There and back again :) It's been a long week, I got into Vegas Sunday at 5:00, and got back into Austin Friday at 8:30 or so. Wheee! Glad to be home, but very glad I got to visit the city.

( travelogue follows )

Spent a few hours today "developing" my better photographs. It's hard NOT to take good photos in Vegas, everything is just so amazing, colorful, bright, and larger-than-life. Here's a "few" of my better shots:



The Flamingo Hotel by day, one of the sleasier hotels on the strip. Very dancing-girl-o-centric. The MGM Lion hotel, totally amazing, and a light display from Planet Hollywood, also impressive, and one of the very many statues from Ceasar's Gardens.



A few shots from the Bellagio hotel, about as tasteful and elegant a place as there is on the strip. I particularly love these two images, though. The first is a particularly stirring moment during the Bellagio Fountain's interpretation of "And All That Jazz," the second, is a particularly stirring image of the world's biggest chocolate fountain. I think that fountain took some of my soul. It was amazing. The chocolate one, not the water one.



A slightly incongruous old man playing slots at the Star Trek Experience, and a slightly frightening clothing model -



And a safety tip for all of you at-risk allergic types:



Glad to be back!

Yeesh! I'm trying to wrap up my work week so that I can go to Vegas with a clear conscience, AND have all the files and stuff I'd need to survive the next week. This is worse than packing!

Whines has been hosting a weekly "art night" for das furs in the area on Tuesday. This seems like a good thing, I've gotten a very little writing done, but caught up on some reading in the quiet time the evening produces, and it's nice to see folks.

Someone in San Antonio...I don't know who, but I have my suspicions--started calling us "Spines and Wotty." So, Whines has started *drawing* Spines and Wotty. Wotty is a cute, somewhat flat-headed and dim-looking, dragon. Spines is sort of a grim-faced zebra griffon type character, which is pretty consistantly hawt-looking, iff'n you like that sort of thing (it is convenient that I do).

Unfortunately, Whines's art gallery on Fur Affinity is down at the moment :(

He's also been taking a fair bit of care to draw these two characters, so they've been more detailed and polished than his just-for-fun sketches. Nice stuff.

Now, if the perpetrator of "Spines and Wotty" would identify themselves, I'll pull something heavy out of the thank-box for them :)

Massachusettes (sp?) one of two states to allow gay marriage and the only one that isn't currently being contested, is talking about dropping the law that states that only residents of Mass. can get married in the state.

Grin.

I'd MUCH rather go to Boston than Canada for our honeym/moon. I probably have friends there, if I checked.

I made a mocha-latte cream pie last night, and had a slice at 8:15 or so.

Bzzzzzzz....

Week is impossibly cluttered, I've got lots of stuff to do before Sunday when I leave for a week. Really wanted to pare back my social commitments for the week, but that's not happening right now. Any furs want to come over this evening for a board game night?

Still no car window. Theoretically the somewhat useless mechanic I go to can replace it today.

Yay, sleep dep :) Rwanda's come over for a few days, good to see him. Saturday was made dense by a Chaka-Tobias barbeque up north, where, sadly, I mostly hung out with the people I usually hang out with. I guess that's an inevitable thing, though there was more socializing with other people than I might do at Wing Night. Babble, babble.

Father's about 1/3 of the way through with building our new bookshelves, the're starting to look like legitimate shelves. Yay!

Nice concert, "Video Game Music Live," brought to you by the letter K, and Thoink. I feel old, though, most of the games were WAY past my time. Except for the Metroid/Mario stuff, and even then. I'm so 8-bit.

Six hours at church, from 9:30 to 3:00, then lunch, then fell asleep. Day mostly over. Made some pesto chicken using a pile of fresh from the garden, "I grew it from seeds" lemon basil. Quite tasty. Then fell asleep again. Lame.

At work, and owing to a name/password glitch, unable to do work. Yay.

One of the local furries has given me a lead on red sparkling Doc Martins, in my size! Short Mall Safari tonight to check in on those, the mall's really close to my office, so I think I can do that in under an hour, if traffic goes well. Let's see if they have them!

Dad came over last night and did one of the supporting walls and two levels for the big array of shelves he's working on. The hope is that this is the stable beginning, and after this everything'll just be easier to snap together. Then, when all the travel ends in Augustish, we'll be able to populate our wonderful new shelves with lots of books!

Made gyros last night, I think they were the best gyros I'd made thusfar. Nice, flavorful lambburger (mostly the flavor was onion), halfway decent cucumber sauce, if about as runny as half-and-half. I even enjoyed the raw onions on the burger, and usu. raw onions make me gag.

*onion burp*

I'm getting a tropical plant in a few weeks that requires acidic soil.

I'm taking home the used coffee grounds from the office coffee pot, for compost. There's a lot of them, woohoo.

Guess that's one of the perks of working here :)

I think this is slightly XX-chromosome-centric, but...stolen from Meilikii...

( Read more... )

Vinci and Arty, an absolutely adorable furry comic, is having a run where main character number one beans main character number two with a bowling ball, and he loses his memory (including the memory of their long-running relationship).

You know, if you watched sitcoms, you'd believe that the three most common life events are:

1) the sudden appearance of an adorable blond child as a long-term housemate
2) next-door neighbor making major, life-altering confession (is pregnant, is eloping, uses drugs, or is pregnant with a drug-using baby with AIDS and is running away with father)
3) Injury-trauma induced global amnesia

That's all, no rant, just vocalizing.

Fondazione Casa Zegna (http://www.fondazionezegna.org/) would like to
inform you that you have been picked by the board of trustees as one
ofthe final recipients for a cash Grant/Donation for your own personal,
educational, and business development. In the year 1982, they started
offering collection for the Sole objective of human growth, educational and Community development. In conjuction with the ECOWAS, UNO, and the EU, We are giving out a yearly donation of US$650,000.00 each to 100 lucky recipients each year, undermining your religion.

Kindly contact the Fondazione Casa Zegna Executive Secretary below for
further information on the donation.

(contact info)

May God bless you with this donation?
Naseem Rashid
---------

The two best parts of this are the strangely ambivilent closing (I don't know, will god bless me? Is it a blessing or a curse?) and the note that this gift is meant to undermine my religion. That just makes me feel all kinds of happy.

I just checked my mail. Enigmatically, there is an AAA "we invite you to join!" made out to "Spotty L. An".

Well, that's clearly me, though I wonder what the "an" is. "Spotty Logic, An Hyena?" I guess that works in Britain.

Vroom!

Sounded like my company was going to pay for a show for us sales support folks when we went to Vegas, and someone picked "Folies Bergere", or, in English, "wacky lightly clothed dancing girls."

We'll see if it's fun, I've never seen a show like that, but in general, I haven't been much of a fan of dancing-type shows. And here's my confession, an all-girls show doesn't really interest me that much. Discounting the "scantily clad members of the preferred sex" angle entirely, it's just easier for me to appreciate a mixed cast or a mostly male group.

But I can appreciate spectacle...but now, things change, and I have to buy my own tickets. Grump, grump.

Ach, well, I shall go and appreciate the truly ludicrous number of sequins involved.

The copy editor's mark for "insert an umlaut" looks like a happy, smiling raven.

I don't remember all of them, but they were brightly colored and fun.

All I can remember at this point was one stream-of-consciousness where we (Whines, myself, and S) were wandering through a park to go swimming. There were massive (30' tall in some cases) piles of soft, glossy fake fur or yarn, and kids were romping through it as some sort of festival of textures. Then, S explained to me that she was originally a man. We jumped into the water, and it was shockingly cold.

I don't recall ever having the sensation of cold or heat in a dream, that might have been a first for me. However, Whines had stolen my blanket, so that might explain some of it.

Next, the mad scientists were plotting to destroy the Mickey Mouse Club. They had a hideous machine planted under the pseudorock path the Micky Mouse Club March went down, and were waiting for the parade. The music struck up (I've listened to it enough to have it memorized, but Whines happened to play it last night), and the parade started, with the climax being the unveiling of the new Disney character, who was waiting in the wings (I'm pretty sure this was ripped from the "Rock Star" movie we watched last night, where a singer for a metal group made his debute down a long, curving path).

However, the mad scientists didn't have a mechanism to *trigger* the machine, so one of them tried to throw an explosive device (a red sphere in a glasslike cube), but one of the marchers picked up the device and handed it back to them. The Mads screamed, the marcher dropped the device into the inner workings of the hideous machine, and everybody scattered. The almost soundless explosion created a massive, perfect sphere of nothing in the center of the parade route, and plans were foiled.

(I really hate the words "free money," but that's a semantic argument for later...)

I know a lot of my friends are underemployed, or unemployed, or students--this is just a note to say 1) it's possible for people that don't file a tax return normally to get the $600 federal bribe, and 2) we're not actually past deadline.

http://www.irs.gov/irs/article/0,,id=180250,00.html

According to this website, it's possible to file until October 15.

Anyway, this is my token "useful information" post for the year. We now return to discussions of food, whining, and spreadsheets.

When I left my house this morning, I startled a bunny that was sniffling dew off my lemon verbena. Extra special cuteness with your coffee? :)

Apparently having one of the first Saturns doesn't help you, some 14 years after the car's design. It's going to take perhaps a week for mr. mechanic to replace my window :(

Worked on shelves almost all day friday, most of today.

Nice fourth of july party at a particularly neat "center of gay culture" sort of fellow, about whom one might say "they don't make queens like that anymore," except he's not really a queen. He's 83, and his entire life looks well-spent so far.

Spent the morning, for contrast, with my 83-year-old grandmother, who's more than a bit alzheimer-y. Was going to make pancakes for all old people in the building, but the careperson forgot and everyone had already broken their fasts. Bummer. But, more time to paint.

Car broken into :( This is, like, 40% predictable, I'd already heard a few warnings about the parking lot in our neighborhood's rec center, but that was the designated overflow parking, and I wanted to get my car out of our driveway to get more workspace.

Now, my car's old (1992 Saturn), the radio is the car's original, and the inside's a wreck. So, they broke my window, got nothing. Irritating. I almost wish I'd had something in there worth taking so there could have been a point to the entire thing.

*shrugs*

Got to ride in the back seat of a cop car. It's all plastic and drains to the street. Yay.

Nearly through painting shelves, father is going to start assembling tomorrow. That's pretty cool. May be a week or two before we can use them, but at least we'll have them!