I've finished adding old art to the Artwork page, and as a bonus, I've added a lost essay on Divine Miracles and some haikus to the Writings page. That should be the last "old" content to appear, unless I stumble across a lost treasure trove of inherent creativity.

What good is a window decal that can only be affixed to the outside of the window? I have a couple FSU-related decals I'd like to put on my car, but putting them on the outside is about as useful as a garnet-studded bikini on the outside of your shirt.

Today I continued with composition and Tallahassee exploration. Unfortunately, the Wal-mart here seems to restock on Sunday mornings, which only leaves the crusty, stale food on the shelves when I go at my usual time. I may have to break my year-long routine of reserving early Sundays for laundry and shopping. The horror! I also noticed a car in my parking lot with Fairfax plates -- it looks like I'm not the only one from Ole' Virginny.

For the record, I don't wear bikinis of any sort on any occasion, even on the inside of my shirt.

String quartets will be an interesting class, not because the material is demanding at all, but because the professor will make it interesting. The theory class I'm co-instructing looks like it will be fun as well. All the students seemed actually interested in being there, although we didn't get through much more than reviewing the syllabus. Now I'm hard at work with student flash cards trying to memorize names and majors and the like for Wednesday. Only twenty-four are officially registered right now but it looks like it will be around thirty students.

"Let's give it a more elegant name. Bridge is nice, yes. But bridges break; transitions don't." - professor, on sonata terminology

Friday Fragments

In a particularly generous moment of ambition, I added fourteen new items to my 222 Things About Me page so there's only six more to go before the list is complete. Is there anything about me you'd like to know that's not covered? Let me know via my comments section because I'm running out of ideas. The lists on that page were getting rather unwieldy so I took the excuse to break down the bigger lists into sublists and more sublists. It's a veritable trove of treasure lists in there. Arr!

Listening to Santo & Johnny's Sleepwalk (272KB MP3) never fails to calm me, relax me, or put me in a good mood. Last weekend after poker, I was flying up Route 28 around one in the morning, windows rolled down, and no one else on the road. I was already in an unusually good mood when this song came on the radio and for some reason, the feeling it evoked really made me appreciate all the good bits of my life. I may have been born with a horseshoe up my ass for all the lucky breaks I've gotten throughout my life, but in the down times, it's sometimes hard to remember to be thankful for those good bits.

Yesterday's search terms:
orient express coaster on quicktime, people who sell yellow lab dogs close to schenectady, recipe for groundhog deterrent

Museday Tuesday

	Lachrymose: (adj.) Suggestive of or tending to cause tears; mournful. My Composition (0:33 MP3)

Other than being a possible substitute for pure sugar, "lachrymose" doesn't immediately present a strong mental picture. The definition seems to infer a maudlin quality over a bawly one. All in all, it seems like a word that might appear in a tenth grade English essay after using the online thesaurus one too many times.

This snippet is written for flugelhorn, alto flutes, and rhythm section.

Weird Search Day

or "How I stumbled upon the URI! Zone"

how to make gangster hats out of construction paper

Start with a ribbed paper plate (for your pleasure) and paint it completely black for the brim. Roll a piece of grey construction paper into a cylinder (or a Moebius strip if you are a savvy gangster that isn't quite what he seems). Secure with tape or gum.

"marc nagy" near salt lake city

satellite pictures of chad kroeger's house

free giant flytrap online games where you destroy cities

Coincidentally, this is the plot of the next World of Warcraft expansion. Petey Piranha falls through a warp gate in Super Mario Galaxy and ends up in Stormwind Harbor, pissed off and ready to devour a city.

Review Day

There are no spoilers in these reviews.

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson:
The second book in The Girl trilogy, I enjoyed this one more than the first, because the mysteries of the plot were more related to the main characters -- like many good books, this one deepens the concepts of the first book, rather than spreading in breadth. It's a little slow to start, notably the nine million pages about shopping at IKEA, but this makes a pivotal scene that much more jolting, and the book doesn't lose any energy from there to the end.

Final Grade: A-

Sherlock Holmes:
There was a choice between this and Hot Tub Time Machine, and I ultimately chose this because you probably can't go wrong with Robert Downey Jr. AND Rachel McAdams. (Additionally, Rob Corddry from the other movie is rapidly approaching Jack Black levels of obnoxiousness). This was a fun little caper of a movie, greatly assisted by Robert Downey Jr.'s characterization of Sherlock Holmes. It won't change your life, but it's an entertaining two hours.

Final Grade: B+

Burn Notice 3:
The third season of Burn Notice feels like it's lost a bit of focus, but it still has a few high quality episodes mixed into the bunch, along with tons of cameos from other USA and Showtime stars. The formula is starting to get old, but I'm not really watching for the cutting edge drama and plot twists.

Final Grade: B

Friday Fragments

why you can have nice things

♠ When the earthquake struck knocked politely on my lawn, I was busy in the kitchen installing outlet covers. One variety which covers a dimmer switch and socket next to each other was not available in stores and had to be ordered online -- this type is called a "2-gang 1 rocker 1 duplex" cover, which incidentally sounds like a very good pilot concept for a sitcom in the ghetto.

♠ Now that the earthquake has finished trending, I'll have to come up with my own original content to milk for website traffic again. Faux catastrophes like a Mineral earthquake are perfect for my mock mock tag, which has been woefully underused this year.

♠ The earthquake and its two aftershocks, Steve Jobs and CmdrTaco, overshadowed much bigger news: one of our own readers, whose name starts with a "D" and rhymes with "BOOBY" is a new dad as of August 18. Congratulations! Based on previous experience with OPB (other peoples' babies), Ethan Patrick Fraker is currently the size of a Denis Wick euphonium mute (stone-lined), but plenty more valuable on eBay.

♠ I have never bought or sold anything on eBay, although once I went canoeing on a wee bay. I guess I don't really see the draw of bidding on weird stuff on the Internet, which is odd given the exorbitant number of hours I've wasted on the auction house in World of Warcraft.

♠ WoW is getting boring again -- It's very easy to login and waste time, but playing is more out of familiarity and lack of a better game than fun or addiction. I may let the subscription lapse in September and drop those eight million gigs of patches into the Recycle Bin.

♠ Speaking of recycling, our office is plastered with signs advertising "Single Stream Recycling". I suppose that means we can put all our cans and bottles in the same bin, and then someone will dump it all into the same creek behind the building. This should not really impact my recycling habits because I was never big on segregation in any arena.

♠ There are no plans for the weekend, because apparently we're due to get peed on by a giant hurricane named Irene. I have a new strategy for stocking up at the grocery store though -- while all of the other rubes are fighting over milk and toilet paper, I plan on hitting all of the less popular aisles. We should be able to get through this weather event just fine with a bag of charcoal briquets, roach spray, cold medicine, dill weed, romance novels, and cake frosting.

♠ Have a great weekend!

Weekend Wrap-up

On Saturday, I did a few miscellaneous home maintenance tasks with my dad, and also received chocolate chip cookies from our new neighbours across the street (they baked enough for the entire court). Unlike six years ago, I, myself, did not make cookies for this new neighbour set, although we did give them an inexpensive bottle of wine as a welcome present.

The primary event of the weekend was a Game Night with Kathy, Chris, Anna, and Ben with Anita's dinner burritos for meals. We also did a sex-blind wine tasting (which is like a double-blind wine tasting but with three times the blindness), featuring three Pinot Noirs of varying price and quality from the same Oregon vineyard. As it turned out, Rebecca was the only taster whose favourite was the high-priced bottle, although I am already familiar with her expensive tastes (she buys her workout clothes at Target). Everyone else preferred the mid-price option or the cheapest one.

On Sunday, we watched the pilot episode of Downton Abbey, starring the love child of Colin Firth and Victor Garber, because everyone keeps hyping it up, in spite of its resemblance to every other show starring British people ever made. We also taught ourselves to play Cribbage, and had delicious fish tacos at Ford's Fish Shack.

How was your weekend?

Random Picture Day

These themed chicken tender shapes are getting edgier every year.

Memory Day: Twenty Years Ago Today

Twenty years ago today, on August 26, 1995, I was fifteen years old and about to start my senior year of high school. According to my historically preserved Far Side calendar, the 26th was a Saturday just after the end of Band Camp, and my sister had just left for her sophomore year at UVA.

Having finally reached the Age of the Learner's Permit (15.5 years in Virginia), I spent much of August doing behind-the-wheel training through Keith's Driving School. On this particular Saturday, my instructor, Big Mike, was particularly disagreeable since he'd just had surgery the week before. I did my hour behind the wheel in Hybla Valley with a girl named Lucy in the back seat while Big Mike played his country guitar demo tapes, and then we swapped for the next hour. We ended, as always, at a 7-11 so Big Mike could grab a bite. His self-applied nickname was actually Big Mike -- I'm not just calling him that because he was bulky.

In the afternoon, I crushed soda cans for recycling in our newly purchased Crusher (thanks, 1990s), and then went for a bike ride around Alexandria. Finally, I went up the street to our neighbours, the Jarrett's. Walt Jarrett worked for one of the big publishers back then (maybe Houghton Mifflin?) and hired me to read off several pages of price lists so he could punch them into the mechanical calculator more quickly. I earned twenty bucks for about an hour of mindless work, which went towards the purchase of Phantasmagoria (the full-motion-video horror game by the creator of King's Quest) the next morning.

Colorado Miscellany

We're heading back to beautiful low-humidity Sterling today, so enjoy these miscellaneous pictures of our non-hiking adventures!

Saurus dinosaurs (acrobats on stilts) take over the downtown Breckenridge square.

A puppy dog hitches a ride up to the top of Quandary Peak.

We go horseback riding in Breckenridge on Lucas and Rubicon.

We enjoy a free wine and cheese Happy Hour at the Queen Anne B&B in Denver.

Annie and Mike use their brain waves to move a ball at the Nature and Science Museum.

We experiment with sour beers at the Crooked Stave Brewery in the RiNo district.

Data Day: Tolls

A breakdown of the $6300 we've blown on EZPass roads since 2006.

Time-lapsed Blogography Day: Twenty-Four Years Ago Today

Twenty-four years ago today, on August 26, 1996, it was my first day of classes as an undergrad at Virginia Tech. I started with 9 AM Music Theory, taught by Dr. Bachelder, my trumpet professor, followed up immediately with sight-singing taught by Dave McKee. That was it for my entire day until "Introduction to Programming in C" at 2 PM, marching band at 5 PM, and a major-wide meeting of all Computer Science freshman at 7 PM that I wrote was "a huge waste of time".

Looking back at who I was at that time, an unassuming short person who didn't like making small talk, who walked emphatically from point A to point B with maximum efficiency and the typical CS major's hunch to my general posture, I probably would have loved doing all of my coursework virtually. This is reinforced by a journal entry from two nights before where I wrote, "I skipped a band party so I could finish up my Honors essay" (This was also a huge waste of time because I ended up dropping out of the Honors program soon after because it was "a huge waste of time").

That said, I'm glad I'm not starting my college experience in front of a Zoom chat and hope that kids today are opting out for a year whenever possible.

Kindergarten Day

Maia's first day of kindergarten on Thursday was a success!

She's in the Yellow Crayon class and sits at a table next to our across-the-street neighbor. She was super excited for her first school bus ride ever.

She told this story about the bus ride home: "Two girls sat next to me on the bus home. They didn't know where to sit so I told them they could sit with me!"

She also wore those cat ears all day long.