Art & Writing

• But look at the money I save! 11 hours ago Patron Saint of Sunflowers
  While driving down the highway today, I saw a single windmill turbine being transported on a really long truck. At first I thought it was a missile! The size of the thing was really impressive. I wished I had my camera with me to take a really hazardous and no doubt out of focus and bad picture of the thing to share with you. It was something to see!
  
  Every year when I clean sweep, I make big donations of stuff to charity and I never bother to get receipts. This year I'm bothering, and Jimminey Christmas! That small stack of library books yesterday? $137.22. Two kitchen trashbags filled with clothes to the Salvation Army today? $129.00. That's like two-fiddy written off of our taxes next year just for cleaning up the house a little bit! Lesson here: Always get receipts.
  
  Open windows, sunny skies, and temps in the mid 60s here in Austin. The kitties love stuffing their little furry faces in the screens, smelling the forbidden (and terrifying) outside world, and making the "ek ek ek ek ek" noise after all the birds.
  
  Baby blanket for the Landreths is almost finished; it went lickity-split! I'll share a photo after it's been delivered to the recipients. In the making, I've learned a lot about stranded knitting where you use more than one color of yarn at a time to knit a pattern into the work. I think I've figured out what was causing some of the problems I kept making with the 84,000 pirate hats I made last year. Ancora imparo.
  
  Our cable company has earned my ire once more. Last summer, we signed up for a special for two months of HBO for free. They didn't cancel it as they should, charged us all fall, it took 90 minutes on the phone to straighten it out. I negotiated with them, and they came through with all kinds of crazy free stuff to make up for the inconvenience, which was great. Then the all kinds of crazy free stuff expired, and we got charged for it all, and now I'm back to negotiating with them again to turn all this crazy stuff off, stop billing us for it, and refund our money.
  
  I'm thinking of canceling our cable television service when Ian stops working. We will both be unemployed and living entirely out of our savings until he finds a new job and we move. We're already living largely without many luxuries (which is fine, since we don't desire too many, either so it's not like we often feel deprived); there isn't much fat to cut out of the budget. Cable television, however, is something that it might be interesting to try living without. I'm on this kick with watching our collection of owned DVDs anyhow. I'd probably keep our Netflix service in that event. We'd definitely keep Internet service since that's fairly vital to us, and we could watch TV shows on Hulu anyhow. I plan to call the cable company and see what kind of money we'd actually save* if we did this. It would involve unbundling our cable from the Internet, thus changing the price we pay for it, so it's not like I can look on the bill and figure it out on my own. Never hurts to ask, however.
  
  Speaking of watching our DVDs, I've moved through "Frailty" which I still think is one of the best suspenseful thrillers out there, and the always wonderful, "From Dusk Till Dawn" which just makes me think of nightcrawler88 every time I see it! That concludes the letter F. Next stop, the thoroughly excellent and most quotable, "Galaxy Quest."
  
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  * Speaking of the money we save, I leave you with a really raunchy dirty limerick passed down in my mother's family -- yes, my grandmother taught me this one:
  
  There once was a man named Dave
  Who screwed a dead whore in a cave
  He said, "I'll admit, I'm a hell of a shit,
  But look at the money I save!"
  
  Therefore the phrase, "Look at the money I save," always gets a chuckle out of my family. That's popular along with, "I rang the bell, didn't I?" which is from an entirely different yet equally dirty joke. But that is the story for another day.
• Komodo King 1 day ago Top of the Mountains
  I've noticed a lot of cool photo manipulations online lately and got the itch to try my hand at one. Here's the result, which I'm calling "Komodo King."
• Everything Must Go! 2 days ago Patron Saint of Sunflowers
  Snapped just a little bit yesterday -- I'm done. Just lonely, and listless and adrift for too long. Don't worry, this is hardly a bona fide Cry For Help or anything; I'm okay in general -- Ian's portfolio is coming along nicely, next will follow his job search, then we pick up stakes and move again, hopefully next time to settle for several years at least. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! Nevertheless, I don't mind sharing that PMS has a way of sort of highlighting the stressful things already on your mind anyhow, and yesterday I just got plain tired of being so lonely out here and feeling kind of useless. That, and today is the 25th anniversary of my father's death. After 25 years, it's hardly the occasion for semi-spontaneous bursts of tears, but naturally that sort of thing does make one dwell on thoughts of loss in general. You know how it goes. Dark moment.
  
  Fortunately, I know a way to put my stress to use, so I started on our pre-move clean sweep! I've said it many times before and will no doubt continue somehow to feel surprise when I say this again many times in the future: No matter how good I think we are at keeping the clutter to a minimum, and living free of the weight of unwanted objects, somehow they do manage to pile up. Every time I've done a clean sweep, I just find mountains of crap smothering us! It truly amazes me how easily it builds up.
  
  I've got a great big pile of my clothing and a smaller pile of miscellaneous housewares that are going to Salvation Army, a very small stack of about five books to go to the public library, and a heaping shopping bag full of dry goods to take to the food bank. That was just the Lightning Round, the first pass that makes the easy choices. The great thing about doing a clean sweep to stave off the monster of stress is that it's very easily done. I find I deliberate less, am far less wishy-washy about stuff. Haven't worn it, read it, used it, touched it in years? It's gotta go!
  
  The next round follows in the spirit of my New Year's Resolution to challenge my old way of thinking about everything else in the house in the general "keep" pile of our lives. Do these objects still fulfill their original purpose? Do they even work, or have they sat in need of repair for perhaps years? Are they useful? Are they beautiful? Do they benefit our lives, or hang on us so much dead weight? Those are the tougher choices. Good way to work through a little stress, however. When the fog lifts, I'll have finished a useful chore and felt a little more useful myself.
  
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• Henry James 4 days ago Patron Saint of Sunflowers
  I mentioned to you before that I'm taking a leisurely stroll through The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Seventh Edition, Volume C: 1865-1914. This totally fits my New Year's theme about trying new things since I doubt I'd have deliberately picked up most of what I'm encountering in here. I'm introducing myself to good stuff -- and even the not so good stuff is still fun to try out, see how I like it.
  
  Henry James has been a fun discovery for me. He's probably best well known for The Turn of the Screw and The Portrait of a Lady, with which I am as yet completely unfamiliar, as books or movies. Norton tells me that James is known for characters and stories that just barely scratch the surface and hint at something more, and I agree with that assessment. He makes me ask questions and make assumptions unconsciously in a clever way that I enjoy.
  
  Last spring, my English class read and discussed his short story, "Daisy Miller: A Study." It's told from what Norton also tells me is a typical James point of view: what I describe (though Norton would say differently) as a less interesting, weaker character who tells the story of a "bigger," stronger character. In this one, bigger-than-life American girl Daisy Miller is touring Europe with her mother. Daisy is, quite frankly, a slut -- or a slut waiting to happen, anyhow! She's loose, pays little attention to social protocols for chaperons and appropriate behavior for a young lady. She gets into trouble not how one would think, but by contracting malaria by hanging out in the wrong place late at night, and thus pays the ultimate price for her sluttitude. My English class was really divided on the character of the narrator, European Winterborne. Were his intentions toward Daisy pure, or was she just an easy mark, a Lolita to him? It didn't take much discussion before we realized that James never tells us Daisy's age. The class had guesses ranging from age 13 to 23! You can imagine that one's perception of the entire story would be strongly affected by that one slight detail. If Winterborne is sniffing after a young adult of marriageable age, he's hardly at fault. If he's attracted to a young teen with a conveniently inattentive mother? Whole different ballgame!
  
  I think James' stories are somewhat like episodes of "Seinfeld" -- not much seems to really happen; they're driven by characters, not plot. The characters all seem to have this sort of quiet sense of desperation about them, yet he paints even that with subtlety, not going overboard. I might like to try one of his novels sometime, however, as I did so much enjoy a few of his short stories. I'd like to give the novel a chance to see if his already interesting characters do more with their interesting selves, and get a little thicker plot going over the long haul. The Portrait of a Lady was apparently one of his earlier works when the man could state an idea directly, so that might be to my liking. I have discovered that I enjoy his earlier works more than the latter. I perceive James' writing style changed a bit over time, and got more complex. His later stories seem to use bigger words for no real reason, sort of clogging the pipes of thought with little gained for it. (Ah-ha! Wikipedia backs me up on this, it turns out: Beginning in the second period [of James' writing], but most noticeably in the third, he increasingly abandoned direct statement in favor of frequent double negatives, and complex descriptive imagery. Single paragraphs began to run for page after page, in which an initial noun would be succeeded by pronouns surrounded by clouds of adjectives and prepositional clauses, far from their original referents, and verbs would be deferred and then preceded by a series of adverbs.)
  
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• CURSE YOU, AQUASCUM! 4 days ago Patron Saint of Sunflowers
  Well -- shee-it. That DVR still owes me money!
  
  Wouldn't you know it! I recorded the Academy Awards last night. This morning I deftly avoided any news about who or which pictures won. I just sat down and watched the whole thing, and...
  
  The DVR stopped recording right in the middle of presentations for the nominees for Best Actor!
  
  I don't know who won Best Actor, Best Actress, or which won Best Picture!
  
  @#$%^&*(^$!+!!!!!!!
  
  ARGH!
• Mormon Digitization Project, resurrected 4 days ago Top of the Mountains
  I'm resurrecting the Mormon Digitization Project, which I blogged about nine months ago and then abandoned while I went and got married.
• Gadget Upgrades I'd Like 4 days ago Patron Saint of Sunflowers
  Before I make a major purchase, particularly a big change or upgrade to technology (since I'm a late-adopting Luddite), I conduct a conscious survey of my desire over a course of months. That way I know whether the fancy was a passing impulse, or something I'd really enjoy.
  
  For the past year, I've been plotting out how much I'd really use an iPhone (or similar product) -- lots, as it turns out! I couldn't count the times I've wished I had Internet access on the go, or a nice screen where I could see a map (since I also do not have a GPS unit in my car -- another gadget I think I'd really enjoy), or various other amusing functions that gadget provides. When Ian and I are both working again and we have some fiat money, I think I'd really like to upgrade to an iPhone -- particularly since they've announced that they'll soon offer service through T-Mobile as well as AT&T. I've been happy with my T-Mobile service for nearly a decade now, and this news pleases me.
  
  Tonight, however, I'm logging the desire for a different gadget: a television in our bedroom. I'm recording the Oscars downstairs, but I don't really want to sit downstairs now. It's cold, and lonely by myself, and seems so very far from Ian upstairs. If, on the other hand, I could curl up in bed, propped up on All The Pillows In The World, turn on the Academy Awards, and sit there all cuddly and knit right now? OH HEAVEN!
  
  I'm thinking more and more that I'd like to have a second television, in the bedroom. It'd be nice to watch TV already in my jammies and then shut it off and roll over and go to sleep -- or occasionally have a lazy movie day there instead of the living room. (Of course this mandates not merely a second TV, but also DVD player, where will the madness end??, however that's not really the topic right now.)
  
  Add this to the list of Things To Spend Money On at some mythical point in the future when I'm apparently done spending my money on more important things.
  
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• Best Way to Move Cats Across Country 4 days ago Patron Saint of Sunflowers
  Our next move will take us at least 1,000 miles from our present home in Austin. Ian and I are debating the best way to transport our two cats. Do any of you have experience moving cats - not dogs; they're really quite different, cats - across country? How did you do it, and do you have any advice to offer?
  
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• Switching web hosts 5 days ago Top of the Mountains
  I'm switching web hosts. (Hurray! :)) For the last few years I've been on Bluehost and while it was mostly acceptable, I've outgrown it.
• Pedigree chart sharing 6 days ago Top of the Mountains
  I needed a web app to share pedigree charts with my sister on the other side of the country, so I wrote one. It's called Pedigree.