Still Life, With Cats

I will always, always have a soft spot in my heart for the tortoiseshell cats.

Always.

Blogging from A to Z in whatever order I feel like.

I remember the early days of the internet, back when the ability to create a personal website was still brand new and you had to put it all together by hand. Oh, there were a few WYSIWYG programs out there, and a couple aggregate sites where you could set up your page without having to also deal with the hassle of registering and hosting your own domain, but for the most part, people were still hand-coding behind the scenes.

I also remember how you could always tell when someone was brand new to the web, so excited about having figured it out that they would slap anything at all on their pages. Eye-bleeding colors. Music that automatically played when anyone came to the page. And of course, animated gifs. The hallmark of an internet newbie was almost always animated gifs. You learned pretty quickly to avoid the sites that felt the need to throw them all over the place, and most of the time, people eventually got over the novelty of ‘look what I can do!’ and moved on to better things.

I find it amusing that here, in Web 3.0 (or whatever number it is that we’re supposedly up to), some things never change. An entirely new generation of people are out there, throwing things up onto the internet, although the world wide web is a lot more cluttered than it was back in the early days. The autoplay midi files aren’t so much an issue anymore, but that’s only because they’ve been replaced by video clips that automatically play (news sites, I’m looking at you specifically – holy crap but I hate those stupid auto-playing videos). And of course, the animated gifs remain constant. Oh, they’re much more sophisticated these days – now instead of some little pixelated thing, the usual animated gif is a clip of a TV show or a movie – but they’re still just as annoying.

I could wistfully wish that eventually people will get over the need to have things flashing around and autoplaying on their websites, but I know better. This is the hallmark of the internet. No matter how sophisticated the tools, I suspect we will never get away from the tedium of autoplay and animated gifs.

Blogging from A to Z in whatever order I feel like. Guaranteed 100% animated-gif-free.

Five weeks ago we picked up our music for the next concert project – an evening of works by Hildegard von Bingen, well known for her chant music. Our group has done some incredibly difficult music works in the past – twelve parts, tricky rhythms, dissonant harmonies, but this one was perhaps one of the hardest of all.

When this music was originally composed, there was no such thing as musical scores like we’re familiar with today, with key signatures and time signatures and useful markings to tell you how everything goes together. All you got, if you were lucky to have anything written down in the first place, was a line of notes with maybe a few notations here and there to indicate when you go up and when you go down in the scale. Easy to perform, perhaps, if it’s just one person singing it, or if, as was the case back then, everything was simply done by memorization. However, there’s 13 of us, and we only five weeks, to go through every single piece, line by line, and note by note, and make decisions on how we wanted to interpret them, so that during the actual performance we would be able to come together as one voice,

Or, in this particular instance, three.

Blogging from A to Z.

In order to get in to the office where I work now, I need a special key fob. This also means every time I leave the office, I need to remember to bring it with me. Instead of carrying around a big fat key ring with me everywhere (and running the risk of then leaving it behind), I have one of those little pull-things on my key ring where I can just quickly detach the fob, toss it into my pocket, and then every night when I get home, I put the fob back onto the key ring.

This morning I ended up walking from the parking garage to the office while chatting with a coworker about the new Superman vs Batman movie. We got into the elevator, I got off on my floor, and started rummaging around in my purse and…my key fob wasn’t there.

I started to panic. Had I forgotten to reattach it the night before? I tried to remember but it’s just one of those things I do now without thinking about it so I couldn’t recall if what I was remembering was from last night, or the night before. I got back into the elevator to go up to the floor where the reception desk is, realizing that I needed to get a temporary fob for the day, and as the doors closed, I absentmindedly patted my left pocket…where there was a familiar lump. Clearly at some point in the walk from parking garage to office, I had done my usual ‘take the key fob off and put it in my pocket’ and then promptly forgotten all about it.

Middle-aged brain. This is what it does for fun.

*****

Completely unrelated, I’m starting to see folks coming over from the A to Z challenge, so yes, I’m doing it again this year. As before, my theme will be ‘whatever I feel like writing for the day’, and also ‘the letters in whatever order I feel like because it’s my blog and I can do what I want’.

Do you know what today is?

Well, I mean, aside from it being a Monday, and February 29th, and all that.

It’s the last day of Thingadailies!

Here. Have a snowflake in celebration.

Thank you to everyone who joined in for a whole month of making things (whatever those things were). Now we’ve all got eleven months to come up with what to make *next* February. Whee!

Making a snowflake a day for Thingadailies.

We had some friends over for dinner tonight, and we played Pandemic. I’ve been wanting to give that game another try for a while, but just haven’t had the time to schedule it. Today was supposed to be spent finishing off a Call of Cthulhu game we all started months and months ago, but life has a way of throwing up roadblocks, so when half the party couldn’t make it, we decided to just do dinner and Pandemic instead.

Our first game ended in a miserable failure. We only managed to get one cure completed, before outbreaks took over and we were all doomed. We took a break for pizza fondue and chatting, and then decided to try it again, this time deliberately picking our roles as opposed to randomly selecting them from the deck. The second time around we were *so* close! Not only did we manage to both cure and eradicate one disease, but we had all the cards lined up for the remaining three cures (and to win the game, all you have to do is have all the cures)….and then we realized we were going to run out of player cards two turns short.

By this time it was late and we were all getting a bit punchy and then someone came up with An Idea. Richard scoured the rules, but there isn’t anything in there about a player (or in this case, two players) deciding to skip their turn, so we worked it out so that we actually *did* get the fourth cure on the very final play of the game….but we all knew it was winning on a technicality.

Ah well. Some day we are going to play this again and manage an actual win. Some day.

Maybe.

*****

We were scurrying around this morning doing a bunch of errands but I did manage to pin out the test knit in the spare room so it can dry, unmolested. Alas, for our cool spring weather, it is not yet dry, which means it’s not going to get into the mail tomorrow like I’d hoped. Bah.

I also whipped up today’s snowflake. Open points *plus* oodles of picots.

Boy do those crochet designers really like their picots.

Making a snowflake a day for Thingadailies.

Today’s snowflake introduces a new-to-me stitch: clusters. There were a LOT of clusters, which translates to “bigger lumps than picots”, in case you were wondering and I am sure you were.

This one turned out pretty good except for my poor blocking skills which resulted in one point being slightly shorter than the others.

I think at this point it is safe to say that any dreams of quitting my job and transitioning to a lucrative career crocheting snowflakes for fame and fortune may not come to fruition….

Making a snowflake a day for Thingadailies.