Category: daily life

   << back home

Monday, December 11, 2006

Okay, on three - everybody sing

[sung to the tune of Happy Birthday, of course]

Happy Birthday to Pie
We'll do your bidding or die
We submit to your command
and we'll give you our land

Or... you know... something to that effect.

Categories: asides, daily life

.:4 comments | baked by pie at 7.47 PM | permalink:.

Friday, September 15, 2006

Good Morning, Starshine

Wow, it's been a long time. I guess I just haven't felt like I've had much to say. Rob and I have just recently submitted our adoption dossier to China, so I've been putting energy into thinking about that lately, rather than coming up with more insulting material about celebrities and/or other annoying people.

On another note: since I apparently am too incompetent to use crutches in the manner for which they're intended, I decided to devise a list of other uses I can find for them. Feel free to add any others in the comments.

Other Uses For Crutches:
* "Innocently" tripping people walking past my desk at work
* Poking people under the conference room table when they try to pawn work off on me (finally I see the benefit of working in a male-dominated industry - better targets)
* Playing air guitar to old AC/DC albums
* Living room croquet
* Reenacting the Black Knight scene from Monty Python's The Holy Grail
* Scaring the wussiest dog alive, Oliver - I swear he thinks I'm some kind of cyborg
* Poking drivers who have their windows open at stop-lights
* Keeping those vicious, killer northwest raccoons at bay when going out at night

Categories: lists, daily life

.:4 comments | baked by pie at 9.29 AM | permalink:.

Friday, August 04, 2006

Friday fumbling

Note to self: putting soap on your toothbrush causes excessive lather and a lingering taste of cleanser every time you brush your teeth henceforth.

Why do I always have to discover the obvious in such a personal way?





Click on images to view larger

Categories: asides, photographs, daily life

.:1 comment | baked by pie at | permalink:.

Saturday, July 29, 2006

I. Am. Fookin'. Tired.
Warning: boring post ahead

Rob and I decided to get last minute tickets to see Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on Thursday night, although we end up missing the first half-hour of the show due to traffic (took us an hour and a half to drive approx. 19 miles) and had to leave a few minutes early to miss the post-concert traffic since I hadn't had any dinner yet, and I didn't want to get home at 1.30am. [Holy run-on sentence, Batman.] Sorry, no photos as they were really strict about not letting in any recording devices. I did get a really groovy CSNY shirt, though. You'll just have to imagine how utterly fantastic I look in it, since it's safer for everyone concerned for me to remain behind the camera.

So anyway, after being up until nearly 4am Thursday night, I dragged my carcass into work and single-handedly destroyed several trees in creating installation and help documents for the software-integrated website I built. Now I'm just hoping to actually get some sleep tonight - if I can turn my brain off for a few minutes. We're going to see the Buzzcocks Saturday night (woohoo!), and I was hoping to take a wander round downtown Seattle before the show and use my new camera to take some photos of something other than the hounds and various attractively-positioned household objects.

But because I'm boring like that, here are a few photos I took this week that I was quite pleased with. I'm taking the camera to the show tomorrow night, so if I manage to actually get the correct settings to work, hopefully I'll have some snazzy Buzzcocks photos on Sunday.











Click on images to view full-size in a new window

Categories: music, daily life, photographs

.:4 comments | baked by pie at 1.51 AM | permalink:.

Monday, July 24, 2006

I think my internal organs are sweating. That is all.

Categories: asides, daily life

.:2 comments | baked by pie at 2.29 PM | permalink:.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Pictures of You

Last weekend, I bought myself a present: a Canon EOS Rebel XT. Damn thing cost me about $900 all told, with extra memory and accessories, so I'm extremely pleased about how the photos are coming out. I'm still learning all the different functions and the best settings to use in different circumstances, but I've managed to shoot a few fairly decent photos that I thought I'd bore you with share here. And damn it, it's my blog so I'll do what I want.

And anyway, I'm currently being worked to into a near-death state by my job, so I don't have the energy to come up with anything amusing, and this stupid bright light coming from out of that weird tunnel is blinding me.













Click on images to view originals on Flickr

Categories: photographs, daily life

.:4 comments | baked by pie at 10.50 PM | permalink:.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

The Big Come Down

And thus endeth the stream of NIN shows we've attended since last September. I thought I'd post about the last show we attended a few weeks ago in Ridgefield, since it was the best NIN show I've ever been to. And since I finally got my photo of the show [find tour photos at Front Row Center] framed and hung in the dining room, I've had it on my mind.

Rob and I got there pretty early since I'm a member of the Spiral fan club, and occasionally they do meet & greets or allow fan club members to see a sound check. Sadly, since this was only the second show of this last leg of the tour, we didn't get either. We did on the other hand, get to stand out in the rain for several hours while event staff stood around with their thumbs up each other's asses, which I'm sure they enjoyed.

Anyway, we had GA tickets, but apparently at the Clark County Amphitheatre, even GA is seated (not that anyone actually sat). So once we got in we had to fight for a good seat, but we ended up only about 4 or 5 rows back so we had an incredible view. The openers, TV on the Radio, were bloody good. I expected some sort of emo band based on the name, but they really rocked. I highly recommend checking them out. And Bauhaus was, of course, fantastic - or "marvelous" as Peter called himself. They had some serious lighting issues, and I was getting blinded, but it was great anyway. And it was pretty cool to see Daniel Ash and David J in person, since I've never had the chance to see them with Love & Rockets, one of my favourite bands.

Moving on. There are no words to describe how great NIN were. We all got soaked, and it was freezing, but it was so worth it. It was a great set list (it was much more evenly divided between albums rather than favouring 'With Teeth', which isn't my favourite album), fantastic crowd (even though the place seemed a bit empty), really good energy. The people sitting beside us even saved our seats during my few forays out into the rain for a smoke. Apparently there was quite a lot of seat-poaching going on, so we were pretty lucky ours didn't get nicked.

And just for you NIN fans who might be interested, here's the set list:
somewhat damaged
know what you are
sin
terrible lie
march of the pigs
something i can never have
closer
burn
gave up
help me i am in hell
non-entity
only
wish
la mer
into the void
the big come down
suck
get down, make love (how freakin' cool is that?!)
hurt
the hand that feeds
head like a hole


Now I'm just looking forward to Agent Orange on July 1st, and the Buzzcocks on July 29th. Woohoo!

Categories: music, daily life

.:2 comments | baked by pie at 10.11 PM | permalink:.

Monday, June 05, 2006

Random stuff that flits through my brain, Part #3,720,511,523

Have you ever really thought about the phrase: "If you love someone, set him free. If he comes back, he's yours. If he doesn't, he was never yours to begin with"? Wouldn't this just result in an endless loop? Maybe it's just my logical programmer's mind taking over, but it seems to me that if you let him go and he came back, and you still loved him, you'd have to let him go again. And again. And again. Eventually he'd get really pissed off and leave forever, and then where will you be?

And to change the subject completely, some good news: Rob and I had a surprisingly great meeting with our adoption case worker on Saturday (I'll spare you the details of the unbelievable mess that we've been dealing with for the past month or so, what with the  miscommunication between our caseworker, our agency and ourselves, and the resultant major irritation on my part). We spent 3 hours in the local Starbucks discussing her concerns (mainly my background, of course), but in the end I think we're all happy and feeling good about each other. She's starting to write up our home study document now, so we're nearly ready to submit our dossier to China and get approval from the US government.

Once all that's done, it's basically just wait mode for us, until the Chinese officials send us a photo and information about the baby they've chosen for us (probably early- to mid-2007 - the wait time is nearly 12 months right now). Now we can concentrate on thinking up the most heinous name possible for the little tyke - because we all want to be just like celebrities, right? Right? Damn.

Categories: daily life, adoption, irritations

.:5 comments | baked by pie at 1.22 PM | permalink:.

Friday, May 26, 2006

Tomorrow Rob and I are off to see NIN (with Bauhaus supporting - woo!) again. Unfortunately I had to pass on their appearance at the Sasquatch Festival at the Gorge today, since there was just no way my boss was giving me another day off, so we're going to see them in Ridgefield (down near Portland) tomorrow instead. And since I got my Buzzcocks tickets in the post yesterday, I've still got something to look forward to after what will undoubtedly be the last NIN show I'll be attending for the next five years, if Trent's usual touring schedule is anything to go by.

And just for the hell of it, I've decided we need another caption contest, so please leave your captions for the below photo in the comments. The best caption will win something not entirely unlike useless junk.

Click to view full size

Categories: irritations, daily life

.:3 comments | baked by pie at 12.18 PM | permalink:.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Family Friendly or Freakin' Futile

After visiting my pain management doc this morning, I popped in to Fred Meyer to get my prescriptions filled. While I was sitting there in the pharmacy waiting, I noticed that one of the check-out aisles had a sign over it stating "Family Friendly". All this means is that this particular aisle doesn't have risqué magazines like Cosmo [ooh shocking, get me my nitroglycerin], since I'm fairly sure that Fred Meyer doesn't sell the 'Faces of Death' as an impulse item by the register.

It just seems a little overdone to me. The whole political correctness/protect our children from every-freakin'-thing trend, I mean. First they had black cards laid across the front of these women's magazines so that all you could see of the cover was the magazine's name. Now, apparently, children are so in need of sheltering that they can't even be in the same aisle as these periodicals. Reading a couple of headlines like "How to Have Hot Monkey Sex" and "Humping for Health" might be good for these kids. We coddle kids today in so many different ways (bark instead of blacktop in playgrounds, plastic playground equipment instead of metal which gets white-hot in the sun¹, and a distinct lack of lawn darts and BB guns), but all they have to do is watch the news and they'll be inundated with disturbing images of violence and sexual depravity. Why is a magazine which treats sex as something healthy and enjoyable so frightening? Kids can play violent video games, and listen to music with lyrics exhorting sex and violence, but Cosmo is apparently the work of the devil.

So my contribution to ending the coddling of today's children is that I'm going to start wearing a giant badge that reads:
I have sex
Ask me how!
I'll be a one-woman sex education machine. And don't forget to take a pamphlet about the hot monkey lovin'.

¹: It's just not summer until you've removed a yard of skin by going down a metal slide that's been sitting all day in the sun when it's 100°F.

Categories: irritations, daily life

.:17 comments | baked by pie at 1.53 PM | permalink:.