singing enthusiastically

pardon the dust

2006-04-07T20:39:00.000-07:00

so proud

2006-04-05T22:01:00.000-07:00

i may have sat in front of my computer all night, but the only time i loaded up WoW was for an auction house scan. what was i doing? ....you'll see... edit: HAW! turns out i couldn't have played all night, even if i wanted to. the login servers are down. ah well, it's still a moral victory :)

newsgator will change your life

2006-04-03T17:41:00.000-07:00

so friday night...or was that saturday afternoon...i think it was saturday afternoon... so sometime this weekend, hans and i were having a discussion about another friend's website (friend T), and how since friend J has basically given up posting there for lent, there's a lot less reason to visit it. friend J's scathing wit is one of the main reasons to visit what is basically a bunch of random people (all connected to T somehow) talking about whatever comes to mind. sort of like a group chat that doesn't get you in trouble if your internet usage is being monitored at work. the catch is that you only get to chat with whoever's feeling chatty that day. no J means T's site is going to be less interesting, which i think even the chatters that don't particularly care for J would agree with (see: scathing wit). hans' response when i bemoaned the fact that without T's site, i don't know what to do with my internet breaks, was to point out that he gets all of his internet via RSS. this is something i do at home, but because of the previously mentioned restrictions on my at-work usage. even if *i* wasn't looking at the feeds more than once every few hours, the illegally-installed aggregator would be pinging sites all over the place, looking for new content, to say nothing of the feeds i look at that are from sites blocked by my company's self-created "net-nanny" (ex: penny arcade is blocked because it's a comic about games... i can understand blocking sites that feature flash games, but blocking sites that are about video games is a bit silly. blocking a comic that's occasionally about games is an extra level of annoyance). "why don't you just use newsgator?" queried hans. it turns out that newsgator is a web-based aggregator (get it? gator) of RSS feeds, that does all the aggregating off-line (i.e: my computer's not the one hitting 100 sites. it will only hit the links i follow), AND syncs with the NetNewsWire software i have installed on my computer at home (currently in beta). another problem i had was that when my computer went to sleep during the day, i'd miss some of the day's posts (particularly on a busy site like urbanstl.com). newsgator fixes that for me. it does its thing, and then when i get home NNW asks newsgator what it missed and then it gets it. it is very, very nice. most of my rss reading is just browsing the headlines and making sweeping "all read" marks across subscriptions, and now i can do it at work! the sick thing, which i expect will fade, is that i can't say away from T's site. i have feed that tells me what (if anything) happened there as well as any and everywhere else i might want to know about, and i still felt the itch. i'm hoping that'll fade.

religious re-conversion: phase 2

2006-03-17T14:57:00.000-08:00

so remember how i went to church last year before advent and had that great "hooray, i'm catholic!" moment? i bet you're wondering what happened next, aren't you? the answer, sadly, is: nothing. didn't go back, didn't give anything up for lent, nadda. work/life has gotten so tiring/crazy that i haven't really had the urge. oh sure, around 11:30 on sunday i think "i probably should have gone. i didn't do anything useful with this time anyway" but never enough to actually do something about. this past week, some friends came into town. one of them is catholic and made plans to visit her old church, the church i went to past november, and sing in the choir (the choir of 3 when she was there that is still the choir of 3 when she is there--do a tenor and an alto a choir make? i really don't think so :). i had debated back and forth going with her, but going with her brought into play potential awkward social situations that i wasn't ready for. i knew deep down that saturday night i would chicken out and she'd be on her own. she had a broken foot, however, and while she didn't necessarily need help getting around and driving, it was always welcome. saturday afternoon, as i was driving home on a near-empty tank of gas in the only car she could drive, i realized i had 2 options: get gas now, or get gas with her on the way to church. as cowardly as i am, i'm not going to make crutches-girl get her own gas, ever, much less on her pokey way to pray. my solution was obvious: get gas now. :) fortunately, everyone was at the gas station, and in my way, so i said "f*ck it. i'll just go to church." we came in from a side-entrance and early enough that the place was pretty empty, so after situating her with the rest of the choir, i took my seat. after looking around at the growing congregation, i realized i forgot that there was a little booklet (missalette?) that i'm supposed to pick up at the door so i can follow along with the parts of the mass that change. when i went back out to pick it up, they weren't in an obvious place and there were people kind of everywhere, with other things to do (not quite angry!jesus at the temple, but certainly there). so i just kind of spun around in a helpless circle for a moment until someone said "are you looking for a booklet, hon?" and i said blushing and quite relieved, "yes. thank you." then i took a book and blushed some more and said, "i don't do this very often." and she smiled and said, "well, we're glad to have you." and i believed her, and that was cool. then the actual mass began. i was dismayed that since it's lent, all the songs i like to sing are unsung because they're happy and jubilant and lent is a time for quiet, but since i couldn’t really do anything about that (except come back during easter where it’s all jubilant all the time), i let it go. that’s when things started to go weird on me. over the past couple of years, when i was able to be really connected to my meditation practices, i'd get this sort of different-conscious feeling. as an angry anti-catholic that was forced to go to mass as a highschool/college student, i was a passive participant. i stood/sat/knelt when i needed to, but there was no talking, no all-group-prayer-ing, and certainly no signs of the cross. it took a while to learn to resist the impulses, but eventually i got it down. sunday, however, when my hand twitched to cross myself, i let it. and something marvelous occurred to me. before, i stopped crossing myself because i wasn't sure i bought into the holy trinity thing, and because i was irritated that so many people around me were sheep, blindly following, saying, doing when they really didn't think about it. the hypocracy of other parishioners was why i left. which is silly really, since who cares about them? but anyway. sunday, it hit me that while there are 100 different historical, symbolic reasons for why it's done, there was one that never occurred to me. you do it because it's a signal to the rest of you that you're in church. it's like stretching before you run, or tuning your instrument before you play. and for me, personally, who cares what the others think and do, everything that happens during a mass can keep me in that beautiful open moment that i can occasionally achieve during meditation, just as easily as staring at a candle flame, or focusing on my breathing, or any other "trick" i'd learned to focus. for me, it's this odd combination of being both more and less aware of what's going on around. everything is extra still. it's...indescribable, really, unless you've been there, but it's pretty nifty feeling. sunday i discovered that if i let it, signs of the cross, "mindless" responses, kneeling, sitting, standing, it can all be used to help sustain that moment. and that is so very cool. it kept going, too. when we hit the nicene creed, i thought "you can't say this. this is a statement of beliefs, most of which you either flat out don't agree with, or are very skeptical of. you probably don't even know it anymore. you'd have to read it from that booklet, and that's pretty lame, so stand here and be quiet like you always do and try not to let them creep you out too much." but a little, growing voice from either deep within or far beyond said, "just act as if and see what happens." so i did. and it reinforced what i'd felt earlier. the words don't have to be important. i've chanted nonsense, or something i came up with over and over again while meditating because it distracts a few senses and keeps them from pulling me out of focus. the creed had the potential to be the exact same thing. and it was. bonus cool: i could only follow when i wasn't thinking about it. the minute i paid attention to the fact that i was saying it, or tried to figure out what was coming next, i dropped both the words and that cool buzzing feeling. it didn't stop there though. when it came time for intercessions, and i was deep in the buzzing stage of being un/aware of everything around me, an unbidden thought came to the surface again: : you should pray for nancy :: i don't believe in praying for things like that. you know that. : yeah. i know. you should pray for her anyway. :: no. it's not my place to ask for anything. : fine. don't pray. just open your mind and flood it with images of nancy and allow all the grief to bleed out of you and add it to the pain that's leaking out of everyone around you right now. :: but that's ... praying.... kinda...only not asking for anything so it doesn't bother me and is actually quite a good feeling. : (you're welcome) are you getting tired of hearing how cool this all is? too bad, cuz i'm still. not. done. yet. communion. i just cannot do it yet, and it's because to me, that's it. when i take communion, i can't pretend i'm here on the sidelines. a portion of me feels like i should have announce myself first. like i need to ask someone's permission to partake after denouncing the whole thing (and taking communion in other churches) for 10+ years. even though the rest of me says that's a silly thing, i'm still nervous about it. i'm worried i won't do it right. i'm worried that lightning will strike me down when i get up there (okay, not really, but kinda). as i was loosing my faith (before i became super angry) i felt uncomfortable partaking because it felt wrong and disrespectful. it is the only part of the mass that doesn't pass my "you're doing it for yourself, forget the rest of them" hurdle. this is a very big deal, so i must treat it accordingly. the thing is, not taking communion makes it awkward. i have to get up anyway, and step out into the aisle so that others can get by and it draws attention to me (even if it's only the attention of 6 people) and makes me uncomfortable. and i hate that. having to deal with communion has actually kept me away before. "not wanting to be in the way is not a valid reason to get communion," a voice told me. and i agreed. and then it happened again. after the lamb of god (or, the "agnus dei" since we were singing in latin), we say "lord, i am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and i shall be healed." now, to me, this was one of the squicky parts of the mass: i'm not worthy? please! i've sat through all of this and i'm in control of my faith and i say i'm worthy so i'm worthy, so who are you to tell me to say i'm not, stupid church. only not. this time, i said the words, but what i heard in my head was "these are great words because they turn you completely over to the experience you're enjoying so much and there will come a time when you'll say these words, and you'll know it's time to go for communion. it may happen next week, it may not happen for years, it may not even happen, but if it does, this will be the moment, so you no longer need to worry about when/how you'll know." i didn't take communion, but i did have a pretty powerful experience, and aside from a few moments in st. patrick's cathedral in ny when we visited it a few years ago (no mass), it's the only time i've felt like that within a church. i was worried that i would lose the connection i get in ritual i create for myself when i came back to ritual created by others. not so worried anymore.

friend!pimp

2006-02-03T11:49:00.000-08:00

or would that be pimp!friend....no that'd be pimp(friend), wouldn't it? um..yeah..so anyway, i know this guy and he's living the dream of all the creative people and ...doing something creative. his thing is animation and his site is calicomonkey.com. go there. laugh. support. marvel at his ability to animate animals jumping down from the ceiling. be happy. pimp.end()

messed up dreams

2006-01-26T13:14:00.000-08:00

so for the past two nights, i've had virtually the same dream. i am walking to someplace to shop with a small pet (a specific pet, mind you, not just "a pet"). i must look after this pet, knowing it's going to be a difficult thing to do, thanks to all the distractions/people that the shopping place affords. in the first dream, i realize this is an impossible task, and take the steps to go home, but struggle with the pet while wandering around the shopping area until i wake up. in the second dream, the pet gets away from me, and i spend the rest of the dream chasing the pet down through the shopping area. i eventually found her...i think. tuesday night it was my cat dexter and was in the loop/central west end area. in the second dream it's a friend's daschund (pixel) and she slips into a generic department store...one with multiple floors and a revolving door. there were little dogs everywhere, almost like i was playing "where's pixel" instead of "where's waldo." going theories are: stressing about my new "job" as team lead (which i've had for all of 2 days) and stressing about babies (started reading "eating well while you're expecting at night...2 nights ago ;) both animals certainly are baby-sized, and i ended up carrying dexter around the bulk of the dream the first night. although that might just be because i don't walk cats with a leash. how weird is that?

that's gloomy

2006-01-19T08:35:00.000-08:00

so if you haven't been aware of this, 2006 has been dubbed the year of the baby. if i'm not preggers or babied by 1/2007, it will not be for lack of trying. the baby-making doesn't officially start for another month or so, but in preparation i have started taking prenatals every day, paying closer attention to my ovulation, making greener choices in my diet, and telling myself every day that tomorrow is the day i start weaning myself off of caffeine. last night was another preparation milestone. my hair is the color of murky lake water. when preggers, you are not allowed to dye your hair. the chemicals in the hair dye seep into your scalp and can cause a miscarriage. no fooling. for someone like me, who hates her natural hair color and dyes it about every 4-5 weeks (it grows like a weed even when i'm not taking prenatals or any other vitamin), this is pretty traumatic. my children will not hear "i was in labor with you for 3 days." it will be "i had to give up sushi and cheese, and dying my hair for 10 months thanks to you!" so why the murky lake water, color? it turns out they don't make "so dark and ash blond it looks grey with 40% real-grey" hair coloring. i checked. i tried a few years ago to find a hair dye that was my natural color so i could grow out the dyed stuff and chop it off, but much to my dismay, i found that the hair growing out was made of grey. once it became apparent that no dye matched my color (even without the grey) i abandoned that quest and started making it a color i liked (light reddish blond with non-red highlights). last night, the closest i could find was "dark natural blonde" which it turns out is murky lake water. the really, really depressing part is that while it's considerably closer to my natural color that what i had on it before, it's still richer and more interesting that what's going to manifest in the coming months. little stephie better appreciate this.

very funny

2006-01-15T14:32:00.000-08:00

best blonde joke in quite a long time, if possibly, ever i promise to update for real sometime later

lazy

2006-01-05T09:45:00.000-08:00

in my company's most recent cost cutting efforts, mail will be delivered to a single place on our floor (each floor has about 120 employees), and sorted by sets of 5 rows (40 people). not by a single row (8 people), and certainly not by individual address (1 people). also, if i want to mail something (inter-company or really-real), i have to take it down to the lobby on my way out the building. i could take it down at any time, but it's only going to get picked up at 4:30pm, so why bother? am i spoiled to want my own mailbox, in a stack of mailboxes that's relatively near where i work? i don't even need my name on it, since apparently looking up names on boxes was wasting too much time and they went to "by address, screw if the person moved" a few months back. is the cost-savings of getting rid of maybe 3 of 10 mail clerks going to balance out the time wasted by about 4000 salaried employees?

Yet another WoW-related post

2005-12-12T18:30:00.000-08:00

so i piqued hans' and ryan's curiosity enough that they picked up trial passes as well. i grabbed another trial to play along (cuz the full version won't arrive until 12/22 at the earliest). to play together as newbies, we started out in the dwarf/gnome area. we logged 4+ hours in a very chaotic round where ryan shot things with his gun, hans hung out while he and his minion got mauled by beasties more often than anything else, and i tried to figure out how a rogue worked (which basically involved running back and forth to get in range of the beastie that kept travelling between hans and ryan and not hitting it). i miss CoH's grouping option which let you see all the quests of all team members. in WoW, if you're near enough to your teammates, you can see how many have the same quests as you, but you can't see their quests. makes plotting a course difficult, even when you're all in the same room. anyway, even after hans took kristan home, ryan and i were still interested in playing, so we fired up a couple of human rogues (because by the end of the round, we were both curious about the class). psychiatrists would have much to say about the fact that our characters look like sisters and have almost the exact same name. playing with the two rogues was great fun, though. i'm not sure it would work as smoothly if we weren't in the same room, or had some sort of teamspeak ability to talk to each other. the next night, i decided that what our group of 3 really needed was a tank. someone to stand in front of the beastie and say "pay attention to me!!" so i built a warrior. a teeny little princess-leia bun wearing gnome girl warrior. she is cuter than cute, but it's hard to take her seriously, since she's a foot and a half tall: she will totally poke you in the calf with her sword, though!! adding to the funny is the warrior's use of "rage" as mana. basically, the more damage you do/have done to you, the madder you get, and you channel that anger into special attacks and abilities. my favorite (so far) is this giant thunder clap of a sound that freaks out all nearby enemies and weakens them. the animation of this teeny bit stomping a giant hole in the ground is tew funny. she has this very bubbly, polite powerpuff-girl sounding (not the mean, green one) voice. so when she tells me she doesn't have enough rage to complete my request, she's almost apologetic about it. unfortunately, user rage cannot translate to toon rage. i was still running back and forth between ryan and hans with the warrior, and since the beasties wouldn't pay attention to me, her rage wasn't building nearly as fast as mine :)

seriously

2005-12-11T08:17:00.000-08:00

i think scott adams has my office bugged, or maybe one of my cohorts in california. the first 1/2 of this comic has been my life over the past 3-4 weeks, only it ends with "yeah, well, suck it up." seriously, we're supposed to be done by now, and the client is insisting we meet a ludicrous deadline (basically the end of next week) while continuing to schedule "definition meetings" that are so fundamental we can't really begin until they're finished.

look what i found!

2005-12-09T22:26:00.000-08:00

i didn't think my screenshot attempts were working since nothing showed up in my non-existent screenshots folder, until i noticed a few random images on my desktop. this is a bit of one of them. it's my lvl 16 character taking a griffin ride from one town to another. i thought it was purty.

so it would seem..

2005-12-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

...that i logged 35 hours almost to the minute, before tonight. 3.5/day average, like i thought. i spent just over 24 hours on the one character. that was a little disturbing to see. 1/10 of my time over the last 10 days was spent with that one toon. also in answer to the "do they kick you out or wait for you to log out" question, the answer is yes....not what i expected either. i got some lovely little status and countdown messages, and then when the time came...nothing happened. i just kept playing and playing and playing. it's like that episode of friends where they got free porn and were afraid to change the channel or turn it off cuz it might go away. i built a little cow character (called mukka ;) with about 10 minutes to go just for kicks and i went for an extra 35 or so minutes before i just stopped. when i tried to log back in, i couldn't. so there you go.

trials and tribulations

2005-12-07T08:10:00.000-08:00

i believe my trial ends tonight around 8:30. if i access the account at all today, it will be to see "what happens" at 8:30. will i get automatically booted, or will it just not let me log back in once i log out? my money's on the not-log, but we'll see. oh, i meant to check how much time i logged in-game over the past 10 days. so yeah, i'll be getting online just to figure that out. i'm thinking the number will average out to about 3.5 hours/day. i spent most of my evenings playing while watching tv, and had some marathon blitzes on the weekend...maybe that's a conservative estimate... we'll see. so...the verdict? me likey. i like it enough that it's worth the hit to my allowance to pay them for the right to play it when i want. it's that much more engaging than d2 (that'd be diablo 2, for those of you just joining) for me. while i did play it a lot...a lot a lot, it was more to maximize the value of the trial, and to check out multiple aspects of the game (character types, trade skills). this next part is only interesting if you play WoW, or enjoy mmorpgs: as of yesterday i had 3 characters all sitting around lvl 9ish (just enough to see what they can start to do, but getting to the point that soloing is slow) and one i brought all the way to lvl 16 (4 away from the trial-cap). yesterday i spent the time unearthing quest after quest that i could not do on my own, but paid attention to the chat channels enough to see that if i got into the game enough, finding a group to take care of them would not have been too difficult. i also managed to get a few skills to the journeyman status (second of four tiers), so i feel i got a good glimpse of how that all works. since the trial prevents you from participating fully in the server economy, i'll have to work out the lucrative business of selling off those precious looted items that propel low-level characters into cash-heaven. i'm only assuming that's the case, based on what i know of foraging classes in EQ. seems there were plenty of shoutouts for linen and leather, though. done with the uber-geekout the bloom fell off the rose (or i took off my rose colored glasses) sometime sunday when i hit that threshold of repetitive action and needing to group up to get things accomplished. this is the part that i hate about perpetually paying for these games, especially since i don't expect there to be a large group of RL friends in the game growing at the same time, like i had with city of heroes. i have a few "contacts" that have come out of the woodwork to say "pick my server and i'll hook you up with some stuff, show you around," which is great, but that's not the same thing. they're so far ahead that they speak a different language, and even when they "slum it" with an alt, they're not going to do it on your timetable. not that i blame them. so yeah, i took a long hard look at the game. when i get the itch, d2 works "fine enough" to fix it, but it doesn't last all that long, and it takes a while for it to kick in. what i crave with the rpg experience is new-ness, and there's enough randomization of objects/levels in d2 to keep that coming, but (obviously) WoW blows that right out of the water. more geeking: i was amazed at the level of detail this game gives you. almost every single item i equipped affected my character's appearance. that just...man. if you know me at all you know how cool i think that is. coming from a background of EQ where only a few items changed your clothes, and the first 2 or 3 sets of armor didn't change it all and you didn't get into the different looks until you were high level, and CoH which was highly customizable, but superheroes don't exactly change their costumes every time they loot a new pair of tights off an enemy, and d2 which is very old, but has about 6 looks per character that are largely dependent upon 2 of the 4 armor slots, this made me so happy i literally clapped my hands with glee when i upgraded from my ragged torn bracers to tattered leather bracers and the wrists actually changed. it blew my mind that the belt actually showed up and changed as much as it did. that, more than any other aspect of the game, shows how well-aligned the folks at blizzard are to my gaming needs. end geeking the $30-$50 startup cost grates even more than the $15/month, and might have been a dealbreaker ($20 offer cujofan pointed out notwithstanding). yesterday, however, i "tricked" my mother into buying the game for me for christmas. her: your status says "WoW trial." what does that mean? me: it's a game i'm trying out. you should buy it for me for christmas. her: okay. i don't feel that desperate pull to play like i did with EQ. i remember experiencing some of that with CoH, but considering that game lasted 7 months and i've never looked back, i'm not really sure that counts. i think i can handle it without being addicted/obsessed, but one thing is clear: WoW is the new D2.

teamwork:

2005-12-03T10:31:00.000-08:00

(a brief conversation had during a trivial pursuit game. the question in question was something like "name the Clinton cabinet member who something something'd...") "what was that scary looking woman's name?" "which woman?" "you know. the scary looking one." "...you mean the one that looked like a man?" "yes!" "um...janet reno." "yes! that one!" (and we were right)

november: a month in review

2005-12-01T14:49:00.000-08:00

well, nanowrimo was not the success i had wanted it to be. i realized early on that the level of commitment necessary to actually pull off 50k words in 30 days was not something i could deliver on. it means 2-3 hours per day of serious writing, with larger sessions on the weekends. everyone was more supportive of that than i was. i don't know why playing videogames or sitting in front of my computer for 2-3 hours every night (and generally wasting that time) makes me feel less guilty than spending that time writing, but it really does. maybe because when i write, it's my own little world and you're not invited and leave me alone, but when i'm playing games or watching tv, there's still a chance for socializing. we'd get invited to hang out with friends and i'd feel guilty even considering wanting to stay home and write, so i didn't. that having been said, even when i knew early on i wasn't going to make the goal, i kept going. i had a day where i trashed the whole thing (day 6ish, maybe) but then i picked it back up. i kept writing on the same story, forsaking all others, all month long. that is new for me. knowing i was going to "fail" but continuing to move forward is not something i do. this is the first year i've stuck with my nanowrimo story throughout all 30 days and i hit 12,686 words before it was all over. go me. also in november, i saw a few movies. pride and prejudice could have been better. harry potter and the goblet of fire could have been much, much better. walk the line was very long, but also very good. just friends (didn't see that one coming, didja?) was pretty much what you'd expect. if they swapped all the anna farris screen time with more ryan reynolds being ryan reynolds, it'd have been much better. thanksgiving break was both the high and low point of the month. we took our yearly trip to chicago/milwaukee to fest with ryan's side of the family. it's hard to put those 48 hours into succinct words without coming off as disrespectful or unemotional, however. ... i keep trying, but nothing comes out quite right. lots of bad things happened/continue to happen to that side of my family, but we still celebrate thanksgiving with gusto, and i'm not just talking about the obscene amounts of tasty food. there's just so much love there. every visit to chicago makes me feel less and less like "ryan's wife" and more just one of the bunch. yeah, can't really talk about friday. ryan's grandfather (other side of the family) died unexpectedly and his funeral was friday. it was so similar to events surrounding my own grandfather's death and funeral a few years ago that i pretty much stayed numb the entire day, cuz excessive feelings are bad. so um...moving away from that stuff... that's pretty much my month. i picked up that trial version of worlds of warcraft and as much as i've enjoyed playing it, i'm not sure what's gonna happen when my time is up. right now when i get that random rpg itch (maybe about 10 days/month in 2-3 day batches) i play dialbo 2. WoW is more enjoyable than d2, mostly because it's newer and prettier, but seriously, is it really worth it?

doooom!!

2005-11-27T18:46:00.000-08:00

through a random series of events, i discovered that fileplanet wants me to play WoW for free for a couple of days. isn't that nice of them? they even included the mac version of the game in the gi-normous 2gb download. it's the whole damn game. you get 10 days, 20 levels, and a handful of restrictions to keep you from using free accounts as mules, farmers, whatever. i have lots of posts queued up regarding nanowrimo, thanksgiving, work, at&t, etc etc. but um...yeah. wow's almost patched so um..it's time to play with the character builder until bedtime. i totally should have waited until christmas break before starting my 10 days but um...there's only so much delayed gratification a girl can stand. oh, and if you see ryan in the next 10 days, tell him hi for me, okay?

pride and prejudice

2005-11-15T12:06:00.000-08:00

we interrupt nanowrimo to bring you 1500 words or so on a completely different subject. this could have been a great movie. it might have eclipsed sense and sensibility as my all-time favorite movie of all time. it had all the right elements to do so. the story of elizabeth and mr. darcy is my already my favorite archetypal romance story: free thinking, unconventionally attractive girl meets handsome, brooding, stoic male and there is an instant revulsion (see movie title), followed by witty banter and sniping for months, (since this is jane austin, it's typically over women's ability to make her own choices within society's norms). at different times, they each realize that they love the other, except they're too proud (see movie title again) to admit it until at last at the very end they kiss and live perfectly happily ever after. this last scene quite often involves rain, or some other precarious position for the heroine where the hero's stoic nature is overcome because of the danger she is in. in p&p, this doesn't happen. there's just so much passion under the surface of mr. darcy that he cannot stand it any longer. for me, that's even better. i can save you the time of pointing out how each one of my personal character flaws fit into this scenario, and that being why i like this story the most-est. i'm aware. thanks. anyway, for the bulk of the movie, this version of p&p does a pretty good job. the scenery is lovely, the people are lovely, the costumes are lovely, and dame judi dench is dame judi dench. "true" fans will have much to pick apart as being anachronistic or a waste of the original material, but as picky as i am about that sort of thing in general, nothing really bothered me all that much (well, one costume set bothered me, but i let it slide because it was clearly a choice, and not an oversight). the movie was a little obvious at times, beating the audience over the head with concepts that are so familiar that we really don't need our hands held to understand, and it may have lingered on the scenery a bit too long as well. kiera knightly's lack of breasts was distracting, simply because her costumes didn't fit right. also, the way she clenches her jaw when she talks drove me nuts. she didn't stick out as much as scarlett johansson did in girl with a pearl earring, but out of the entire cast, she didn't fit right the most (neither did donald sutherland as the patriarch of the bennet family, but his role was (sadly) minor enough that it didn't bother me as much). disappointing since she was the lead, but not enough to break everything, since in general i like watching her. she's the right kind of english, so she never had to worry about her accent slipping, either :) what this movie mishandles is the most important aspect of the romance: the first kiss. more specifically, that moment right before the kiss where lips are hovering and the two characters are mere inches apart but it seems like this insurmountable distance. they wait and they hover and the tension builds and builds until finally one or the other gives in. when it's done well, it's absolute bliss. it's the best part. it's what you go see these things for. ordinarily, i'd consider this sort of thing a spoiler for the film, but you know she's going to end up with mr. darcy from the first time you see her see him, thanks to the obviousness of the film, and besides, you're going specifically to watch that play out, so the fact that they kiss at some point shouldn't be a spoiler. kiera has been touring the talkshows with the first kiss scene, and that one is done perfectly. he's just proposed, albeit terribly awkwardly, but his timing is off (as it must be, because there's still a good hour to go) and she's raging mad at him for something she just found out he did and so she's yelling and telling him she can't possibly ever love him. in the face of all her fury, instead of walking away, he leans down to kiss her. because, you see, he cannot help himself. and you know that she loves him back because instead of freaking out when he leans down with these beautifully halting awkward movements, she tilts her head up because as mad as she is, she wants him just as badly. you can see in their eyes how confused they both are that their bodies are basically telling their minds to shut the hell up. unfortunately they're not ready yet, and mr. darcy's stoicism and propriety wins out in the end and he says something ridiculously proper just inches away from her and walks away into the rainy storm sans kiss. as tangible as the pre-kiss moment was, the loss of it is just as palpable. it's beautiful and perfect, and what really makes it work is that you know the real one is coming later, and if this one was so fireworksy, just imagine how great that one's going to be. the movie is teasing you, and that's okay, because the real payoff is coming. and this is where the movie breaks. when the really-real scene happens, it's a bit overdone. ... okay, it's really overdone. you cannot help but snicker when elizabeth is outside wandering around in the early morning for no good reason and mr. darcy suddenly appears through the misty fog just as early-morning disheveled coming to see her and profess for the very last time that he loves her and cannot do without her. the shot of mr. darcy emerging from said fog has "this is for you, ladies" written all over it and it goes on and on and on. it's very silly. still, though, once the witty banter is over, and they've each professed their love in their own awkward styles, and they're reaching for each other, i stopped caring that it was over the top. as the sun "rose" to be positioned perfectly between their mouths i knew in the back of my head how cheesy that was, but really, that's what that moment feels like so i didn't care. i held my breath and waited for the kiss. and then the scene ends. yep. not in a great big ball of angst like the first one, not in the resolution of a perfect anticipation moment. just cuts to the next scene. you know they kiss, you can tell by the way they act around each other for the rest of the film, but you don't get to see it. not showing the kiss just deflates/negates all the tension of the scene, if not the entire movie. i didn't feel teased like the first time, i felt cheated. i can only assume this is to keep some sort of tension going for the rest of the film, which is really just "daddy can i marry this guy we all think i hated because i love him?" and "they lived happily ever after." and by the way, when your touching father/daughter scene does not reduce me to tears you have done something terribly, terribly wrong with your movie. the last scene of the movie, where they actually kiss for the first time (on camera) is after an offscreen wedding and wedding night. you know this because they're sitting outside at mr. darcy's beautiful house in their nightgowns and the sun is rising yet again. plus, he's calling her mrs. darcy. and there's all this loving build up and blissfully happy people and even then they try to build up that first kiss tension. finally, moments before the credits roll, lips meet lips. and it flat out doesn't work. they're married. they've had sex. there's nothing even close to the tension in the first two scenes. happily ever after kiss? yes. angsty first epiphany kiss? not in the least. it was so ridiculous that i literally threw a hand up at the screen and said "what is this crap?" i don't think the last two scenes would have lost anything if they'd have shown the kiss in the scene before. as silly as that sounds, it broke the whole movie for me. i was willing to forgive everything else except that. since that's wrong, instead of replaying blissful scene after blissful scene, all i can remember is the things that were off, like the intermittent loud-as-hell piano soundtrack, the way the mother and the "minor" sister characters were beyond melodramatic, and donald sutherland is dumb, the fact that everyone's hair was messy, even when it was not-messy, kiera's costumes not fitting at all at all, and oh yeah, the rich girl's costumes were complete nonsense. a pity, too, when it could have become my all-time favorite movie of all time.

huh

2005-11-14T20:46:00.000-08:00

9046 total as of right now, not including the bit of "what happens next" at the end of the thing. that's almost 3600 today, in less than 4 hours. it's amazing what happens when actually apply myself :) also, that outline i wrote? Almost completely out the window. I'm on chapter 3, and i'm still in chapter 1 as far as the outline is concerned. not surprised. it's going someplace a little different/easier now, but i'm a fan.

nano-update

2005-11-13T00:06:00.000-08:00

so i finally sat down and wrote some. i had another 3 or more hours today that i could have used, but i just didn't. i was struggling with trying to get to the interesting parts (the parts i want to write) but i didn't want to skip. it didn't help that we saw pride and prejudice last night. i wanted to turn it into a regency romance and dress them up in pretty clothes and rework the whole thing. but it wouldn't work. so i sat and stared at it for a while until i found something interesting. and then i wrote that. and when i looked up it was 2 am. i almost reached the wpd goal at the beginning of the month. it actually wasn't that hard, and only took about 3 hours. i should really set aside more time and get caught up. it could happen. maybe mont 50k, but possibly 30 by end of month. we shall see. (oh, and i'm counting all these words for 11/12, even though it's technically 11/13. i didn't stop and do a wordcount at midnight) total words: 5288 words "behind": 14,714 wpd needed to reach goal: 2484 (initial wpd was 1666)

nanowrimo meter died

2005-11-09T07:35:00.000-08:00

looks like the site that ran my slick little progress meter has caved to bandwidth-breaking popularity. that's gloomy. so you'll have to deal with manual updates when i make them. total words: 2432 words "behind": 10,901 wpd needed to reach goal: 2161 (initial wpd was 1666)

procrastination

2005-11-05T20:30:00.000-08:00

the writing is going not so well. i got stuck with my fabulously outlined story after 600ish words on day 1. day 2 i couldn't get it going, so i abandoned it for a sudden inspiration. 730ish words into that, i petered out. what looked like brilliant, engaging prose the day before looked really lame the next. day 3 i pouted, certain that i was doomed until ryan gave me a good "you could get caught up if you hang out with a bottle of wine one night this weekend" pep-talk. well, he didn't suggest the wine, but i've found historically that it helps. anyway. i took a break or two at work (plus the metro link ride) on friday to add a bit to story one (i got some cold-med induced inspiration day-3 night--i told you drugs were good) but most of day 4 was spent having a friday night, which was fine cuz day 5 (today) was going to be catch-up night. except our saturday day got full of stuff/dinners out with parents so now it's 10:35 pm, and i have to get through all of the pre-writing activities (also known as "procrastination") before my brain calms down enough for me to write. i started with the lovely little status bar on the right (which for now is a total of both stories). next up is some diablo 2 to get some jitters out. i should also do some laundry and dishes, but it's so late that i won't. that'll be part of tomorrow's procrastinations.

buzz-phrase of the day

2005-11-02T14:01:00.000-08:00

"experience sensitive to cost" - a customer who does not spend much money with the company (or only has services with a very small overhead) should expect their customer service to suck it. Mr. Executive’s (yes, that one) first attempt to talk about customer service painted this idea in a much brighter light. we need to identify our higher paying customers and make sure their experiences are of a very high caliber. his second attempt (when someone asked how much of our call center and help desk staff was going to be off-shored) was much less well spun and included the above phrase.

nano-what-mo?

2005-10-31T16:53:00.000-08:00

tomorrow starts national novel writing month, otherwise known as nanowrimo. this will be the third year that i've attempted to write a 50,000 word (heh. for a moment i typed page) novel. it ends up being 1666.6 words a day, which may or may not sound like much to you, but this entire post is only (369) words long and took me about 25 minutes to compose. so yeah. it's a chunk of time, even if you can type like a fiend and can just pour the writing out of you. and that never, ever happens when you want it to. smarty-smart me made a lovely xls file that not only tracks my progress, but re-calcuates my words per day needed to meet the goal based on how many words i've written so far. it can get discouraging after a few days of 500ish words when you know you've suddenly got to start churning out 2500 word days if you hope to make it. the first year i started out fairly strong (for about 5 or 6 days) and then got stuck. the second year (last) i couldn't even get my idea off the ground and started writing a few random things before abandoning the process entirely. this year, however, i'm a step ahead. i've already got a (legally allowed) outline for my story that is 12+ chapters long and i have a good idea where it goes from there. the trouble may be getting it all wrapped up in 30 days. i've never finished a story before. my largest effort is currently hovering around 96K words, and it's only about 2/3 complete. it has large, gaping holes and i have no way to connect the pieces, which is why it's been repeatedly abandoned, but it's there, a 1+ MB file of original words, if not necessarily original characters. anyway, yeah, i've got an edge this year. i spent some time a few days ago looking at some of the story ideas i've fleshed out into an outline and found one i think i like well enough right now to spend a month with it. so, if you don't hear from me until december, you know why. :)

you know what's frustrating?

2005-10-28T07:18:00.000-07:00

i'm experiencing a lull in my responsibilities at work. i have been for over a week now. when it was about to happen i sent an email to my team lead (C) who said "great! thanks for the update, we'll try to find something for you to do." a day later, she came back with, "It looks like S (an architect) could really use your help on the XYZ application. he should be getting in touch with you soon." two days went by. i get a brief message from S where he re-states his intentions to give me something. i include in my status report (which C, S, and a bunch of other people see) that i've been promised work on XYZ, but haven't gotten it yet. earlier this week (but not monday) i get yet another confirmation from S that he's got something for me to work on soon. we talk briefly about the fact that it'd be better if this was a java and cold fusion thing vs a just-java thing because, being new to java, i'm faster when at least part of what i'm doing speaks my language. he points out that the dual-language issue is more complicated than the just-java one. i make it clear this is not a problem. he promises to send me something "soon." that was the last i heard of it. today, i am greeted by this email from the boss-man (E is S's team lead): We have an "all hands on deck" issue today. We must meet the XYZ client's expectations for Monday. S and E are aware of what needs to be done. I ask that all of you be ready to help if needed. <<snipped stuff you don't care about>> Please make yourself available as needed. This may mean OT for some this weekend. C and E will assess that need later today, hopefully that will not be the case, but just in case, I wanted everyone to realize the possibility. Thank you for your understanding and support on this critical delivery. seriously. i've been sitting on my little ass for more than a week saying "please give me something to do!" and nothing has happened. it's not like i'm one of those useless "if we give it to her it'll slow us down" employees, either. i'm a go-to girl. i'm one of the few people on the team they're comfortable dumping into a new mess and expect fast fixed turnaround. but this. i just... ugh. if i have to work overtime this weekend i'm gonna be very, very upset.

2005-10-24T11:37:00.000-07:00

weekend in chicago: brought to you by starbucks. friday: when you factor in the metrolink ride to the airport, waiting for the plane, and then waiting some more because the (vice) president was also flying out of the city that night, the 45 minute train ride from the airport to the stop closest to the hotel and the 6ish block walk, it may have actually been faster to drive :) it might not have been cheaper, however. our restaurant of choice on friday night had a 1.5 hour wait when we got there at 9:30 (and/or the host may have just been trying to scare away our jeans-wearing party of 4) so we walked around until we found a sushi place that sat us immediately (one restaurant over). this was my favorite meal of the trip. the atmosphere of the restaurant was perfectly japanese, from the flatscreen tv that displayed japanese cooking shows over the bar to the lighting, the ... whatever you call plates and glasses and things (serving ware?) ... to especially the trendilicious waitresses who had that extremely meek/shy japanese girl attitude that compliments the food so well. and the food. i know what red snapper is supposed to taste like now. the portions were bigger, the fish was fresher and it was about the same price as anything you'd find in st. louis that wasn't uber-pretentious, although that wasn't really a surprise. while i cannot truly comment on the originality of the rolls until i've eaten more sushi in more cities, they were considerably more creative/tasty than most things we've come across in st. louis. the majority of them (which are separate from the standard rolls on the main menu/website) were named/themed by color (white, red, green dragons, arizona sunset, winter, summer, etc) and they were oh-so-tasty. my favorite of the bunch was the white dragon which had tempura shrimp and some misc veggies (cucumber maybe?) on the inside and was topped with white tuna (yum!). it was decorated with some white roe of some sort (not masago), and little dollups of red sauce as spikes. the dragon was complete with carrot slices of ears and flame, a tongue, and eyes made of octopus circles topped with mayo and a tiny black dot of roe for each pupil. it was so cute i almost didn't want to eat it :) hans's camera has a picture of it somewhere. total visits to starbucks: one (airport) saturday: otherwise known as the day of walking. we started early, with a trip to starbucks soon after 9am and then made our way (entirely on foot) along the riverfront to shed aquarium, where we walked around several exhibits. the new wild reef is incredible, even if you're afeard of sharks to the extent i am. i've never seen a tank so big and so full of predators. also impressive (but not new to me) were the dolphins, beluga whales, and the amazon exhibit. after that we walked to the nearest train stop (appx 7 blocks away) and hitched a ride to the loop for lunch. it was probably only 4 or 5 blocks away from where got the train, but we had day-passes, so it didn't matter. we wandered for a bit, looking for the expected cluster of restaurants to pick from but didn't really find something. hans and kristan led us to a known restaurant they ate at during a previous trip. it was not incredible, but filling and warm, which was important. i do not think there was a starbucks stop during all of that, but i find that sort of hard to believe. after lunch we hopped a train back to the hotel where we rested our feet for a few minutes and parted ways. kristan and i walked the magnificently crowded mile while the boys went...elsewhere. because it was actually between the hotel and our nearest train stop, it was entirely on foot as well. did i mention the strip was crowded? i'm guessing the two world-series games that weekend had something to do with the increased level of crowds, but it was nuts! at several stores we had things in our hands to buy, but turned and looked at the lines and decided it was not worth it. also on the strip, i developed a sudden and searing animosity towards the american girl phenomenon. i was dimly aware of this phenomenon before we went, but hadn't really understood what it entailed before we got there. in addition to a line of $90 dolls and coordinating outfits, there is a 3 story "store" where a girl can bring her very favorite doll or 2 and spend the day with her. the doll. there's a salon (for the doll!), a glamour-shots esque photo studio, a restaurant (complete with seats/serving ware for the doll) a theatre...the list goes on and on and suddenly everywhere we went for the rest of the trip there were little girls clutching their dolls to their chest while mommy/daddy/grandma trailed along with brick-red bags full of merchandise. cuz that's the genius of the thing. the dolls are time-period specific, so you can't put felicity's 1784 frock on melody because melody is from 1934 (note: i made those years/names up, so please don't correct me, because i don't really care). i just wanted to rip the dolls out of their hands and destroy them. i don't know why the ridiculous excess made me so violent, because destroying the $90 doll in her $30 outfit certainly wouldn't help the problem, but oh man did i want to. kristan and i were going to hit starbucks on our way home, but the line was so obscene and we really just wanted some water/propel so we abandoned it for a convenience store along the route home. i heard a rumor that the boys managed one on their walk back to hotel, though. dinner saturday night was at a real pizzaria uno, the kind where you order when you get there and even after your 1.5 hour wait for a table, your incredibly tasty slow cooked. deep dish pizza is not ready for you. while we waited in the bitter cold rain, we hit another SB. it was so much the caffeine or the thirst, it was the warm liquid while you walk/wait in that cold, bitter rain. the pizza was worth the wait. i picked up the sausage and instead of bits of sausage all over the pizza, it was one giant piece. very clever and very smart. by the time dinner was over, the first game of the world series had started, so the streets weren't incredibly crowded. we picked up some previously coveted items at the apple store and eddie bauer before heading to the blue man group show. we got to take the train for part of our journey, but there was still about 15-20 blocks of walking from dinner to the show and back home again. there would have been some soul-warming sb on the way back, but it was late enough they were all closed. i was much much more impressed with blue man than i expected to be but it was hilarious and entertaining and all things interesting and good. there is no describing what bmg is. its improv, it's music, it's absurd and it's hilarious. the general "plot" is these 3 alien-like guys explore whatever gets put in front of them. this includes drum sets, bottles of paint, boxes of captain crunch, bags of marshmallows, pvc-pipe musical instruments and of course, the audience. they even find time to mock our concept of "art" and the excessive amount of media that's thrown at us on a daily basis. if you have the opportunity to go to a bmg show, then go. that's really all i can say. total visits to starbucks: two (three if you're a boy) ... although i may be forgetting one or two. that number seems low. sunday: after the day of walking, we were all pretty beat. my shoes and i were not getting along, but they seemed to level off with the amount of pain they would give me. after the first 20 or so steps after any break, the pain leveled off and was ignorable. besides shoe-induced pain, there was some ankle/calf quirks happening, which were less comfortable. we started the day at west egg cafe(no decent link), brunching with some in-town practically-family friends. more tasty, tasty food. after that, we walked to the pier and did some more people watching and shopping. we got sort of stuck with figuring out what we wanted to do with the rest of our visit. yesterday had taken a fatiguing toll on all 4 of us so while there was plenty we could do, motivation was pretty low. eventually we decided to wander around the bit of the mag mile we (the girls) hadn't gotten to yesterday. we hitched a ride on a free trolley from the pier, which (to me) was worth the 20 minute cold-rain wait. there was still copious amounts of walking to be had as we wandered around inside and out of shops/malls for a few hours. the football game kept the crowds to a healthy minimum, so that was nice. eventually we wandered back to the area of the loop we had trained from the day before, and found an old navy where scarves and gloves were bought, and to a smaller, less chaotic H&M than the one we found on the opposite end of the shopping district. egged on by the "Y chromosome votes" actual commerce in considerable amounts transpired. i was happy :) stores with multiple stories also make me happy. it might not be any more floor space than your average strip mall version, but it feels bigger. after shopping we took the train back to the 10 or so blocks we called "home" for the trip, ate dinner at a tasty italian restaurant and picked our bags up at the hotel. we hung out in the lobby and then a nearby starbucks for a little bit, we headed home. o'hare is just as twisted of an airport as they claim it is, and i'm not sure if the construction helped or hindered navigating through it. we passed several kiosks of SB (for one last bit of vacation silliness) before arriving at our destination, but the one near our gate was closing down and less than remorseful that they did not have the things that ryan and i wanted. i ended up drinking the rest of the bottle of water that was in my bag instead. i swear my laptop gained 35 pounds on the way, too. when we finally got home, there was a will waiting for us, and in true will fashion, had reserved a few of his "hooray st. louis" white castles for us. nothing tops off a crazy whirl-wind mini-vacation like cold bacon cheese castles at 1 am. total visits to starbucks: two (three if you're not a stephenson) total visits the entire trip: (5-7 depending on who you are)

bathroom setbacks

2005-10-19T08:59:00.000-07:00

painting a bathroom can be hazardous to both your physical and mental heath. during coat 4 (while in a particularly awkward and stressful position to pain behind the toilet), something in my back snapped and made the rest of the paint job pretty challenging. ryan offered to finish up for me, but i declined. he hates painting and i wasn't in too much pain. two weeks later, i'm still in “not too much” pain. it's dull, it only gets aggravated when i'm sitting down and/or leaning forward (like say, at a computer screen) or when i'm actively challenging it (like say, painting) but those sorts of things rarely happen...for less than 9 or 10 hours a day. it is less than fun. if it's still bothering me after this next weekend (where i will be in chicago, doing less desk/chair sitting) there will be a doctor visit. it's not a ruptured or slipped anything, i don't think. i would expect much more pain and some bizarre leg feelings were that the case. it's just my back, between the shoulder blades until i put too much stress on the rest of my back and i start getting lower back pain. heating pads either take the pain away, or distract me from it, so i'm a fan. i tried ice because someone suggested that it's inflamed and taking away all the heat might soothe it. it worked great during, but once my back started warming up, there was twitching and spasming. heat doesn't give me that, so i sit with a pad between me and my chair for pretty much the whole day/night now, shifting it up or down depending on where the pain is the brightest. but not too big of a deal right? we've only got one more bathroom to paint, right? wrong again. there were some novice mistakes made during my painting blitz. tape needs to come up almost immediately after painting or not used at all. i left the same tape on the walls for all 4 coats, over a 5 day period. bad. lots of paint and primer coming off the drywall. even when it's cut, it's not sealed, which is badder for bathrooms than normal. also, after spending all that money on the bathrooms and then paint and supplies, we decided to save a couple of bucks (literally, i think it was like $2.50) by buying the cheaper disposable rollers. cheaper, full of loose fuzz rollers. which got all over the walls and ceiling, making the paint job look super-duper crappy. the fact that neither one of us liked the color we picked suddenly didn't matter any more. the whole place had to be sanded down and painted again anyway. feeling crappy for doing the crappy job, and knowing that ryan is not a fan of the painting, i bit off a bit more sanding than i could chew. he was, after all, responsible for all the edge trimming/tape removal stuff since there's no way my back was gonna let that fly. that probably pushed my back-healing back a bit, so we decided to take it easy. after all, we hadn't picked out a new color yet...or a shower curtain that didn't suck... time started to creep away from us, and it was looking like this was going to be another project that got away from us and was hastily finished later. considering the amount of money we spent to get the bathrooms this far, this was more frustrating than usual. we're expecting a house guest next week, who might appreciate having someplace to wash up, so we started pressing on with the re-paint this week. being physically restricted from fixing it added greatly to my stress, because nagging is not something i want to ever engage in, but ryan's pretty much on his own right now. i did the easy work of using the rollers. it didn't take long (and only hurt a little) so i tried my hand at edging. it hurt too much to do, and the pain was adding to my frustration so i quit before i threw a bahia green colored temper-tantrum all over the bathroom. ryan spent the rest of the night painstakingly getting new-coat 1 on the walls. tonight we'll do coat 2 and a coat on the ceiling. tomorrow we'll assemble, just in time to leave for the weekend. this could be going smoother, really. oh! and we have not even begun work on the master bath, because we’re waiting on a vanity resolution. it’s just untreated drywall, still.

to do

2005-10-16T18:53:00.000-07:00

i'm not saying it's the best list, but time's 100 best english-language novels is a good place to start. i've read a total of 9 so far. many of these books/authors i haven't even heard of! (hands head in shame) ah well, i guess it's time to get a library card, huh?

well

2005-10-12T10:04:00.000-07:00

at least we can still beat chicago.

i smell layoffs!

2005-10-11T11:32:00.000-07:00

our yearly assessment process involves this online tool. we go in and set goals for the year (which are actually pre-defined by higher-ups but they pretend like we do it) and then each quarter we mark down how we accomplished them. At the end of the year we update it for the whole year, approve it, our boss approves it, gives us a "grade" (does not meet, meets, exceeds, or far exceeds expectations -- another rant on it's own), and that grade determines how much of our boss's pot of money for raises and bonuses he gives us. this end of the year process usually starts up mid-november and finishes up late january, with the actual money game hitting in february. this year, because we have to "focus on the business at hand" (read: merger) all of this needs to be accomplished asap and be completely done (except the money) by mid-december. and it's so that they have an even better idea who to layoff as soon as the merger goes through. honest.

latest sign that i've become a mac-head

2005-10-07T14:03:00.000-07:00

i only resize windows from the bottom right corner. also: i've mapped the thumb button on my mouse at home to do expose'. i probably try to expose' my work computer at least 2 or 3 times a day, despite the fact that there's not even button there.

so it turns out...

2005-10-06T15:17:00.000-07:00

that while leaving primer on the walls over night before you paint the next day is a good idea, leaving it on your skin over night (since you're just going to paint more the next morning) is not. it makes it very very hard to get off your skin without taking two or three layers with it...and only then when you use a loofa and your own fingernails. in completely related news, the hall bath has 2 coats of primer and a coat of color on it. i'm not sure how i feel about it, but we'll see. pictures will come after coat 4 and hardware have been installed.

bathrooms - day 6

2005-10-03T19:56:00.000-07:00

two pictures really say it all for the dramatic differences in the master bath. the tub is gone and is now all shower. we've got a minor issue with the vanity--it's not the one we thought we picked out. the glass in the catalogue looked simply frosted, not etched like "grandma glass." this was disappointing, but dalco's being very accommodating. ryan's picking up a catalogue from dalco tomorrow and we'll pick out a new one. if it's fancier, we'll have to pay the difference, but other than that, they're taking care of it. that's more than i would have expected. and that's it for a few days. we're going to prime and pick out paint and paint within the next couple of weeks. we also need to pick up some accessories (towel bars, etc). when it's all done, i'll take (hella) more pictures so you can see it all polished up. :)

bathrooms - day 5

2005-10-03T19:40:00.000-07:00

my previous post has drained me of my words, so this will be short. nothing much happened in the hall bathroom. there was some patching and spackling and such, but nothing picture worthy. in fact, there won't be any more hall bathroom pictures until we paint. here's some shots of the master bath including the new shower nook, grout-less tile, the hole where the medicine cabinet goes (receding it means better light in the room), and the tile where the hole under the sink went. no more trashpiles or stuff piles either. so sad ;)

shine like the sun

2005-10-03T11:55:00.000-07:00

i'm taking a break from the bathroom updating. don't worry, pictures have been taken and i'll post day 5 and 6 later today most likely. there's some stuff that's been mulling around in my head for a few months now and i had an epiphany of sorts on sunday. purging onto paper is always a nice way to help sort out my thoughts/path forward, so that's what i'm going to do. let's start with a disclaimer, though, shall we? i mean no offense to any one currently practicing an organized religion of any sort. i am of the belief that it's all good, and just because your church does not meet my needs does not mean that i think it's "wrong" (or a waste of your time, or whatever). if that one statement offends you because you do believe that your church is right and the rest of us are going to burn in hell (or not attain enlightenment or whathaveyou) you'd best move on. you're not going to care for what happens next, and i'm not going to apologize for having an open mind. next i suppose we need some history, so that if you read this, you know where i'm coming from, and why i might think the way i do about certain things. i'll try to be brief, but if you know me, you know that's not possible. ...sigh... i just wrote a 5 page essay and i hadn't even gotten to the point... let's try this again. i was a late-comer to catholicsm (about 6th grade) so learned it from a slightly different perspective than most of my peers. i attended a catholic high school and a jesuit university. i went from being so devout at 14 that i seriously considered a life of service (i.e. becoming a nun) to so angry at the church/god i couldn't see straight at 18. eventually i mellowed into agnosticism. i still found the idea of religion fascinating though, and took pretty much every opportunity to research and talk to people from all sorts of faiths (not just christianty). when i figured out (for myself) that there was value in the journey in this life regardless of what happened in any next life, i turned to paganism. why paganism? because it was a build-it-yourself sort of religion where i could explore ritual on my own without centuries of other people's ideas to really get in my way. looking ahead, i knew that i would eventually get back into organized religion. it's the natural progression that we go through culturally and individually. i assumed it would be christian-based. you stick with what you know, and even though i craved the intense, ancient ritual of juadism or islam, it's too different from what i wanted. i also knew i'd be steering very clear of the evangelical, born-again, charismatic christian churches. i still have not lost the belief that every faith is just a valid as another, so a religion in direct, active opposition to that belief was not for me. i was on the fence about it resolving back to catholicism, because that's the one i've picked apart for it's flaws more than any other. i figured the first foray would be to universal unitarianism, but it turns out, my next step was to UCC (united church of christ). i didn't even realize it until yesterday, how does this happen? my husband's parents are UCC and we'd been going to the big celebrations (christmas and easter with a few random sundays throughout the year) there for a few years. we were married there. while i kept myself at arms distance, i still felt welcomed and that my personal journey/philosophy was not in conflict with the church's views. i actually took communion when it was offered. to me, coming from and rejecting catholicism, this was a big thing. two years ago ryan and i joined the choir because i need to sing and it was a great way to spend time with his parents. i know what you're thinking. you take communion, you attend regularly, and you sing in the choir. how do you not feel like a member of the church? i don't have a good answer for you, other than it just snuck up on me. the music is what gets me. singing along with music in my car, even when it's choral/sacred stuff just doesn't cut it. it helps, and not being able to do that compounds the stress it's supposed to relieve. there is something about singing within a congregation or a choir/chorus that fills a void inside me. i am happier when i'm in a choir. i just am. i would hate getting up on a sunday and go to mass, but once i was there, and the music started, i'd feel better. it kept me going to mass long after i started distancing myself from catholicism. so we sang with the UCC church. it wasn't the same as the music in a catholic church, but it worked. there was very little in the service that i actively objected to. it only happened during baptism. i forget the actual wordings, but the stuff about original sin i cannot agree with. it's a beautiful baby who hasn't done a thing to hurt anyone. how can you say it's evil/impure? anyway, let's not get too tangent-y. we're approaching that 5 page essay again, and just now getting to the point. this summer i attended 2 catholic weddings (one was full-mass) and a memorial mass. that's more mass in 3 months than i'd experienced in the 5 years before that. and the music. oh god the music. i'd forgotten how much i loved the music. the glory to god, the alleluias, the hosanna. not to mention all the songs interspersed in the mass. it brought tears to my eyes (it's doing so right now, actually). its amazing how the same music can sound so joyful, and yet can be such a release for sadness as well. after the memorial mass, which was itself an intense reminder of how much faith can bring to a person's life, i started thinking about checking out the catholic churches around my house. i went so far as to figure out which one was "mine" as well as get some advice from a friend who happened to be catholic, in the same general area, and shares my feelings about the music. i sort of let the idea die since then. i'm shy and socially awkward, and actually going into an unfamiliar church where they might descend upon me with enthusiasm i could not match freaks me out. then sunday happened. for all sorts of reasons, we hadn't gone back to the choir at the UCC church for the fall session (there's no choir over the summer). ryan's parents invited us to brunch and the late service to sing with the choir anyway. the music is simple enough, and we're both decent enough singers that sight-reading puts us on par with the choir as a whole, that this was not a daunting idea. the church had changed over the summer. perhaps things might have gone differently if i had been introduced to these changes one at a time, but they didn't just move my cheese, they served me hummus instead. i'm a fan of hummus, but not when i'm expecting cheese. to start with, the church's population was aging rapidly, without a real influx of youth, so they were (and have been) trying to get more young people involved. the last service of every sunday was now a "celebration" service with more (and trendier) music and a slightly different format. they had been doing this on the 5th sunday of every month with the old pastor, but either i'd never attended one, or the format got juiced while i was away. there was an excessive amount of 80's pop-esque music about how much we love god, and it's great to worship and the like. it's the sort of music that turns my stomach because of the schmatlz factor. it's not a choice i'd make, and if the whole thing changed to this format, i would be unhappy, but it didn't bother me that much on sunday. none of the bits of music that are always sung were sung, though, and i missed that. adding just a bit to freak-factor of sunday was the first song we sang at the service. short of christmas music, the odd spiritual that snuck its way into the choir, an arrangement of beethoven’s 9th (or 5th?) symphony, and this one hippy pop song from the 70’s (morning has broken) we have never, ever sung a song at this church that i’ve sung in a catholic church. nothing that i associate with my love of catholic music anyway. until yesterday when we stared with “on eagles wings.” was it a coincidence or was it providence messing with the music director’s mind so that the first time i’m back at my church after entertaining the idea of going back to a catholic church i sing my favorite catholic song? what was the point? to say “you don’t belong here?” or “make this your home?” i will never know. i’m glad i was there to sing it, though :) it was also "world communion" day, one of the 6ish days in the church calendar that they give communion, and for this service they did things a little different than the others. instead of passing around a plate of bread and a tower of little cups of wine, there was a plate at the front and a single glass of wine and the patrons were welcome to help themselves. do what? coming from a catholic tradition the sigle cup wasn't too too off-putting except that there was nobody policing it. it was just sitting there. i don't think anyone touched it. one of the things that i like about communion at this church is that everyone takes it at the same time. the cups/bread are passed out (one then the other) and once everyone's got a piece we eat. because it's something we do together, as an expression of our community. apparently a very long time ago (30+ years?) they used to do it "the catholic way" (their words, not mine) and everyone progressed to the front. they tried that last holy(maundy) thursday because some members thought it might be a nice change, but it was not well received. what made this service a little irritating was that instead of the standard white-bread, you also had your choice of matzo crackers, pita, or flat german rye-bread to eat. because it's world communion day, you see, and other religions (including the ones that UCC evolved from) have different ways of breaking bread. there was no host. there was no mention of catholicism as an origin. nothing. unconsecrated hosts are not hard to come by, just head to your local catholic supply store and pick some up. i think they're pretty cheap, too. i don't think anyone there (besides me maybe) would have touched it, but if you're going to play both the "whole world" and the "our origins" card, you need to make the effort. it's rude, disrespectful, and feeds old anti-catholic sentiments not to make mention of it. and then there was the new interim pastor. (here's were i'm going to try not to get offensive, but i probably will) the old pastor retired earlier in the year, and this was the first service i'd attended with "the new guy." in a nutshell, he is everything that comes to mind when i think of a protestant minister. his voice was weak and high-pitched. he was constantly drawing attention to his mic as he turned it off and on. he was already acting like every one's best friend, even if he didn't know you from adam. his sermon was about finding salvation and all the things we can do now to secure ourselves a place in heaven. he reminded me of a car salesman who's primary method of selling you the car is to talk to you as if you've already decided on it. i was not there because i was worried about eternal life. i do not do good things because it earns me points in some great book. he made reference to giving money several times, and not in a "please help your church" way, but in the "giving us money makes god happy" way. his entire attitude felt false and superficial to me, but i can see how in another church, with another congregation he would be very well received. some religions are based on redemption, and with them, he'd fit right in. it's just not what i'm about, and not the message this particular UCC church had ever sent me. you do good because doing good feels good, and makes everyone's life easier. jesus was a very good example of this. it always amazed me that some protestants weren't "loyal" to their sect of choice. but sitting there, next to ryan's sister who kept saying over and over "this is not my church" i understood how important the pastor/lead minister was to a church community. in an hour, this man had destroyed the comfort level i had developed over the past few years. this wouldn't have happened in a catholic church. sure, the pastors come and go and certainly their personalities have an effect on the church community, but not mass. mass is mass is mass and for all the cheese moving and the song changing that might take place, it's still mass. and that's when the epiphany hit me. i'm catholic. i need to sing in a choir (or with a congregation if there's enough general singing going on). the UCC church, under the previous leadership was doing okay, but only because i had really forgotten about the power of the music of the mass. if i'm going to "sit through" all that other stuff so i can sing, why not do it in a place where you maximize the power of the music, where the ritual itself resonates on some level and won't get all shaken up when someone new shows up. i'd be happiest singing in a catholic church, but some serious issues still remain. i stopped taking catholic communion long before my self-excommunication because i felt it would be disrespectful to their tradition. i wasn't playing by all the rules, after all. so, i can't just walk up there next time like nothing happened. i have to go to confession first. except that one of the things i dislike most about catholicism is the concept of the sacrament of reconciliation. ironically, my reaction to "not wanting to confess my sins to a priest" is to think "i need to find a good priest and talk about this stuff." i still don't know if i can bring myself to attend a mass, though. the shy factor is still there, and there's another one: pride. it infuriated me in high school when teachers found out about my not-real atheism and agnosticism and nodded wisely saying "you'll be back" and negated pretty much my entire exploration. i really, really don't want them to be "right." yes, even though they're the narrow minded jerks and i'll never see them again, and my pride/stubbornness shouldn't affect me in that way, it still irritates me. my husband, while being very supportive and a good listener, and is willing to attend mass with me (some/most of the time) has a completely selfish reason to be excited. turning catholic and living in st. louis pretty much means we have our pick of communities to live in, regardless of the public schools, which will make affording our next house possible...it also negates the main not-money reason we can't buy a loft. it should be noted that is not to say we’re going shopping any time soon, if ever, no matter what ryan tells you.

bathrooms - day 4

2005-09-29T18:45:00.000-07:00

so many pictures. so not in the mood for commentary. hall bath has pretty stuff now. toilet works, sink works, tub works. haven't tested shower, have no door. it's amazing what this guy can accomplish in a day though. check out the shots of the master bath. that hole is the one under the pedestal sink that goes staight into the ground. it feels a lot bigger when its 10 degrees outside. trashpile went bye-bye (thursday is the day the dalco truck goes around town and picks up trash apparently). stuff pile is almost non-existant. it's pretty much just the vanity and the shower doors now. the final shot is of the only bit of either bathroom that's staying: the master bath's toilet. of course, looking at the new one, we probably could have swung the extra couple of hundred for that, too.

bathrooms - day 3

2005-09-28T19:42:00.000-07:00

we got home to find our new sink/vanity blocking the entrance to the bathroom. why is that? because we can't go in the bathroom. why is that? because there's floor! just the tile, no grout yet. i guess that happens tomorrow. anyway, we can't go in there right now. muka managed to sneak past the sink at one point to check it out, but as fat as she is, i don't think that'll make much of a difference. also, the marble is up on the tub, as well as all the shower related fixtures: i'm a bit worried about how the brushed silver stuff is going to look with the beige-y neutral tile/marble, but it's kinda too late to worry about that now. we'll make it work. :) i totally won a conversation ryan and i had last night about whether they would install the vanity and cut around it for the tile, or install the tile and then just set the vanity on top of it. he got all gloaty and smug about it last night and i told him i didn't care. today i did a little dance. just, you know, cuz i could. tomorrow he's going to trash the master bath, this will become our bathroom within the next 24 hours. kinda scary considering that there's no toilet in here and we can't walk on the floor and you know, there's stuff in the tub. parting shots: trashpile got full of boxes from the stuffpile.

bathrooms - day 2

2005-09-27T16:11:00.000-07:00

quick! before the grapefruity flavored wine goes to my head! WALLS! i came home and the bathroom had walls again! greenboard (and some whiteboard on the ceiling, very far wall) was every where. this man is a machine!!!!!! what's this? it's where the sink's gonna go, plus a shiny new switch on the wall. the switch is actually 3 switches in one. 1 for the overhead light, one for the overhead fan and one for the vanity light. it's gonna be so bright in there, you're gonna have to wear shades! seriously, though, they had to put a fan up there, so why not put a light up there, too? speaking of up there... this is up there. the base of the light/fan is dangling from the ceiling and is the new source of light in the room. the ceiling is the only place where the original wall was not removed. covering it with new drywall instead of taking down the old stuff eliminated any issues with old insulation, which would have been a messy pain in the behind. and lastly, the trash pile. not much bigger. just a bit of greenboard scrap. doah! i almost forgot this one! muka never ever sits right there. i think she's making sure nobody goes in and messes with it.

bathrooms - day 1

2005-09-27T14:51:00.000-07:00

originally i had thought to break this up by bathroom, but bathrooms are hard to photograph and since it's getting gutted to the studs, reference pictures really don't help much, so i'm just gonna go day by day so you can see the whole process. ryan came home midday and took a few shots. the guy works so fast that we would have missed some of the "good stuff" other wise. let's start here, shall we? i was as surprised as you are to discover there used to be a window in this room. it makes sense, sure. this used to be the back wall of the house, but it was still a shock. this picture still makes very little sense because it's so not a bathroom. it was taken from the doorway, looking at where the tub used to be. you can see on the side the tub plumbing and some of the tile as a frame of reference on the bottom of the picture. speaking of the tile. it turns out that 55 year old floor isn't always in the best condition, especially in bathrooms where it's exposed to leaking plumbing. the original plan was for dalco to strip the floor down to the subfloor and build up from there. well, that subfloor is rotten crap and flat-out missing in places. it went bye bye for a nominal extra fee. i never got to see it. by the time i came home, it was while k/lyle was tearing through the walls, he discovered a few other fun things. the wall that looks ripped up in this picture is the kitchen wall, not the bathroom wall. the fridge (above) was a gaping hole in our kitchen that we knew about. we got the fridge with the house, so we didn't find it until we pulled the fridge out to re-tile the kitche floor, but at least it wasn't a complete surprise. the hole in the back of the cabinet under the kitchen sink? that was new. it's actually kind of useful, as you can see. you need some way to get into the plumbing for both the bathroom and the kitchen that doesn't involve remodeling one or the other, and hiding the holes in the dark where nobody can detect them isn't a bad way to go. still, it's a little surreal to be standing where the bathroom goes and see the kitchen. sure did freak the cats out. and here's what everything looked like by the time i got home. new tub, new subfloor. all good. this was all done by one guy. in about 7.5 hours. he's a machine. to cap the day off i offer you a study in contrast. one is the pile of bathroom debris that's going to collect on our driveway before being hauled off on the last day. the other is the pile of fixtures/tile/supplies that will slowly whittle away in our back room while he works on both bathrooms. can't wait to get home and see what it looks like today!

master bath - day 0

2005-09-27T14:47:00.000-07:00

we decided when we started pricing that if we could only afford to do one of the bathrooms, that it would be this one. fortunately everyone we talked to was eager to cut us a deal to knock them both out at the same time, passing a 2k+ savings onto us. this bathroom is where the real "fun" is. pictures can't do it justice really, but i took them anyway. the layout is pretty much the same as the other one, just mirrored (sink/tub on opposite wall), so these shots are basically highlights of what's so much fun. let's move right past the choice of pedestal sink that doesn't hide the pipes. what no picture can show you is that at the base of that pedestal sink is a hole roughly the size of the base that goes DIRECTLY OUT SIDE. not to the basement, but to a crawl space. it's big enough that it took us a couple of raggedy t-shirts to plug it properly. perhaps at one point the hole had been properly plugged, but it wasn't by the time we moved in (more on that in a bit). we didn't discover the hole until winter when the room was so cold water froze in the tub (which, as it turns out, the base is also directly exposed to the elements that make it into the crawlspace). another thing you cannot really tell in this picture is the craptastic patch job that runs from about the towel rack down the side wall, and wraps around behind the exposed pipes at the sink. you see, when the bathroom was originally built, they used some textured paint to cover up the bad dry-wall job they did. when our inspector checked out the plumbing he discovered about $4000 worth of no-nos that they had to repair before we'd take the house. it was ... extensive and chewed up that drywall. when they went to patch the holes, they made a feeble attempt to blend the patchwork into the existing wall. it's painfully obvious in person. speaking of bad dry wall, the seams in this room are a-TRO-cious. here's a good example, but keep in mind that it all looks like this: you see how it almost looks like piping? it's also shinier than the rest of the wall. i guess the paint didn't stick to it as well or something. next on our tour is a shot of the shower nook itself. you can see that here they did edge the insert before putting tile around it. they did not seal around the tub however. remember how i said that wasn't a huge deal in the other room cuz there was tile behind it? yeah. well. there's not even green board behind this (greenboard==water-resistant drywall that you put around things like tubs/showers). it's just drywall. know how we know? because it's rotting out from under the unsealed shower insert. see how it looks lumpy and there's some black stuff along the edge? yeah. that's the wall coming out in bits and rotted pieces. it was perfectly flat when we moved in because they never used the shower in this room. know how we know? cuz along with the plumbing we discovered that the spigot for the tub wasn't attached to the plumbing. if you tried to use the shower, the pressure would pop the spigot right off. so, by now you have to be wondering why we bought this money pit? much of this stuff was new enough when we looked at the house that the problems hadn't manifested well enough to be an issue (but god bless the inspector that caught both the plumbing and electrical problems). we also knew there was a lot of cosmetic work that needed to be done because the people who lived here before us (who did all of the shoddy repair work) also had no taste. mostly, though, we saw the issues, knew we'd get around to polishing them up when we got around to it. this is a "first home" house. nobody moving into it next will expect a better homes and gardens house, either. your final picture on this tour is for reference. this should look pretty darn different by the time it's all over. muka says "please don't take away the drippy water. i love it so."

hall bath - day 0

2005-09-27T14:38:00.000-07:00

so i had a lovely tour of the hall bathroom pre-demo all written out for you, but safari ate it before i could get blogger to save it for you. i blame myself for composing in a browser, but with the abundance of pictures, it was just easier that way. i could have recreated it then, but i was tired, and it would not have been witty in the least. it probably won't be witty now, but at least it gets a fighting chance. so, without further ado...

Hall Bathroom - Day 0

i can explain about the green paint. not well, but i can explain. when we moved in, we did a considerable amount of painting in the front of the house. the boy's bedroom we toned down from a freakishly bright blue (think "toy story" sheets) to a nice subdued color. the girls room (which had been "disney princess pink) we put this pretty nifty textured job with a few different shades of green. this bathroom was next on our list, but it got ignored. later (like maybe a year?) i did some touch-up work in the pink-now-green room (they turned a window into a bookshelf but never finished/painted the wood they used) and when i was cleaning out the brushes i thought "i bet this bathroom would look good with that green color." so i put some of the left-over paint on the walls to see. i was pretty right, but we decided to pick out a really-real floor (and you can see why in the next shot) first, incase we couldn't find a floor that went well with the green. then there was the issue with what to do about the tile border that had been liquid-nailed to the plaster...so the plan stagnated until right about now. oh. and the light is like that because about 3 days ago the bulb burnt out and we didn't feel like putting the glass back up. cuz really, why bother when the whole thing's coming down in a couple of days? lovely floor, ain't it? the picture doesn't really do the cheapness of it justice. granted, we've got peel and stick tile in the kitchen now (because poor choices/execution abound in this house and we fixed that one) but the stuff in this bathroom looked bad. plus it was ripped in one corner. by now you're probably wondering why the border separates two white walls? well, the top is the original plaster, and the bottom is dry erase board stuck (let's assume liquid nails. they owned stock in that company or something) to the plaster. it's thin enough that in places you can still see the texture. high quality. if you look closely at the tile right by the shower insert, you can see that they didn't truly cap it off like they should have. they just glued tile on it and the wall. it's not flush, they move. in the corner they just didn't bother cutting a piece. or maybe it fell off because the insert and the wall were so far away they couldn't get it to stick. regardless, it's classy with a capital K. since moving in we've replaced the handles on the shower faucet at least once (the actual face of it is stripped so bad nothing will stay attached) and that little "make it a shower" pull as well. there's a trick to turning on/off the shower and getting it in that sweet spot where you have most of the water coming out the head. it's a great thing. did i mention that there's no seal between the tub and the shower insert? no? well, there's not. it's not such a big deal in this bathroom since there's tile behind the insert that is sealed to the tub. that's...less true in the other bath, but that's a different tour.

project 2 - the bathrooms

2005-09-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

no, we did not suddenly win the lottery. we just finally got our butts in gear over things we'd been planning/wanting to take care of for a couple of years now. we are officially in the pre-conception "get shit done we won't be able to afford to do later" phase of baby-making. so, onto project 2: the bathrooms. we got a couple of quotes for the bathroom work, but dalco finally won out. please, no comments with dalco horror stories or "why did you pay so much when you could have ya ya ya'd" things. it's too late, and posting them will only make you feel better. no, we're not unhappy with dalco, we just got a bit of that from people (you know who you are) when we shelled out hella cash to replace the 50 year old windows in our house. anyway, why the bathrooms? well, as you'll see in the pre-demo pictures, they needed it, hella bad. the hall bath is 54ish years old, and had been "upgraded" by the previous owners. these same owners put an addition on the house that included a back room, master bedroom and master bath. the front bath isn't in too bad a shape, but the patchwork solutions they put in, including super crappy tile and "dry-erase board as wall" will not make it another 5ish years when we want to sell. the back bath? oh man, we'll get to that when we get there. so anyway, mr. dalco man (i think his name is kyle..maybe lyle) will be here for the next week plus to do the bathrooms. there will be some minor over-lap between the two (when work on the hall bath gets slow enough that he can take some time in the front) but we will never be without a potty and a bathing place (may just be a bathtub one night), and that's a pretty good deal, if you ask me. enjoy the pictures of the transformation. they'll be on the side menu as well.

Landscaping Complete

2005-09-24T13:28:00.000-07:00

I cannot say enough good things about Bluff View Nursery. You've seen the day by day shots, so you already know how fast and clean the crew worked. I can say that they don't have a website for me to point you to, sadly. If you live near enough to Defiance, MO for him to consider you part of his area (and suburbs on the otherside of the Mississippi apparently count), you should seriously consider giving Mark Wiemann (636.798.2565) a call. He's extremely amiable and clearly, clearly knows what he's doing. One of the things he focused on was making sure we had color/interest in all four seasons. As you can see with the cool yellowish leaves and the bright red berries, he's certainly got autumn down. When we went to visit his nursery he took us around and showed us each plant/tree remarking on what it looked like in all four seasons. So yeah, go there. Give him money. Let him make your house look like the coolest one on the block. Worth. It. Here's a shot along the west side. The tall tree in the middle is an "upright arborviatae," flanked on either side by spirea (I think they have little purple flowers in the spring, and the leaves are yeller in spring/fall), and then two blue hollies. They'll look leafier when they're not so full of berries. At the far end (at the front) is a dwarf lilac. Here you can see the same dwarf lilac (he looks a little sickly, but I bet he perks up next spring), another blue holly and a japanese maple to replace the one we had to take down. This one has niftly leaves and should hopefully grow up more tree-like than the last one. Around it are some liriope, which also flower in the spring. No need to plant anything ever again! On either side of the front steps are albert spruce(s). On to the east side! Alberta spruce, followed by a blue holly. The bush with the one pink flower is a knockout rose. I hear they're all the rage nowadays: lots of flowers, low maintenance. We told Mark we didn't want any "painful" plants (you know those evergreens made of needles, or those spikey red leaved things?) but he told us this one would be worth the minor pain so we let it go. You can just make out the crab tree against the neighbor's yard, and around it are 3 boxwoods. The cluster of dwarf grass was the thing we were most worried about, since that entire area used to be made of overgrown weeds, but Mark was again right. It really softens the place up, and from the front, disguises a utility box. The shot below this one gives you the same stuff from a different angle. Our final stop on this "tour of the pretties" is the east side of the house. Starting again from the center (gotta love the symmetry) is a foster holly. It's about the same size/shape as the arborviatae on the opposite side, and yet, not the same tree. It's flanked by spirea, but instead of blue holly, he used boxwoods. and now onto the less pretty, but no less impressive work they did. Remember that side shot i kept taking? It's now turned into a love stepping-stone path (instead of overgrown junk that lead to a pit of run-off dirt/mud, complete with it's own blue holly (that didn't make the picture). everwhere you see exposed ground, it used to be overgrown weeds and stuff. Yes, we obviously need to clean off the siding, but before we couldn't even get to it. They also cleared away the "intentional" stuff along the edge that covered up the fact that the foundation of the garage is crap, so you can actually walk through there, past the pretty stepping stone without getting attacked by weeds and/or poison ivy. Yet another place where they cut back some crap landscaping from the original owners. We could have put something there, but we decided against it. Grass is good. this is the final cleanup spot. The landscaping used to go up the length of the house, but we decided to cut it back to around the only tree we saved from the original landscaping. The mimosa provides some quality shade for that back room, and it wasn't threatening the foundation like the others were. They even left a few hostas which they liberated from the overgrowth. And incase you're wondering where all those crap-tastic rocks that *used to* line the landscaping went, wonder no longer :) So there you have it! My house is soooooo pretty now :)

reorganization time!

2005-09-20T18:40:00.000-07:00

i added the renovation pictures as perma-links on the side menu, that way you don't have to go hunting for them later when they roll off the recent posts. you'll notice the "coming soon" place holder links for the bathrooms. those start monday (hooray monday!) there is a charge, however. if you make a comment, you'll notice that i've turned on the "word verification." you now have to read the warped image if you want to say something. why is this? because when i posted the original sets of pictures, i had 7 spam comments on two posts before i finished posting them all. that's just dumb. plus it gets my "people like me!" hopes up to see all of them. that's about it for now :)

makeover - far side

2005-09-19T16:55:00.000-07:00

Sunday

Monday

(monday's shot isn't in the same spot, but nothing interesting happened back there on monday, so it's okay...to me)

Tuesday

what none of the pictures from tuesday tell you is that all the miscellaneous brush and crap in the backyard is gone, and ready to be seeded as of today. that's boring, so i didn't take pictures. i promise you, though. interesting things will happen in this corner later.

Wednesday

i don't want to get your hopes up that this corner is going to be more spectacular than anything else (unless stepping stones == spectacular to you), i just want you to know that there's a really-real reason why i'm taking pictures of it :)

Thursday

see?! i told you stuff would happen here!

Friday

makeover - west side

2005-09-19T16:53:00.000-07:00

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

oooh, border!

Wednesday

what this shot won't tell you is that a bunch of dirt was moved from the backyard (where we didn't want it) to fill in/level the work done yesterday.

Thursday - TREES!

Friday - All Done!

makeover - front

2005-09-19T16:50:00.000-07:00

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday - TREES!

Friday - All done!

makeover - east side

2005-09-19T16:48:00.000-07:00

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

the spray painted-line is where the new border will be going.

Wednesday

borders!!!!

Thursday--TREES!

bonus picture of further down that side!

Friday--All done!

our house gets a makeover

2005-09-19T16:38:00.000-07:00

so here's how this is going to go. a wonderful landscaping firm is overhauling our yard this week. i'm taking pictures every day from four different perspectives. i think the most impactful way to appreciate the magnitude (and the speed) of their undertaking is to post them so you can see the same shot from day to day (vs all 4 sunday shots, all 4 monday shots etc etc), so that's what the next 4 posts are. i'll update them when we get new pix. rss feed won't tell you it's happened, so you'll have to check back on the site yourself :) before you go screaming about the lack of trees on day 2 (it's pretty shocking) keep in mind that those trees were growing dangerously close to the house and had to come down for the good of the foundation. i wanted to save the pretty japanese maple in the front, but it was pointed out that without the birch next to it (that had to go), it would look really odd. and they were right. anyway, assuming blogger doesn't freak out (i've never added pictures before) that's what we're doing. if i have to i'll do it the old fashioned way and make my own html pages. sigh. that would be sooo tedious ;)

happiness!

2005-09-13T20:46:00.000-07:00

kate the goddess (as described in a previous post) had her baby earlier this week. alexander constantine (kate owned up to the pretentiousness before she discolsed the name ;) was born at a very hearty 9lbs 10oz, 21 inches long. mommy and baby are doing well. kate sounded tired but blissful on the message she left me. also, apparently second baby labor goes very very fast. and she must have managed to convince her husband that it was okay to name their second child after a buffy character because, yes, he'll be called xander. kate still maintans she forgot that angel's name was originally liam when they named their first.

apple bread

2005-09-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

to help celebrate apple-picking season, i offer up a family recipe that i've spice-tweaked and garnished because that's what i do (can't leave well enough alone). it's called bread, but it's so soft/sweet/tasty that it don't even need butter. more like a loaf-shaped brownie-cake thing.

Apple Bread: In a large mixing bowl (i highly recommend a kitchenaid upright mixer) combine the following: 2 cups sugar 1 cup veggie oil (canola works fine) 1 tsp salt 2 tsp vanilla 3 (yes, 3) eggs sift together the following and add slowly to the bowl: 3 cups flour 1 tsp baking soda any spices you want (see note below) once that's all done, stir (probably by hand) in the following: 2 cups diced apples (size depends on how apple-obvious you want your bread) 1 cup chopped nuts (i skip the nuts and +1 cup apples) pour into two standard sized loaf pans (see note) and bake for 50-60 minutes. may need more time. freezes well (so they say, but mine never last that long) spice note: i cannot give you exact amounts, because i do not use them, but i can give you what i've found to be a good flavor ratio. 2 units ground cinnamon 1 unit ground ginger/nutmeg/allspice (any or all) 1/2 unit ground cloves this basically turns into "some" of the 3 single units, "a bit more" cinnamon and "a bit less cloves. pan note: i use disposable aluminum pans that come with their own lids. makes it really handy for cooking/cleaning/giving away. also, i found that garnishing the tops with sliced apple wedges makes it pretty. make sure you use two rows down the length, otherwise it splits funny on top.

this recipe only needs about 3.5 apples, so you have to bake several loaves to really make a dent in your apple-day pickings. i suggest the following supplemental recipe which still tastes mighty good even when the apples have aged a little.

chunky applesauce 8-10 medium apples peeled and cut into chunks (a bit bigger than the bread size) 1-1.25 cups water 1ish cups of sugar (to taste/tartness of apples) "some" cinnamon and other spices (about 1tbsp of cinnamon is decent starting point) put the apples and the water in a crock-pot on low. simmer about 8 hours or so, stirring when you feel like it, until it's cooked down to a brown mush. feel free to leave this overnight. dump in the sugar. cook for another 30 minutes or so. sprinkle in the spices (don't slow-cook with the spices-makes them bitter) and serve/store.

if i've got the straggler ingredients left over from christmas, i might just replace the raisins in my spicy oatmeal raisin cookies with apple bits and see how that works.

temptation

2005-09-02T07:39:00.000-07:00

i brought my laptop to work today because our friday even plans seem to be shaping up in such a way that i'll probably want it tonight, and won't be going home first. the sims doesn't need the internet to play. this wasn't going to bother me. i'm not that kind of employee, and that's just blatant. i'd take a nap at my desk, first. but my laptop is sitting in my bag and the sweet little white status light is pulsing at me. and it's going to do that all. damn. day. if i don't take it out and turn it all the way on. and if i do that...then it's my lunch break, isn't it? i can do whatever i want... do you think it'd be obvious if i'm hooked into my shiny silver laptop with my headphones on for hours? probably, huh?

i miss my pc

2005-09-01T14:20:00.000-07:00

there. i've said it. i can't take it back now. i didn't think the lack of games would hurt quite this much. i went into the switch with a relatively open mind, all things considered. at the time i was playing diablo 2 on my pc, because nothing on the market could hold my interest or give me the fix that diablo 2 could. blizzard owns my gaming soul, and since they release games on both platforms at the same time, that was really no big deal. i would be giving up a lot of clones and wanna-bes, but really, is that much of a sacrifice? i didn't think so, and for the most part i still don't. when i get a video game itch, i either need to create, catalogue, or destroy. rpgs, especially of the hack-n-slash variety, can meet either goal most (let's say 75%?) of the time. i get to build characters, grow an inventory, tick off lists of accomplished goals via quests, and destroy pretty much every/anything that gets in my way while i do it. city builders work when i'm feeling a bit more create-y than destroy-y, and the sims will work when i'm feeling like more mindful destruction (less violence, more diabolical---heh. the sims are more diabolical than diablo ;). i'm also a fan of pretty things, and things i can play with ryan, so a game can draw/keep me around with one of those, but that's not really important right now. the type of games i want are available on the mac. sure your choices are more limited, and unless it's blizzard, your game will be behind the current offerings on a PC, but that was okay with me. there's also every major console at our house, so i'm not too terribly limited. i couldn't have made the switch a year ago when i was hip-deep in City of Heroes, but since my "mmorpgs are not for me" epiphany (which pre-dated the mac by 3 months), and the fact that i've been able to entertain myself by writing more and more often, the gaming sacrifice seemed do-able, and for the last 4 months, has been. but here's where it gets murky. i've been having a sims-specific craving for a couple of months. it comes and goes, and since it's got elements of the create/destroy that i can meet with d2 it hasn't been that bad. i could have picked up a copy of sims2 at any time, but i just could not justify spending $50 on a game when i have an exact copy of it sitting in my house. i was mostly intrigued by the college expansion, which i never bought for the PC, but coveted, and probably would have picked up when the next sims craving came around. my problem with the game is that the most interesting clothes/drama come as a teenager, but the time any character spends as a teenager is limited and the game just starts getting weird when you befriend a teen-townie and become an adult. the teen-townie keeps calling and saying "why don't you call me any more" and all you can do is say "i'm an old man and you'll never be anything but a little blond girl in pink boots. i'm sorry." "love means never having to say you're sorry." "yeah, but i can't even process that emotion for you any more. didn't you see the icons?" the game even chides you for letting the friendship die off. it wants you to be a pedophile. it's just warped. like when peterpan comes back for wendy and she's a grandma. woah, tangent. sorry about that. i mean, the whole thing’s been a tangent, really, but that was special. so, um... anyway, i wasn't going to drop the cash on the game when i knew it would only take a few days to get my fix, without at the very least the opportunity to complete the set with a university pack and for all i knew, that would never ever happen, or would take so damn long that sims 3 would be out for the pc and i'd be a bitter old woman, still playing d2 because mmorpgs had taken away any interest blizzard was ever going to have in making d3. then a couple of weeks ago "they" announced that the university pack would be available in november for the mac. my brain said "yay christmas!" and that was about it. until a couple of days ago, when i got a new gaming itch. d2 was meeting all the create/destroy/catalog needs i had except that it's not pretty. it's 6 years old and i've seen pretty much everything it has to offer. this doesn't usually bother me, because, like i've said, the game owns my soul. this round, however, the game couldn't keep up with my demands. i wanted pretty and i wanted more-different. yes, i entertained the idea of WoW for a minute. maybe 2. but i know i don't like mmorpgs, so it didn't take long to convince limited-allowanced me that WoW would be a bad choice. the other key anti-sims2 issue was all the user-created content. could i have access to the insane amounts of houses/clothes/people that are waiting for PC users to download off the sims website? this is important. i don't understand why they even bother with putting sims on harddrive/internet-less platforms. if i was stuck with the 30 bizarre outfits that came with the game, and couldn't mooch off the people who spent entirely too much time designing ballgowns and such, the game would lose soooooo much of its replay value. so, last night i went to maxis' sims site to make sure my mac version was compatible with all that stuff. there is no mention of the mac version of the game on the sims site. or on the main maxis site. nothing in the support files. nothing that even suggests a mac version of any game was ever anywhere. ever. they have a version of the game that you can play on a basic mobile phone and it has it's own section on the sims site, but nothing about mac. i didn't exist. my needs were so not-important there wasn't even a courtesy link. they didn't even want to try and sell me the game, and when a gaming company says "no thanks, we don't want your discretionary income" your place in the world becomes very very clear. i started to feel ill. i knew the game existed. i'd seen it on shelves. i searched for it and found links to amazon to buy it, and for apple's page about it. that's right. there are so few games for the operating system that they have their own pages on the os's site. It is, in fact, the best place to go for information about the game. Can you imagine the ludicrousness of that sort of situation for the PC? When I looked at the game’s true manufacturer, i discovered aspyr. it was much, much later in the evening when i realized that i had transposed the name around in my head. i saw "aspry," and just thought it was a nonsense word. had i realized that the name meant "we can only hope to be as cool as what you really want" at the time, i may have curled up in a ball from the sad. by the time i found the "macgamers" site, i was already so depressed i could barely stomach skimming the site for the information i was looking for. those sad, deluded little freaks. anyway, aspyr takes all the games you know and love for PC and clones them. that's why there's a delay. it's possible that aspyr does it's own development, but for these sorts of things, there's not a whole lot of support other than your basic "why won't it run?" kinds of questions. after all 99% of the game is exactly the same. same interface, whatever. it felt like buying a pair of pantyhose from an "almost perfect" outlet store. eventually, i received enough confirmation that i could use the existing content, that i broke down and picked up the game. it may not last through the weekend, but it'll be there waiting for me the next time i need a sim-fix and i won't have to deal with a half hour of "you're worthless" surfing to remind me of what i'd given up. and that’s really all i was after. is that where our story ends? of course not. that was just a warm-up that took on a life of its own. the universe could not leave well enough alone. i got an email today telling me that CoH was going to let me back in for 5 whole days for free in hopes of luring me back in permanently. 5 days of playing around with all the new character creation stuff that's appeared since i quit the game in february would have been great fun. getting a chance to be in the CoV beta for the character creation would have also really interesting. but i can't. i could rebuild the still-broke german piece of crap that was the catalyst for my mac-switch just to take advantage of these free things, but that idea makes me feel so...dirty. still...i kinda miss my pc. (this should be riddled with links, but i'm at work and links for gaming sites are a bad thing to hunt down)

ignore this

2005-08-31T14:21:00.000-07:00

TrevisThomasDotCom i'm just trying out the "blog this" button on my google toolbar. i'm sure it's been an option for ages but i just now noticed it.

too many bunny butts

2005-08-30T12:10:00.000-07:00

yesterday i bought a bag of animal crackers from the vending machine, and i've been munching on them in waves since then. i was disappointed at how many of the pieces were broken. there were very very few whole-animals in the first 2/3 of the bag. i also noticed that there was an overwhelming number of bunny-tops. i assumed that when i got down to the last serving, it would be almost *entirely* bunny-butts, but i was wrong. not a one in the bag. NOT A ONE. now, considering i bite each cracker in at least half before ingesting, and i don't spend too much time contemplating the animal i'm eating (it's not like the bears taste different than the penguins), this probably shouldn't bother me. but it totally does! where are the bunny-butts? how does this sort of thing happen? i can understand a few pieces getting broken before going into the bag, but seriously, we're talking 8 or so heads and no butts! the ratio of bunny to other animal in the bag alone was odd, but for it to be just heads? a part of me is tempted to raid the machine for the rest of the animal cracker bags to see if the ratio rights itself, and to find the missing bunny-butts.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

2005-08-27T20:29:00.000-07:00

we went to schnucks today (cuz hans said propel was on sale) and guess what we found?! PITCH BLACK IS BACK!!! and it's sour(er)...ish. i didn't even know it was ever going to come back ever, but it has and it's still oh-so-tasty. i stopped in the middle of the aisle and just stared and hugged myself. and then we got some. and it was tasty. still so sugary-sweet that you need someone to share the 20oz with you, though.

more movie lists

2005-08-26T14:16:00.000-07:00

here's the current movie top ten:

as i said in whatever email this started out in, this was hard to do. eventually i defined favorite as equal parts "i would watch this movie any time someone suggested it" and "i would suggest emphatically that people see it if i found out they hadn't yet." that last one's a bit tricky though. many of these movies have specific audiences. i wouldn't expect a boy to sit through sense and sensibility, nor would i want to watch boondock saints with the family. i'd rather sit through leon and pulp fiction, first...possibly twice. ...but anyway, that's the list.

all time favorite movies

2005-08-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

-- of all time there's been some talk amongst friends late about what makes a movie a favorite, and after i compiled my list of "current" favorite movies, i got all nostalgic for the flicks i used to love, but moved beyond as i/they aged. so here they are, starting from earliest memories and progressing in as close a chronological order as i could remember (many over-lap because they were loved for different reasons) from when i first fell. as much as i enjoy the fact that i'm a geeky not-girly girl, my favorite movies reveal me for the romantic girly-sap i really am. pete's dragon - i don't actually remember loving this one, but my mother says i watched it all the time when i was a tiny tot. (we had a vcr when i was only 2 (1979) because my father is one of those early-adopter never upgraders. they didn't upgrade until i graduated high school.) i think i went through a similarly intense love affair with mary poppins but there is no proof. ~~there is a gap of about 8 years that i cannot account for. i blame cable.~~ princess bride - this one has withstood the test of time better than any others (it's still 2nd overall). i know i fell in love with it at a sleep-over at my cousins, so i couldn't have been in high school, and probably not even junior high. i've got it so memorized that it's still impossible to watch without lip-syncing along with the characters throughout most of it. you don't get that space back, you know. once you've committed an entire movie to memory, it stays with you. you loose bits and pieces, but it's pretty much there. mannequin (hangs head in shame) - another one i've (still) got memorized freakishly well. i don't know how i loved this movie so much when i didn't really understand 3/4 of the sexual innuendo (hollywood was gay?!), but oh my god how i loved this thing. i think it was the idea of running around a mall playing with all the clothes and stuff. plus andrew mcarthy was so dreamy. little mermaid - seriously, what girl who loved to sing didn't love this movie? it hit when i was in junior high, and our eight-grade chorus concert featured 3 songs (i know choreography to "under the sea"--FEAR ME!). one of my mother's "unforgivable sins" was not buying this (or possibly even not letting me buy it?) because cartoons were for little kids. fortunately, the soundtrack kept my dream alive (it was in the first batch of CD's i bought). when harry met sally - this movie is almost single-handedly responsible for my inability to keep a boy friend during high school (and early college), not because billy crystal was right and men and woman couldn't be friends, but because i wanted that last scene to happen to me so very, very badly that i crushed impossibly hard on every friend i started to develop. sadly, i also used this movie to comfort myself when things started going sour (where had i gone wrong?), so it sort of built on itself. i had no idea this was the problem until way too late to do anything about it. school ties - i used to watch this every day after school my senior year (by this time i had my own vcr in bedroom). i went so OCD on it that i knew what the vcr counter numbers were for my favorite parts. i could watch "the whole thing" in about 20 minutes. this was a very dark time to be me, and this was one of the things that kept me from walking off the edge on a daily basis. silly, i know, but i still think it's a good flick. it's also why i don't like matt damon (i'm sure he's crushed). (side note: the photo on imdb, which i'm assuming is the latest dvd cover has ben affleck on it. he has like one line, and is part of the nameless ensemble.) breakfast at tiffanys - for a while i was in an audrey phase (working at a video store is very handy), but this one stuck with me longer than any other film, perhaps because it so perfectly captured the image of audrey hepburn that i loved, complete with a final sudden-confession ending that topped harry and sally (the cat! the rain!). it's the movie i'd like to say is my favorite of all time, but for unknown reasons, it didn't make the current top 10. all favoriteness has been replaced by nostalgia. sense and sensibility - the current favorite, and has been for quite some time. i don't watch it as obsessively as i have with others, but i've been known to pop it in my computer just to have entertaining background noise, and then i loose an hour waiting until just after "the next good part". it is easy for a flick to make me cry sad-tears. it's a little more challenging for tears of happy, but the last scene in this movie, when emma thompson's character starts stammering and then breaks down into these sobs that almost choke her i will sob right along with her every single time. i don't even have to watch the rest of the (highly enjoyable) film to trigger it. i'm tearing up now by simply recalling the scene to type it up. it's not just that scene though. it's the whole thing. it's enough of an ensemble (much like the book) that it hits on all the classic romance points. and the costumes are pretty. and the people are pretty. and that's all the all-time favorites i could recall, besides a few minor crushes on movies i watched and watched and watched (and would watch again) for the boys in them like robin hood: prince of thieves and young guns 2.

it's official

2005-08-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

spurious is a real word, no matter how much gina tries to deny it :) someone used it on NPR this morning, and nobody makes anything up on NPR.

i am so fired...

2005-08-17T07:47:00.000-07:00

so here's what happened. every so often (about once a quarter) my company puts on these town hall meetings where an executive talks for about an hour on the state of the company and then spends a half hour answer questions from the audience. this year, they've put together a system so that you can watch and ask questions from your desk, which eliminates the need for one of these in every major city in the network. it also helps squish some of the rumor mill that follows these around. if we all hear the same message at the same time, there's less ability for speculation to turn into "fact." it is part of my employee progress report to attend these as best i am able to. because there are a few other "as best i am able to" status indicators on that report that i refuse to do, i make a point of watching these when they come up. i should point out that i am part of a very large IT group and that was the target audience for this town hall, and that the executive who gave the presentation is the chief technological officer. a couple employees on my team who watched the most recent one were so concerned by what they heard (specifically the general attitude of the executive leading the presentation) that they wanted to voice their opinion up the chain of command. my boss, in turn, put out an open call to the entire team looking for feedback. this is what i wrote:

I would prefer this candid commentary from Mr. Executive to some sort of misleading "everything is fine" illusion, but I think these town halls aren't alleviating employee concerns. There's very little in the town hall that I can pull as an example of something that was obviously inappropriate or offensive, but I was left with the message that I was not trying hard enough, did not love my company enough, and should not expect anything for my increased devotion. Was that the goal? A couple of very brave audience members asked questions that impressed me, specifically the one about being "heavily persuaded" to sell products to our friends and family we have no faith in, and the bright flight the company is currently experiencing where we're losing young talented employees who could be helping shape the future of this company. In both cases, Mr. Executive presented a 3-fold response. 1-That the issue did not really exist (customer service is improving/promotions and progressions are being allowed no matter what we're being told). 2-That it was beyond his power to do anything about it (marketing builds the packages/our supervisors are "screwing up" (direct quote) by not identifying and keeping these talented individuals) 3-That the true problem lies within the individual employee (you should take pride in our products or not be a part of this company/you should have developed the ever-changing set of skills or business knowledge if you expected the company to value you). That last one, in particular was a slap in the face to the thousands of employees who have devoted their entire careers to the backbone of this company. This method was frequently used by my ethics teacher in college when one of his students attempted to argue against a point he was making. Invalidate the argument, absolve yourself of any accountability, and discredit the source. It infuriated me when it was used by a man determining my grades. It frightens me now that it's being used by someone determining the future of my company. These are my thoughts. I'm probably less concerned about how having my name attached to them will affect my career at this company than I should be.

yesterday, as i hit the send button i was looking forward to the shock and awe i might get in response. this was my chance to tell them what we're all thinking. i wasn't just doing it for me, i was doing it for all the people i've talked to in the past few months who are so dissatisfied with this place. i was doing it for my mom and all of her friends who look so incredibly disheartened when i describe what's happened to the company they loved. today, after my boss said "that's great, do you mind if i send it to the whole team?" i'm more than a little freaked out. it's not that i take back anything i said, it's just...i think i just wanted to be heard. i didn't think of any potential repercussions, and the ones swimming in my over-active imagination right now are...frightening.

one foot, two foot

2005-08-12T08:21:00.000-07:00

we have official confirmation from the podiatrist that i'm a freak. well, okay, that's probably a bit harsh. i visited my podiatrist for the first time last night and discovered that one leg is longer than the other. Based on generally observable phenomenon (such as which ankle is more warped, which shoulder is slightly higher than the other) one would assume that my left side is longer. however, because nothing can ever be normal even when it's irregular, it's actually my right side that's a wee bit longer. based on the extremely controlled test involving pen-marks on some easily located (if you're a podiatrist) bones in my feet, it looks like almost a half inch longer. when i stand up, the marks are right next to each other. when i sit down? not so much, but again, they symptoms are manifesting like it's the other leg that's longer. this is apparently not all that uncommon, and means that somewhere else in my body i've got a contrasting kink most likely. this morning it occurred to me that it might be the fact that i carry purses, messenger bags, backpacks with the uneven weight on my left side. i should probably stop doing that. the podiatrist laid it all out for me. not wearing heals takes away my symptoms (read:pain), so i could just pick up a heel lift for the height thing and not bother with orthotics (things that would make my misshapen feet walk right, preventing stress on other joints) until i start having pain. then again, i could not have pain until things progress to the point that i've worn away at other joints to the point that i'm really in trouble and will look back and say "if only i had gotten orthotics that day." health care to the rescue! it turns out that my heathcare provider's new philosophy is working in my favor this round. their logic is "we'll pay for all your preventative care, because it's cheaper for us and we look like a good guy. but if you get sick, or have any conditions that require maintenance, look out." so, orthotics (which prevent problems that cause bad things) are free for me. (healthcare detour) it's really stupid. if i get a test as part of a yearly physical, it's on the house. if i get the exact same test to diagnose something specific? i pay. and since they're being such generous guys, starting next year if all you ever do is get physicals and nothing's ever wrong with you ever you don't have to pay for healthcare. no monthly fee, no visit co-pay. nothing. if something *is* wrong with you, there's this complicated hierarchy of deductibles and limits that you start tripping up. if you're perfectly healthy and don't get into any accidents or anything, it's a great plan. if you're a person with some expensive chronic conditions (like, say, my father's rheumatoid arthritis which requires about $1200 in meds/month), it's pretty much a wash with the current plans (because he'll hit that deductible in january, and the max out of pocket by about april). according to the calculator i've played around with, someone like me (who has a few random cheap-ish conditions and is planning on having a baby) has about a 60% increase in overall costs. that's because it'll take me a while to hit that first "we're not paying a thing" deductible, and i'll never hit the cap out of pocket cap, unless of course, something very bad happens to me/mine over the next year. i understand the argument that some punk kid who thinks he doesn't need healthcare shouldn't have to cover my dad's meds, or my mother-in-law's chemotheraphy, but it's a healthcare system designed to benefit the people who don't need it. and that just seems fundamentally wrong. (end detour) so yeah. after all this diagnosis, the dr's assistant came in and paper-mache'd ballet slippers onto my feet. in 2-3 weeks i'll get to go shopping again, and hopefully pick up some shoes with a teeny bit of a heel on them again. this is good, because super-flat shoes are hard to find, especially in winter, and i need me some boots.

so...um

2005-08-10T20:59:00.000-07:00

i made a new blog tonight. it's not gonna take the place of this one or anything. it's for non-non-fiction writing. there's a sticky link on the side of this blog, which you may have noticed already, but in case you don't. this is your official notice. you don't have to read it or anything (i'm sure i'll turn shy about it any minute now and want to take it down) but it's there, in case you wanna.

just don't wanna

2005-08-09T13:11:00.000-07:00

this day has taken forever. maybe it's because i know i've got a 4pm meeting (the nerve) so i won't be leaving when i want to, but oh. my. god. this is the slowest day ever. i keep looking at the clock, thinking "surely it's almost time for that meeting?" but it's not. it never is. it's probably a good thing i've got that meeting because i'd be seriously considering taking off too early without it. i just want to go home and make dinner. stupid job.

you would think...

2005-08-08T09:27:00.000-07:00

that if ever there was a game i could win/be better at than my husband by sheer innate ability alone it would be karaoke revolution. i mean honestly after years of years of him cleaning the floor with me on FPS and fighting games, even after i spend hours and hours trying to get competent in mouse-look or a single character's fighting style so i can get past the blind luck of button mashing, i should just be able to walk up to this game and deliver the payback. but...no. it's not that he's a terrible singer or i'm so much better than he is. i think we both expected that the fact that i've had more (and recent-er) vocal training and my general familiarity with the music would give me an edge. it looked, at first, that i was going to be the clear victor, but the points just didn't line up that way when we stopped taking turns and started going head to head or signing duets. it irritates the crap out of me. i mean, it wasn't really bothering me in a pissy "i'm not playing with you any more!" kind of way since it meant we were both playing and singing together, but i did change my character to "salty jack" the pirate for a while ;) and that was after the litany of "not really my fault" excuses i came up with. i was singing the harder part in the duet. i was "player one" so i started the unknown songs, giving him a chance to listen. his focusing on the notes and mumbling through the words was working to his scoring advantage, etc etc etc. i stopped vocalizing them after a while, because i realized what i was doing, but still. irritating. i could get better than him. i could download all the songs into my ipod and practice so i knew the words and the music better. i could analyzing the game's scoring mechanisms to "sing for points" instead of trying to make the noise coming out of my mouth as pleasing as possible. but dammat! i shouldn't have to!!! this game is about singing!

as if i needed another reason.

2005-08-04T07:53:00.000-07:00

i got my official invitation to my 10 year class reunion last night. it's a dinner/dance at the same place we had prom. i'm sure someone thinks it's all nostalgic and grand (and indeed, one of the coordinators had her wedding reception there as well), but for me? ugh. prom night was easily the worst night of my high school career. it was the stuff that angsty teen melodramas shy away from. the only things preventing it from being a real-life version of carrie were that nobody was being deliberately malicious and that i'm not telekinetic. cuz if i were...oh man would that have been a really bad scene. also, no pigs blood. anyway, i'm not in the mood to rehash all that drama so i'll spare you. and that's exactly my point. for $90 (for just the tickets) i could recreate that night with my husband and add the awkwardness of "who were you again?" "sorry, i didn't recognize you under the 70lbs you've put on since graduation" "hey, remember that time you did something hideously embarrassing and i'm assuming you're ready to laugh about it, but actually you've just repressed it so far deep inside you that you can't even come up with an example for your web log?" no. thank. you. i mean, i wasn't going anyway, so it's no big loss. i might have considered if it was going to be another meet and greet where we just rented out some restaurant and chatted for a few hours like the 5 year was (or so i'm told--i didn't go to that one, either), but i'm really, really not in the mood for prom 2005. i'm an anti-social pessimist who doesn't let go of old pain easily. what can you do?

today is...

2005-08-01T12:51:00.000-07:00

casey's birthday. so happy birthday casey :) assuming casey ever comes here

helpful reminder

2005-07-31T09:53:00.000-07:00

i think this post by gabe on PA, where he makes observations about life after 60 on WOW does a really good job of elaborating on the boredom/ennui that hits on higher levels of these games. it also reminded me that i really don't want to get involved in another one. thanks, gabe

official

2005-07-28T13:21:00.000-07:00

"We just got word from **** that the requirements definition on the project has changed and they are no longer in need of a developer"

i was expecting a "not interested" response anyway, since it's been a month since the interview, but still. lame. i'm bummed.

green is the new purple

2005-07-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

if you asked me what my favorite color i'd say purple, without even thinking. but as i sit here, writing on my green blog, in my green shirt, listening to my green ipod that i pulled from my green messenger bag, i'm thinking maybe it's green.

kate the goddess

2005-07-25T13:26:00.000-07:00

someone once asked me to tell them about my friend kate and i simply said, "she is a goddess." i then went on and tried to do her justice and to explain why i said that, but it didn't really impress. then he met her and agreed. she is a goddess. she came in from out of town the week of my wedding 4 years ago to help out. i was in that melancholy, stressed-out, "let's just get this done, okay?" phase and then i showed her my dress. her face lit up and she gushed about how beautiful the dress was and how i was going to look like a princess and that was the last of my melancholy. that's the shortest/best example of how incredible kate is and how much i value her friendship. to clarify, we're not talking beer-advertisement goddess. we're talking the sort of girl-power "all women are goddesses" kind of thing. kate is incredibly giving and loving and nurturing, but if you cross her you are in for a world of hurt. kate protects as passionately as she cares. she is down to earth and practical. she exudes a sexy self-confidence that only comes when a woman is contented with the shape her body is, societal expectations be damned. she is, above all of her greatness, incredibly modest. i tell her she's a goddess, that other people think so, that she's amazing and she brushes it all off. "i'm no different than you," she says, and i know it's true, and that makes me feel all goddess-like, which is an incredible feeling, too. perhaps what elevates kate past "great friend" to goddess is that she has the ability to inspire. while she makes so many daunting things look effortless, it doesn't look like magic. it just looks do-able. kate can do it, so can you. so what's stopping you, eh? that thing that's stressing you? meh. it doesn't worry kate, so don't let it get to you, okay? last april she gave birth to her first son (liam--not named after a character on buffy. it was pure coincidence) and ryan and i went to visit the happy family in august. while i've always wanted kids, babies freak me out. i never had any younger brothers and sisters, and never baby-sat a kid younger than 2, really, so all i know about babies is that they're precious and they seem infinitely breakable and oh crap, what if they start crying and i can't fix it? i'd just been hoping that when the time came some sort of mom-stinct would kick in and/or the baby would recognize me as mom and that would make it easier. within about 2 hours, kate managed to cure me of that. she laughed away my fears in that easy "of course you feel that way, but it's really quite silly" way she has. i knew after that weekend that everything was going to be okay, and that i was procrastinating for a stupid reason. last weekend, she and liam came into town to visit some friends and friday night we ate dinner with the two of them (daddy chris had to save his vacation time for later) and some mutual friends who have two very small children (claire is 2ish and mark is 5months). after dinner we went and hung out at the children's rec center at west county mall. you wouldn't think that was a happening place to be on a friday night, but the joint was jumping. ryan and i joked that eating dinner with 3 babies was going to fix my baby-fever, and you might expect that hearty dose of reality would help calm it down, but i knew it wouldn't. kate is 6ish months pregnant, and nothing brings home the goddess-image than having a 15 month old on your hip, a baby-swollen belly, and smile on your face. "i'm already on #2, what's keeping you, slowpoke?" she said before she even opened her mouth. while we were sitting around the edge of the play area kate sighed and asked if i ever expected our lives to turn out like this. "didn't you kind of hope they would?" we spend most of the evening like that. idle chit-chat, simply enjoying each other's company for the first time in almost a year and then randomly saying soul-sharing bits of stuff like we could read each other's minds. cuz, you know, she's a goddess.

the island

2005-07-24T08:48:00.000-07:00

it's better than you might think, but like most action flicks requires a hearty helping of suspension of disbelief. also, they made this scene just for me. and it made me very, very happy.

congrats!

2005-07-22T12:00:00.000-07:00

mc and joe welcomed their daughter into the world earlier today. third parties report that she ultimately weighed in at a very hearty 10lbs, 10oz and 23 inches and that mamma, pappa, and baby girl are all doing great. in related news, i'll be dining with a very pregnant woman and 3 children all under the age of 2 (as well as a few more people) tonight. i expect to either be temporarily cured of or to come down with an acute case of baby fever.

yeesh

2005-07-20T09:26:00.000-07:00

my favorite co-worker is giving notice in the next 48 hours. on the one hand, i'm very happy for him, on the other, i'm really, really unhappy. i'd never been used as a reference before this, so i'm glad i didn't break his opportunity by saying the wrong things. i very selfishly wish he'd stick around long enough for me to leave, too.

quasi spoilers

2005-07-19T10:02:00.000-07:00

in the comments of this post lie vague references to harry potter and the half-blood prince. minor talking around the plot, but no specific names or anything. much more emotional response-y.

dead muse

2005-07-19T10:01:00.000-07:00

apparently, my muse is also reading harry potter. i haven't been able to write a thing since finishing the book. i keep looking for pictures inside my head to write down, but it's a huge blank. i've gone through older outlines and half-started story attempts in the hopes that something will get triggered, but it's like trying to light a wet fuse. granted, it's only been a couple of days, but it's disturbing for her to close up shop so fiercely. usually i can stumble across *something* to trigger a scene, even if i can't get it down to my satisfaction, but this? there's no scene. i can almost feel her sitting in the corner of my head, slowly rocking against the wall, refusing to listen to me. why do i blame the book? i was already feeling a bit self-conscious about writing thanks to a conversation ryan and i had about it a few days earlier, so i'm sure that's contributing, but it's like the plot of this book has blocked everything else. if it was filling my brain with things about the book, it'd be okay, because then i'd just write about them, but it's not, it's just stopped the flow. i'm distracted by the crossroads that she has left the characters. if joss whedon had written harry potter, i wouldn't be worried, because i trust joss, even when he does very bad things. i don't trust her, because i don't know her. i'll probably elaborate more in a comment (because they don't show up on the main page), not to the point of being a true spoiler, but just because things inferred from comments can be just as spoilery as actual plot points. ... gah! i can't even finish off a post properly. i've spent entirely too long shuffling sentences about, trying to get everything to flow right, but it just won't end. sigh. i'm hopeless.

crazy weekend

2005-07-17T19:58:00.000-07:00

so many things happened in the last few days that deserve their own essay-length posts. we picked up will and gina from the airport so late on thursday that it was actually friday morning. friday afternoon was spent socializing, hanging up flags in a hall for saturday's party, and visiting the soon-to-be spectacular workspace for a company that will works with/for, which just happened to be in the same building as a company i sent a resume for. so much coveting. friday night we had a crazy whirlwind dinner prepared by gina in a very shiny kitchen that didn't quite have everything she needed. her skills at adapting rival her general cooking skills. saturday morning we attended a memorial mass for a very great man. i'm still sorting out how i feel about that on multiple levels. cancer, death, afterlife, catholicism, family, friends--you name it and its in my brain, and has probably gone through some sort of radical change since saturday morning. well, except cancer. that's never not going to suck. saturday afternoon we attended a party for the same man. giant illegal fireworks were set off in his honor right next to the new cathedral. how incredible that 3 times as many people showed up to celebrate his life than originally expected? also, don't be afraid to make silly faces in your pictures. don't scowl at people who do. those are the best pictures ever. saturday night was full of good friends and many games. i've never rolled as many large straights in yahtzee as i did that night. ever. put together. makes it hard when you need 6s. clue is very easily over-thinkable. if i was allowed to use a spreadsheet, there would have been no stopping me. :) sunday morning we said goodbye to will and gina (again). sunday i burned about 3gb of music from cd to itunes. while doing this, i read, in its entirety, harry potter 6. i know who the half blood prince is, and i ain't tellin'. also, my neck hurts. a lot. sunday evening, we saw charlie and the chocolate factory. it was really weird. i also think it was really good. not sure i ever want to see it again though. weird. although it was slightly less disturbing than the original one. i think that blending hp6 and charlie was a good idea. it should scramble my brain well enough that i might get some sleep. also managed to cram a good 3 or 4 tour de france stages in while all this happened. this is the week that i, in theory, find out whether i get the job i interviewed for on my birthday. if not, then it's time for round 2 of irons-in-the-fire games. my boss is leaving wednesday and won't be back until august. puts a kink in any notice-giving plans that might develop. friends from omaha are coming in for the weekend. doesn't look like i'll be taking it easy next week, either. ah well.

happy anniversary to us!

2005-07-14T06:44:00.000-07:00

i had something all set to post last night, but i can't remember what it was. i think it may have been about watching stage 10 of the tour de france made my legs ache. or how i like my hair color. or maybe my new messenger bag. i can't remember, so i'm just gonna say "happy anniversary to me and ryan!" we've been married 4 years (yes, just 4) today. and happy bastille day to the francophiles.

yay for TMBG

2005-07-12T21:37:00.000-07:00

went to the they might be giants concert at the pageant tonight. it was an incredible show. they played many of my favorite songs, including a couple i hadn't heard in quite a while. a happy note on what is shaping up to be a rather gloomy week, so i'm going to try and hold this happiness within me as long as possible. you wouldn't think that 2 inches makes that much of a difference, but i discovered that kurt is not so short and tim is very tall. i expect there to be clouds around will's head the next time i see him, and to be able to look gina in the eye. :) woo! first pass through the post and i didn't mispell anything!! ;)

goddamat!

2005-07-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

was it not enough to have a head full of grey hair before i'm 26? apparently, the answer is no. i do not have a broken toe. i do not have a hairline fracture, what i *do* have is arthritis, or the beginnings of it in my right foot. my freaky "one is 9 3/4 sized and one is 9 1/4 sized" feet. turns out that that, coupled with wearing women's shoes has caused a stress point to develop in my foot that if not attended by a podiatrist will turn into a knee and hip problem as well. more importantly than that, it means NO MORE HEELS. as if didn't have enough "fun" trying to get my freaky "only shoes with adjustable straps/buckles/ties across the top, please" feet into shoes. i walk so much better when i'm in heels, but apparently that walk is putting too much stress on one of my toe joints (and by too much i mean "all" which, yeah, is too much) so no more heels, or heels on special/painful occasions. grrrrrr you know that scene in every sitcom where the neurotic character goes to the doctor and the doctor is so awed by something that s/he brings in other doctors to look at it? that happened to me today. the nurse practitioner called in my real doctor for a second opinion and when the real doctor started talking about my problem (she knows only because she has it too) they turned me around so they could look at how my feet/ankles line up. apparently something is really impressively off with the way i stand, because there was awe. i should be happy. i get to go shoe shopping.

things that make you go...

2005-07-09T07:15:00.000-07:00

'k. maybe just one so there's this new commercial for best buy's geek squad that i happened to catch today (unrelated tangent: summer is hell on tivo), which pretty much looks like a daft punk video to me. i can't help but think, the only people that commercial is going to appeal to probably don't need the geek squad.

A-AND

2005-07-07T18:57:00.000-07:00

blogger doesn't count comments as rss-worthy. lame. maybe i just haven't found it yet...

bummed

2005-07-07T18:51:00.000-07:00

looks like one of my prospects just got un-prospected. lame. oh, and no posting comments that make me cry. that goes double--nay, triple--if you live in texas. good thing i was already drinking 8( i almost spelled triple like nipple. tee hee.

not much to say

2005-07-06T20:11:00.000-07:00

but i'm still trying to do that once a day thing. work sucked so hard today that i had to be talked out of just walking out...twice. tomorrow promises to be just as fun. maybe it's that i haven't said anything commentable yet, but y'all do know you can comment just as easily here as you could on snipsnap. ...assuming you're even out there. if everyone got the snipsnap though RSS i guess i really *am* talking to myself. oh, and covet

poor dave zabriskie

2005-07-05T19:45:00.000-07:00

so, i don't really care about the tour de france. i'll watch it every night, while doing other things, because i live with someone who cares, and i care about him, and frankly, it's either that or the ranma 1/2 disk we have sitting around because we haven't gotten around to watching it yet. but i've got to say, my heart bleeds for this guy. i hope he's right. i hope he comes back. if nothing else, it'll make the last 15 or so minutes of the 2-3 hour nightly viewing interesting. see for yourself

before i forget

2005-07-03T22:29:00.000-07:00

sitting near us at tonight's fireworks show was a young couple who could not have been dating more than a few weeks. how do i know? because he was saying inane things and she was acting amused/interested when really, she shouldn't be at all. at all. it started with him "confessing" the fact that he's a starwars geek, but in a way that suggested he was trying to say "see how shy and awkward i am? isn't that endearing?" here's a helpful tip: saying that you brought your starwars books back to school with you because you enjoyed the movie so much isn't awkward, it's nerdy. tonight's fireworks display was set to music, most of it from movies (hence the starwars). he sang through all of it, and not well. not on tune, often making it very, very obvious that he knew not the words neither the tune. it was PAIN FULL!!! the highlight of my eavesdropping/judging came when the theme to indiana jones started to play. he: what is this. she: indiana jones. he: i don't think that's right. she: i'm pretty sure that's indiana jones. he(dismissively): well, it's not any indiana jones i've ever heard of! had a hard time not snickering at that one.

this is what i'm talking about

2005-07-01T12:07:00.000-07:00

in a desperate attempt to "post something almost every day if i can help it." i present the following instant-messaged conversation. it is a symptom of why i must get the f*sk out of here. me(13:51:57): how long is unit testing? like a whole month, right? her(13:55:45): ?? her(13:55:49): not sure sorry her(13:55:54): **** may know me(13:56:07): isn't it your job to know now? me(13:56:10): :D her(13:56:30): actually no. It wasn't as an architect nor PM. me(13:56:52): i'm sorry, the project manager doesn't maintain the project timeline? her(13:56:59): It's not an Express milestone so the project PM and development lead are the ones that care her(13:57:16): I'm not PM of that project... ^^^^ is. me(13:57:46): your new job gets easier every time i ask you a question ;) names have been erased to feign anonymity. PM==project manager

green is pretty

2005-06-29T11:54:00.000-07:00

that is all

saying goodbye

2005-06-28T18:58:00.000-07:00

there is a scene in the last episode of buffy the vampire slayer that is fairly gut-wrenching if you're a fan of the show. the ensemble is getting ready for the big battle to end all big battles (for real this time) and the entire cast is in this small hallway. the characters who have joined the cast over the last 7 or so years sort of trickled away, leaving the original 4 characters alone. after a moment of "typical" banter where nobody really chooses to acknowledge that there really might not be a tomorrow, one falls away and the last 3 walk down the hall to their stations, again with the witty talk that distracts them from what's about to happen. then there are 2. then just one. that's what the last few days felt like to me. saturday we had a grand fete for two friends who were moving away tuesday morning. they were planning on leaving monday, but didn't want to leave on my birthday. that's how cool they are. they had been staying with us for the past month, which as potentially dangerous as that sounds was actually incredibly cool. i don't think i could have handled it as long had it been any other couple, but for me, it only served to cement what had become a very special set of friendships. on saturday night, someone asked me if i was ready to say good bye to will and gina and i said, "i haven't said good bye to them in a month." i've said "good night", "have a nice day at work", and other very, very temporary words of departure, but nothing even close to "see you in a few months, maybe." anyway, back to my analogy... saturday we had the "whole cast" basically, which by the end of the evening whittled down to smaller and smaller groups. and then sunday the four of us ate leftovers with another couple. watching hans and kristan say good bye was rough. it brought a level of realism that i wasn't quite prepared for. monday night i fixed dinner for just the four of us and as the evening slowly dragged on, it was hard to go to bed. going to bed meant that this day was over, and the next day they'd be gone. we spent the evening sort of skirting the topic. they had to plan a route, but didn't want to look to closely at the maps. there were a couple of things that still needed to be packed up/dealt with, but nobody wanted to look too closely at why we were doing any of it. this morning we got up early and in the fog of not-enough-sleep helped them pack their cars. and they left. and now our house is so empty.

first post!

2005-06-28T18:23:00.000-07:00

entirely too sick of snipsnap's inability to be consistently up or consistently down. gonna hang out here until it either stabilizes or i fall so madly in love with blogger that i forget how to spell snipsnap.