this space for rent

...Seems like it, huh?

I have a couple of blog entries in the works, saved as "drafts", but they aren't ready for the world yet. They just need a little coaxing.

...

I'd say something profound, but words escape me.

holy crap...

caffeine low. big time.

and I feel too lazy to grind more beans. oh, the agony...

on my own, here we go

I fell asleep for about two hours early this evening, because I took half a Benadryl. Now I can't sleep.

Kevin was gracious enough to handle laundry and other Sunday duties while I was passed out. Now he's snoring away in his office chair. Maybe I should wake him, because his neck is gonna have a big ol' crick if he doesn't move.

But he looks so... restful.

100 things redux

it's been 7 months since I wrote my 100 Things list (and I never had a permanent link from the main page to it! shame!), and I figgerd it was about time to updated it... because things change.

That, and I totally lack for content today. ^_^;;

added text is in blue, if you're just lookin' for the updates.

1. I've never had formal graphic design training, although I am a freelance designer.
2. My middle name is Lea, pronounced like "Princess Leia".
3. My mom used to do my hair up in braid rings, which only further enforced the "Princess" teasing.
4. I have been in and out of college for 6 years, but have yet to earn a degree.
5. I live in a rental home with my fiancé and his two children.
6. I have been a Macintosh user since 1992.
7. ...Although I was an Apple user when I was a kid.
8. Then I was a DOS geek for the bulk of the preteen and teen years.
9. I have worked in the office of the black turtlenecked one, Steve Jobs.
10. I rarely eat red meat. When I do, it's in sparing amounts, cos it makes me feel sick. I allow myself one In-N-Out Burger a month, around "girl time".
11. ...But I used to eat a steak a week.
12. My toenails are often painted "Gunmetal". Many years ago, I used to live in a house with a bunch of friends who would paint their toes this color, including the men.
13. I've never been overseas. Living in Hawaii doesn't count.
14. I'm an amateur wine snot.
15. I have always had an affinity for spicy foods, since I was a kid. Apparently, I take after my father, since no one else in the family really does.
16. I smoked cigarettes for almost a week. That was the beginning and the end of my smoking career.
17. I am incredibly allergic to mosquito bites. They often swell to the size of a grapefruit.
18. I don't read women's magazines. I swore them off when I was in my late teens because I realized they were destructive.
19. I love to cook. I have considered a career in the culinary arts at times.
20. I don't like shellfish like clams and mussels. Well, fried clams and clam chowder aren't bad, but that's my limit.
21. I am the only one in my immediate family that does not wear corrective lenses. I guess it's only a matter of time.
22. I have dreams with recurring characters: kids from grade school. The school itself shows up a lot in my dreams as a locale as well.
23. I watch less than 3 hours of television a week.
24. Although I have made the exception when I discovered that we had the G4 network on our cable system. I'm over that. But I do watch a lot of Food Network.
25. I only listen to NPR and college radio stations.
26. I have never met my paternal grandparents.
27. I used to consider 27 my lucky number when I was a kid, only because it was my birthdate and it happened to be my assigned student number in grade school.
28. I've been told that I am "too emotional".
29. I had braces put on my teeth as an adult.
30. I often forget to wear my retainer these days.
31. I love to get personal mail. Hardly anyone sends snail mail anymore.
32. I had my first boyfriend when I was 15.
33. I broke up with my first boyfriend after five months because I didn't want to have sex yet, and he didn't respect that.
34. My brother is 10 years younger than me. My sister is 3 years older than me.
35. There are nine computers in my house.
36. Six of those computers are Macintoshes.
37. I love to play Pinball, and often gravitate towards pinball machines over arcade games.
38. I've only been drunk outta my mind, to the point of technicolor yawns, once.
39. I can hold my alcohol quite well "for someone my size".
40. The first album I owned was Michael Jackson's "Thriller".
41. I played an Italian girl in a school musical when I was ten years old.
42. I can't sing for beans.
43. My favorite band is They Might Be Giants.
44. I first discovered TMBG when I was eleven years old, and was a big fan of the song "She Was a Hotel Detective".
45. My first term paper, in seventh grade, was on the history of animation.
46. My second term paper, in eigth grade, was about Andy Warhol.
47. The subjects of my writing in junior high pretty much set the tone for the my creative tastes for the rest of my life.
48. I still watch cartoons (who doesn't?).
49. I don't wear name brand clothing.
50. It's taken me twenty minutes to get this far. I've been editing this for 12 hours on and off now.
51. My favorite cuisine is Thai.
52. I have one credit card, and have had it since I was 18.
53. My hair was once dyed over purple. I've also dyed over blue, and now I just covered it all up with midnight black. My natural color is actually a dark brown.
54. I make a kick-ass batch of Tiramisu.
55. My fiancé is over a decade older than I am.
56. ...and it has never bothered me a bit in our 6 years together.
57. I cannot speak another language fluently. What can I say, I'm an American. I'm in my third quarter of learning Japanese, and I think I'm doing pretty well.
58. I am a first generation American. My parents came to the states when they were kids.
59. I eat rice with almost everthing, and every meal.
60. I am writing this list in a text editing program called Alpha, and will copy it over to my blog later. I'm editing this in the MT interface. I haven't learned, after losing many posts in the past.
61. I've had to look at a couple of other people's "100" lists to get ideas for some of these questions.
62. I drink of a lot of iced tea.
63. I really have to pee. It's the norm since I drink a lot of water, too.
64. I was a cheerleader two years of my high school career.
65. I really didn't like being a cheerleader.
66. I would've rather been home playing text based RPGs and mucking around on BBSes.
67. I have a massive student loan to pay off for only 2.5 years of art school that I didn't finish.
68. I was an uncredited Production Assistant (aren't they all) for A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2.
69. I spent a lot of my allowance on comics when I was a kid.
70. I still spend a lot of money on comics.
71. I am a self-taught coding geek.
72. I use Adobe GoLive to lay out a lot of my pages these days for sheer instant gratification, but I still futz with the code.
73. I've only been sunburned once... after snorkeling a whole day, I got burned on my back.
74. I've developed respiratory allergies only within the last few years.
75. I am the only person in my family that doesn't have asthma. It's prolly only a matter of time, like the eyesight thing (see #21)
76. I love the smell and taste of coffee.
77. I love caffeine (I guess this is a geek requirement).
78. The laptop I'm writing this on is the only computer in the house with a wireless card in it. Nyah!
79. Working in a movie theater as a teenager led to my pursuit of a career in filmmaking.
80. Having a fiancé in the movie business (and seeing how it can be) led to my dropping out of the industry.
81. I really like Gorgonzola cheese. As a matter of fact, I love cheese in general. When they say "Behold the Power of Cheese", I certainly behold.
82. Even though I know I shouldn't, I almost always have dessert.
83. I hate being far from the ocean. I can't stand not seeing the ocean for more than a few days.
84. I'm a small percentage Spanish, although I am mostly Filipina.
85. I've been mistaken for Japanese, Hawaiian and Chinese.
86. I lived in Hawaii for two and a half years, after ditching film school, and don't regret it at all. I miss it a LOT. I get all wistful for moving back there someday.
87. I'm shorter than both my older sister and my younger brother.
88. But I'm still taller than my mom.
89. I had a short stint as a "Perky Goth".
90. I'd rather be an anime girl now.
91. I wore a uniform for all of grade school and junior high.
92. I consider myself lucky now that I did wear uniforms.
93. I skipped kindegarten and went straight into first grade when I was six.
94. I spend way too much time in front of a computer.
95. I play poker almost every weekend with good friends. We've been at it for 8 years, I think.
96. I've never played the tables in Vegas.
97. I never played team sports as a kid. I guess I was more of the nerdy, geeky crowd. duh. Comic books, board games (Scrabble) and text-based RPGs got me excited.
98. I was on a springboard diving team as a teenager for one season.
99. I've made some wonderful friendships and networked with a lot of smart, innovative people through blogging. I'm really thankful for that.
100. I'm am so done... for another 6-7 months. ;)

april showers

more rain. it always seems to come on the weekends, and that just bites.

so much for the cherry blossom festival events this weekend!

tonight, we have our usual poker night, but I guess for the meantime, we're confined to indoor spaces... which usually means cleaning house or napping. I prefer the latter, of course. Maybe I'll play more Tropico to get my dose of computer-generated tropical weather. Heh.

what do you do on your rainy days?

but oh, those summer niiiights

Wow, anyone who's anyone in the geek world is gonna be at Gnomedex in July. I need to make plans, and now. We've been just talking about it for a couple of weeks, with no solid plans. When I say "we've", I mean, like a group of four. Aw yeah! We're gonna ring in the big three-oh in good company!

The summer is coming up faster than expected. It looks to be a busy one! The spring quarter at school ends at the end of June, we are hoping to take a vacation, and I may be teaching computer camp for kids in August. Phew!

But I do need to get my gnome on, in a big way... and the only way is gonna be in Iowa... w00t!

shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen

My hair is at an awkward stage at the moment.

It's long enough to be put into a ponytail, but it's a cute stubby spray of a ponytail. It's also long enough to be annoying as hell when it dries naturally, with the layers underneath flipping out while the outer layers turn in.

I dyed over my highlights in attempt to return to my natural color, but now that is fading, and you can see my dark roots again. Blast. I even dyed my hair over blue last month, but that was short lived, and was barely noticeable.

So I'm pretty darned overdue for a haircut, but I am unsure of what to do with my tresses. I always tend to go shorter with my hairstyles, but I do so like having longer hair that I can tie back, as well. I've even considered bangs for a change.

I just need to decide what to do with my hair and stick to it. Gawd, I'm such a girl.

do not taunt happy fun ball

geeky chick is in a poopy mood.

geeky chick had a dental procedure done this morning that made her grumpy and grumbling in pain.

yes, folks, it's the long awaited crown on one of her eye teeth.

maybe more later... just thought an update was in order.

ow.

blog blahs

Blogger's Block. Meh. It hits us all every once in a while (some of us more than others, but who's naming names? heh).

For me, it's not necessarily a lack of energy, creativity, or a lack of things to talk about. There have been a lot of not so happy events (for the lack of better words) that have happened in the past couple of days. I hesitated at first to post about this, but I feel that you should know as well (if you do not already know). Robyn and Todd, as well as Ed have suffered some terrible losses over the past couple of days. It makes me... sad, but mostly pensive.

I think these events have actually just pushed me to live my life more, and blogging was on the back burner because if it this past weekend. Take time today to enjoy today... the people around you, your surroudings, and your own lives. Yes, I know a lot of you are snowed in today... a perfect opportunity to spend time for yourself... read a book, cuddle with a loved one.

Sorry to sound sappy, but I guess I just am right now.

what to do...?

So, I'll have the house to myself this weekend. It'll be quiet, but only if I want it to be.

Any suggestions on what I should do?

Top contenders:

• Go to Todai with Mish and Ace
  
• Sleep. A lot.
  
• Be an anti-social loser and play TSO all weekend
  
• Arrange another Bay Area Blogger meeting
  

but, is it art?

Today, in my photo history class, we were briefly discussing the long-debated subject of photography as an art.

In the early 20th century, more and more people were using cameras. The common man had access to cameras, like George Eastman's brownie. Photographs were mainly a document... to capture scenes, landscapes, objects. But now, people were starting to express themselves through photography. We were seeing found objects from new perspectives. Photo montages rose in popularity.

But was this art? Many debated (and some still do) that photography was just a form of documenting. If it resembled art, it was only in the eye of the beholder, because the photograph was only a form of expression from the person who created the image.

IMHO, I think that's enough justification for a photograph to be considered art.

What do you think? Is photography really an art? Is it mechanics or science or documentation? I think it's all of the above.

And I'm gonna continue shooting pictures as long as I can.

missed the bus

I'm bummed that I never got to The City yesterday... the only way I had of contacting peeps at the disco party was via Gnome-Girl's cell phone. I'm not sure what happened, but I called her voicemail in the late morning, but never heard back... either everyone slept in way late, or everyone was just plain gone.

Well, besides Lance... *now* I know that. Waaah. I missed out meeting some of mah blogging peeps.

And I missed some good sushi too. Damn.

look! up in the sky!

BAH! Mikey tagged me with a snowball first. Now it's time for me to wreak more havoc in the 2002 Blogger Snowball Fight...

holidazed

The holidays are upon us. For many, this season brings joy.

Throngs of shoppers have descended upon the shopping meccas of our cities and towns. Strings of Christmas lights, images of a rosy-cheeked Santa Claus and a barrage of holiday sales have been foisted upon us. The commercialism of the holidays are unavoidable. For many, this season will bring stress and empty pockets.

I heartily encourage all of you out there to participate in Buy Nothing Day on this upcoming Friday, 29 November.

Simply don't buy anything. Go outside, spend time with loved ones, read a book... just don't succumb to the retailers' "First Offcial Christmas Shopping Day of the Season". Please do visit the Buy Nothing Day web pages to find out more information, download materials, and read about the history, debates, reports and news about this day.

This year, my holiday gifts will mostly consist of mostly yummy cookies of all sorts and hand-printed photos. Not just because of my lack of fundage, but also to minimize my consumerism during this time. I think that everyone should do something to curb their consumption, especially at this time.

It's especially hard, for the geek in me, who always wants shiny new things with buttons, but I do try. :)

What will *you* do?