photos

Back at work, kids will go back soon-ish. A new year has begun in full force. Jobs to be done: get Wii fixed, get out of debt, get a handle on taxes, figure out where Leah and I will live next. I’ll ship the Wii today. The rest are nontrivial, but can be managed.

Random image, for a not bad year. Lovely mellow night here with the kids, in and out at parties.

HAPPY NEW YEAR Y’ALL

I like this photo by Grace Davis very much. It’s from dinner at Olio E Limone prior to going to see Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris perform.

Had a great time, and we’re wiped out. Here are some vaguely representative photos via a fuzzy phone camera.

This is Leah and Me at a very unflattering angle listening to my Uncle Lee sing at a local church service (Lutheran) he sounded great!

And here’s the same uncle and my aunt singing on Christmas Day:

And here’s a cousin (Mike) and my Grandma (Jean) and the new in-training puppy (Toby):

That’s all I have for photos. I also have a drawing I did as the basis of an ornament for some friends of ours who happen to love Linux and the Ocean. I did it in pen, then a brush pen, then embellished in PhotoShop. Leah and colored the final product with crayons. That’s right, we were kicking it like 2nd Grade, baby!

Right now, 9:56pm on Christmas Day in the Year of Our Lord 2007, I want to sleep now.

I bid you peace.

Leah and I took a trip to a local Thousand Oaks Ralphs Supermarket—freeway-close and near the intersection of Moorpark Road and Janss Road—to get some Christmas essentials—namely: colored cellophane paper, candy canes, and IBUPROFEN. And what to my wandering eyes did appear, TWO AISLES OF SEASONAL TRAPPINGS. Only, what Season? Perhaps Christmas? Perhaps New Year’s? Here we are, December 19th in the year of Our Lord, two-thousand and seven. Guess again, says the Universe. No, not Christmas. No, not two aisles of New Year’s hats and noisemakers. The reason for the Season, and a two aisle display of candy and suchlike—VALENTINE’S DAY.

My eyes goggled, I went stiff from shock. I pointed this out to Leah. She was stunned. I snapped a photo so I could chronicle this sign of the times in a blog post.

Greetings America! You’re crazy!

Excellent photo by Mack Reed over on Metroblogging.la: “Frigid dawn over Los Angeles”:

Absolutely beautiful. About ten years ago I worked downtown on the night shift at California Hospital, just a few years after that I worked as a temp at ARCO working on web pages, where I first encountered any server-side programming in a little language called Perl. Photos like these remind me of the great beauty possible in a city some consider ugly and cruel. Not me. Me, I love Los Angeles.

So Flickr Pro users now have access to stats, also announced on the flickr blog on the amounts of traffic they get, and where that traffic comes from. One of the first things I saw was a post on Valleywag that uses an old image from my Amiga Pictures set, here’s another old link to my
amiga set, and another:

Most of my images are licensed under a Creative Commons license, and it’s fun to see where these are used. For example, the Wikipedia article “Book” includes a photo of mine of Kali Kirk at the San Diego City College Learning Resource Center, which was taken for the technical writing class Leah and I took at City College in San Diego several years ago. I mentioned it in a blog post back in 2004. And actually, that image was one that I recieved a note from someone from The Pirate Party about using in a poster back in 2006. I never heard anything more about that though. This is the image:

Two silly ones pulled in from starwars.yahoo.com, recent: 1 and 2:

Here’s a usage of this image from a post in Hebrew. Interesting, but I wonder what the article is saying? I tried Google Translate and Babelfish and don’t see any machine Hebrew to English translators. What’s up with Hebrew? Is it harder to machine translate than, say Arabic or Chinese or Korean or Japanese? Or is it simply a less popular language?

More great work from flickr. I’m impressed. We use it to print family photos and get prints at Target, excellent service. Unrelated, but I thought I’d mention it since I’m all warm and fuzzy and enthusiastic about the service today.

I really like the photo, but we do look a bit worn out. I do like it very much though. Dooce takes some great photos. This photo was from Friday night, pretty late.

Backstory: Last Tuesday, Leah drove with Alison and Tony (my niece and her husband) back to Utah, where they will go to school. They were great houseguests and their soups will be missed. So last week Leah was hanging out with Robin and the Armstrongs. I stayed back and worked. On Friday I flew to Utah, Saturday hung out in Utah, yesterday drove the 750 or so miles from Salt Lake City to LAX, then LAX to home in Moorpark.

I’m way behind on phone calls with a few colleagues. I will catch up today and tomorrow.

I’m late mentioning this, but the security requirements doled out by the Transportation Security Agency are mindless and stupid and arbitrary. I don’t even think about them anymore. Put my shoes in a bin? Okay, fine. Keep my paperwork in my hand? Okay. Hand carry my bag over to the security screeners? Okay. Bah.

Southwest Airlines is more like a bus than an airline. I actually kind of like that.

I arrived to snowfall, and impressive driving by Dooce and co-piloting by Chuck and Leahpeah. I was happy to arrive safely, and even happier to end the night with conversation and a nightcap. Then, precious sleep.

Incidentally, this is what happens to the aggregate traffic on my hosting account when Leah gets Dooced. In case you can’t tell that’s about a quadrupling of our aggregate bandwidth usage. Luckily, we could sustain that. But if we have more growth like that I’ll need to look at another upgrade. Still, Leah’s site has stayed up like a champ.

The rings Leah made look just as good in person. Does she have a future in lapidary arts and jewelry-making? Who can say? She is a person who takes to creative projects with aplomb and seemingly, with ease. I’m not sure if she’d call it easy. But she paints, takes photos, draws, watercolors, sews, knits, makes jewelry, beads and those are just the ones off the top of my head!

Saturday we hung out with Los tres Armstrongs and had a lovely time. Included, much talk of Disney Princesses and Dora the Explorer and her friends and wondrous chilling out. Then, sushi with adult conversation. Nothing Jon Deal has to say in this post is true except maybe the participants, but it was nice meeting him and his wife. I got kudos for driving in snow. Bah, I’ve driven in snow before! I’m a big boy! I can do it! Mooooooooooooom! But seriously, it felt pretty manly to man a snow scraper for the first time in years.

Sunday the pioneer children drove and drove and drove. It was a good trip once we got through the weather in Salt Lake City and southward. Leah was happy once we hit about St. George. No snow on the ground, we washed the car, we gassed up, we bought drive-thru tater tots.

Sidenote: If Leah is going to order at a drive-thru, the order is going to get wrong. It doesn’t matter who does the talking (me)—they are apt to “forget” we said “tater tots” when we said “french fries.” Also, fry sauce and mints!

Then we drove, and then we almost got by Las Vegas (good only as the place we got married) but then I had to urinate, and at the stop I chose, the AM/PM Mini Mart and Gas Station was CLOSED. Like, concrete barricades. Like, shut down. And yes, we had just seen the sign off the highway saying “AM/PM MINI MART NEXT EXIT: Last Chance to Pee!” I am not making that up. That’s a true fact, and yet, they were closed. Then we escaped, but not before making a left turn to get back on the freeway, and diligently following the the dotted white line for the turn lane onto the service road for the freeway. Problem: Leah suddenly saying “Uh, those headlights are pointed in our direction.” I said, “uh, yes they are”—then I changed lanes as far right as possible. That dotted line was representing Las Vegas, and that’s when we realized that LAS VEGAS WAS TRYING TO KILL US. We politely declined and got gas and relived ourselves and got coffee in Primm, Nevada. That’s when we realized that we don’t like Nevada at all, whatsoever. I don’t think it likes us either.

Then we came further south on the 15 to the 10 so we could go to LAX, and I don’t remember the 10 freeway being so complicated. About every 10 minutes I was choosing to stay on the 10 and this required lane changes, at least that’s how it felt. I was not impressed. Eventually, after 12 hours of driving, we got home, and collapsed in heaps.

Now, the workweek begins!

Oh, also, Chuck and Leta and Jon and Dooce are every bit as charming as you might suppose. We are glad of their generous hospitality. Also, the conversations about hosting, WordPress, Drupal and whatnot were awesome. I think Leah likes using the cameras of others, too:

I had a great weekend. I am very tired.

Week, here I come!

Went bowling yesterday with co-workers, it was pretty fun. I bowled a 137, a 130, and a 114 which put me third among the 12 folks bowling.

My head is feeling better too. It’s all good.

The song in my head which I was unable a good copy of from either on iTunes, Amazon MP3 store, or via skreemr is Oblivious by Aztec Camera. Meanwhile, YouTube does not disappoint.

Particularly the line “I see you crying and I want to kill your friends”.