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2.14.08 6:53am - coming soon to a theatre near you
Contents of journal archived above via links. Installed wordpress - new blog format up soon (hopefully).
2.10.08 8:47am - math error in my favor
Sometimes, my brain totally glitches, and I make math errors.
Fortunately, my most recent one was in the good direction - I run through my taxes a few times to estimate what I'm going to owe before I actually sit down and do them (because I am crazy anal when it comes to knowing where money is going). The first time I guesstimated $250 owed. The second time, though, it came out more like $600. But I actually sat down and looked things over again this morning... and it came out to $175. Woo! So I have enough money saved. That's awesome. I know exactly where I made my mistake and it was a stupid mistake. But at least I owe less money than I thought. I'm ok with feeling stupid for a bit if I end up owing less money.
In other news, my family is visiting. I didn't know until Friday night that they were coming to see me - my stepdad got some last minute time off from work, and his dad was in Dallas visiting people, so they're doing a long weekend Texas roadtrip. I spent yesterday cleaning so as to get things up to my mom's standards. She has good reasons for her standards, though, what with the asthma and allergies and all. Still, it was a lot of cleaning.
They're all still sleeping. I'm the only weird morning person in my family. Yet another glitch, I suppose. My mom and stepdad are sleeping in my bed, and my slightly pregnant stepsister is on the futon. I got to sleep on the floor, which I was very cranky about last night. But actually, it wasn't so bad. I sleep pretty soundly pretty much anywhere. It's worth it to get to see my family for a couple of days. :)
2.6.08 10:23am - electioneering
I swear, if the election comes down to John McCain and Hillary Clinton, my main election day activity will likely be vomiting. Ugh.
Sigh. GObama.
I wonder if I'm going to end up writing somebody in on November 4th. I don't know if there are even any third parties in Texas I could vote for instead.
2.3.08 9:15pm - Superbowl!
I've been a New York Giants fan since I was a kid. By which I mean I used to actually have Lawrence Taylor and Phil Simms Topps cards. Yeah, ok, I was a weird little girl.
Anyway, it's been years since they were any good. I mean, seriously. Since they defeated the Bills in 1991, they've just sucked. But I heard they were in the playoffs as an underdog a few weeks back, and I started to perk up and pay attention.
They got into the superbowl, and so I decided to ask around to see what people were doing. A ragtag bunch of friends and I watched tonight... but for the first 3.5 quarters, didn't really do much watching at all. Just hung out... kinda a boring game, you know? But all of sudden, the fourth quarter actually turns into a game, and Eli Manning throws a beautiful pass for the winning touchdown. I jumped up and down. My friends probably think I'm a little nutty. But I like to believe in the underdog... especially when it's my childhood team :) Go Giants!
That said, it's probably the only sports victory I'll see this year for a team I root for. SU's basketball team have had some rough luck - Torn ACL on their best player. They've been losing quite a bit since. Probably won't even make the tourney. Oh well.
2.1.08 3:21pm - through the looking glass
I've been having dreams lately. I should start by explaining that sometimes I have dreams and sometimes I have dreams. Dreams of the normal variety have no consequence in the real world. They feel like a dream while I'm having them, my memory of them is fuzzy, and there's no emotional residue - I'm totally detached from the dream when I wake up. It's like an intellectual exercise, no matter if the dream is good or bad. Dreams, on the other hand, are vivid. I get confused while I'm having them - Is it real? I forget that I have a waking life. I am living in that dream, entirely inside my subconscious. It feels like real life. When I wake up, whatever feeling I had in the dream sticks with me while I'm waking up, and I can feel every detail as though it was a memory. I've been having dreams every night for weeks. I wake up feeling physically refreshed but emotionally drained. Sometimes the dreams have woken me up, and then I couldn't get back to sleep, hours before I was due to wake up. Last night I had a dream that was, at least for most of it, devoid of meaning. Vivid as always, but neutral. I still felt it when I woke up, but it was a more image than emotion. I was in a big garage, almost like a barn, looking at and then starting to drive a hunter green Mercedes. I remember the color so vividly, and the logo. I remember how boxy it was - I knew it was an older car, but I wasn't sure how old. It felt, in the dream, as though I had come into owning the car somehow, but it wasn't clear how. I remember running my fingers along the trunk of the car, thinking about what an unusual color it was to see a car in these days. Such a deep rich color. I left for work and had shaken the image from my mind, a little faster than I'd been able to most days lately. I got in the car. I listened to the radio. I was glad the car warmed up quickly. I sat at lights. And then, as I was making the right hand turn into the entrance for work, I saw it - A boxy, older, hunter green mercedes, sitting dead in the median across from my entrance. In the instant I saw it, I wanted to pull over and look at it. In it. How was it there? It was in my dream last night. I've never seen a car like that in my life, that I can recall. No one in my building drives that car. Did I imagine it? I checked from my window once I was in my building, and it was still sitting there. I went to check on it again later, though, and it was gone. I've tried, today, to make an interpretation of what happened. It could be a coincidence, or maybe I've seen it before and didn't remember it. Maybe I recognized similaraties between the two cars that weren't there. Or maybe there was something deeper going on with my dream and real life... but what was the message if that was the case? Was God just saying, "Hi, I'm just passing through - check out this cool car?" I doubt I'll ever know. I'm just going to chalk it up to one of those things. Still, it's left me with a very odd feeling today.Contents of journal archived above via links. Installed wordpress - new blog format up soon (hopefully).
1.20.08 6:03pm - random thought of the day
I firmly believe that "How ya doin' beautiful" is an inappropriate way to greet customers at the drive through window at Jack in the Box.
I should feel lucky that he didn't spit in my food, considering the look I gave him.
1.19.08 5:47pm - camera obscura
My new camera came in the mail today. Or rather, they left me a note on my door yesterday, and at 7:51am this morning, I went to the post office to get it.
Unfortunately, I had to work from 10am-5pm today, so I didn't get to play with it much this morning. I took a couple of shots of my hedgehog's sleepy butt, and a whole bunch of me looking early morning grumpy, and flipped through the manual a bit.
When I got home, there was just enough light to go out and take some test shots. So I did.
But I'll get to those in a minute. Let me blather on about the camera first. And cameras in general.
My first digital camera was a Nikon 2500. Those who care about cameras will remember this as being "that sorta blue one that flipped into itself". Yes, that's it. I still have it actually... my sister was using it for awhile, because she and her husband didn't have a digital camera at all. But my mother and I remedied that with a graduation present last year.
Oh, right. Nikon 2500. Ok, well, it was only 2mp, and I got it on clearance for $150, I believe. This was back when digital cameras didn't get much below $200, ever (2003 or so). I was working at ye olde camera shoppe (known hereafter as YOCS, though the actual name of the chain is very different). Anyway, I got it, and the best thing about that camera was the color quality. It was amazing. Nikon-amazing. But having few manual settings and only being 2MP doomed the camera. I loved it, but I also love cropping. Twain the never shall meet.
For those who've never asked me about my prior employment, I worked at YOCS off and on for 4 years. It was an amazing thing to behold: that transition from film to digital. When I started in 2001 (hired because I understood computers, and digital cameras were "an adjustment" for the sales folks who were used to film) a 3MP Nikon 995 cost $999. Seriously. The features were amazing, though, as far as digital cameras go. You can't get as many manual features on most point and shoots digitals anymore. They were really still figuring out what people would want on a digital camera.
Anyway, time and progress both march forward, and eventually, digital cameras outsold film cameras, though I knew some pro photographers who even swore they'd never switch. I should track some of them down now and see what they'd say (so I can gloat). That was about the same time I got my Nikon 2500, actually. That's about when the tide turned - the summer of 2003. After that all the electronics manufacturers really started to push digital, making me the owner of one of the last clumsy ridiculously slow digital cameras.
So when a sort-of broken 5MP camera came my way in 2005, I took it, even though, it was, well, sort-of broken. It was also a brand of camera I loathe. But with the significant speed increase and at a can't turn down price (free!), I sucked it up. I went and bought a memory stick for my used and busted Sony W-1.
3500 pictures. I took 3500 pictures on that Sony, despite the focusing errors. Most of them were lost in the great hard drive crash of 2007, but nonetheless, it held up. I never would have thought it would have kept going that long.
But over my extra long winter vacation this year, it started acting up even worse. I'd been taking fewer and fewer pictures on it, because it just wasn't behaving. On Christmas morning I had to turn it off and on several times to get it to open and focus. I had wanted a digital camera for Christmas, but I knew there was no way my mom could spring for it. So I resolved to start saving up.
Unbeknownst me, actually, sort of beknownst to me, I got bought something I did need, and was originally going to use the proceeds of the sale of my very dead Honda for. So it was actually a double present, because I got to use my now freed up money to buy the camera I'd so desparately wanted for the last 2.5 years.
Actually, I had no idea what kind of camera I wanted to get. I wanted to stick with Nikon, but their point and shoots are pretty awful these days. I knew eventually I will acquire a digital SLR (they are just too awesome), but primarily I wanted something I could take pics of friends with, and something that had good enough color quality to get into photography again with. I knew I should go small, to contrast with my hypothetical future DSLR. So despite my protests that I would never, ever, ever buy a Canon Digital Elph (made when the Digital Elphs were annoying to use)... I bought a Canon Digital Elph. The Canon SD-850 IS, to be exact.
So this is why it is awesome: Great color quality. 4x optical zoom. Image Stabilizaton. 2.5 inch LCD. 5.8oz. And on sale. Amazon even threw in a free 2GB memory card.
Can you tell I'm going to enjoy this camera? Now that I've rambled on for what must seem like years, here's some pretty pictures.
To start, a flower in macro mode. Color and contrast adjusted:
And here's a whole mess of tubing. I really like this one. I think I'm going to make this my desktop image. I haven't had one of those in awhile. Unretouched (seriously):
Here's a view of the creek near my house. I don't like the composition as much as I'd like, but the glowing leaves are too cool. Contrast and brightness adjusted:
And finally, I took a self portrait. I put it under my album as the honest self portrait. Cropped, but otherwise unretouched. That is, apparantly, what I look like.
I suppose that's it for now. This just killed 1.5 hours of my time and that was well worth the effort. Now off to read the "advanced" camera manual...
1.18.08 6:56am - returned to sister winter
I went to see five short plays on Wednesday night because Jose was in one of them (as a rather humorous angel of the apocolypse, no less). Unfortuanately, most of them weren't very good. I'm a bit ticked at the people who made the one where a guy stood silently on stage for seven minutes. That's not a play. I just spent 1/5 of $12 on that, which is completely lame.
I watched "A scanner darkly" last night. I wasn't sure if I liked it, but I woke up this morning and decided I did. I definitely need to read some Phillip K Dick, because I don't think that I have, and that's a huge gaping hole in my sci-fi background.
I was very surprised to find out on wikipedia, though, that the origin of the title was from the bible: For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
In less pop-culture oriented news, I hope I start crying less soon, because I can't wear my contacts when I'm like this. And it really sucks to feel like crap and look in the mirror and look like crap too. I am a little bit vain, I guess. I'm going to have to force them in for at least tomorrow. I just can't teach in glasses.
Both the title of this blog and the last one are from the same sufjan stevens song. Which is sort of funny, to me, but this blog has more to do with the mood of the song than the last one. So I figured I may as well use it.
now my heart is returned to sister winter
now my heart is as cold as ice.