ans99

currently i am giving my cat a forced handshake and trying really hard to remember what i've been doing for the past whatever.

oof, she just hurtled over me. i'm pretty sure from the way she gave me a Significant Look afterwards it was punishment.

anyway, we got another camcorder about 1.5 weeks ago. it's a panasonic gs400, which is basically the only camera under $1000 that i ever wanted. it has that green line the last one did, so we're just assuming they're all like that and most prosumers have just been too dumb to notice. we can just crop a few pixels off the side if we don't shoot in widescreen, because other than that it's an awesome camera for the price ($700 used, i think, including tax, etc.).

fourth of july weekend didn't go exactly as planned, but it wasn't that bad. i had just convinced alan we really really should just go to bodie and art out for the fourth, when a couple of quick calls to campgrounds in the area revealed that apparently EVERYONE had the idea to go to mono lake and yosemite that weekend, so even if we found a campsite we would have been miserable, and there were absolutely no guarantees. even the "first come first served" sites were full by thursday afternoon. i guess everyone else was much more firmly ensconced in their plans than we were; we bailed and decided to take a day trip out to point reyes instead the friday before. although the campsites there looked absolutely fanfuckingtastic, and we'll have to go back on a less crowded weekend and stay overnight.

point reyes was pretty beautiful, and although it really seemed to emo alan out, i felt at peace there, and it was a not really "despite" the fog thing so much as "especially with". we saw our share of dead things and live things and soon to be dead (probably) things, including:

-tule deer, first through a telescope and then right outside our car window
-bird trapped in a historic farmhouse, bashing its head against the window and completely ignoring the crack in the door. we laid down some tortillas for it in the hopes it'd find them and eat its way out but i would not be surprised in the slightest if it died. of course alan and i completely capitalized on its pain and took loads of pictures, because we are the paparazzi for suffering animals. ken took the high road and refused to film such things with the camcorder for very long.
-beached seal, that we were warned to stay away from but we guessed nobody would ever come rescue (alan's quote of the day: "that's cold comfort to a dead seal. i want to pet it!")
-dead seabird of some sort on the beach, and lots more in the sky

it was a pretty fun time, the three of us road tripping it and listening to mostly my music, and a smidge of alan's horrible music. it was cool to take the video camera too; ken used it the most, and every scene subsequently ends with an extreme zoom or the camera doing a 180-degree roll. i guess that's ken's signature filming style :)

after hiking on tomales point (no tamales to be found, unfortunately) we drove around the point a little before heading to find something to eat. ended up at this standard-looking restaurant with above-average food, almost seasons-like. i had a buttered rum that was pretty fantastic, but got stiffed on a veggie burger even though our table neighbors were able to order one. etc etc.

((kitsune cute-report: she's twitching her nose and paws now, deep in dreamland next to me on the futon :D this cat likes to lay out all floppy paws; i guess she hasn't quite grown into her body yet. it saddens me that she's probably dreaming about eating our other pets :/))

i took something like 3 GB of pictures, and i want to start uploading them soon but i've run across another problem-- i am out of space on my c drive. so basically i need another hard drive to backup my pictures before i feel comfortable working with them. and the only way i can have three hard drives is if i upgrade my case to one my parents gave me. all this involves work and time we really haven't been able to afford yet, so no pictures for a while :(

the rest of the weekend we did errands mostly. we decided cat condos are way too expensive these days so we're building our own. lowe's is a damn frustrating place in that it sells 4 x 4s too long to fit in our car but do not have the ability to CUT DOWN 4 x 4s. i find that pathetic. it's funny how some hardware stores are good for some items but lousy for others.

i'm also planning on knitting kits a collar (will be velcro for breakaway purposes), a cat toy and a pet bed.

hooping is going okay. i can vortex now, and also shimmy up to and hoop at the chest. sometimes i can hoop at the knees for a couple of rotations. i'm working on vertical hooping. i really need to practice more often, and learn some new moves, since i've started tentatively working on a routine to "time is running out" by muse.

july 4th itself we spent playing rock band with mario, and succeeded again in completely missing the fireworks. i think it's the second year in a row we've done that.

our rats got names (bruce and harvey) and lost their balls this week, and we've started introducing them to wilson. the going is slow; last night was the first time and basically wilson puffed up so much he looked like he was going into anaphylactic shock, then aggressively groomed harvey. at that point we were afraid he'd actually BITTEN harvey so we took the babies out.

after reading up a bit more and wising up on some issues today, i stuck their cages next to each other and switched them for a while. wilson spent the whole time ransacking their cage like someone sneaking into the enemy's office and searching for Hard Evidence in a conspiracy movie, while bruce and harvey pulled a goldilocks and hung out in wilson's bed. wilson then proceeded to one-up THAT by eating their food. i'm not sure who was more passive aggressive.

this weekend was pretty uneventful. we tried fuzio's new location and had a great dinner, and then crashed early friday night. saturday was 7/11 so we got a free slurpee with mario, then played some rock band. we're going to enter pepsi's rock band video contest, so we "rehearsed" our song a little, made avatars that actually looked somewhat like us, and talked about the video and how/when/what we were going to film. i think next weekend we're going to either film down in stockton or kidnap mario for the day and bring him back up here; either way it should be an adventure.

sunday i got the best jeans and skirts ever and then pretended to do art.

today i had an animation class at the cc, taught by the very inspiring and extremely awesome kevin okulolo of leafworthy.com. i already have an awesome idea for an animated series/film. can't wait to get started on it!

actually lately i've been bursting with ideas, so many and so fast i find i don't have time to write them down. i don't know if it's this 2xcreative thing i'm participating in, or just thinking about my future more and more, or finally finding a balance between work and life, or not getting enough life in so my mind's been wandering. or you know, maybe i angered the dream king. either way it's pretty cool, because i never really had many ideas (that i actually liked or thought were any good). most of them came from ken or others much more witty than i, and i always saw it as my biggest failing and the most frustrating roadblock in my art. now they're finally starting to come. :)

work, by the way, is going aight. i'm being randomly social enough i hope to not earn anyone's ire, and they seem to really appreciate my work. it's a little weird having to use a WYSIWYG, but fortunately when it acts up i can fall back on my CSS/HTML hardcoding knowledge (one of the few things i'm truly grateful to henk for, actually). and i'm starting to see the convenience of WYSIWYG, although i really think ultimately depending solely on one and never learning how to code is extremely detrimental to website maintenance and design.

eh, could be worse. we use PCs ;P

tonight we tried round 2 of rat thunderdome. unfortunately the babies remembered wilson's "King Rat RAWRRAWR" routine from last time and guess what? we learned tonight that they are capable of leaping out of the tub! we kept them in there as much as we could though, and wilson got a lot of his dominance displays in. including nosing their abdomens, sniffing around them carefully as if they were military recruits up for inspection, and sidling his butt to their butts to scent mark them. of course through all this the babies squeaked vociferously and jumped out of the tub at every opportunity presented. eventually though they learned there was one stance that did not offend King Rat, and that was staying in a sort of bent over half-standing position on their hind legs, their front legs in front of them, and freezing like the tanuki statue in super mario 3.

i found the whole thing much more amusing than i probably should. rats are so ridiculous.

afterwards they all got chickpeas.

i'll have to steal a sentiment from kyle cassidy here-- i love my life right now.

ah. i also quit my diet. i suck.

freyja: how about an a capella version of muscle museum
penguin42: oh that would be cool
freyja: nananananananananananannananananananannananaanannananannanananana
penguin42: :-D
freyja: or knowing them it'd be
freyja: bumbumbumbumbumbumbumbum
penguin42: ugh
freyja: MR SANDMAN
freyja: christ get out of the 50s
freyja: your syllables are OUTDATED
penguin42: seriously

this is a pretty accurate version of how i spend my time at work when i'm overtired (note the frequent 'head-down' breaks)

freyja: omgomgomgomgomgomg
penguin42: sup sup sups
freyja: bloodsugar

it's amazing how fans suck up to @benjaminfolds-- his pictures ARE good-- very good! but do you really need to act like every single snapshot he posts is some unique, never-accomplished-before work of pure gold? good grief.

the search for a companion

yesterday we went to the sac spca shelter looking for rats and cats-- a rat as a companion for wilson and a cat because we both agree it's just time. finally. unfortunately we got there a half hour before closing and there was not enough time to drink in the cats and their personalities. also, they don't want to adopt out singleton rats, which makes sense but our wilsy could sure use someone. so we said we'd think about adopting a pair. it makes the most sense, because then when wilson dies we'll hopefully still have the two who'll have each other, and nobody will be alone. i guess i'm just worried about wilson getting ganged up on by the other two or something. and two rats having to be returned if things don't work out, as opposed to one. i know how to introduce them after being counseled a little, and really hope that they all just get along when we do this. i feel bad for waiting for more than two months to get this shit started. wilson seems to have bounced back and doesn't act depressed, which kinda enabled our procrastination-- but i can't be there for him all day anymore with my fulltime job, and i don't think interaction with me can really take the place of another rat who shares his space anyway, as rewarding as it seems to be for both of us.

music

today i got up early and actually practiced piano, which was an amazing feeling. i really need to do more of that. among my various twiddlings was figuring out optimal fingering for "chain reaction", original renditions of damien rice's "rootless tree" and amanda palmer's "have to drive", and slogging through this finger exercise book i got when i was 10 and have recently cracked open again to get up my finger strength and agility. i suppose it's not entirely amazing i lost much of my groove from my lapse in practicing, but it's similarly amazing how quickly it can come back if you've had enough training consistently through formative years. so i think if i just practice more i can improve and maybe get back to where i was when i was 14 and whizzing through "cristofori's dream."

at any rate, i'd at least like to be able to play the parts i *write* :/

free food and photo geeking

after that we jetted with aj to a free pasta buffet and wine tasting in shenandoah valley, which seems to be more like napa before napa was napa. it's beautiful out there, and the winery holding the buffet has some of the best wines i've ever tasted. wasn't a huge fan of their zins though, which is strange.

people have been asking me about why the buffet is free, how we heard about it, etc. ken's parents signed us up for the winery's club-- which, after tasting their wines, i have absolutely no problem with. one of the perks besides free tastings and discounts on bottles and cases is that they occasionally give their members free meals. the winery (toscana?) is super neat, and it even had keg tastings while we were there. keg tastings are apparently sneak previews of wines to come, so several of them weren't "done" yet, but to be honest they were pretty awesome already. we bought some port and a viognier.

on the way home i made ken stop a couple of times so i could take pictures. it's a lot of beautiful farmland up there. i am sure i looked like a total geek jogging down the road from the car to get a shot but i'm starting to care less and less as i age and become progressively less attractive anyway. fuck 'em, i like taking photos.

i'm not sure what the funniest part of the day was exactly-- whether it was pie in a jar, the kinda overly threatening "we can get to the fence in three seconds" beware of dog sign, aj's reaction to the chorus of "rootless tree" (a literal "WTF"), the people parked on the side of the road that we soon realized were there to couple-fight in the car rather than enjoy the scenery alongside us... so many moments. i love my friends.

polyethylene at last

after we dropped aj off at kdvs (and i had finished chasing squirrels with the camera) we went to lowe's to pick up *****!!!!!!Hooping Materials!!!!******-- i don't think i can express my excitement on that enough-- both finding the materials and the thought of getting started, yey! i was telling ken that i think this is the first thing i've been this obsessed about in a long while. since film editing maybe?

then we went out for a short run/crossfit workout. my arm is almost 100% but very obviously not, so i've been taking it easy with pullups and pushups, but i'm thinking of starting weights up again soon.


i've been playing with the gorillapod mike gave me, finally, and it is AMAZING. tonight i saw the moon and had to try it out, so there i was lying in the grass aiming the thing as people walked by staring at me from the sidewalk. it came out beautifully though, not a jiggle or a jostle. i love this thing.

i guess am a teacher (and you can too)?

thurs is my last drawing class of the quarter. i'm consistently amazed at the attrition rate of these things, especially this quarter where i've felt spread so thin that i haven't had time to do much more than read the notes i made last quarter when i rehauled the course syllabus a little. but then that syllabus was a labor of love, so maybe it's just... good the way it is? maybe it's good that i don't get a chance to think before i teach so that i can avoid getting stressed out? god, last quarter i remember the first class i taught while in the throes of a panic attack; that was something to experience for sure, although obviously not something i'd ever recommend.

one of ken's and my little rituals takes place after drawing class, when we go to burgers & brew for dinner. this pretty much started because it is the only decent thing open past ten on a thursday night, but i've really started to look forward to it. still, i'll be kind of glad to have my thursday nights open again until next quarter. i've been teaching at the cc but i haven't actually DONE anything in there yet, and that's kind of sad. i think there's only two weeks left; who's going to make that gary oldman shirt if not me???

"come to the faire!"

we're going to the maker's fair this weekend. i've never been, but it looks exciting, and also i'll see sara and karl and that'll be nice :)

when did my life get so busy? oh well; i guess i like it that way. doesn't give me time to get too miserable. someone once told me that one of the reasons i got so depressed might have something to do with boredom, and i'd believe it. it's so easy to forget about all the bad things in life when you're rushing around, but if you have too much downtime suddenly everything's all emo-town for some reason.

keep yourselves busy, folks, even if it's just staring at the moon or laughing at with your friends.