anagram of brat

Temperatures for the next little while are expected to stay between 60 and 70 F. There are peeper frogs out at night. The cat is going more apeshit than usual and spends hours either at the open back patio door or in the newly de-plasticked living room window. Or trying to make a break for it when we open doors. Expecting her to resume her rocket powered charge through the patio screen at any moment.

Met with Lesley Arak last night to talk wedding photography. Have some lists to make.

It's pi(e) day. I don't think I will get any tasty pie today, but it's only 10:30am, who knows what lovelies the day might bring.

I took a mental health day yesterday to rest up and deal with the brain weather, though that was quickly explained by the onset of ladytimes. Feh. Thankfully the cramp fairy has the month off, but her spot seems to be filled by the EAT EVERYTHING fairy. I tell you what, this whole having an appetite thing is awful. I just want to eat ALL THE THINGS all the time. I would appreciate a happy medium between pig out and nonconsensual fast.

I baked cheddar biscuits though. Nom nom nom.

Anyway, the brain weather seems to have settled a little bit, though I clearly still have some ex-related angries that need to be either put to bed once and for all (not likely) or cheerfully beaten back into their little boxes until later (probable). No real point to stressing myself about it until I find some way back onto my wellbutrin.

Somehow after swearing that I wouldn't freelance anymore I found myself helping one of the campus cops with his photography web site after work on Monday. Oh well. Extra money is never a bad thing.

I have a date tonight with CuteGirl - we are seeing The Artist. We'll see how I do w/r/t terrified lesbian sheep tendencies.

Still struggling with creative projects and the actual working on of them.

I have accidentally an aloe plant. One of the techs upstairs was putting this pot of aloe shoots out with a "TAKE ME HOME" so I was all what the hell, I used to be really good at growing aloes. Actually I have to get cracking on this year's gardening projects. Now that it's warming up I need to empty out and wash out last year's pots and decide what things I want to grow besides tomatoes. Also repot Spidey, he's looking a little sad.

cell23 and I are into the fourth season of Breaking Bad now. OMG this show. I can't even.

I have also broken my resolution to only have three books out from the library at a time. I met Lesley at the Jones last night and the temptation was just too great. Right now I have parts 3 & 4 out from Bujold's Sharing Knife series, Justine Larbalestier's Liar, Juliet Marillier's Daughter of the Forest*, and Justin Cronin's The Passage out right now. Also reading Stolen continents : the Americas through Indian eyes since 1492. Occasionally I have to break up all the YA and fantasy stuff, and this book so far is pretty good. *sigh* because I really have oodles of time to read. Feh.

I feel like I need to use the time between now and PAX hermited up until I get more stuff finished, or at least until I feel like I have. Except the damn weather's all COME OUTSIDE AND SPEND TIME IN ME. I suppose I ought to enjoy these precious few days of springtime before the trees all wake up and start filling the air with their abominable itchy fornications.

* intrigued, as this series seems to have the same cover artist as the first three Kushiel books.

( pictures behind cut )

Things I learned this week:

I have to actively try not to take pictures of the cat. BUT SHE SO DAMN CUTE ALL THE TIME IZ DIFFICULT.

It never fails. When I have the Hatemonger on me? nothing leaps out in front of it. The day I leave it home, HOLY SHIT PICTURY THINGS EVERYWHERE. Moral of story, carry Hatemonger everywhere until smaller camera can be arranged.

I'm shit at taking low light pictures. Must work on this. And get a tripod.

Just because you already took a picture at noon doesn't mean you get to leave the camera home at 8. Something even better might come up.

Shallots are rather... testicular looking when they're all hanging out by themselves like that.

I need a new "click!" icon I think. Maybe when I get a better mirror.

( 7 large pictures under here. )

Things I learned this week:

• I hate the iPad's camera. It's good for pictures of the cat being a doof, and skype and other sorts of video, not much good for anything else. Grainy as hell and no options for adjusting it unless you download a couple apps that require jailbreaking the thing. Too much like work.
  
  
• Still shit at remembering to white balance when I have the camera on manual settings. Also haven't really gotten the hang of depth of field. Need to work on that, because it's a pain in the ass to do in post.
  
  
• It's pretty easy to get lazy with this during the week seeing as I work on a college campus that if it were a person would be the biggest camera whore imaginable. Every corner of that campus and even just the building I work in positively screams TAKE A PICTURE OF ME ME ME!!! every second. Even the ugly buildings photograph well.
  
  
• Still miss having a pocket camera for this project, regardless of oogy camera quality. Carrying around the hatemonger on top of my other portable tech gets heavy.

The fun thing about life changes for me is that I suddenly am filled with the hunger to DO ALL THE CREATIVE THINGS. Which is hilarious, because generally when my life takes a shift like that, it generally means that I have less time for creative stuff, not more. But for the little while where I have the shiny happy New Thing Energy*, I get ideas for projects and desires to do things. Granted these rarely come to any sort of fruition due to a lack of focus, but for a few weeks at least I actually want to do stuff as opposed to just feeling meh about everything.

I've got creative stuff on the burner, of course. I still have to cast The Witch off the loom, and soon because I want to start the next project and it needs to be done by Kidzilla's birthday, and that's not including her other birthday present which I've started working on as well. But on top of that I've been feeling the fever. I want to dance again, like not just go dancing, but go back to belly dance class and start really working on that again. I want to take moar pictures... and of other things besides trees, cats and kids. I'm finding I miss having someone willing to let me point a camera at them on a regular basis that's well over the age of seven, but considering the grief people have given me in the past for wanting to take their picture and my own lack of confidence in my abilities/camera, I'm kinda too self conscious to ask anyone I know about taking pictures of them (though I do seem to remember standing offers from aersi and htl_1126, which I'll have to cash in on sometime).

Oddly enough, something I've been turning over in my head is a partly overheard conversation between a few members of our company before burlesque about acceptable male body types, where it was posited that there are in fact only two that fit the criteria of "pleasing" either the skinny willowy gothboy type, or that insanely jacked cut-muscle beefcake type. See Joe Manganiello from True Blood or Chris Hemsworth from Thor. I think I know one guy that looks like the latter, but he's a dancer and is in the gym or the studio quite literally all damn day. I know maybe one person that conforms to tall willowy goth boy, but again, there was a lot of overzealous gym work to maintain that. (Being in the Air Force don't hurt none either.) Pretty much the rest of my male associates have/have had every single body type in between, though for the most part they tend to burliness of varying density. Some are widely considered beautiful, as it applies to guys anyway. Others aren't quite but have either a combination of compelling features overlaid with a cubic shitfuck of charisma. Still others still have something about them, but have alas been relegated both by outside voices and internal monologue to the ugly box. All this said, I can't think of a single person I know personally (that includes all of you reading this, by the way) that identifies as male that didn't have something I considered beautiful/aesthetically pleasing about them. A lot of you are handsomer than you realize, you know.

It was very much a concept that stuck in my head while watching the burlesque show, actually. I was on some level paying attention to the crowd reactions to the various acts and I've pretty much concluded that boobs seem to have universal appeal, no matter the size and shape. The two acts by the male guest performers, as expected, got somewhat less of a crowd reaction, considering the straight male contingent of the audience for the most part seemed awkward about expressing... appreciation? for their acts, and if they did it was for the humor of them and less for the physical attributes of the men performing. (Not that there was anything wrong there. Sirlesque ain't exactly my type, but they were pretteh.)

I don't know, I'm sure there's an argument for masculine body types/image, but it's gonna take someone far more eloquent than I to express it properly, I think. The entry got away from me a bit, honestly. At this point I kinda want to go watch The Full Monty in a fit of pique though.

I did have a greater point here, tying back to my whole CREATIVE EXPRESSION = VERY YES thing, but what I'd love to do is both find and take pictures of men. Not "models" or the type that Planet Fitness cheerfully derides as "lunkheads," just regular, real guys that still have a whole lot of a certain something that someone managed to catch on "film" or is willing to let me try. Alas, I'm quite sure the former is ridiculously hard to find, and the latter, well. I have yet to meet one of you male-identified types that wasn't also viciously camera shy, for all of the reasons poorly expressed above. Also see the part where camera = nerd repellent.

Eh, it was something twirling around my brain today, since I did promise yesterday that I'd post about it at some future point.

In other news, its cold and rainy in MA today, neither of which I'm complaining too hard about. Rainy means happy tomatoes, cold means happy Andee that doesn't mind getting glomphed at night. And the fact that it's this cold in August feels like a rare delicious treat. Also I had to nip into Target for a moment today and MY GOD IT IS BACK TO SCHOOL SEASON BAN ME FROM STAPLES NOW FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY.



* Its actually not entirely unlike New Relationship Energy actually - the spillover effect is much the same.

So I now have this combination printer/scanner/copier thing sitting on top of my tower courtesy of stormslegacy. I spent a little bit of time tonight first weeding though a Diamond Comics box full of pictures I have been meaning to put into albums for at least five or more years and scanning some for the MSFC facebook group I mentioned earlier. I've also thrown out quite a few - some I don't want to see ever again for obvious reasons, some were simply bad shots, most... I know ostensibly there was some reason I had doubles made of every goddamn picture I took in college but as I winnow through these stacks of pictures and weed out the dupes, I've concluded that whatever it was, it wasn't a good reason. (It was probably honestly because it was free.)

But yeah, um. Wow. If anything this box is all the evidence needed to prove that my friends have always been utterly wacky creative types and none of them (especially not harinezumi - yes, I still have the pics of you in seriously bad drag) should ever run for political office. Also wow. We were all so goddamn... young... fifteenish years ago.

Speaking of young, there's also this.



Like bellarisa couldn't resist pointing out, yes, I have one of those faces that hasn't really changed since the Carter administration (Which I was alive for, thank you, this picture was taken during it). Just less baby fat these days. And more hair/yarn.

Bedtime now.

~~

[Error: unknown template qotd]

I generally am a little woogy about it, as I'm not in control of the picture and don't think I photograph all that well unless I'm doing it. (Some notable exceptions apply.) I generally am far more critical of the end result, not because it's a bad picture generally, I just hate how I look in it, but that's me and my appearance issues, not me having a problem with having the picture taken itself.

Other than that, especially if miracle of miracles I end up liking the picture, I'll generally link/tag/post it rather than hide it. I guess you could say I'm a camera whore with caveats, or more like if I could be I'd be all like Kim Il-Sung about it - ONLY PHOTOGRAPH OUR GREAT AND ETERNAL LEADER FROM THE LEFT SIDE AND SLIGHTLY UP AT THE MYSPACE ANGLE, KTHX.

In other news, while we didn't get any of the spectacular weather we were promised/threatened with, it is currently delicious outside and I have the fans going anyway despite the fact that my room is now freezing. Hey, summer's a-coming, I'ma savor all the cold I can get.

K I lied, I can't actually sleep yet.

Today cell23 took me and the kids to Groff Park, which started off as an adventure because a bee blew into the car window and landed on Kidzilla's booster seat, and much to everyone's terror (except mine apparently - hence the OOOH A BEE I MUST TAKE ITS PICTURE instinct) seemed content to hang out below Kidzilla's arms for half the trip. We finally pulled into the Hadley Pride so I could get rid of it (why do I always end up being the goddamn Bug Whisperer??) Turns out it had a wing problem. Poor bee.

Anyway, we got to the park without any further nonconsensual wildlife in the car, and after being a little surprised by the emptiness of the part (we showed up around lunchtime) we had a lovely few hours of sunshine, sandbox and playground, and I took a crapton of pics of the kiddos and read and revelled in the fact that I come with natural sunblock (especially since there was a bit of a struggle getting it on the kids before we left.) Also I must add that the best place to reread Alice in Wonderland is under a tree on a warm sunny day.

We went home, had lunch and watched the end of the Indy500, then went to deliriumdeva's and renegadethumper's new place to let the kids play with Ollie. Small creature meet small creature. *shakes head* Oh two year olds. Kittens don't take well to being bossed around.

At that point, I left to drive down to Hamp for a bit, as Bosslady's widow was holding a gathering/barbecue and I hadn't seen her or the dogs in a couple of years so I figured now that I can, you know, DRIVE I'd show up. I'm glad I did, though I was slowed down a bit by a nasty three car crash that shut down part of 116 in South Deerfield on my way there. It was so nice to see her, and Cisco and Dottie and a bunch of V's friends and V's dad and all them. Plus there was dead thing on a grill and that always makes me happy. Even picked up a couple of contacts for work on Tuesday so profit? heh. I would just like to say that Dottie is still a big gorgeous golden nuisance. Seriously, I make a big exception in my general dog terror for golden retrievers (okay, and borzoi) but she is still easily the prettiest one I've ever met in person. Even if I did spend a good portion of the cookout holding her leash so she wouldn't steal the food.

Home again home again (did I mention one of my favorite things is to drive up I-91 BLARING "Sabotage?") then back to cell23's to say goodnight to the short stacks and to spend an hour or so after that sprawled on the couch with him until he went up to bed, whereupon I went home and discovered picasa's crop tool works very well and spent an hour or so cropping pictures from today and Easter that suffered a bit due to my lack of zoom lens. Le sigh. If I were a rich man, lada dada dada dada dada dada dada daaaaaaaaaaaa. Ehhhh, honestly I'm okay with the Hatemonger's kit lens for now - in terms of camera equipment I'd like a tripod first and a couple of filters before a new lens anyway. Specifically an infrared filter - I've been looking at the infrared pictures crazybee has been posting into pic365 and positively drooling, not to mention summer is the perfect season to get that freakishly pretty white foliage effect.

On a tangent, I'm having an unholy amount of bliss being able to wander from my apartment and through Squire barefoot. There is something rather delicious about being able to run through lawn and feel cool grass between my toes. I almost ALMOST get lawns now. They're nice as long as someone else is mowing them, basically. I have a feeling this summer is going to be spent mostly eschewing shoes.

On a completely different tangent, I kinda envy everyone that moved this weekend. Not for actually having to move, mind, because moving sucks, but because I just want to get mine over with. I hate waiting for things, and this goes double for moving because I loathe the month or so beforehand where I'm waiting and packing and detaching emotionally from whatever place I'm currently in and ugh. Not to mention other stuff I've bitched about before concerning the boobyhaven. But mostly the anticipation stresses me out - I just want to fast forward and have it over and done already you know? and dear fates please please PLEASE let this be the last goddamn time for a while. Moving, how I loathe and despise you. But yeah... I'm not looking forward to the summertime's worth of transitional period, but I'm grimly determined to make it a decent summer, nonetheless. I'm WAY overdue for a truly good summer, and the season is usually running at a disadvantage considering it's already the season I tend to hate above all others (it's always hot, lonely, and angst ridden for me), so we'll see how I do. It may have to be a sort of "GOOD THINGS WILL HAPPEN OR I WILL DIE IN THE ATTEMPT" sort of deal.

Nothing on tap for tomorrow, other than a low key Memorial Day and then driving the kiddos back across the state. Then back to your regularly scheduled week-a-day worries. Yippee.