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Thursday, June 26, 2008
photo mosaic meme
lifted from Breda.
It's that meme thing where you -- well, here are the instructions.
How it's done:
* Answer each of the questions below.
* Surf over to Flickr (set up an account if you don’t have one — it's quick and easy) and type your answers (one at a time) into the search bar.
* From the choice of pictures shown only on the front page, click on the one that moves you.
* Once the page with your picture opens, copy the URL.
* Surf over to the Mosaic Maker, set up your mosaic, and paste your URLs.
* Click “Create!”
Here are the questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you attend?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. What is your favorite drink?
7. Where would you go on your dream vacation?
8. What is your favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. Choose one word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name?
Photo credits:
1. Rachel and the Lake, 2. fruit salad, 3. Respirators, 4. Gizmo, 5. Buying a Nikon doesn't make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner., 6. ...As Long As You Water Them, 7. Borrowdale, Lake District, 8. Chocolate Ice Cream, 9. nurse 1, 10. Raccoon Family, 11. Tee-hee, 12. mrs rachel lynde is surprised
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
home again, home again
I'm feeling very boring and unwitty and generally not like blogging. Just to warn you. I just wanted people to know I was still alive.
We came home today from a short four-plus day stay in Morro Bay. Usually we stay longer, but this year with the garden and our general lack of funds, we decided to make it a short stay. But we had a fantastic time, even including Scout who turns out to be a great traveler and who adjusted fine to camping life (and who never once pottied in the tent). (Yay for the Caliber, too. Thirty-two MPG there and back = way way better than twelve.) Not long after we left, we had a lightning storm here at home that started a few majorish fires, the most worrisome of which is very near my brother and SIL's house. They've not been evacuated, but they were told to be ready to evacuate just in case. It's very smoky here.
The garden is fine. On my dad's advice, I started watering it less often a few weeks ago and it has been LOVING it. Who knew that I could take TOO good care of something green? This mean, happily, that we only had to ask friends to water it once while we were gone. We now have a whole bunch of little bitty green tomatoes and some peapods and some tiny baby zucchini and carrots that are edible small carrots (not ready to harvest, though. I just thin one every now and then.) As soon as I get my pictures sorted, there will be photos of the garden (including last week's, which I took but didn't upload) and of our vacation at Flickr. (Look out for the very cool sand castle. The Ts have once more surpassed themselves.)
And I think thatisall. More later, maybe, if my brain comes back.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
garden update and (cue Johnny Olson) A NEW CAR.
In case you don't follow the RSS feed for my Flickr photos (all the cool kids do) (*snort*), I should mention that every Tuesday (or thereabouts) I upload new pictures of the garden. I have a general garden set and a weekly garden photo set. The garden is getting really exciting. Something I planted actually has blossoms on it! Although we have had our first casualty. One of the "extra" tomato plants we put out (more seedlings than we had room for in the beds) was swiped by some gophers -- gophers with a death wish -- night before last. It's just gone, like it was never there. Granted, it was right next to the fence and it wasn't exactly thriving, but if the same thing starts happening to my squash plants I am going to sit out there all night myself with the .22. That actually sounds like a fabulous idea! We even have a spotlight. A diet Coke, a .22, the full moon, and thou ("thou" being a stupid little rodent who apparently doesn't know who he's messing with here).
Also, we're picking up a new car tonight; we signed papers for it on Sunday. I swear it's the frugal thing to do. The best mileage we can get on any of our classic Mopar daily drivers is 12mpg. TWELVE. That's highway MPG. At the current price ($4.50/gallon the last time I looked, but it may have gone up a dime), we can save almost the entire payment on our new (black, strippy model except for A/C because hello this IS California) Dodge Caliber in gas costs, especially since we get 500 gallons per year for three years at $2.99/gallon as part of that schmancy promotion thing that Dodge is doing. And from all accounts, gas prices are only going up. So it makes a lot of sense, right? Doesn't explain why I am having a total freakout about it. Well, not total. That was yesterday. Today it's only the occasional very small freakout.
Actually, it's seeming kind of... fun. I have never owned a new car before. And we got a really killer warranty, so that our usual main objection to new cars (things inevitably go wrong eventually, and they cost so much to fix, and T can't usually do it, and even if he could the parts are also outrageously expensive) is a moot point.
(Firefox thinks "freakout" isn't a word. Silly Firefox.)
Monday, June 09, 2008
syntactic felicity
You don't want to make C mad. Here is a brief sampling of the hail of impromptu insults she flung at her brother in the space of about ten seconds after he beat her rather unkindly at Waterworks (there were more, but we can't remember them):
You are a pecan with two arms and two legs that can talk!
You are a pecan chopped up in a pecan pie!
You drowning little fishie!
You flabbergasting baboon!
and the pièce de résistance:
You are a boiled baloney and baboon sandwich!
It's hard to reprimand her when I'm laughing like that.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
little updates and miscellanea
Still not the big post. I really, really thought about sitting here and fleshing out my notes and coming up with an articulate post about something that really matters to me, but that felt too much like school and darnit, I'm on vacation. So it's snippety updates instead. For now.
The garden is going like gangbusters (that is, if gangbusters go in a green, thriving, and surprisingly not-dead manner). We had our first little mini-harvest from it this weekend, when we ate spinach on our hamburgers, which is surprisingly good. There's more spinach ready (begging) to be picked but there's not enough to freeze and I don't have lettuce on hand to make a salad and we've never been cooked-spinach-as-a-side-dish people, although we may have to start or else the spinach will rot on the plants and that would be a shame. The only puzzling thing about the garden (other than the fact that I have personally touched, breathed on, and handled every plant in it and yet none have died) is that I'm getting these little mounds, like gopher mounds but with no holes and no plant damage, here and there in the garden. Do toads do this? We've recently transplanted some toads to the garden to help keep the eeeevil grasshoppers at bay. I will have to research this.
Hey, remember that couch-to-5K thing? I'm pretty much still on the couch. Well, on the computer chair, anyway. The fact is, I did it twice, on a Friday and a Sunday when T was home to ride herd on the kids, and then what with him working and all of our evening commitments, I couldn't find a way (barring getting up with T at 4:30: not happening) to squeeze in the third weekly workout. Now, however, we only have one weeknight commitment per week, and I am determined to start afresh (oh, this is killing me: what Austen adaptation is that from? or am I delusional? it would kind of defeat the purpose here if I were to sit and watch all of them this afternoon). So last night I stayed up until 2 AM making the obviously very necessary iTunes playlists for the first week. See, the thing about C25K is that you start out doing 60 seconds of running and then 90 seconds of walking, repeated for 20 minutes, which means that you either:
- a) fumble with the buttons on your daughter's watch trying to make the timer function work, something that's increasingly hard to do as my eyes get older buttons and labels and stuff keep getting smaller
- b) clip your kitchen timer to your shorts, which also entails much fumbling and also possible battery loss
- c) hire a trainer or your former PE teacher to run alongside you with a watch and a whistle -- too expensive, not to mention, hello, embarrassing, but really, we didn't know how lucky we were, being forced to do PE for free every day, did we? or
- d) spend a huge amount of time creating 90- or 60-second snippets of appropriately-paced songs and compiling them into a playlist that will not only motivate you to run EVERY SINGLE DAY but also magically melt fat off your thighs while you just sit there and listen to them.
The choice is obvious, no? (Actually, for the walking portions for the first week I used Librivox recordings, except that then I realized that I would have to make three daily playlists instead of one weekly one, unless I wanted to listen to the same story every day. Oops.)
I don't think I ever posted about the end of school. It ended. The end. OK, OK, seriously, I really enjoyed both my classes this semester, and my grades were good (easy when you're taking six units! I'm telling you, people, this is the way to go!). However, I don't see how I'm going to make it through next semester, when my two classes are both online to save on gas (and because there's nothing offered locally that will do me any good), so I'll only have one classroom meeting per month, and both of the classes sound a little... boring. Especially Principles of Interpersonal Communication. The description sounds like it'll involve a whole bunch of I-statements-instead-of-you-statements kind of stuff. I wanted to take Fundamentals of Speech for that requirement instead, because for all my talkativeness I really get nervous when it's time to do any public speaking and I could use the practice, but that class meets every week, and every trip to the main campus costs $40 at current gas prices. I just couldn't bring myself to do it.
Also, good news: T finally got the promotion he's deserved for the past seven years, so that he is now actually being paid for the job he does (I know, what a novel concept!). Not that we get to go have a fun time with that money, or, you know, pay extra on our mortgage or buy yarn or anything, since it will juuuust allow us enough breathing room to be able to pay our gas bill if we're very careful and maybe put a tiny bit in savings. It's definitely a welcome help, though.
In all other areas of life, there's nothing new to report, really. I mean, there's little stuff, like how I managed to spill a pint of very messy, sticky stir-fry sauce all over the counter while I was cooking dinner the other night, or how I mistakenly poured a quart or so of nasty used deep-frying oil into the quarter-full (big) container of new, clean oil instead of into the OLD OIL container kept below the sink -- a mistake I didn't discover until I went to stir-fry the abovementioned dinner -- or how Scout got our hopes all up by not barking/growling at T once all last weekend, but then apparently once more mistook him for an intruder with Evil Intentions when he came home from work on Monday. Or -- ooh -- how I actually finished two knitting projects last week. Two! Finished! Knitting! Including [fanfare] THE ELEPHANT!
But that's all. Really.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
ten ways the world has changed
I am plotting (I even have notes) a longish, serious blog post. Meanwhile, it's been a really long time since I've done a meme, and Michael presented me with one that was hard to resist.
Ten ways the world has changed since I was in school:
- Number one would have to be the Internet. I mean, it definitely existed in 1993, but almost nobody had it in their homes and I don't think our school even had it in the library yet when I graduated (although it might have). Now everyone from my three-year-old nephew to my eighty-one-year-old grandmother knows how to use it. And this extends to the proliferation of computers in general. Kids in some schools get laptops issued to them like textbooks. As far as I know there was no such thing as a laptop in 1993, and I was really excited to pay ONLY $425 for a used 386 with TWO WHOLE MEG OF RAM. I honestly do not remember the hard drive size. T, a little help?
- The outsourcing of labor to overseas markets. This has caused a major shift in the American employment scene (granted, not so much around here), with factories closing and companies moving their production to Asia, where the labor is cheaper. It's also caused the prices of computers, components, and other electronics to plummet. I'll never forget going to buy our second inkjet printer. We bought our first one at Staples in 1997 or so for $300. We used that one until it died, and then a friend gave us his old one when he got a new one and we used that one until it died (or until it ticked us off so much with its utter inability to pick up paper that we shot it full of holes, one of the two), and then we went to price new printers and see what we were in for. This was maybe 2001. We were braced to have to save up $250 or $300; imagine our surprise when the most expensive printer on the shelf was under $100, and the models comparable to the ones we were used to were $40. (They still didn't pick up paper.)
- We're teetering on the brink of another depression. (That's pretty recent. Does it count?)
- I think gas was around $1.25/gallon when I graduated. And weren't we all mad to see it over a dollar!
- When I started high school, I had never seen anybody except really out-there punk rockers with unnatural hair colors. While I was in high school, a few cutting-edge alternative types dyed their hair "eggplant". Now ten-year-old boys go around with spiked blue hair and nobody thinks anything of it. (Or was that five years ago? I lose track easily.)
- Fashions, obviously. When I was in high school, I would have been laughed off campus if I'd worn flare-leg jeans and the strappy little tank tops that are de rigueur now. Also, we still believed in tucking in our shirts -- at least the shirt that we wore under the baggy flannel one.
- I think in 1993, the children and teens who called their elders by their first names were still the exception, offspring of hippies who never got over being countercultural. Now my children are the freaks because they're actually polite and deferential to people who could be their great-great grandparents. Go figure.
- Homeschooling was not quite under the radar when I finished school, but it was definitely not the near-mainstream movement that it is today. Everyone's heard of it now, and most people know someone who's doing it.
- In 1993, if I remember correctly, homosexuality was out of the closet but still stigmatized. Nowadays, schools have "coming-out days" and teenage girls experiment with bisexuality because it's cool.
- Sexual mores: It took the culture of the 90's to make sex on the second or third date something that was almost expected, instead of something that only the easy girls did. And when I was a teen, I would probably estimate that people who lived together before marriage were still (barely) outnumbered by those who didn't. I sincerely doubt that's the case anymore -- living together is done so casually that even the phrase "before marriage" has pretty much been dropped.
Looking back over my list, it's mostly negative stuff, which I didn't really mean it to be. Life's good now, too. :) Just... different. (And hey, I've found that even mid-rise jeans aren't so bad.)
