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Wistfully inclined

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Most of you out there probably have at least some artistic abilities. I’ll bet that a majority of you can hold articles of clothing up to each other and determine whether or not they match. Most of you can probably slap a teeny tiny swatch of paint on a wall and somehow find a way to visualize what it will look like in the entire room. Most of you probably would have been able to pick your own house’s colors instead of pathetically begging someone else to do it because you have no damn clue.

There are those of us, however, who do not posses the color gene. We stick to solid colors, and basic styles because at least we can be pretty sure we’re not wearing things that make people’s eyes bleed when they’re put together. We’re the type that stand, paralyzed, in front of the paint chip aisle, before grabbing a few colors that look pretty, and then sticking them on the wall and leaving them there for years because we have no idea how to go any further. We’re the type that cannot visualize designs and hues – cannot do it at all. Give us a starting point – say a small palette of colors to choose from, or a basic design on which to build, or a paint-by-numbers kit and we will be thrilled, because then we can make a few teeny modifications here and there and do our very best to pretend that we really aren’t completely hopeless. Sometimes, however, we get a big fat smack in the face of reality. Right now, for me, is one of those times.

As I work my way through the lessons for this Photoshop class I am slowly coming to the realization that perhaps this was not the wisest of choices for the artistically impaired. The first few lessons were deceptively straightforward, walking the student through the various tools, explaining colors and pixels and bits and far too many file formats and how to move things and crop things and make layers. It was on layers that the instructor decided we should all build something – out of layers – and send it to him, just to show we know what we’re doing.

Oh, sure. Building a thing in Photoshop out of layers is really not at all difficult – provided you have the layers to begin with. And if you are not given a set of layers with which to build something, that means you have to make them yourself. And if you are artistically deficient (like me), this means that suddenly you have to come up with not only pictures to mangle down into things that can be used as layers, but you have to come up with something even worse – an Idea. A pictorial, layered Idea. Let the screaming in terror commence now.

I do well with patterns that tell me what to do – because I can take an existing pattern and modify it to suit me. I can take templates and plans and mess with them at will – that part is the easy part. The hard part is making up that pattern or template or plan out of thin air – something I’m not the slightest bit good at doing. So suddenly this oh-so-simple little homework assignment has become something big and scary and enough to make me try very hard to forget all about whose idea it was to take this stupid class in the first place, until I finally told myself that this is really stupid and even better, I remembered that once upon a time I actually had an Idea, and actually used layers to do it. And if it can be done once, why shouldn’t it be done again, this time correctly since this time I sort of almost know what the heck I’m doing.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I sent off my (probably rather pitiful) homework assignment this evening. But I know it’s far too early to start celebrating. I’ve peeked ahead. The homework with layers is only the beginning. By the end of the class I’m going to have to be creating collage type things from scratch, and I’m not going to be able to dredge up old projects to use instead. Layers I might have done before (even though I had no idea that’s what I was doing). More than that? Ha. If I’d figured out how to do more than that I wouldn’t be taking this class in the first place, now would I.

I have until about mid February to finish. I’m not sure just what I was thinking. I am currently telling myself that surely between now and then I will be able to dredge up at least one Idea, complete with concept and scribbles and actual pictures. However, if by Valentine’s Day I am curled up in a corner whimpering, you’ll know why.

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Midweek already

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Yesterday afternoon I sat down and figured out the list of things I knit last year, and was actually pretty happy with what I’ve accomplished. Later this week I will likely sit down and make a much longer list of things I am hoping to knit this year, and I imagine it will be a little overwhelming. The biggest problem with diving into a new hobby head-first is that there are too many things to do with it and never enough time to do them all.

This was the week Richard was due for his allergy shot, so we went in together after work and made the nurse roll his eyes when he caught us beaming games to each other on our Clies. But when one has to sit at a doctor’s office for twenty minutes waiting for one’s allergy shot-induced welts and hives to properly mature, one needs something to do. PDA-versions of solitaire and Boggle help a lot.

I am now supposed to take antihistamines the day of my shots, except that I keep forgetting and since they are upping my doses with the expectation that I am medicating myself appropriately, this means things tend to get even more itchy and welty than before. And taking allergy meds immediately after getting home from the shots helps somewhat, but it also means my hives are more likely to last until the next day and make my arms hurt. You would think all of these petty little inconveniences would help me remember to take the damn pill once a week, wouldn’t you. You would obviously be wrong.

We made dinner together – Caribbean Pork and Sweet Potatoes – which turned out quite delicious and watched the episodes of The Simpsons where Maggie shoots Mr. Burns, and then watched Lost and, for the first time since starting to follow this show, were disappointed. There are 41 people supposedly on that island from the crash and we keep getting snippets of back stories for only a handful. This evening’s episode seemed too much like filler and gratuitous displays of skin.

Bah. I feel as if today I am just mostly grumbly. I am tired and all my coworkers are tired and two of them are sniffling and sneezing through their second run with the current bug that’s going around and all I want to do is rewind back to Monday and have a few more days where I don’t have to do anything at all. And this time I really will do absolutely nothing productive except maybe sleep. I could really use a vacation to just sleep.

This has been a Holidailies entry.

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Back to reality

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Christmas weekend did not feel like a holiday weekend. I’m not sure if it was because we had Friday off instead of Monday, or if it was just so busy, but it didn’t feel like there was any actual break. This weekend, however, felt more like a three-day weekend – helped along, no doubt, by the fact that I had all day yesterday to just slouch around the house and do nothing (even though I ruined that completely by accomplishing lots of chores).

So it was a little hard to get back into the regular routine today, getting up early, and heading off to work. Richard made coffee and the two of us hunched over our bowls of cereal in the dining room, staring blearily at the freeze dried blueberries (I picked mine out and gave them all to him because euww). When I got to work it was apparent I was not the only one who felt a little out of synch. Every coworker spent the day wandering around looking a little dazed. Luckily the phones remained relatively quiet and we could get small things done without having to actually think too much. And it helped that there were pastries from a frou-frou bakery to nibble throughout the day – although by the time afternoon rolled around I think we were all a little muffined and croissanted out, and in need of something a wee bit more healthy.

Richard and I met for sushi on the way home, which helped wake me up a little. And then it was home, to poke listlessly at our computers and also the cats. I am hoping tomorrow I feel more like a normal person again.

This has been a Holidailies entry.

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Guess I have to do it myself

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Unfortunately, Santa did *not* bring me a Finisher for Christmas. Yes, I know, I’m as surprised as the rest of you. So, since I had today off from work, I decided to see what I could do about shortening the list of things my Finisher would have had to do, had one appeared under my tree.

It being a Monday, this meant that the very first thing I did was go meet my mom at Curves to work out. I did ponder, when the alarm went off at 6am, calling her to see if we could reschedule a little later, but I knew if I got up then I’d have more time to get lots of stuff done. So I dragged myself out of bed and I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and I scribbled down a rather lengthy list of things to accomplish today, and then I headed off to exercise.

Since I didn’t have to go to work immediately after like usual I suggested we get breakfast at the nearby bakery (the Curves we go to is nestled between an ice cream parlor and a bakery, which seems either cruel or just extremely poor planning). My mom called my dad, who also had the day off, and he bicycled over to join us for coffee and bagels. And then I headed home and decided I might as well get started because that list wasn’t getting any shorter and the cats still show absolutely no drive to learn how to operate the washing machine or the dishwasher.

I am actually pretty proud of myself for how much I managed to get done. I cleared off my desk in the office and finally dragged my laptop back upstairs (after months of having it living on the coffee table in the living room). I put away all the rest of the Christmas presents. I cleaned off the kitchen counters and ran two loads in the dishwasher. I did a massive amount of laundry (because it was time to clean the bedding). I filled a huge box with all the paperwork that needed to be sorted and I organized it and filed it and cleared out the files of stuff that was over 3 years old and now there is still a huge box of paperwork on the floor in the office, but it just needs to be shredded – a task which has far less urgency. The little cardboard box I toss bill paperwork into is now completely empty (or rather, it was until Allegra discovered it was empty – now it is full of rather sleepy grey fuzz). Even better, the little desk-top file organizer is now nearly empty – and the only things it has in it are the bills that are still pending. Plus, I finally tracked down the paperwork I need to send in to change my name for an old savings account (yes, yes, three years late), and the paperwork I need to fill out and send in to update my passport. I’ve placed those prominently in the front of the file organizer in the hopes that seeing them every day will guilt me into finally getting around to checking those tasks off the list as well.

I still found time to twiddle my thumbs and play a few dozen games of Spider Solitaire on the computer (although in my defense I was covered in three cats at the time and couldn’t exactly move to go do something more useful). I returned a stack of library books and cleaned out the fridge (which meant battling a few containers of leftovers that had been in their so long they were starting to develop appendages). I even had time to do a little knitting.

I didn’t get everything on the list accomplished. I have not conquered my procrastinating tendencies completely, after all. But it felt good to know that at least a few things are now off the grand list of tasks that have been waiting for far too long to be completed. And although I’m not planning on doing any official sort of resolutions for the new year, I think I’m going to try, this year, to focus on keeping this momentum going and see what else I can finally get done.

Don’t get too excited, however. I have always been, and will always be, a confirmed procrastinator and it’s always easier to say I’m going to do it than to actually motivate myself to finish what I start. I’m sure by next Christmas I’m still going to be wishing for a Finisher under the tree. After all, no matter how many projects I might complete, there will always be new ones to start and then abandon, half-done.

This has been a Holidailies entry.

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Fitting

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Yesterday evening Richard’s parents drove up for a belated birthday visit. They took us out to dinner, and afterwards we all finished up the last of the birthday cake. They brought him presents, and among the loot was a collection of Alfred Hitchcock films on DVD.

After they left we decided to watch one of them, and pulled out one neither of us had ever heard of – Mr. and Mrs. Smith. It was described as a ‘screwball comedy’. The premise of the whole thing is that a married couple finds out that, due to a technicality, they are actually not legally married. For some obscure reason the wife decides she would prefer to remain ‘unmarried’, and begins dating her husband’s law firm partner. I am assuming that back when this was first released on the big screen n the early 1940’s, the whole thing was considered oh so funny. However, when viewed from current standards it fell more than a little flat. Throughout the movie the husband tries to convince the wife to come back to him; throughout the movie I kept trying to figure out why the heck he would actually want her back.

Today felt quiet, even though we managed to get a lot done. First was church, where I was the accompanist, and then we had lunch at the local diner because we haven’t been there in a while and it’s nice to occasionally support your local greasy spoon. After lunch Richard took down all the lights in all the windows while I battled the rather dead Christmas tree for all the ornaments. Normally we would have left the tree up at least until the 6th, but it’s been looking more and more brown and dry lately, and the volume of pine needles accumulating on the floor has been increasing. As it was, the needles were so brittle that I ended up with hands full of tiny pinpricks by the time the tree was bare.

We did a quick run to Costco (along with most of the rest of Solano county because apparently that is what one does on a rainy Sunday afternoon) and picked up a case of canned food for the cats, a new sweater for Richard, and a birthday present for my niece because that is the fun of Costco. Then we came back home to finish the task of putting Christmas away.

Last year the living room felt far too empty and hollow when we took down the tree and put away all the decorations. This year I didn’t feel as if it felt much different (with the possible exception of 100% fewer pine needles underfoot). Somehow we managed to get everything into the crates, although each year I wonder if that will be the year we’ll actually have to break down and get one or two more containers to hold everything. I hung up our new calendar downstairs – one with antique maps on each month – and we moved the plant tree out of the dining room and back into the bay window in the living room, which makes the dining room look suddenly spacious once again.

We went to my parents’ house for dinner and had the traditional Christmas meatloaf (a week or so late, but who’s counting?). I introduced my mom and dad to Haley Westenra, and my dad and I thoroughly trounced my mom and Richard in Boggle. We had pie in the shortbread-type crust that my dad makes by hand each year for the holidays and when we headed home, we took with us a huge mirror, framed in gold and dark wood, that came from my uncle’s house and has been living under my parents’ bed for years. We’re still figuring out what to do with our living room, but if this mirror fits (and it’s certainly looks large enough) it will hang over the fireplace and finally the little dark wood sofa table with the leathered top done in antique maps will have something to make it look as if it belongs.

This has been a Holidailies entry.

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In with the same as before

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I have now decided that, should I ever be required to drive in rush hour traffic, or in the sort of nasty rain and wind we’ve been dealing with in this area again, I must always remember to bring my new Haley Westenra CD. Months ago I heard a review of her latest album – Pure – on NPR and liked the snippets they played so much I put it on my wish list. Richard saw it listed there, so it showed up under the tree for me, and today we popped it into the CD player in the car as we headed up to Napa for our New Year’s Eve gathering. She has an amazing voice and an incredible range and she makes hitting those nearly impossible high notes seem effortless, and most of all, her music is the sort that just flows over you so that you cannot help but just relax and think happy thoughts. It’s perfect for stressful driving. We listened to it all the way up last night, and all the way back today, and I think it will definitely have to live in my car now. Richard is already making plans to rip it all to MP3 and add it to his iPod clone, since he liked it just as much as I did.

We were headed up to Napa to do a family sort of New Year’s Eve, for the first time in quite a while. Since my family never drinks, we made it our tradition decades ago that instead of gorging on alcohol and getting drunk, we would instead gorge on leftover Christmas cookies and all of our favorite flavors of ice cream as we watched the stupid ball drop in Times Square on TV. As my mom puts it, by stuffing our faces with all these calories until we feel uncomfortably full, it gives just enough added incentive for us to get back into exercising and healthy eating in the new year.

Since I got off work early we somehow managed to avoid any traffic at all on the way up to Napa. My nephews positively exploded with glee when we walked in the door at my sister’s house and Richard and I were dragged off in a million different directions to see everything that Santa had brought. The K’nex ferris wheel we got for the oldest nephew had made quite a hit, and he also showed me he was already picking out tunes on the ukulele he got from his paternal grandmother. The youngest nephew babbled mostly incoherently at me about all manner of things, but mainly we had to be shown the inflatable spears with which they could bap each other over the head and without danger of injury, and the racecar track where the cars leapt through a ring of ‘fire’ and, if you turned the speed up high enough, would sometimes leave the track entirely and crash in random heaps somewhere else in the room.

My parents arrived a little later bearing all of their leftover cookies and containers of ice cream. We all gathered around the table and made homemade pretzels (well, the adults did – the kids mainly watched and did their best to mangle the dough they were given). Richard opened more of his birthday presents and we ate dinner while watching The Court Jester, which is still one of my favorite Danny Kaye movies of all time. Richard and my dad and Bil-1 and I all hunched over the little joystick controller and did our best to beat each other’s high scores on PacMan and DigDug and some other game that was deceptively difficult, which none of us remember seeing when we were younger but which my nephew was getting the hang of a lot quicker than we adults.

Later the kids went to have their baths and went to bed, and then it was time for How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (which I had never seen, and which had me laughing hysterically throughout most of it. Also I suspect that there are more than a few couples who watch this movie and then, at some point in their future, gift each other with a ‘love fern’, just for the humor potential). We all brought out the ice cream we’d brought with us and sat in front of the TV with birthday cake and containers of ice cream which we ate with spoons right out of the carton until we were almost too full to move.

By the time the movie ended it was only a few minutes until midnight, so my sister went to fetch my oldest nephew, since he’d wanted to see it, and we watched some strange news personality walk around New York with a head on a stick, trying to get a date to kiss at midnight, and we listened to another announcer say that the ball dropping over Times Square was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and I wondered what exactly he was smoking and why he wasn’t sharing with the rest of us. And then the stupid ball dropped and we all cheered Happy New Year rather weakly because of all the ice cream and cookies, and also because we were all very sleepy and most of us not used to staying up so late any more. Just like that, it was 2005 and just like every year at this time, it was absolutely no different than it had been minutes before.

This morning my older sister made a marvelous coffee cake with streusel and frosting and we drank copious amounts of coffee to try to recover from being up so late the night before. Then Richard and I hugged our goodbyes and loaded in our Hayley Westenra CD into the car again, and set off for home. We may or may not have made a few stops along the way to search for the game controller that has PacMan and DigDug and all the other cool games that I may or may not desperately need now, but alas, we could find it nowhere. So instead we came home and collapsed on the sofa to watch Jabberwock, which earned its reputation for being the most forgettable of Terry Gilliam’s films quite well (yawn), and I was immediately overwhelmed with five cats (the sixth was probably still lurking in the linen closet and did not come out until much later). We had leftover birthday cake and leftover New Year’s Eve ice cream for lunch and I did some knitting and started a list in my head of all the things I want to get done on Monday because I have the day off from work, and it has been really quite a lovely way to start a brand new year.

This has been a Holidailies entry.

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Celebratory

Today was Richard’s birthday. Since I had to go to work and he had all this week off, I left this morning before he ever woke up. But I did have time to bake his birthday cake, and wrap, or otherwise set up, his birthday presents so he would find them when he came downstairs later. Since we are, after all, nerds, I gave him another domain (a nerd can never have too many domains, right?), a very goofy spirally stuffed dragon (who we have decided must live in the library on the new library chairs which arrived Tuesday and they are gorgeous and perfect!), and the extended edition of Return of the King, which apparently he promptly sat down and watched in its four-hour entirety. I expect that at some point in the near future we’ll be doing a marathon session to watch all 13 hours of the extended editions of all three of the movies. Mmm. Legolas. And also the movies were pretty good, too.

The office was quiet today, since pretty much everyone else had the day off (we get our holiday on Monday instead). So instead of fielding calls from clients, we all focused on getting work done. I had files to scan for disk storage (all those boxes we brought back with us from San Francisco) and some minor updates to do on the databases for each of the offices (hooray for some end-of-year coding). We all did our best to stick it out as long as we could but by 3am there were only two of us left, and I gave up and decided that anything else I could do could just as well wait until next year and left work early. Although that last coworker pretended to be hard at work as I walked out the door I have no doubt that he was only minutes behind me for leaving.

Richard and I had our own New Year’s Eve celebration a night early, since the special holiday menus offered at the restaurants we’d considered did not in the slightest sound inspiring. So instead we decided to do dinner last night instead of tonight, thereby avoiding crowds and lack of parking and traffic and all the other joy that comes with holiday dining. We went to a fondue restaurant in Sacramento, where we ate far too much of the swiss pesto walnut cheese fondue starting course, finished almost all of the main course (which included cuts of filet mignon, salmon, tiger shrimp, among others) and finally had to leave a small amount of the turtle chocolate fondue behind when we were done. Oh, so very good.

This has been a Holidailies entry.

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Coming undone

When we first moved into our house we rather quickly discovered that the front door bolt was a little unusual. Not only does it latch in the normal manner, by sliding a deadbolt into the wall, it also has a super special secret lock, which can only be triggered by accidently turning the knob inside one extra twist to the right. This has the unfortunate advantage of essentially ‘freezing’ the latch on the outer side of the door so that it cannot be depressed, which means that even if you happen to have your key with you, and attempt to unlock it, you will be unable to do so.

In the first year we each managed to lock ourselves out a time or two, but luckily it wasn’t ever too much of a problem – the other person was always home (although there was one incident when Richard went outside to the backyard to do something rather quick on the front porch in his bathrobe and pulled it shut behind him, and then had to sit on the front porch and wait because I was in the shower and oblivious to his frantic ringing of the doorbell). And since then we’ve been mostly pretty good about always double-checking the latch when we pull the door closed behind us, just to make sure we were not trigger the super secret lock. I will admit that I have become almost paranoid about this. Apparently Richard had not.

At about 2 or so today I received a rather sheepish call from Richard. He’d gone outside to help someone load a computer into their car (a computer we were given from one friend to overhaul and give to another friend, except the second friend ended up getting a far nicer computer beforehand, so instead we offered it up on Freecyclers, and the woman came to pick it up today), pulled the door shut behind him to make sure the cats wouldn’t get out, and then realized a split second too late that he had forgotten to check for the super secret lock. As I sat on the phone with him he ran around the house checking all the other doors, but we’re fairly good about making sure all doors and windows are always kept locked, so he was out of luck. I eyed the time, pondered various possibilities, but everyone who has a key to our house was out of town. So if he was going to get back in the house, I was going to have to come home to let him in.

I had to let a pile of files download from the main server to my email because I knew if I left them on the server over the weekend I would hear about it from our IT guy, so I was impatiently waiting for them to complete when the phone rang again.

We’ve been in this house nearly four years now and we always figured that the super secret lock feature was sort of permanent and could only be undone from inside. Desperation had never before been a factor. Turns out there *is* a way to get the door latch to release, if you fight with it long enough. So now we know. Heh.

All my coworkers got a huge laugh out of the whole ordeal, however. And I am sure, once back inside and not having to lurk on the front porch for half an hour while I drove home to let him back in, Richard probably found the humor in the whole thing too.

This has been a Holidailies entry.

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The sound of dinner

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Another day down in the old office in San Francisco, sorting files, lugging boxes to the dumpster, clearing the storage room not so affectionately nicknamed ‘the bilge’. This room goes on forever and ever, curving around narrow little pathways in between and underneath and behind the huge ventilation pipes in the basement garage, and everywhere, in every nook and cranny had been stuffed boxes that we had to go through and then cart away. We filled the huge dumpster to overflowing and finally, somehow, it was done. My car and my boss’s were stuffed with boxes of files to bring back to Sacramento (I sense a whole lot more scanning and archiving in my future).

When I got home, Richard had started dinner – a head of garlic in the oven and burgers ready to be put under the broiler. Unfortunately, the burgers were a bit juicier than we’d expected – a fact which was discovered when all the drippings started to smoke, followed shortly thereafter by the oh-so-lovely sound of every single smoke alarm in the house going off at once.

Here is when we discovered a very important thing. We have no idea how to turn the damn things off. Richard went racing for the stool and fumbled around at the closest one, looking for some kind of button, but nothing was there. Next I dragged the crate of owner manuals and warranties from the cupboard and frantically dug through it, hoping we might find the paperwork that came with even one of the darn things – something that might tell us how to turn them off – but no luck there either.

And then, as abruptly as they started, the alarms finally shut themselves off, all at once. So even though we never did track down any information on how to actually turn them off manually, at least we can be reassured that, should this happen again, at least we only have to endure about five minutes of ear-splitting screaming from half a dozen little machines attached to the ceiling in all the most inaccessible spots in the house. We turned on the exhaust fan and finished preparing our dinner – thick layers of roasted garlic and slices of cheese over burgers which had shrunk dramatically during the cooking / house-smoking event. Despite the slightly smokey cast to the house, dinner was delicious.

This has been a Holidailies entry.

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My own version of Boxing Day

Christmas was over too quickly. But I suppose that’s to be expected when it comes on a weekend. Today it was back to the normal thing – or at least as normal as things get in my job. I got up and met my mom at Curves to work out, but then instead of heading off to the office in Sacramento, my boss and I instead headed down to the office in San Francisco. That office moved a week ago, leaving behind piles and piles of old files for us to go through. A few months ago my boss had brought back several dozen boxes of files, which I’ve been slowly scanning to disk so we could dispose of the paper copies. Now that the San Francisco office moved, we had to either take all the remaining files, or throw them away.

So while my boss’s son and his friend dragged load after load of boxes and random trash out to a dumpster in the parking garage, I rummaged through boxes with a thick stack of papers listing every project for which we still didn’t have an original copy. Considering there are at least 5000 projects for this particular office, that was a lot of files to flip through, one at a time.

Driving there and back we had the radio on, mainly to listen for traffic updates. With the rain and the wind, even though there were fewer cars on the road there were enough nasty accidents that we had to take a few detours to avoid them. So as we listened for road conditions we also listened to the updates on the situation in Indonesia and India and Sri Lanka. And every time they discussed the story, the number of dead grew by the thousands.

We’ve had horrible earthquakes and tornados, hurricanes and tsunamis, everything that Mother Nature can throw in our direction in this country, but the devastation has never come close to what they are facing over there. So many people have died that they may never know the true number.

The story that touched me the most tonight, driving home from San Francisco, was of the little two-year-old boy who had been found. No one knows who he is, or where his parents might be, or even whether they are alive. They weren’t even sure what language he speaks. And there are thousands more like him – little children, old men and women, mothers and fathers – who are suddenly alone.

This has been a Holidailies entry.