November 28
[ Taken October 9, 2008 | Burano | Burano, IT ]
Happy day after Thanksgiving.
I made turkey with stuffing (Grandma's recipie, and the stuffing was cooked inside the bird, as god intended... forget about this whole "it's unsafe to cook the stuffing insode the bird" movement...stuffing just tastes better when done inside the bird), potatoes, parsnips, carrots (the veggies were thrown in the broiler with the stuffed bird about halfway through the coof time), and apple pie (Great-aunt Agnes's recepie). I stuffed myself stupid. And more leftovers for lunch and dinner today. Hooray!
And also a happy Black Friday to everyone who is int that sort of competitive shopping thing. I am not. My goal for the day is to stay far, far away from retail establishments. I did venture out for some light errands and got my hair trimmed. When I say "trimmed", I mean I had them take off about 3 inches to get rid of all of the split ends and even enerything up. You really can't tell either. My hair has been getting pretty long.
Experiment of the day: loading a book on CD onto my iPod to listen to on the plane for my next overseas trip. I hope that it works. We will see... I have been seeing some oddities while copying the disks over. If this workd... great. If not...oh well.
I kind of don't want to go on this trip... I have had about enough of traveling for the year. I haven't even left yet, and I already wish that I was back home again.
November 20
[ Taken sometime last winter | Winter | Dayton, OH ]
It is snowing right now. Big, fluffy, flakes of the glorious stuff. It makes me hopeful that this will be a "proper" winter this year. It is even sticking a little bit. After growing up, and then going to college and grad school in parts of the country that typicalls get a lot of the white stuff, I tend to think that a winter without snow just isn't a real winter at all.
I love winter.
The irony there is that I get cold very, very easily and my hands and feet stay icy cold all the season long.
It has been almost two weeks since KWAR (Known World Academy of the Rapier) and while the bruises on my arms are almost all faded away, my left hip still hurts deep in the joint. I can't figure out how, where or when I hurt my hip, and so far stretching and my normal workouts haven't helped it much at all. Then again, since my normal workouts include about 45 minutes running on the elliptical machine in the gym at work, maybe my normal workout is a bit to blame for the hip here.
Gas has gone down in price again. At $1.76 a gallon, I feel like I ought to get some big huge barrels and start hoarding it against the day when it goes back up to $4 a gallon.
This past weekend I shot a show at the dance studio. 10G worth of RAW images. This will take me a little while to work through... and I am going to try very hard to have them all processed by the end of this weekend. Whenever I shoot a show, I just like to have the shots all "done" within a week of the show. I know that I am not getting paid for it... but it just feels more professional to me to try to handle it that way.
Almost the end of the year.
November 4
[ Taken October 9, 2008 | Cast | Venice, IT ]
It is election day.
I didn't have to stand in the lines at my local polling place today, though. I already voted. Last month, when I wasn't quite sure if I was going to be in the UK this week or last week I sent away for an absentee ballot, just to be sure.
I will be glad that this is going to be over soon. I am very very tired of the endless campaigning, and attack ads, and radio spots, and debates... and I am even more sick of having to hear the whiny, grating, "don' cha know" accent (it truely is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me) of the running mate of one of the candidates. I sincerely hope that that particular candidate does not win, as I hope to never have to see or hear his very shrill and idiotic and annoying running mate ever again.
I am going to try to stay up late enough tonight to watch the combined Daily Show/Colbert Report live election night extravaganza (wherein they mock both candidates and the entire electoral process) and see the returns come in. I may need the help of a pot of coffee to pull this one off, however...
But you know, in the end, I am not sure that it will really matter which candidate gets elected... the country does not currently have enough money for either of them to enact any of their grand plans.
No matter who wins, the sun will still rise tomorrow.
That doesn't mean that I don't have a preference, of course...
November 2
[ Taken October 9, 2008 | Ca Macana mask shop | Venice, IT ]
...I love Venitian masks and mask shops. So cool. Also, so fragile, large, and tough to bring back home with you...
Just got back from London yesterday evening, so between the jet-lag and the switch to daylight savings time, I was out of bed by 5am. Do you know that on Sunday mornings Comedy Central does a mini-marathon of The Colbert Report"? I watched it while I was cleaning the kitchen at 8:30am.
I technically missed Halloween, since I was still in London on the day, and it is not the big-deal extravaganza in the UK that it is here. But that's okay, because I got to celebrate Diwali while I was there. Diwali is the Hindu festival of lights and id a pretty big deal in the UK because of the very large Indian population. My Indian co-workers brought in samosas, special Diwali sweets, and sparklers (fireworks are a really big part of Diwali celebrations) for the whole group. We are the samosas and sweets (Indian sweets are basically pure sugar syrup with just enough cake soaked in condensed milk to hold it all together) and then played witht he sparklers on the canteen balcony over the canal. It was fun. How often do you get the chance to take a break in the middle of a workday afternoon to play with fire and eat fluorescent pink and green sweets?
That was also the night that it snowed. It started out with rain as work let out, moved up to sleet, and then by the time it had graduated to a very heavy fall of huge puffy flakes I decided that I would be better off if I just stayed in and ordered room service for dinner. Fun times. I was actually quite excited, as I love snow... I wasn't prepared (clothing-wise) to go out in the snow and frolic around, but I enjoyed it through my hotel room window.
Gas prices. Well, they just keep dropping. When I left last week, they were around $2.40, and I think that the last time they were that low was about five years ago. Now they are barely above the $2 mark, and I saw a station while I was out doing errands that had the price posted at a whopping $1.97. I literally cannot remember the last time that gas was that cheap. If it keeps trending like this, by Christmas time they ought to be paying us to fill up our cars. Well, okay, I know that it won't get to that, but still... it is a heck of a funny daydream.