July 2007 Archives
If you're a Flickr user, maybe you know what I'm talking about. You see something interesting in the last four photos posted by everyone. You click on it, and it leads you to something strange and disturbing in someone's photostream.
I just clicked on a nice picture of someone surfing and ended up in someone's photostream looking at someone's injury, including a skin graft the size of a dinner plate. I had no idea skin grafts looked like moldy steak. Feeling woozy now. I'm not linking to it... you really don't want to see it.
I'd best just stick to my own lovable Flickr contacts.
Okay, so let's start with my day today. This is Mercy Hospital's Heart and Vascular Center, the place where Brad and I spent a good part of our day today.
Continue reading "Let me tug at your heart-strings for just a minute here" »
The past five days have found me covered in dirt, dust and sweat. I've also managed to tire muscles I didn't even know existed, and to acquire numerous bruises, and of course those two minor burns (those were due to garden-variety clumsiness, however, and not any special occurrence in my life).
It's been a great long weekend.
No, seriously. This is quintessential summer, to me. Toiling away at some foolish project while it's in the upper 90s, feeling sweaty and tired and very alive. Coming inside to drink some cold water from a glass covered in condensation, and eating some insanely fresh cherries, raspberries or blueberries.
Today, despite the oppressive heat, I drove around in my car with the windows down, just to soak up as much summer as I could. When I got back in my car this afternoon to come home, a spectacular thunderstorm was in the midst of pushing the heat away. The thunder rumbled loud and often, and the rain poured off our roof in buckets. This evening is the first bit of laziness I will indulge in during this five-day weekend, and then it's back to eight hours a day in the office. Sigh.
Apparently I really, really, REALLY like flowers. At least, that's what my credit card statement would lead you to believe, because I spent thousands of dollars at 1800flowers.com over the last week. I also bought a bunch of junk at Walgreens and iTunes and some other random places.
This is the second time I've had my credit card number stolen and had to close an account, check my credit reports, fill out paperwork, etc. I feel like I'm being careful with my information, and I feel like I'm not shopping at a bunch of shady online stores, but this is the second time this has happened to me. What am I doing wrong?
Trying not to be too angry about it. I'm not liable for anything. But I'm still mad. Time to do some research into how to prevent this from happening AGAIN.
I've been lurking Strobist.com for a while now, and the itch to experiment with photographic lighting is getting harder and harder to ignore. My Amazon wishlist now sports the Canon 430EX Speedlight flash. I wonder how long it'll sit there on my wishlist until I break down and buy it? If my credit card number hadn't been stolen, I may have already bought it by now.
Today I had to take some photos of a room for work, and I couldn't stop thinking about how much better they'd be if I had that flash. I did manage to use the onboard flash on my camera and soften it a little bit using a very sophisticated Kleenex approach, and the photos turned out decently well. It always irks me when I take some interesting photos for work but then I can't post them because of client confidentiality. Oh, well. All the more reason to dabble in my own spare time.
Old Pillsbury building, originally uploaded by AMK.
The sky is yellow in my world.
I don't know anyone who needs as much down time as I do. It's sort of embarrassingly, really. I often feel like I'm ridiculously busy, but when I think about it, it's not that I have that much going on. Plenty of people have way more going on than I do, and they manage to survive. No, I feel like I'm too busy because I'm not getting enough down time to make up for everything. I'm like a bad cell phone battery.
This is just one of the many things that freaks me out about the possibility of eventually having a kid. No down time. Would I be able to function at all? Would I go absolutely crazy? And I don't mean the kind of crazy every parent is sometimes, but really debilitatingly, impossible-to-live-with crazy?
These days I've been walking the line between energizingly busy and crazy-making busy. It's hard to remember to do the things that keep me sane. Must try harder.
Brad and I agreed over the weekend that starting today that we'd try to start some healthier habits. All the health problems in our families are getting to be a bit sobering, and we're trying not to fall into the trap of feeling like we're young and invincible. Spinning class has been great, and it's fun to be able to bike 20 or 30 miles at a time without too much trouble, but that doesn't seem to be enough to reverse the expanding of our midsections.
So, we're starting this couch-to-5K program. Got up early this morning and went for our first walk/jog. It was easier for me because I used to run and I still do jog occasionally just to keep up the ability - I ran a 5K last spring so I at least know it's physically possible. We're hoping to run in some kind of organized 5K event after we're done with the two month program, just to have something concrete to work towards.
We're also trying to curtail our worst eating habits. So I'm going to stop eating junk food all day long at work and he's going to give up his iced mocha/peanut butter cookie habit.
Nothing like publicly announcing something to create a sense of accountability!
Hydrangea, originally uploaded by AMK.
From Wikipedia:
In most species the flowers are white, but in some species (notably H. macrophylla), can be blue, red, pink, or purple. In these species the exact colour often depends on the pH of the soil; acidic soils produce blue flowers, neutral soils produce very pale cream petals, and alkaline soils results in pink or purple. Hydrangeas are one of very few plants that accumulate aluminium. Aluminium is released from acidic soils, and in some species, forms complexes in the hydrangea flower giving them their blue colour.
Although this is technically my hydrangea plant, it lives in my mom's backyard until I buy a house with a yard. Last weekend, my mom fertilized the plants, and within a day, its flowers had morphed from the purplish color in the above photo to a much pinker color (unfortunately, I don't have a photo of that). Apparently, MiracleGro has an alkaline pH.
I find this aspect of hydrangeas fascinating. I always knew the hydrangea's flower color came from the pH level of the soil, but I had always assumed that it was determined when the flower was forming.
Exhibit A:
A 22-year-old Scandia woman and her friend were hunting for a spot in the lot near Midway Parkway and Kaufman Drive when the woman spied a vehicle leaving a space.The problem: The car she was in wasn't the next in line.
The solution: Jump out and "reserve" the spot by standing in it until her friend could get there.
Exhibit B:
But the driver of a white minivan approached the spot first and wasn't willing to give up that easily, St. Paul police spokesman Tom Walsh said. The driver inched toward the woman and told her to get out of the way or he would move her.The woman refused.
A female passenger got out of the minivan and shoved, punched, scratched and ripped the shirt of the woman who had tried to save the spot. The minivan's driver pulled the women apart, and he and his friend drove away.
Yellow line, originally uploaded by AMK.
I was going to make some kind of deal out of the 100th day in a row that I've managed to keep my photo-a-day project alive, however that day has come and gone without me realizing: it was yesterday, and this not-so-exciting photo was number 100.
I'm sort of proud of myself for setting a goal and continuing to do something for 100 days in a row. I'm not very consistent. Maybe even flighty, I guess you could say. In fact, I was accused once by a jilted lover as being wildly inconsistent. So being consistent is a novelty, once I'm enjoying quite well, thank you very much.
- Kumiko bookshelf
- AQUS water conservation system
- Better lighting
- Peel and stick chalkboards
- A grill of some kind for the deck
Brad and I seem to have overbooked ourselves lately. The dishes are piling up in the sink (the dishes never pile up in the sink!), there's a load of laundry accumulating more wrinkles every day, as we haven't gotten around to folding it in a week, and the cats are starting to get lonely.
It finally dawned on me last night that we've been stretched a little thin, when I had to accept the fact that I wouldn't be able to finish rereading the sixth book of Harry Potter in time for the seventh to come out. It's not that I've been unmotivated to read (that's never the case), but that every second of every day seems to be filled with some sort of obligation.
If I were a nice, friendly, social person, I wouldn't have used the word "obligation" there.
When I'm stretched thin like this I learn interesting things about myself. My filter stops working quite so well, and I start to do and say things I know I shouldn't. I committed two social faux pas yesterday, though I managed to salvage one so far (I think).
On the other hand, I did manage to convince my employer that we should really be drinking filtered tap water instead of the astronomical amounts of bottled water we go through. I normally wouldn't get up on my righteous environmental high-horse and rouse the rabble, but I was feeling sassy. So I guess it can be good sometimes to have my inner editor on vacation.
Still, I can't wait until life calms down again.... sometime in mid-August.
The Emerald Formula, originally uploaded by AMK.
Brad and I were walking up to his mom's house, when this scrap of paper on the grass caught my eye. "Oh, did I drop something?" I said, and Brad picked it up. "It's your handwriting," he said and handed it to me.
Actually, it wasn't anything like my handwriting, nor was it my scrap of paper. However, it was very interesting. It was a crib sheet outlining the seven steps of the Emerald Formula, which is some kind of alchemical process, according to the internets.
And just the other day, I found this bent fork on my driveway:
If I were a superstitious person, I'd really be wondering right about now. However, I'm not, so instead I choose to view it as a quirky occurrence that makes for interesting photographic artifacts.
Why Brad decided he wanted to start running in July is beyond me. This morning it was like running through a steaming hot bowl of soup. Salty, sweat-flavored soup. It was so humid it wasn't even worth it to detour through peoples' sprinklers because when it's this humid, water doesn't evaporate. Running is becoming an exercise in leaving the house, collecting as much moisture on our clothes, skin and hair as we can, and then coming home and attempting to remove it using MORE WATER. I can practically hear the laughter coming from all the people driving by in their air conditioned cars as we lurch by, spraying drops of sweat with each movement.
The worse it gets outside, the more stubborn I am about running. I will run through the humidity, the heat, and even the horseflies (evil, evil horseflies) because I'm not going to let them beat me. I'm much more likely to give up on something like this if the weather is perfect and I have no excuse. It irks me sometimes how much I depend on adversity.
The finished product, originally uploaded by AMK.
UPDATE! THIS JUST IN!
Movable Type is working again, but I don't really feel any better. It's like when you take your car in to the shop and the mechanic tries to reproduce the problem, but it doesn't happen, and he sends you on your way only to wonder when that scary grinding noise will start again.
If Movable Type could talk, it would have been making a scary grinding noise yesterday. I could post to it from my Flickr account, but if I tried to open my blog admin page, it just came up with a blank screen instead. Today, all appears normal.
If I were superstitious, I'd say that Uri Gellar's fork was #1, the Emerald Formula was #2, and the poltergeists in my MT installation is #3. Weird or bad things arrive in threes, after all.
Really, though, this MT installation has been a bit wonky from the beginning, as you may have experienced at some point when trying to comment. I don't know when I'll have time to fix it, so for now I am going to throw salt over my shoulder, knock on wood, cross my fingers and toes, and hope it keeps working
Traveling for work is a traumatic thing for me. I fear flying, so just getting there is traumatic. It's generally a bit stressful, also, to have to figure out where I'm supposed to be and when, and whether I have all the materials I need, etc. But on the flip side, I have opportunities I don't usually have to connect with coworkers I don't usually work with (often people who work in other states). And there's a certain amount of satisfying excitement when I'm pulled out of my comfort zone and manage to pull something off.
In the end, with all the ups and the downs, it usually makes for an exhausting time. This trip has been more exhausting than usual because I probably got a maximum of three hours of sleep last night, broken up into chunks that couldn't have been more than 30-60 minutes each. We went to a fairly awful restaurant for dinner last night and ate a bunch of questionable Mexican food and I was up most of the night feeling like I was going to throw up.
I've never been to Louisville before, or anywhere in Kentucky, and yesterday I didn't see much of Louisville that impressed me. But today we got to walk around a bit of Main Street, and that was sort of charming. We went to a great restaurant (called Proof) where I tried grits for the first time tonight and approved heartily. And I feel good about the work I came here to do.
In the end, I have to say this trip was definitely worth it. I'm excited to be back home tomorrow, though.
Road trip, originally uploaded by AMK.
1400 miles * 2 cars (one way) + 1400 miles * 1 car (the way home) = a total of 4200 miles which will be driven in the next seven days.
I'm tired just thinking about it.
I always kind of liked the idea of going to grad school; I envisioned that for myself when I was younger. But now that I'm older and have a career, it just doesn't seem like it's ever going to be something I'll do. I also always kind of wanted to live somewhere else other than Minnesota for a while, but that hasn't been in the cards for me either.
My little sister, on the other hand, is soon to be the most highly educated of the siblings; she's headed to Boston to fill up her brain. And my mom and I are helping to drive her and her stuff out there. It's exciting and scary and it's going to be really, really great for her.
