So I just got back from that Vegas trip only to find a TON of work waiting for me. It’s like everyone knew that I was going to be gone, so they should just bombard me. So I’ve been busy trying to get everything finished so that people don’t have to wait a week to get more assignments from me.

In case this is confusing, I don’t think I officially mentioned, but I’m going to Maui for a week, starting tomorrow. Plane leaves early on Wednesday morning, but of course I’m driving home tonight. I still need to pack though—I’ve done absolutely none so far! But I did buy some new sunglasses, which I hopefully won’t lose or break, since they cost more than my last pair (which I recently noticed were annoyingly scratched right in my line of vision).

So anyway, blog posts will probably be non-existant until next Tuesday or Wednesday as I am doubting I will have internet. Hopefully I’ll take lots of cool pictures, so I’ll have something to share when I return.

Anyway, I’d write more, but I’ve still got to finish up this work and then get home and pack so I can start my fun drive.

Aloha.

Posted at 3:12 PM | (1)

I had a great weekend! After calling in sick on Friday, Steve and I headed to Vegas, Baby, Vegas!!

I had a lot of fun. We of course did some playing, but we also did other things that made the trip quite nice like laying on a raft thingie in the pool together while people-watching, trying to spot hot-looking people in bathing attire and lamenting that there was a considerable lack. You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to find good-looking people by a pool in 100 degree weather, but apparently these people were all somewhere else. What good is a packed poolside in the City of Sin without some eye candy?! Instead we had to content ourselves with pointing out all the weirdos and people who were wearing outfits totally inappropriate for their body types.

We also went bowling during the trip—we didn’t bowl stellar games, but I think Steve hustled me a bit, as after a shaky start he broke 100 and I didn’t, and thus I had to buy the celebratory ice cream bars. One evening we went to a nice restaurant where I was made happy by the fact that we (ok, Steve. You know me and my love of talking to strangers) got someone at the next table to take our picture. I think it came out good, but I haven’t downloaded it yet, so it’s hard to say how the tiny display on my camera will translate into reality. But we NEVER remember to take pictures of ourselves, so I was glad that we’ll have something recent where we look nice.

Anyway, the couple next to us was quite interesting. They sorta chatted with us and told us all kinds of pretty personal things about themselves—including that they were a stunt double and a model. Some of the things I’ve looked up online seem to check out, but who knows. At any rate, it was entertaining, and I now know the entire back-story of their relationship together.

There were other instances of colorful people we encountered during our trip, which kept things interesting even if they also were putting up an act. We may never know, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

Also, we saw the new Wynn casino and weren’t very impressed. It’s a lot like the Bellagio, only on acid or something and on a lower scale. There was a garden like Bellagio, only it was smaller and not as impressive. They also had other floral motifs, like in the carpeting, but the pattern was a trippy ’70s retro thing or something. Most things like employee outfits seemed plainer and there just wasn’t a lot to catch your interest. Basically, you can see all the elements of this place in Wynn’s other creations, so there isn’t much to see. Maybe it’s worth seeing for yourself, but if you’re not already down on that end of the Strip I’d probably not make the trek and just go to Bellagio instead—at least there you get the cool water show.

Posted at 12:01 PM | (5)

So, I went to both the knitting thing and the Star Wars midnight showing last night. The knitting thing was fine—there were 5 other girls all making really cool socks or sweaters. They seemed nice and told me about the occasional additional Thursday gatherings they have. The girl I emailed wasn’t among the group, so I didn’t get to meet her. I got a little worried though when I showed up at 7pm and no one was there. The first two people didn’t show up until almost 7:15!

After leaving that, there wasn’t much time before Steve and I were on our way to the Arlington to be there when they opened the doors at around 10:30pm.

We got decent seats in the middle section, and watched as the employees cracked down on “fun” much more than when we saw Episode 1. Any beach balls, toilet paper, balloons, or blowup dolls (yes, someone brought a blowup doll) were confiscated if they were being bounced among the crowd, and anyone caught perpetuating the activities was escorted out of the building. Not sure why they cared so much about balloons and other things that won’t hurt you. Especially when you’ve got a crowd with an hour and a half to kill.

I killed the time by enabling the Bluetooth on my phone and bluejacking people. I created a contact that said “The force is with you” and sent it to all the phones I could find. Apparently someone else had the same idea, because I got sent a message saying “May the force be with you”. Ever since I read about this, I wanted to try it. It works best in a large crowd, where you are anonymous and also have access to a greater number of phones that might have bluetooth. Being that a bunch of geeks were congregated in one place, it’s not surprising that I found over a dozen just in my corner of the theater. Heck, one person even named their phone “Yoda”. I kept telling Steve how exciting this was, but he may have just been humoring me when he agreed. :)

Anyway, as for the movie, I do think it was better than Episodes 1 and 2. Some scenes seemed a little frivolous or sappy, but overall I think the crowd was pleased. One of the characters I knew was going to be making an appearance seemed to only be there just to draw cheers from the masses—as it didn’t really add anything to the immediate story at hand, per se. I won’t elaborate any further so as not to inadvertently give away something you may not know (assuming you’ve even read this far!). Suffice it to say that the movie was enjoyable—perhaps because it is darker than the other 2 prequels and so had a different focus.

So that was my night in a nutshell. Didn’t get to bed until almost 3am, and this morning I made it to work before 9am. I am hard core, yo! :)

Posted at 8:58 AM | (6)

So the group of SB Knitters that I found meets twice a week, with an extra Wednesday meetup once a month. Tonight is the Wednesday meeting for this month.

I’m thinking about actually going, despite my dislike of being in places where I don’t know anyone. It wound up not being so bad at that housewarming party where I only knew the hosts, so hopefully the same will hold true in this instance.

I emailed the girl in charge of the email list for the meetups and told her that I was a very new knitter and was interested in possibly coming to one of the gatherings. She sounded nice and very enthusiastic about knitting and said how nice everyone is, and how willing they are to share things and help others, stuff like that.

I am probably 75% done with my first project—Zeeby’s Bag from Stitch ‘n Bitch. The girl I emailed seemed surprised that I chose this as my first project, saying that it was quite ambitious considering most people start with scarves.

Really though, I mostly didn’t pick a scarf because my mom just crocheted me some scarves and is working on one for herself. So, I really don’t need another scarf right now—especially since it’s getting hot out. That being the case, I picked the easiest non-scarf pattern out of the book—the essentially rectangular bag. So far it hasn’t been hard, although my stitches aren’t quite perfect. This is probably a throw-away practice project anyway so I’m not sure that I care about the irregularities.

All I really worry about is negative feedback from the group of girls. I mean, I’m sure they won’t say anything bad, but I worry anyway. For all I know I’ve got some freaky knitting style! No one taught me—I just watched the videos on Knittinghelp.com and occasionally refered to my book. I did choose Continental method, which apparently isn’t the most popular in America, but which I thought made more sense, so we’ll see if anyone else knits the same way.

This is, of course, assuming I even go tonight. The Star Wars midnight showing is tonight, and depending on what the plans for that turn out to be, or if I chicken out of the meeting, will determine whether or not I show up.

It would be nice to have someone tell me how to sew up the damn bag though, so I don’t have to sit and figure it out myself!

Posted at 9:48 AM | (3)

So it looks like I get to go to the midnight showing on Wednesday night of Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith with Steve. We saw Episode 1 together at midnight back in 1999 and it was pretty fun—lots of energy in the place, people playing with beach balls, throwing rolls of toilet paper from the balconies, and fighting with light sabers in the aisles. I missed the special showing of Ep. 2 though. Hopefully this installment won’t disappoint—on the good side, I’ve heard that it’s actually gotten some decent critic reviews.

On that note, I think I’m off to bed—gonna need the extra sleep! :)

Posted at 11:13 PM | (5)

One of the downsides to living in my new place is the lack of screens on the windows. Well, and the fact that out of the 5 windows in my place, only 2 actually open. These aren’t normal windows—being made a century ago and in odd sizes—so that I don’t think there is any way to remedy the problem.

Normally I’m not a big window opening person anyway, prefering to keep things warm. But, it seems that being on the second floor of an old building keeps things a little warmer than I’d like.

But EVERY TIME I open a window some sort of large and/or dangerous insect flies in. Proving my point, I decided to air out my place right now and a large black bee decided to fly in. It stupidly tried to go through the glass for like 20 minutes, until by a mere fluke it happened to go through the GIANT opening created by the open window.

I’m always afraid to try to kill the large bugs that fly in because they will probably try to attack me, and that’s never any good. So I always kinda hope that they find their way back out. So far they have, but it makes me wonder how long my luck can hold out. It seems I am fated to either sit in a very hot room, or in a semi-hot room full of deadly insects. What options!

Can’t I take what’s behind curtain number 3 instead?

Posted at 4:45 PM | (0)

You know, sometimes I find it entertaining to read British texts—simply because it’s a novelty to read such words as “favourite”, “colour”, “pyjamas”, “defence”, “organise”, and “draught”. It’s cool to read, but I think I’d be annoyed if I had to actually write that way. For one thing, it usually involves making the word longer, and in some instances the British spelling complicates matters.

Take the proofreading I’m doing right now at work, for example. I have the word “analyses”. Now, in American English the forms are “analysis” for singular noun, “analyzed” for a past tense verb, and “analyses” for plural noun, and “analyzes” for present tense verb. In British English you have “analysis” for singular noun, “analysed” for your past tense verb, “analyses” for the plural form, and “analysed” for the past tense verb. You still following me? Now, depending on how it was used, it could be v. (or “very” if you’re not British) difficult to discern whether or not someone was referring to multiple analyses or whether they were saying that something analyzes something else.

One thing is clear. American spellings are far superior. See, it must be true, I found a webpage that supports my claim. ;)

Of course I mean no offense (offence) to those who use these spellings. It’s just an observation I had because I can’t blanketly utilize (utilise) the “replace all” command with the word “analyses” when trying to convert everything to American spellings.

Admittedly neither version is entirely easy to read from a purely phonetic standpoint, but perhaps my British readers (or those non-native speakers who were taught British spellings) can answer the spelling quandry. Is keeping the longer spellings a matter of pride/tradition/differentiation from the Americans or something else? Do you ever find you prefer the American spellings? Do you even notice or care?

Posted at 3:51 PM | (4)

It’s turning out that maybe spending all that money getting the graphic design certificate wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

The Dreamweaver instructor who hooked me up with one guy needing blog help has now put me in contact with another local guy needing the same assistance.

Seeing as how I love to blog and modify the setup using a zillion plugins, how could I not be the perfect person to help others?

I met the guy for lunch today and it looks like I’m going to help him with his company’s blog and then potentially with any of their clients who need such services. Hopefully that will all work out—they are a smallish startup type company, but the guy seemed really nice.

Cool deal. Who ever thought I would make money helping other people blog?

Posted at 6:33 PM | (0)

I am home with my family this weekend in honor of Mother’s Day—and the fact that my mom took me clothes shopping today. Can’t pass up free stuff, right? :)

Anyway, despite the unusually long drive home (almost 3 hours when it usually only takes me 2 at that time of night), I arrived to a pleasant surprise—my parents got DSL!!

Even cooler, the modem they were sent is also capable of wireless, meaning that I can use my laptop without having to dialup or be near the other computer. Woo. It’s so much nicer not having to suffer with dialup every time I come. I’m so glad that they finally decided to upgrade their internet.

Maybe I’m spoiled, but once you go high speed, it’s really hard to deal with dialup.

Posted at 4:31 PM | (9)

I have off-street parking at my apartment, which is nice, except for the fact that I have to park next to the trash cans. Usually it’s not that bad, except for the days that the trashmen come.

They invariably return the trash cans rather haphazardly, instead of in a neat row like they are usually found. As a result, they are either right next to my car and need to be moved for me to even open the door, or else they are blocking my path when I attempt to park, and I have to get out of the car to move them. Either way, it’s a pain in the ass.

It’s even worse on days like today when it’s raining, because the lids pool a bunch of dirty trash water, which inevitably splashes onto my feet when I attempt to push them back in place. Kinda gross, especially since 99% of the time I’m wearing flip flops. Just like I am today.

Ugh, why can’t they just move the cans against the wall instead of flinging them at my car?! :(

Posted at 12:52 PM | (0)

Woo, I made my first knitting test swatch in garter stitch this evening. And um, it only took me like 6 tries. I kick ass at the double cast-on, but damn if knitting those first two rows wasn’t complicated. I kept messing up the first row, but by the third row it was a lot easier to work with—probably because stuff stops getting in the way.

Anyway, in another instance of some color, one of the freelance people I give assignments to at work was SOOO happy with the assignment I gave him that he not only sent me a thank you email, but also came by to give me thank you flowers. So that was sweet. Hehe, too bad he’s like 65 years old.

I wonder if I’ll get flowers next week…

Posted at 9:40 PM | (0)

Well on Friday when I wrote that knitting post, I also impulsively bought 2 knitting books—not that they were terribly expensive.

So anyway, I guess now that I’ve bought the books I am obligating myself to actually try and make something with them. Eek. Guess I’ll have to go buy some yarn and needles now.

Anyone besides Colleen want a hat? LOL! :)

Posted at 9:23 AM | (0)