It’s one of those things i still don’t nearly understand, something about a little snail-wheel with twelve steps moving a bit every hour and the chime levers being triggered X number of times based on what step they end up on when some other lever does something else… Right. It’s a brilliantly clever system, though, and i’m wondering now how i managed to go so long without ever stopping to think ‘Wait, there’s no computer in there telling it how many times to chime – how does it do that?!?’

I think this is the first time in my life i’ve been almost sad by how easy computers make everything. Necessity being the mother of invention, in the old days, when horologists needed their clocks to make noise every hour, they had to design complex and beautiful systems of gears and levers. Now we can do the same with a few lines of code. Even if some brilliant engineer were trying to build an analogue clock with no previous knowledge how they worked, e’d probably use some sort of computer workings instead of gears for the chiming bit. Maybe even the chimes would be mechanical, but triggered – and timed – not by gear trains, but little sets of electrical contacts lining up on the hours… lovely, but just not the same.

Of course, they also had to readjust the pendulums practically every time the weather changed, and pull out the mechanics every few years for cleaning, and do a ridiculous amount of other stuff which more than cancels out the brilliance of the gears. But still. Chimes.

Food-Tracking: Done. I even tracked my tea consumption, which was kind of a bitch as i drink around seven cups of tea a day and being only about four calories a cup, there’s not much motivation to track. But i did.
Apparently i don’t eat enough in general and my carb:protein ratio is way off. Fat intake was perfect, though. So apparently i just need to eat more protein. Bring on the meat!
(…which will also up my fat, but lower my carbs, and i think a goodly amount of my carbs came in the fattening-junk-food form, so if i actually eat less carbs due to being full up from protein, it’ll maybe balance out. I have no idea how nutritionists and the like keep from going insane.)

I worked on other stuff this week, too. Lots of other stuff. I did research on various things and started scripting ideas for my webcomic and worked on my novel.

I feel really distant from it all now, though… Suffice to say i had multiple tea-and-computer mishaps this week, culminating in a keyboard which refused to work (and the Getting of a Travel Mug, aka ‘sippy cup for grown-ups’). So Friday was spent ordering a new laptop keyboard and trying to convince local computer stores that yes a non-Apple USB keyboard will work with a Mac stop telling me it won’t before a Grizzly Old Computer Expert suggested pouring a bit of alcohol over the offending keyboard. And now everything works except my brain, which thinks it’s still supposed to be fixing stuff and has a particular type of ‘but why am i not applying a screwdriver to this problem?’ sort of ADHD.

random other stuff

• A Rant About Women. But a nice ‘Ladies, you can kick way more ass than you actually do’ kind of rant.
• Logitech has a wireless keyboard app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Which i totally could have used three days ago. Yay timing.

if xkcd says it's good, it's good enough for me.

Turns out it’s kind of tough to decide on a programming language to learn. I don’t want to learn just one – i want to learn Python, Perl, and PHP at the very least, and probably in the future some variety of C.

I know a bit of Perl and PHP already, but for the purposes of learning one new language at some point in the next two years, i think i’m going to go with Python for now. It’s supposed to be ridiculously easy to learn, and the whole reason i already know any Perl and PHP is because they keep popping up in personal projects.

Logically i should be reasoning ‘since i keep using them, they are obviously useful to me and i should learn to use them properly’, but i’ve got the feeling everything i haven’t learned yet is stuff i only don’t know because i consider it boring or useless or over-complicated. I know there will be boring, complex and seemingly useless bits in pretty much any programming language, but at least if i’m starting from scratch i’ll be learning the interesting bits alongside the boring bits.

random other stuff:

• Tarot Dame crocheted an awesome little bag for one of her decks. I kind of want one but there’s no yarn in the world which will actually look proper with my Russian tarot :P Maybe some of those scraps of faux leather i have lying around…
• Ever wonder why people who seem to be total idiots make tons of money? There’s a Salary Theorem for that…

Semi-random update on all my semi-random goals:

Novel!: it has Been Re-Outlined. If i’d written it properly i’d have already had a sense of what order everything happened in but hell, it was NaNoWriMo. There’s parts where i destroyed countries just to add words.
Next step is to go through and redesign the characters. Some are horribly, horribly unrealistic. Granted, the unrealistic ones are mainly minor characters, but they still need to get whipped into shape.

Tarot: I understand almost all the cards now (and the ones i don’t know i can guess fairly well), and know several spreads for reading purposes. Sweet. I learned in kind of an odd way so i’ll probably do a big long rambling 43things how-i-did-it style post at some point, once i have all the cards down.
I haven’t done any readings for anyone else yet (unless you count novel characters. They get tons of readings) – but i’d kind of like to read another real person at some point. I don’t think i’d ever want to be a professional reader but it’s definitely going to be a different experience. Certainly can’t do anyone in my strict Protestant family. Not without first giving big long explanations as to Why This Is Not Evil.

Yoga: I started up again on Saturday, with the YOGAmazing podcast. Saturday i just went with the longest episode dowloaded, figuring i’d work on it for twenty minutes and see how far i got. Erm, except the longest episode turned out to be a weight-loss one, ie ‘aerobics which happens to use yoga poses’, and my has-not-done-yoga-in-six-months body couldn’t keep up. The Yoga for Geeks episode is much more my speed :P And because it’s designed to be done at a desk anyway, i can actually watch it without having to set up some contorted system of balancing my iPod on a chair and craning my neck to be see whether i should be in down-dog or up-dog.

Dyeing hair blue: It’s… erm… turquoise. Dammit. And actually a really nice shade of turquoise, but not what i wanted.
Maybe, when my hair is back to its natural colour, i’ll try to dye it dark blue. Previous attempts turned out black but i have light blue hair dye now, so… maybe?
If that doesn’t work i’ll have to go to a stylist and have it Professionally Done.

random other stuff

• I love alternative-goal-setting strategies. Already mentioned David Turnbull’s design-a-perfect-day post, but since then i’ve also found Donald Miller’s post on writing your goals out as a story (i’ve heard ‘imagine your goal already done’ before, and ‘find a way to force yourself to accomplish it’ before, but put in the sense of climactic scenes and inciting incidents it sounds cooler.)
  And while it’s not really ‘alternative goal-setting’ in the strictest sense, Naomi Dunford’s unstupid goals post is good too. In summation: if it is a stupid goal you’re more likely to not bother and then feel emo-low-self-esteem-bad about not accomplishing the stupid than you are to awesomely do it.
• There’s also the awesome goal of reading a book a week, which averages out to forty pages a day, something most people can knock out during a coffee break or two. This is something i really need to do, especially with fiction. I more or less quit reading fiction a while ago; i think in 2009 i read two Scott Sigler books and Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, and everything else was non-fiction. The truly bizarre bit is i’m currently reading Reading Like a Writer, which kind of requires reading fiction. And no, it wasn’t a gift; i paid good money for a book telling me special ways to read stuff i don’t normally read at all. Sigh.