November 1, 2005 :: 10:13 pm
tragically…
the CF card upon which all our halloween photos were taken….
got munched.
the only photo that came through unscathed is this one. if only one of them is going to survive, i guess this is a pretty good one. after all, how often do you get to see a nun drinking a rum and coke talking to joey ramone??
Category Halloween, Party | Tags: | No Comments
October 27, 2004 :: 9:27 pm
we voted early last weekend. not that it matters one way or the other, seeing as how we live in a giant red state. however, something interesting has been happening: i’ve been seeing pro-bush, anti-kerry ads on tv. here. in texas.
why?
you’d think that if they thought they had the state wrapped up, they wouldn’t bother spending the money on unnecessary ads.
unless they’re not unnecessary.
ha-HA!
oh, hell, i know it’s a pipe dream. but i can dream, can’t i??
in other news…
chris hamilton, a friend who is a photographer, came over and took a bunch of pictures of our cats for a business he’s starting. they turned out great! i don’t think that i can really post any in a public forum (they are his pictures, after all). our halloween party is this coming saturday. on friday, in our new building at work, we are having little preschool kids coming through to trick-or-treat. our office’s theme is “black and white” (even though we just moved and are still settling in, and have had no time to think of holiday decor, the whole building is apparently expecting great things from “the creative group,” so we brainstormed the other day and came up with something). anyway, i’m going to wear my black and white stripey stockings and my short black supermodel wig. man, any excuse to wear alternate hair!!
the moon eclipsed tonight. we saw it for a few minutes through a break in the clouds. it was pretty cool; it turned this nice rusty red color. actually it’s still going on, but it’s awfully cloudy outside. in fact, the weather has just been horrible lately: incredibly sticky and very very warm. i want my cool dry crips autumn days, goddammit!
Team America: World Police is freakin’ hilarious!! I highly recommend it, as long as you are over the age of 16 or so. America, FUCK YEAH!
jon stewart was on crossfire last week, i think — the lesson learned here is, do not fuck with jon stewart; he will make you look like an idiot. he called that bowtied freak tucker carlson a dick! my favorite line, when carlson was poking at him about the quality of the questions he asked john kerry during his daily show appearance: “wait a minute, you are on CNN. you know what show leads into mine? puppets making crank phone calls.”
Some fun links…
Give Bush a Brain!
iFilm political short films & clips (freakin’ awesome site!)
the U2 iPod
Category Cats, Halloween, Links, Movies, Photography, Politics, TV, Weather, Work | Tags: | No Comments
December 28, 2003 :: 9:21 pm
I had a nice Christmas. We went to Houston to spend it with my family. Both my brothers were there, along with Mike’s girlfriend Vanessa, who seems very nice. For a holiday where we weren’t supposed to give too many presents, we sure all ended up with a lot of stuff! Mom made each of us a personalized quilt. It is so cool. Mine has photos of all the pets I’ve ever had on it. Doc’s is really cool; I call it his “smartass quilt.” Be careful what you are a smartass about when asked about your likes and dislikes, or you might end up with a quilt that has a picture of a Mudflap Girl, skulls and crossbones, and Sunbonnet Sue smoking a pack of Kools on it. Mom also made me, Mike, and Bob each a scrapbook with old photos in it, in pretty much chronological order. She’s not finished with them; mine goes up through college. There’s hundreds of pictures in it. Very very cool! Doc and I gave each other a new set of pots and pans (Calphalon Stainless Steel). He gave me some computer games, calendars that I’d asked for, gloves, some Christmas ornaments, a mixed drink book, and also bought me/us a scanner. It’s very neat in that it is basically just a sheet of glass with a frame, that you set on top of whatever you’re scanning. It also has a stand if you want to use it that way. I ****HATE**** scanning…(hate…scanning… so… much…) but this may make it not such an ordeal.
Now I’m in sort of overload mode. I have freelance work to do (and am having no end of trouble with FTP! GRRRR!!!!) but also two new computer games; the house looks like a tornado came through here; we have a New Years party on Wednesday that almost no one has RSVP’d for… which reminds me, I’d better send out a reminder message, ’cause if it’s just going to be Joel and Valerie and us, then I don’t want to make six tons of food.
Sigh. Too much to do, not enough time, and zero motivation for any of it.
Category Christmas | Tags: | No Comments
December 16, 2003 :: 11:12 pm
I have managed to completely mess up my font situation on my home computer. I think I deleted some important system fonts while trying to wrangle FontBook, because now everything is completely screwy. Regular old standard system fonts are defaulting to other ones, etc. Right now this is supposed to be displaying in nice smooth anti-aliased Arial as I type this, and it looks all Helvetica-y and somewhat jagged, even though Arial appears to be activated.
I think I might actually have to reinstall something. Yuck.
Happy birthday, Bob! I can’t believe my youngest brother is 24. Wow.
So, my division at work gave out Christmas gifts yesterday… a nice card with a nice imprinted message, along with a sheet of address labels featuring our home address… which is all very nice. But then, included in the card, was a donation request form. Merry Christmas, now return some of that paycheck! Many companies give out holiday bonuses — THEY give US a little something extra (and I’ve never had any illusions that this would actually occur at my office). But asking US to give money back?? And in the guise of a Christmas card??? Talk about tacky!! They might as well have said “Yeah, happy holidays, whatever. Now, down to the real business — give us your money.”
We have finally acquired a Christmas tree. We got a real one this year (spiky old Scotch Pine, but they all turn brown and die within a couple weeks anyway). We might look for a nice fake tree during the post-holiday sales. We haven’t named him yet. Oswald was our tree a couple of years ago. I’m having trouble thinking of a good name for this one. Maybe Emporer Crumpington. Now, for the fun part — decorating! I loooooove my ornaments. Doc bought them for me a couple Christmases ago. They are freakin’ gorgeous. I don’t get all girly and knick-knacky about much of anything, but I just loooooove these ornaments.
I put lights in the tree in the front yard and on the garden gate on Sunday night. And some around the interior of the house as well. I guess I have a little more holiday spirit this year than usual. Maybe it’s that two week vacation I’m taking starting next week.
OK, on to other more important topics. I could talk for a while about the capture of Saddam Hussein, and the way the media has reported on it, but Hillsman at work summed it up best this morning: “Four more years.”
. He’s probably right, too. I haven’t been paying enough attention to the Democratic debates, but it seems like the Dems are a house divided this year. If they do not get together and strongly back one guy, ONE GUY (or gal, although that’s not looking likely, even thought it is freakin’ 2004, for god’s sake), then the Dem vote will be split and Bush will be a no-brainer in 2004.
And I do mean no-brainer.
Category Christmas, Politics, Technology, Work | Tags: | No Comments
November 18, 2003 :: 11:33 pm
Just what every holiday tree needs.
Category Christmas, Weird Stuff | Tags: | No Comments
November 11, 2003 :: 11:18 pm
Category Halloween, Party | Tags: | No Comments
November 6, 2003 :: 8:31 pm
I’m finally getting off my butt and writing some more stories. I’ve been so tired lately, and I haven’t felt like doing much of anything. I’m glad that I was productive last week and sold some paintings. I think that I’m going to try to donate some paintings or other “artistic goods” to charities for fund raisers or raffles or what have you. That would allow me my selfish “me-time” to continue my creative pursuits, but would also allow me to do something for my community at the same time. I’d like to volunteer, but it’s just a question of giving up the time that I could be spending doing something creative.
I don’t even know if places would want a donation like that. I guess I’ll have to look into it.
I promise that I will post the Halloween party pictures sooooooon! It’s a lot of work to go through all the photos, throw out the bad ones, crop and color correct the good ones, and get them all online. There’s well over 200 photos, so please be patient!
I’m coloring my hair, so I have to get up in about 15 minutes to check it and rinse out the smelly goop. Maybe I’ll see next time if Andrew can cut me a deal and color it for me. I’m pretty proficient at it, but it might be nice to have a professional do it once in a while.
Here’s a story from more recent days than the stories I’ve been telling lately — probably from about three years ago:
We were living in the rent house on Ridgelea Street by Love Field. This house was built in 1946, and nothing at all was standard size (windows for miniblinds, shower head threads, doorframes, etc.). The kitchen cabinets went all the way to the ceiling, and the top shelf was waaaaay up high so that even I, at 5 feet 11 inches, had trouble reaching it.
Anyway, I was making dinner and reached up to this tippy top shelf to get the spare blade for my food processor, and I lost my grip. The blade fell off the shelf and was headed straight for my head, and my natural reaction was to grab for it to keep it away from my face. Well, it being a BLADE and all, this didn’t turn out so well. It sliced into the fleshy pad of my left thumb, nice and deep.
I ran into the bathroom to try to stop the bleeding, and was running my thumb under the cold water faucet when I made the mistake of looking at the wound. It was deep, allright, and spouting blood everywhere. So I fainted. Luckily, my dear sweet Doc was standing next to me and caught me before I fell all the way to the floor. I came to within seconds, and he sat me down on the toilet seat lid next to the sink, and had me hold my hand over the sink but NOT LOOK, so he could try to bandage it up or determine if I needed stitches.
He was trying to get the bleeding stopped, and I was trying to relax, so I leaned back a little and took some deep breaths, but I had forgotten about the lit candle on the back of the toilet seat — and my hair caught fire.
It didn’t burn too much before we noticed my head crackling and smoking, and luckily a few whacks with my hand were all it took to put it out.
So when I tell this story, I call it The Day I Sliced Open My Thumb, Passed Out, and Set My Hair On Fire, All Within Five Minutes. You think YOU had a bad day?!
Category Hair, Halloween, Health, Holiday, Memories, Party | Tags: | No Comments
November 2, 2003 :: 11:49 pm
Last week was one of the busiest weeks that I think I’ve had in a long time. Arushi and Shyamal moved on Thursday. Right now they are somewhere in Colorado, enjoying the sub-freezing weather (while it’s still HOT here in Dallas – mid 80s in November). I am having a hard time believing that they are actually gone. I guess that distances aren’t really so far anymore, what with e-mail and IM and free long distance on cell phones… but still. We had a farewell brunch for them at Rachel’s house last Sunday, and then dinner with them and Kim on Tuesday.
The rest of the week was spent preparing for Friday’s Halloween party. We had some great decorations (and lots of decorating help) and I think that the yard and the downstairs of the house looked awesome. I’m not sure that we can compete with John and Melanie’s decorations (neither of us have built a real life web slinger, for instance), but I think ours were cool in their own way. The party was fantastic. Tons of people came, and we got some really fabulous photos. I’m going to post them to their own page so people can look and download them, but here are a couple of my favorites: [Photo 1] [Photo 2]. The last guests left some time between 2:30 and 3 in the morning. I’ll write more about the party later
I sold five paintings at my art show yesterday!! That was just beyond my wildest dreams. Two young couples each bought two paintings, and Joel bought one. Turns out that the first guy is a cousin to someone that I went to college with. Small world! I wasn’t sure that I was going to sell two of the paintings, but I felt good about the people who were buying them, so I decided that I could let them go to good homes. I’m glad Joel has one because I can go and visit it. :)
Category Art, Friends, Halloween, Party | Tags: | No Comments
July 2, 2003 :: 10:15 pm
Darn it, I keep forgetting to bring photos home from work. Hillsman came to our signing at Barnes and Noble on June 14th, and took about 75 digital photographs. I have not even looked through them thoroughly yet. And then I scanned in photos that go with the fork story below, that I sent to Scott’s mom and dad. I wanted to add one to the blog entry, but I can’t seem to remember to put all that stuff on a CD before I leave for the day.
Arushi and I moved the QFC pages to a new server. We finally broke down and bought commercial hosting services. My iDisk, while free, was too damned slow to use. It served pages to users at an OK speed, but uploading files was absolutely painful. So now editing, uploading, and downloading are much much MUCH easier, plus we can use FTP, plus we both have access to work on the pages, PLUS we have new custom email accounts! This all makes me happy.
Unfortunately, our hosting service does not use Mac OS X Servers, but maybe we can eventually find one that does, at a comparably reasonable price. At least they offer a Linux option, so we don’t have to use Windows servers.
Neko is eating something unidentifiable under the computer desk. It sounds like styrofoam. Aha, it IS styrofoam. Somehow she got ahold of a packing peanut. I don’t think I’ve had packing peanuts in my office… I wonder where she dug it up from.
I’m also happy that it is a short week at work. On Friday we are probably going to hang out with Brittney and hopefully Kim as well. Dinner in air-conditioned comfort, watch fireworks somewhere, then maybe have some drinks to celebrate Kim’s 12-year medical anniversary, which is Saturday. I’m not positive exactly what the date signifies, if it’s the day she was diagnosed with the brain tumor, or maybe the day that she was given the all-clear by her doctors. At any rate, it is definitely an occasion to celebrate.
Category Books, Cats, Friends, Holiday, Writing | Tags: | No Comments
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