existential fashion disaster

I upgraded the blog to Wordpress 2.6 today. I started the process at work, at the Y, which I was worried about, since the computer there is a little slow and I don’t have any of my backup versions of files there. It went fairly smooth, though… basically only left the custom, random header image thing to do here, and a little debugging. This will serve as my Livejournal crosspost test, since that is a new/old plugin… development on the one I had been using seems to have ceased. I guess this will also test all the other new and old features. There’s a new Flickr plugin, too. It’s been a good n’ geeky day.

We’re going to see Step Brothers tonight with our recently engaged friends Jess and Jason. It looks like a typical Will Ferrel flick, which is usually a good take, and we used our $5 coupons from the opening night of Hancock… so it’s totally worth the price of admission, pretty much, no matter what.

Next weekend is our Theater in the Woods/Troll/etc weekend. I’ve definitely been looking forward to it. That also means that I have a four-day work week for camp… which is awesome. Not that camp’s hard, but it is a little draining. Only three weeks left, now. It also means that I get to do some more driving. Taking the metra/cta into work all summer has been fun, but I miss driving, and this should help make up for it. I guess I have to be more careful, now that I’m on my extended warranty. I didn’t know it was going to cost me a $100 deductible every time I needed something fixed for the next 50,000 miles.

Current Mood:  chipper

Camp is a much easier than adventure ed, but the hours are longer. We (the adventure ed facilitators) complained amongst ourselves about not being paid for all the time between classes, but those hours were nice, relaxing breaks. Breaks just don’t happen in the summer. I don’t have to think nearly as much; I’m barely doing any programming at all, only running or playing games a couple times a week. But all the running around and gathering supplies, moving lunches, taking pictures, etc. keeps me busy all day and makes me exhausted by the time I get home. I should be taking more days off, especially these weekend days doing front desk at the Y. I took next Sunday off, since it’s the day after Can’t Stop the Serenity in Chicago… and I’ve got the the first weekend in August, including the Friday, all blocked out for our theater / trolls / house on the rock weekend. No more 15 days in a row, this summer.

In other news, I’ve found a new feed aggregator that I like: Swurl. It has a much more blog-like design, and the timeline feature is really neat. Here’s my swurl. I also got a new camera bag. The one that came with the Pentax owed me nothing, since it was, essentially, free… it finally got too beat up to be used, so I got a Crumpler 6 Million Dollar Home and it fits a lot of stuff.

…must do some planning for the Seattle trip… must resist urge to play Mario Kart Wii until I don’t have time to do anything but finish the Adventure Ed stats before the meeting on Tuesday…

I’m probably forgetting stuff, but already on the list are some gardens in Victoria, the Capilano Suspension Bridge in Vancouver and Pike Place Market and the Seattle Aquarium… on the probably/possibly/maybe list is the Space Needle, Experience Music Project, Boeing and the Underground Tour.

Some Yelp searching has turned up these, that I’d like to add to the food possibilities list:

Paseo - the words “food orgasm” come up in their reviews, especially when it comes to something called a midnight cuban.
HoneyHole - sounds dirty, and delicious… “best fries in seattle” in several reviews
Armandino’s Salumi - great reviews… short hours, long lines and sort of expensive, but worth taking a day off of work for!
Cloud City Coffee - need to snub my nose at Starbucks by having good coffee somewhere in Seattle and this place sounds pretty cool
Portage Bay Cafe - good breakfasts, some talk of “unlimited fruit” and such at the “toppings bar.”
Georgetown Truck Stop - affordable, delicious breakfasts

And some other stops/shopping that sounds interesting:

Elliott Bay Book Company - we like books.
Archie McPhee - toys and silliness
Lincoln Square Cinemas - in case we decide not to break our movie night tradition
Nintendo Headquarters - yeah, we love nintendo.

Any other suggestions?

Our trip to St Louis was fantastic. There was almost as much driving time as time spent there, but we threw a great plan together at the last minute, and stuck to it, and it was great. We checked in around 3 and then headed downtown and directly to the yummy place in the riverfront district that we liked so much from our last visit to St Louis, Hannegan’s. It was delicious… again. The toasted raviolis were super yummy, their fries were amazing and the dessert was as great as I remembered.

From there, we headed right over to City Museum and got a parking spot so close that there was an airplane visible through the sunroof. The party was mostly chaos, but it was definitely a good time. The place is really amazing. It was mostly teenagers and older, so we didn’t have to watch little kids crawl through all the tight spots and feel super jealous. There was free Monster energy drinks (which, after two sips, I decided are too gross for consumption) available the whole time that we were there and some other free foods became available later, but we were still pretty full from Hannegan’s. We could’ve used some water or something, but that wasn’t an option. Free admission and free food and free generic sodas is pretty good, though. I did buy a Ball Pit shirt, because mine smelled funny. We took a lot of pictures. I experimented with my new semi fish eye for the first time. I posted a bunch.

After a few hours, we took off and got some much needed rest at our hotel. The bathroom door(s) were like closet doors, with no lock. It was strange, but otherwise, the hotel was ok. We watched the silver surfer movie when it came on HBO and I think it might’ve been worse than the first fantastic 4 movie, which is saying a lot.

In the morning, we headed back downtown to get breakfast at a place called Rooster. We chose it based on Yelp ratings. I should really go review it (and Hannegan’s and City Museum), but I think I’ll save that for the morning. I had a Finnish Pancake and it was really delicious… Sarah got monstrous crepe filled with egg and bacon and Vermont Cheddar cheese. I tried some, it was awesome. She also got a side of Breakfast Potatoes of which I probably ate the most. They had a little hot pepper or something on them and it was really delicious.

We started home from there, stopping at every antique mall that we saw along the way and a restaurant that Sarah’s mom frequented when she was in school called Avanti’s, in Normal, IL. The antiques were fun, the food was decent and we missed all the bad Chicago traffic.

Gotta prepare a little for next week’s trip to Seattle, but it was great to get out of town for a day or two. It really makes me look forward to the longer trip.

And now, the sleep.

This page has some videos of me performing in my high school’s song and dance group (the ones with titles that include years back in the 90s - cause I’m old).  Totally embarrassing. Enjoy.

It’s been a fun week. The weather was fairly nice and we went to the Flea Market, today. We’ve been teased with warm spells and then temperatures dropping back near freezing overnight, so it was nice to walk around in a t-shirt today. The overnight trips for Adventure Ed. are this week, so I hope this warm spell continues. We saw Iron Man on Friday. It was pretty darn good, especially for a comic book movie. We also went yard saling that morning and attended Fly Bird’s 4th birthday bash-thing and picked up some weird stuff. I think we’re doing a double date tonight and seeing another movie, maybe Forgetting Sarah Marshall or maybe Baby Mama… I really liked the intriguing “is that for real?” ad campaign that Forgetting Sarah Marshall did with their billboards and busboards.

I also did something bad to my knee at some point this week. I think I may have injured it on Tuesday night when I was doing a balancing-on-one-foot-and-tying-my-shoe dance. It was kinda sore on Wednesday, worse on Thursday and really really painful on Friday. Yesterday it was much better and today it feels fine… but it really made me feel old. I was all gimpy and hobbling around the yard sales on Friday.

Oh, and while it wasn’t my boss, this time… a director at the YMCA I work at was let go this week. I’m not directly involved and, as I said, it wasn’t my boss, so it has nothing to do with the curse that I bring along to every after-school day care that I’ve ever worked for, but I am curious to see how they fill his position. I haven’t yet worked for a YMCA that filled a vacant position with anyone half-as-good as the person that left/they fired. They usually cut corners and give some of their responsibilities to other directors and maybe hire a new assistant.

I’ve never been to Michigan, before. I drove very close to it on my treks between Woonsocket and Chicago, but never crossed the line. Today, I did. I believe our bed & breakfast is in about the second or third town over that line. Cute little towns with shops and restaurants and beaches. Not much in the way of urban civilization. We drove about 30 miles north-ish and found a movie theater in a town with a bunch of retail stuff. We saw Horton Hears a Who. It was cute and fairly well done. It gets the thumbs up. Our bed & breakfast also gets the thumbs up; nice sized room, friendly person at the desk when we got here… all the local restaurant menus in the “library” … wi-fi. Our first stop here was a brief one, we just brought our stuff up and took a look around and decided where we should have dinner. Red Arrow Roadhouse won, mostly due to having delicious sounding desserts and toasted ravioli as an appetizer. I had a full slab of ribs and it was yum. They had two different kinds of mudd pie, we each got one. The place was pretty full, especially for a Monday night, and it was getting even more busy as we were leaving. After food, we went to a casino in the New Buffalo (the first or second town over the Michigan border). I put in somewhere between twenty and twenty-five dollars, and cashed out at $85.75. Did a little video roulette, but won most of it on a video slot machine.

Hopefully, I’ll get some pictures of stuff tomorrow. The lake on the horizon seems unnaturally high to me. I told Sarah that it looked like a “lake mountain” and she laughed at me. We’ve got the Kalamazoo indoor flea market and other such antiquing/shopping on the schedule for tomorrow.

Now that Sarah has picked up a couple new, fun cameras and we set up both her Holga and the Diana+ with 35mm film mods, we’re ready to go out and shoot like crazy. She even brought home a roll of film that fits the Brownie Starflex from some deep, dark back corner of the attic, at work. Unfortunately, we haven’t had a day with decent weather or half-decent light forever. We want to go to the car-kabob in Berwyn, and we’ve been talkin’ about it for a while now, but gray skies make for lots of boring photos.

I prepped my Robert Rodriguez Puerco Pibil tonight and put it in the fridge to marinate. We used a couple slightly different ingredients, but it still smelled strong and spicy. It was really tasty last time. I hope it turn out just as good. Maybe I’ll try to make the recipe on the Sin City DVD… I should really watch that movie again, first, though. I got Planet Terror this Christmas, too, I really need to put aside some quality time in front of the TV downstairs.

I also got a 24-20 pin adapter so that I can use Frank’s old power supply in the fish tank. That’s gonna be a messy project, I’m sure, so I’ll have to save it for a fully free day. I finally got the laptop Sarah’s uncle left here back to working order, I’m not gonna open it up and resolder the power jack, though. I’ve never been good with soldering and taking apart my Dell was a tedious project that I probably would avoid doing again, given the choice.

Still enjoying my break… but would enjoy it more with a little sunshine.

I’m about to leave for the second of three overnight Adventure Ed trips, but I wanted to let everyone know that I have officially booked flights and I will be in the New England area from Thurday the 20th of December until Christmas. I leave early morning on the 25th and I have dinner with the family on the Eve, but the rest of my time is pretty open. If you want some, lemme know. I’m also not opposed to some big group shindig thing, some music, a movie, whatever, so feel free to try and plan amongst yourselves. I should have Mom’s Nissan van most of the weekend, so I’ll be mobile and based out of Dudley.

Inner city camp is a new kind of experience. It’s still camp, it’s still summer, there’s still songs and activities and such but having no real home base means we take a lot of trips… some walks to parks and playgrounds and a lot of field trips (on school buses with seatbelts!) to interesting places around the city. It feels like an extreme version of those school-vacation-week camps that I’ve been part of in the past. It’s also a much more liberal and less restricted camp, in terms of contact with the kids; I’m finding it hard to break out of the mold of the Y camp no-unnecessary-touching behavior/style. Another mind-blowing difference is that we provide the lunches for the entire camp and staff, every day. The food’s not bad, either. I need to start bringing my camera every day, the camera-phone is probably not doing these scenes justice. Oh, and I went in Lake Michigan for the first time, on Tuesday, with the campers. It was cold.

Fish tank computer is going slowly. Booting off an external drive is proving more difficult than it seemed. It wouldn’t be an issue, except that I’m trying to preserve the Windows XP OS from the Gateway. I believe Linux would happily boot off a USB drive. I don’t think the machine is quite powerful enough to attempt OS X x86. I attempted a few portable XP installations, with no luck, and I think I’m going to give in and go eSATA instead. Otherwise, it’s in good shape. It runs, and the tray fits into the frame and acrylic piece that I cut to shape (which snapped into two pieces, but we’ll solve that with the silicone sealant). We decided that a blue light was necessary, so I picked one up, and then found that there are blue lights in one of the fans and the power button and the external hard drive enclosure. The machine might need a blue-themed name, when it gets finished.

The Serenity screening was very fun, it was definitely a different experience on a big screen. I knew the fan base was extreme and had obviously accomplished some great things, but the Done the Impossible documentary was pretty informative and really pointed out just how special they all are. We got a couple of Sarah’s friends hooked on the show and have been watching Firefly from the beginning with them.

In one week, Sarah and I are going to see Serenity in the theater. Every year there is a charity event called Can’t Stop The Serenity, and we’ve got tickets for the Chicagoland show. In preparation, we’ll probably be watching Firefly - The Complete Series. We were also waiting for the Serenity (Collector’s Edition) DVD to come out, and now we’ve got it pre-ordered at Amazon. I’ve learned to love Amazon. I used to boycott them, when they were still trying to enforce their patent on cookies (via the one-click shopping patent). Hopefully they won’t abuse the new patent they were just awarded. I’d hate to give up my Amazon fix.

Phase One of this week’s computer upgrade project is complete. I gutted the old Gateway that Frank, Sarah’s little brother, had been using and put in a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and hard drive. It took a little more work than I expected, due to the fact that gateway’s choice of case didn’t have all the right holes on the back for the motherboard ports… so some creative sawing was necessary. All that’s really left to do on that machine is add some front audio ports so frank can plug in his headset for his games.

Phase Two involves all the hardware we pulled out of the Gateway and a fish tank full of mineral oil. I’m following the specs detailed by Puget Custom Computers on this page. Fish tank and oil and random parts are all ordered and on their way. I’ll have to go to Home Depot to get the sheet of acrylic and all the necessary sealant. Wish me luck!