December 2005 Archives
Whew! Last night I finished the last content page and cut the folios for the mounting and binding. I still have a few little odds and ends to sprinkle around in blank-looking spots, and a couple of pages are going to want titles, but this phase is substantially done! Remaining tasks: scan the pages, make the covers, mount the pages on the folios, bind. I can't wait to see how it looks all put together--I must admit that I am exceedingly pleased with this book so far.
R&C -- No peeking!
Run, do not walk, to pandora.com. The concept is simple and BRILLIANT. You tell it an artist or a song that you like, and it streams similar music for you. But (this is key) they don't classify by "genre" (stooopid) or even by artist. They analyze each song individually. So if you happen to like the one cool song on some lame new artist's album, you're going to get other cool songs instead of all the other lame songs by the same artist. Oh, and it's FREE. It's like having the KTRU djs at your disposal, without the frickin' reggae show (which SUCKS, by the way, just in case any KTRUers ever read this--if you have to have this show, at least move it to 2am or something and NOT at rush hour, 'mkay?)
Yesterday we purchased our Christmas tree. It makes the car smell good ;-)
The MO handled the electrical tasks
and Melvin helped with the decorating
because cats love Christmas too, you know!
We did a good job, don't you think?
We have a ficus tree that we bring in for the winter (although it's getting pretty big, so this may be the last year we do it) and I decorate it, too.
This year it's a Penguin Tree.
Combine Christmas carols on the digital music station, a couple of glasses of wine and curious kitties, and you get a very pleasant evening and one happy Magpie. (Hello, ornaments, they glitter, right? Of course I like Christmas....)
At a small company, phone answering duties tend to get spread around, so fairly often I end up answering the main line, and then transferring the caller to whoever they really want to talk to. This call, however, left me puzzled:
Me: "Company X"
Stupid Caller: "Person Y please"
Me: "That person is no longer with the company"
SC: "I'll call back in a few minutes" ::click::
Me: " "
So what does this guy think, we're going to go out and find Person Y and re-hire them before he calls back?
The MO said he'd picked out stockings for us and he hoped I'd like them. They arrived today and they are soooo cool! (The saguaro for me and the flames for he....) They are hanging from the mantelpiece already, looking quite festive. This weekend we get a tree (yippeeeee!) and put up the lights and it's going to really start looking like Christmas around here.
The Shape of Days: Part of being an adult is knowing how not to be an ass
What are we, four years old again? People, this isn't that complicated an idea: Don't be an ass. If somebody asks you not to take their picture, say you're sorry and move along. Don't insist that "photography is not a crime." Of course it's not, and everybody knows it, and dammit, you know perfectly well that's not the issue. The issue is that when people are made uncomfortable by something you're doing, you should stop. That's called being courteous. It's called being respectful. It's called not being an ass.
(A bit of follow-up here: Hammering in my head and discussion here: Hassled for photography?.)
I quickly answered these questions and came up smack dab in the middle. That is to say, you just couldn't get any middler. (I know that's vague, but I don't want to give away the scoring system.) I'm not sure what that means, but I hope the MO won't divorce me over it, as I expect he would come up pretty solidly on the conservative end ;-)
(Oooooh, I think he's looking at it now, so we'll know soon!)
We have a new favorite tv show in the MO household: The Private Life of a Masterpiece on Ovation. It's an hour-long show that focuses on one particular famous piece of art. The episodes are well-done and inevitably contain nifty little bits of trivia. Several of them have gone into forensic detail with x-rays and other analysis of these works, trying to determine original sizes, intentions, etc. The program about Degas' The Little Dancer was particularly interesting.
Of course, you have to suffer through some capital-a-art critics in the process, but part of the fun is yelling at them to just get over their bad selves already. Roger Kimball1 is a suggested antidote to these folks ;-)
1All credit to the MO for exposure to Mr. Kimball....
OMG I just volunteered to administer ANOTHER website. What is wrong with me???
The Houston Book Arts Group is gonna be great :-)
Yes, those sentences are related.
