Caught In The Whirlwind
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Been A While
Mar 4th 2011
It’s been quite a while since I’ve updated here. I’ve just been busy and haven’t felt like writing so much about myself.
General Life Update
The house that my roommates put in an offer for that I mentioned in my christmas post was accepted and they’ve gone all the way through the entire process to where they’re waiting for the closing date. The deadline in the contract is March 16th, so there will be a house by that date assuming all goes well. Just need to wait for the relevant people to get together to actually close. I’ve been spending time packing and such the past couple of weeks so that’s been fun. We’re moving out of this hell-hole of an apartment at the end of the month.
As it turns out, so is everybody else. Our downstairs neighbor moved out over the weekend and the people across the hall are looking to move too. Must be because of our neighbors from hell. Ugh. Anyway, it’ll soon be over with.
School Stuff
We’re in the middle of another school semester and as I think I may have mentioned here, I’m taking General Drawing this time out. It’s going about as well as expected considering I don’t really have any drawing skills to speak of. Half the class is perspective drawing and the other half is still life. The perspective stuff is a lot of fun for me since it’s all creating a composition, measuring and then drawing it out. I can do that sort of thing. Still life is…touch and go. Some weeks are better than others.
In other news, two of my photographs from last semester ended up being shown in the MVCC Faculty Select student art show.
I was hopeful that I could get something in but the deadline had unknowingly passed and the show was coming up. I spoke with my instructor and she managed to sneak these two into the show. If you’re local and want to swing by, it’s in the Information Technology and Theather building on the Utica Campus on the second floor. Tuesday-Friday 1pm to 6pm until April 7th. My roommate has a lot of stuff in there this year as well.
New Toy
And last, but not least, I have a new technological toy to play with! If you’ve seen my facebook status updates at all, you’ll probably know this already, but I’ve purchased a brand new Apple Macbook Pro.
My old laptop was the original Macbook Pro from 2006, bought a week or so after they first came out. It was still performing all right, especially in non game tasks but it was starting to fall apart and the wireless was REALLY spotty (aka, works fine one minute, next needs to be within 3 feet of the router in order to pick up a signal). It was time to put it out to pasture, as good of a laptop as it had been for me over the years. With Apple being rumored to update their laptop lineup relatively soon, I hunkered down and waited.
Finally the day came and I pounced on the store as soon as it came up and came away with an order for a new laptop. The spec bumps in the 15″ MacBook Pros were…incredibly impressive. I came away with a 15″ MacBook Pro with a 2.2ghz quad core sandy bridge i7, 4GB of RAM, an AMD Radeon 6750m with 1GB of memory, the 500GB 7200 RPM hard drive option and the high res (1680×1050) anti-glare display.
It was delivered on Wendsday and all I have to say is, OMG this thing is FAST. I haven’t been able to find anything I do that really taxes it yet and when I boot into windows for games…wow. I’m playing Half Life 2 with everything enabled at over 100+ FPS at 1680×1050. City of Heroes with ultra mode enabled for almost everything works silky smooth. I’m REALLY impressed by the graphics card they put into these as historically apple tends to skimp on graphics.
I’m VERY happy with my purchase. This thing should last me another 5 years. Sure they’re expensive laptops, but if I’m only getting a new one every 4-5 years, it works out pretty well.
Christmas Report
Dec 27th 2010
Back at work, sadly, after an action packed christmas weekend. I figured I’d post a quick update as to the goings on.
I left work at 2 on wednsday and spent the time relaxing and winding down. Not too much to report there that’s terribly interesting.
Christmas Eve I wandered over to my parents house to help prepare for all of the food items my mom was making for the family gathering later that day. Once that was done around noonish, it was mostly relaxing until my sister got finished with work and came over for the opening of the presents.
You know you’re getting older when getting clothes on Christmas is actually a good thing. This year shall be known as the year of the sock (which is good because I needed more socks). My parents got my sister and her husband a new vacuum cleaner and individually wrapped a lot of the attachments and various bits and pieces of it. And my sister got my mom a game of quit-opoly which is a quilt themed monopoly type game. It came damaged so my sister wrapped each individual part in a seperate pacakge. So they both did it to each other.
As for me, I’m sporting the new 6″ kindle and a Razer Naga mouse. Along with an x-rite i1 display lt for color calibrating my monitors which is really handy, although I haven’t used it on my main LCD yet.
After the present opening we had a little downtime before the rest of the family arrived. My grandma and grandpa were there, as well as one of my aunts and uncles and a cousin which is about as many people as we could fit in my parents house. We ate, played some games (apples to apples) before my sister and grandma and grandpa left when we switched over to a couple of games of pitch.
Christmas day I went back over to my parents to hang out a bit more. Got to watch the mandatory showing of A Christmas Story in two parts because I came in on the middle of the first showing. After which we played some quilt-opoly (my dad won) and hung out some more.
Sunday I went with my roommates to see a couple of houses that they were looking at. The first one we saw (well the second, the first first one was delayed since their selling agent never actually told them we were coming, so they had to clean up and clear out for a little while) was a ranch type house but the bedrooms were tiny which killed it entirely from considering.
Back to the first house in Oneida and it was really nice. The downstairs was really well set up and the kitchen was probably the best laid out kitchen of all the houses they’ve looked at. Nice big bedrooms, big back yard, only small problem was the neighborhood was a bit less than ideal (neighbors were a bit close) but not insurmountable.
Then we went off to a house in Sherrill which was really nice looking but a little too big for them and the taxes were pretty high which would make the financials a little rocky. They decided after talking about it for a bit to go back to their agent’s office and put in an offer on the house in Oneida. So hopefully that goes well. They’ve got until Tuesday night at 5pm to respond to the offer, so we shall see.
And now…back to work.
Christmas: Begin!
Dec 19th 2010
For a lot of different reasons this year I haven’t been really feeling too christmasy. Too many stressful things going on inside the family and with friends to really feel like it’s coming around. But it finally hit at the end of last week and I listened to my traditional first run through in it’s entirety of Trans Siberian Orchestra’s Christmas Eve And Other Stories which I’ve been doing for years now. So things are still stressful and all that but I’m not feeling as blargh about it all. At least for a little while.
Yesterday I went over to the christmas party on my dad’s side of the family which was good again this year. Very few cases of “who the heck is that person?!?” and I spent most of the party (probably tragically) sitting near the desert table with my immediate family, talking with my aunt who’s house was hosting the party and whoever else happened to wander on by. The older I get the more I appreciate seeing family who I haven’t seen in forever. A lot of those people I only see around christmas time. So it’s nice catching up and chatting.
All of my christmas shopping is done this year, and I’m just waiting for 3 boxes from amazon to arrive on tuesday before I have everything assembled.
I’m taking off work at 2pm on Wednesday and I took thursday off for the heck of it. Friday I’ll be going over to my parents house all day to help prep for the party that’s going to happen over there in the evening for my mom’s side of the family. Officially designated the “people without little kids” party because my parents house isn’t terribly child-proofed. My mom’s side of the family’s traditional christmas gathering at my grandma’s house splintered apart a few years ago since they were getting too old to handle all the running around and prep work involved in a party. So we moved the main gathering to the summer and there’s a bunch of different smaller parties going on around christmas. So my parents will be hosting the people who don’t have small children (my grandparents and a few others plus my immediate family) which I’m looking forward to.
Not sure what’s going on Christmas day yet, but usually I end up at my parents for a while. Not sure if that’ll happen this year or not yet.
Signs
Dec 7th 2010
I’ve been working today on getting my final assignment for my photography course done and I thought I’d share a couple of my final images. The assignment this time was signs. In a nutshell, finding interesting signs or interesting ways to photograph signs. The assignment also had to be done in duotone which is a technique that uses 2 colors of inks to create the final product. So these images are going to look a little different.
So..here we go then:
I liked how the angles of everything in this one pay off against each other. It also ends up lookings like something out of a video game, like Team Fortress 2-ish. I took this one at work, where we’ve got a big battery thingy in the back room. Hence the high voltage and the chain link fence.
And the other one I was working on today. I took this in Boston, where we happend upon a Shell station with a pretty interesting/unique looking sign. I took the colors all post-apocolyptic because the subject was more industrial and the sickly green kinda goes along with what our dependance on fossil fuels is doing to the environment and all that. I also took some of the gigantic Citgo sign (the one that’s visible over the fence at Fenway Park) but we were a little far away and it ended up turning into a skyline shot which I haven’t done any post-processing on yet.
Still need one more sign, but I’m hoping to grab that tomorrow and finish up the assignment by friday’s due date.
Speaking of which, I’m also submitting my final portfolio images too since the class is pretty much over with and I had to get some prints. I ended up settling on using a service called WHCC and they’ve been really great to work with so far. When you set up an account they make you get 5 free sample prints to make sure your monitor settings and their printers are acccurate. I had those 8×10 prints sitting on my desk today at work and my bosses wandered by and wanted to know if I had taken up a new hobby. Hopefully it’ll be a little more than a hobby someday. Everybody who ended up looking at them seemed impressed. So that was unexpectedly cool.
So this is the last assignment in this course. I mentioned (or not) that I’m going to be taking General Drawing next semester. I’m simultaneously looking forward to and dreading that course. I’ve wanted to see if I could improve my drawing skills for the longest time now, but…I’m pretty awful at it to start with so it’s going to be a bit of an uphill climb. I hope I can learn a little more though. This class feels a little more intimidating because I’m roommates with Wassy now who is EXTREMELY talented in the drawing department. Last time I took a drawing course I didn’t know her that well. We’ll see how it goes! Half of it is perspective drawing which I can do pretty well. Second half is more still life things which…I’m not so good at.
Long Overdue
Dec 6th 2010
I haven’t updated this blog in over a month now. I blame NaNoWriMo. It sucked my writing energy for everything except working on my novel.
I’m happy to report that I have, indeed, won. I finished my wordcount while I was over visiting with Kris and Marcy in Boston Thanksgiving weekend. The book isn’t finished yet as I need to actually write the ending, one flashback scene and then rewrite the beginning to match up with the ending. But I’m planning on finishing it. I’m taking a little writing breather break. After spending that many days in a row writing so much, I need a little time off.
So, hrm, what happened last month. Not much to speak of other than writing really. At least not that I can remember. Time to pull out my Facebook status updates.
My roommates who were searching for a house to buy found one that they really liked and put in an offer at the beginning of the month which was accepted. Unfortunately things have been going pretty slowly ever since thing with various things. The lawyer found a potential issue with a possible buried oil tank on the property but the eventual environmental inspection revealed that they hit solid concrete when they went down to inspect it so it looks like if there was a tank there, it was taken care of properly. The next delay ended up being with the roofer. The roof needs replacing in several spots on the house and the roofer my roommates got took weeks (and counting) to get back to them with the final report so they could request repairs. The seller finally got another roofer to look at it, but things are kinda in limbo at the moment. The projected close was the end of this month but that’s probably not happening at this point with the delays.
(UPDATE: It looks like my roommates are backing out of the house. The environmental inspection ended up not being done how they asked and everything is kinda falling apart. So it looks like this house is officially 100% dead. Blargh.)
Moving on…
There’s been no change with my work situation sadly, and it’s really bumming me out. At the beginning of the year I promised myself I would make something happen to get myself in a better situation (ie, out of this job) but nothing has panned out and it doesn’t look like anything is going to any time soon. I don’t know what to do really. It kinda sucks feeling stuck. I’ve just been feeling kinda blah in general over the past week or so realizing exactly how little has changed over the past year.
I am still continuing with classes though. I’m finishing up the basic photography course this week and next semester I’m enrolled in General Drawing. Wish I could take some of the Graphic Design theory courses but they’re all at times I absolutely cannot take right now :-/
Heading in a totally different direction now though, as I mentioned before I went out to Boston again to visit with Kris and Marcy. This time no big concert drew me there, just plain old visitation. I had a lot of fun, hung out, played Rock Band, found an awesome little tea shop that I’ll be ordering some stuff from in the near future. Kris had some car issues which cast a shadow over the visit but overall, I enjoyed it a lot and I’m looking forward to the next time I can visit in that direction.
I never thought I’d say this about the Boston area (even the outskirts) but I’m starting to really like the general area. It’s become one of the few places on my list of areas that I might end up living someday. No plans to leave the state now or anything, but down the road, maybe it’ll happen.
Hmm, I think that’s pretty much it as far as personal activities. Just marching onwards to December and hoping 2011 is better. In my 50 in 365 challenge, I’ve read books 30-35 since I last posted a book update. I’ll be combining those into one big huge update coming up next just to get it out of the way. I’m a good chunk into book 36. Looking like I’ll be missing the 50 book deadline but 36+ ain’t bad.
National Novel Writing Month
Nov 1st 2010
If you haven’t been seeing my twitter/facebook feeds recently, I should mention that I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month this year. Basically, it’s a sprint to try and write a small novel during November. 50,000 words by the end of the month.
My chances of actually finishing are slim, as are my chances of producing something that’s worth reading, but I’ve always wanted to give this a shot since I’ve heard about the event and I’ve wanted to get into writing a bit more than I have so I’m giving it a shot.
The novel I’m writing is basically exploring the past of an original character I’ve come up with. It’s going to be in the urban fantasy genre as this character can use magic. Basic rundown is that she’s the daughter of a russian stage magician who traveled around Europe with his family performing. They were very close and when he suddenly took ill, she discovered that his magic tricks weren’t really tricks after all and he had the ability to use real magic. And she did too. He started teaching her but he died before she learned complete control. The emotional turmoil of his death caused her to lose control of her newfound abilities and nearly kill her mother as well. She fled her family, eventually making her way to England where the novel will take place. Or where it starts. I might have her move to the US somewhere in there…still not sure where this is going exactly, but I’ll figure it out. It’s intended to be a story about her past and how she’s dealing with that self doubt and grief in the present and finding a way to escape her getting mixed up with some bad people who want to take advantage of her fragile state.
So anyway, I’ll be trying to write a novel. Probably won’t finish because I’ve got other stuff I need to do. But I’m going to give it a shot anyway.
Random Landscape Photo
Oct 26th 2010
Just dropping this in here since I never actually posted it. It’s one of the pictures I took for my landscape photography assignment. I liked how it turned out:
RICHARRRRD!
Oct 6th 2010
It’s time for another one of those weekend activity reports I said I was trying to get away from, but this weekend happened to be totally amazingly awesome so you’re going to hear about it anyway.
Like I’ve been mentioning, I went out to Boston this weekend to meet up with my friends Kris and Marcy, hang out for a while and go see Roger Waters perform The Wall live at the TD Garden.
Saturday
I drove up Saturday morning and got there just after 11am. Saturday was going to be a day of mostly running around as they had to do some shopping and I needed to grab some landscape type photographs for my photography class assignment.
One of the first stops we went to was The Container Store as Marcy needed some….well…containers. And apparently they run demos of their closet organization system and at the end raffle off a $25 gift card. Well…we figured we were the only people who were interested so we had a pretty good shot of getting the gift card for standing around for 5 minutes listening to somebody talk. That is until Richard showed up. At the very last minute him and his (I presume) wife hopped on the bandwagon. And I know his name because he won the gift card in the random drawing. RICHARD!!! *shakes fist* This has developed into a running gag between the three of us now for whenever somebody gets screwed.
Other things I discovered on saturday:
- There is a furniture store chain (Jordan’s) that has an IMAX theater built inside of it.
- If you go into a men’s clothing store to look for a sports jacket to wear over a tshirt (a pokemon shirt in this instance) and jeans for a comic book convention, and tell the salesman who’s helping you such, he will give you a very funny look and ask several times if you’re sure that’s what you’re going to be wearing it with.
- Costume store employees who dress up as Master Chief from Halo enjoy dancing crazily on street corners until you manage to get your camera out to take a video.
We also visited a couple of scenic spots so I could get some landscape photos in considering there was actual sun this weekend. We hit a state park that was nice looking but only marginally useful for landscape photography as it turned out. But then Marcy and I took a walk down the road from their apartment (while Kris napped) and headed over to the Charles River which passes nearby which turned out to be great with the lighting of the sun just starting to go down. I took this picture which I like a lot (even though there’s some technical issues with the composition…namely the horizon being a bit too centered). As usual click to get a bigger view on Flickr.
We grabbed lunch from Domenic’s where I had the best tuna fish sandwich ever and hung out and chatted outside of Starbucks while enjoying some coffee beverages. Dinner was sushi at Shogun which was awesome. We sat at the sushi bar and got to see all of the prepwork that went into all the dishes they prepared. The sushi was great even though I ended up totally stuffed.
The night ended with with some Beatles: Rock Band and reading of comic books until I fell asleep on their very comfy couch.
Sunday
Sunday was more laid back. Woke up and grabbed breakfast at this awesome place called In A Pickle, where I had one of the best omelette’s that I’ve ever had (are you detecting a theme here?). Then we went back to their place and hung out for the remainder of the morning and afternoon, watching football. I took the time to adjust some of the photos I had taken for my class and get some work in on Kris’ book.
The Wall
Then we headed off for some Mexican and then headed into the city to visit the TD Garden and settle in to see Roger Waters. Our seats were on the left hand back corner, two rows from the very top of the balcony seating area. So pretty much almost as far as we could get:
Awful Phone Picture Of The Wall
Once the show got going though, we were in a pretty darn good spot to watch the production and video…so it ended up being a pretty good situation. The show started in a blaze of fireworks and pyro (which, as it turned out, were intended to make the arena smoky so the lighting effects would work). The end of In The Flesh? was amazing, with swirling spotlights from the ceiling lighting up the crowd to an airplane flying down from the top back of the arena into an explosion of pyrotechnics and then we were off.
The Wall which was being built brick by brick as the first half of the show progressed doubled as a gigantic video screen. As the workers laid bricks into the wall the video expanded to play on the bricks that were just put in. Gigantic puppets of the Teacher and Mother made their appearances. Eventually the band was totally seperated from the audience by the wall aside from a few small holes which, during The Last Few Bricks were stealthily covered up so you wouldn’t even notice they were gone. And then there was one brick left for Goodbye Cruel World…and then it was covered and the intermission started.
Marcy and I spent pretty much the entire intermission discussing the first half of the show (Kris kinda didn’t want to be there, he just came along to watch the show which was spoiled for him by a radio DJ a couple days before). The video show, the production…the music…everything was amazing. Especially Don’t Leave Me Now which is a track I tended to not like as much on the album but live, hearing Roger belt it out with all of the emotion in his voice…it really connected. My appreciation of the album and what it meant was growing by the second.
The second half of the show started with the band playing “Hey You” totally hidden by the wall which was surreal. It’s not something you DO in a live show. For the second half the traditional lighting you expect at a concert was mostly replaced by the video show on the gigantic wall. Comfortably Numb was a HUGE highlight with awesome guitar solos and the video show….wow. My favorite moment of the concert was during the second guitar solo, Roger (who was out in front of the wall at this point as the only band member visible) was acting like he was exploring the wall, eventually, with his back turned to the audience made as if to pound his fist on it and a gigantic crack appeared and the wall exploded “virtually” with him at the center, revealing a brightly colored landscape with the video bricks spiraling away.
Eventually the band reappeared on the outside of the wall as “the surrogate band”, with a completely different setup of instruments that just suddenly appeared ( I later realized they came out of the floor of the section in front of the wall) and they did the concert section of the album in character.
The Trial was amazing, with the iconic animations playing full across the entire wall, synced up with the lyrics and music. And with the chant of “Tear down the wall!” from the audience the gigantic wall crumbled and fell, and the band came back on with acoustic instruments to perform “Outside The Wall” and with that the show was over.
It was an amazing experience which I can’t fully duplicate through words. I’m still digesting what I saw and the more I think about it, the greater my appreciation for the album.
After the show we headed out to Spike’s Junkyard Dogs for a late night hot dog and drink which was also really good. Then back to their apartment for sleep.
Monday
Sadly, I had to return home on Monday, but not before breakfast from the local bakery (which was…well…you know) and some hanging out and Rock Band before I left.
The drive back was similarly uneventful to the drive out except I stopped at a couple more rest stops along the way making the drive more like 5 hours long.
So I’m left with an amazingly awesome weekend, spending time with some great people chatting about comics and music and life in general. I’ve determined to find an excuse go visiting again. I’ll be up there again for Boston Comic Con for sure and I’m considering hitting up PAX East this year (have to see if Jonathan Coulton is going to be performing this year or not. Probably he will.)
Unfortunately, it’s now time to get back to reality. Bah.
Er…Oops.
Sep 30th 2010
My vacation started today. I’m off of work until Wednesday, woo! Unfortunetly it started kinda crappily.
I was cleaning out Mr. Spatula’s fish tank last night…getting the green gunk off of the greek column thingy that’s one of his tank decorations. I put it back in the tank and thought everything was great. Until I came home today from work and noticed that Mr. Spatula wasn’t around. I suddenly realized what must have happened, picked up the decoration and there he was. Crap…Sorry little guy…
Since the tank was already cycled and all that I ended up running over to the store to get a replacement. He looks a lot like Mr. Spatula did mostly because I really like the color combination. I was going to call him Mr. Spatula The Second. But then I called him “Replacement Fish” when I went to put him in the tank and Wassy mentioned “Replacement” would be a good name…so that’s what I went with.
Blargh. Feel bad for killing the fish though. The first fish I’ve actually had an active role in killing since I started my fish keeping hobby.
Looking Forward and Back
Sep 28th 2010
I’m headed to Boston this weekend to see some friends and catch the Roger Waters concert on the 3rd, so needless to say I’m looking forward to the weekend right now. This stretch over the past few weeks has been pretty bad relatively, so I could definitely use a little mini-vacation right about now.
There’s just one potential problem on the horizon. Both of my roommates have come down with a nasty cold which means there’s almost no possible way I’m going to avoid getting it myself. My throat was bugging me a tad yesterday but that’s mostly gone now and I’ve got a very occasional cough. So I’m hoping this is one of those situations where they get something and I mostly avoid it because it would kinda be awful battling a cold.
This past weekend I went out to Keuka Lake (aka, wine country) in an attempt to get some landscape photos for my photography class. Sadly, it ended up being mostly cloudy all weekend. I went anyway to get out for a while and the only bits of sunlight I got was about 15 minutes when I was going down the Thruway and about 30 seconds here and there. I managed to get some shots that will work out but because of the lighting nothing spectacular. Blargh. And it’s going to be rainy all week which isn’t going to help me get photos for the assignment.
Ah well, just have to do what I can.
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