AliThinks

La Fin Du Mois

Two months of the new year, gone.

One month of daily posting, done.

How many regrets, or feelings of guilt, or other negativity? Too many. I'm still working on these facets.

I successfully completed NaBoPoMo, however. Woooo, go me. 

Look for me in March. I'll post at some point!

What We Did Tonight

We saw Chuck Prophet at Cosmic Charlie's.

Here's a video from a show a few months ago:

The show started around 8, so we were good and fresh (unlike last night at the same venue). Plus we got a couple of cushy bar stools to sit on. It makes a difference. Gah! OLD. Anyway, it was great, all of it.

Not Feathered

Just tarred. Long day. Came home early from a show at Cosmic Charlie's. (I KNOW, RIGHT?)

That is all.

Dinner

Here's a conversation I had with Allan via Gmail chat. I was at work (OH HAI, WYN MORRIS), although we have been known to IM each other from across the couch.

me: Got any dinner ideas?

Allan: No. I am totally without clue.

me: Sans clue. Sin clue, en español. Well. Maybe I will go to Fresh Market on the way home. Where I can either pick up a clue, or a delicious deli meal.

Allan: Sounds good. I love delicious meals. My favorite kind of meal. A delicious meal is the only kind of meal I will eat anymore. Life is too short to eat anything but a delicious meal.

me: OK, Rain Man. I will do that.

Allan: Cool. Don't forget to bring the delicious.

me: Honey, I bring the delicious wherever I go.

Allan: hubba hubba

me: :D What kinda aminal [purposeful typo] protein do you want?

Allan: Delicious animal protein. Not delirious. Delicious.

me: OK. That doesn't really help me, though. Pork? Lamb? Cheecken? Feesh? Shreemp? Shellfeesh?

Allan: Feesh might be good. Of some type. Shreempfish, tunafeesh, shellfeesh.

____________________

I have to give a shoutout to AndreAnna here, because she posts her text conversations with her husband on her blog. Although, I must admit, theirs are more interesting than what you just read. And her daughter cracks. me. up.

It just so happened that right after this little exchange with Allan, I checked my Google Reader and saw this post from Serious Eats. SCORE!

The only ingredient I couldn't find was chervil, but even when I lived in France I never used it (over there they call it cerfeuil), so whatever. It was still awesome. Next time I'll only use mussels, as they're way cheaper. Littleneck clams are "sold by the each" here (to quote the guy at Fresh Market) and at 49 cents a pop, well, you get the idea. I didn't buy a pound of them, needless to say.

Allan took photos.

Before:

After:

So tonight's dinner was full of win. And shellfeesh.

Bol de Riz Avec Baguettes

Bol de Riz Avec Baguettes, originally uploaded by Alison.

I'm out of words. Here's an old photo.

Why The Yellow?

When I lamented on Twitter that I didn't know what to blog about, my friend Beth replied "Have you blogged about how you picked the paint color?"

And I guess I haven't, you know, because until recently I was pretty mum on my personal life and my home and other details that most of you don't need to know. OK, I'm still mum on the details that most of you don't need to know. But I guess I can talk about paint color.

I forget where it started, but I'm pretty sure the posters had something to do with it. I've been collecting posters from Cricket Press* for the past year-ish. And I thought it would be good to display all these posters (I counted tonight; I have eight of them) on a wall, and didn't we have the perfect wall in the living room?

But the wall was white, and that wouldn't do. And that was that.

(Now, Allan may disagree with this chronology, and he may be right in his disagreement.) 

And then in December, we got a catalog from one of our favorite furniture stores. And Allan mentioned getting a new couch. And from there we started talking about paint again, and I wanted ORANGE!. Not orange, ORANGE!. And we sat on a couch in the catalog store, and then another, then went back to the first couch, then to another store and another couch, then back to the original store (that of the catalog, if you're following along), and we decided to buy it. And the color we chose was "Smoke." And the ORANGE! was decreed acceptable, and lo, it was planned.

In January, I got some paint samples. Both were ORANGE!, but one was more like ORANGE, and we decided they were too close in color to paint the whole room with. Call the grammar police, I just ended a sentence with a preposition. Allan suggested yellow, which I interpreted as YELLOW! and which people in these parts call "yaller." I got some samples of YELLOW! (which were respectively called "Chickadee" and "Field of Daisies") and I painted them on the wall (not realizing, DUH, that I could have painted pieces of posterboard and saved myself the trouble of priming). 

And so we had the Island Orange and the Persimmon and the Chickadee and the Field of Daisies samples on the walls, and then my kids were here for their winter break.

Two days after they arrived, the furniture store called. Our couch was ready, three weeks early! Could we schedule delivery the following weekend? And we said "OKAY!" without thinking it through.

I've chronicled some of this in a previous post. This past weekend we painted two walls. Soon we'll paint the other two, one of which will be ORANGE!. And I'll have my posters framed, and we'll hang them, and this will be the awesomest living room in Lexington.

OK, so maybe I'm exaggerating. It might take me six months to get it all together. It'll still be the awesomest (yes! It's a word! I deem it so!) living room in town. 

*Cricket Press is a great example of some of what Lexington has going on, y'all.

I Was Going To Write About...

...how much I hate bikram yoga at the beginning of class, and how much I love it at the end of class, and not just because it's over.

However, I just updated my iPod software and installed a new app, which when I tried to associate it with a couple of other social networking accounts, wouldn't let me log into said accounts. This made my blood pressure rise and gave me the urge to throw the iPod against the wall.

Sometimes computer stuff makes my blood boil when I can't get it to work.

Then I remembered I'd changed passwords on both accounts, but hadn't used them on the iPod since I'd changed them.

Yeah. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Halfway Done

Watching Paint Dry

I mentioned that we got a new couch, but that we were going to paint. Well, we're painting, but because of a couple of heavy piece of furniture (notably said couch), we can't do it all at once.

Tonight we started priming two of the walls, one of which is the one the couch sits against. In a bit, we'll put the first coat of color on, and with a little luck, by tomorrow night or Monday morning, we can put the heavy stuff back into place, then paint the other two walls at our leisure. I think in between projects, we'll do that purge I mentioned, and I'd like to look at some different storage options. We have some baskets underneath the coffee table, and they don't fit under there right, and the dust gets in anyway.

But first paint. Then purge. Then paint. When I write it out, it seems a little bass-ackwards.

I Promised

...more about the Black Eyed Peas concert, but at this point, I feel like I'm kind of over it. The most important thing was the fact that it was a theatrical arena show, and I haven't seen one of those in ages.

Allan and I have seen a lot of live music in the past few years, but what we've seen has been in music clubs and bars. The last time I saw a concert in an arena, it might have been the Grateful Dead in Pittsburgh's Civic Arena (now Mellon Arena) in 1988, 89? Or it might have been The Who in Three Rivers Stadium (RIP. The stadium, not The Who, well, you know what I mean). Let's just say it's been 20 years since I saw a show in a place capable of holding that many people.

I definitely prefer the intimacy a music club offers. Lexington had a great music club until it didn't, but we have a couple of substitutes which fill the hole nicely. I will admit, it was pretty cool to see a show with such great effects and lighting and performers who own the stage.

Here's a review of the show, if you're interested. And here's another photo:

We were sorry to have missed Will.I.Am's DJ set at Buster's (one of the places that fills the hole, although they could book more bands for sure) after the concert, but it was an 18+ show, and we weren't about to drop the kids off here and go back out. It's okay, though, we had a great evening. If BEP comes to your town, it's worth a go.

Just Photos

It's been a busy day; it was my kids' last full day here. They fly back to France on Friday tomorrow evening. So while I've been thinking about the Black Eyed Peas concert today, I haven't had time to sit down and compose my thoughts about the concert. Here are a couple of photos I took.

This is from the beginning of the show. Each member of BEP had a green cylinder of light to welcome them onstage (they arrived from underneath; it was cool).

I took this early on in the show:

Unfortunately, I couldn't take my Nikon to the concert, but I had a point-and-shoot that belonged to Allan's late sister Jo Ann. It did the job!

You can also look at a slideshow from the local paper, but the photos don't reflect all the costume changes.

More tomorrow about the concert itself.

Quick Post

We took the kids to see the Black Eyed Peas tonight. They put on a great show; and I'll write more about it tomorrow, and post a photo or two.

Late, But In Earnest

I look pretty young, but I'm just backdated, yeah. And so is this blog entry.

An evening at a local Cajun joint turned out to be not-such-a-good-idea on this Mardi Gras. So we went to the local French resto for all-you-can-eat mussels. We ran into our friend Mo, which was cool, since she doesn't actually live in Lexington.

On our return home, we watched men's figure skating, then I hung out with C. in her room for a while, then read another chapter of the first Percy Jackson book to T.

It was a good evening. Yep.

Just A Few Thoughts

Lately I've been thinking about social media, and I'm trying to figure out what I want to say about it without sounding like a jackass. I've been using social media for years, and it's interesting to see patterns of adoption.

When I knew I was moving to Lexington, I contacted a food preparation company Allan had told me about, to propose my services to expand their Internet presence, because I read they were hoping to eventually franchise their business. I never heard back; perhaps I went about it the wrong way, or perhaps they didn't think it was important. Whatever, it doesn't matter.

My point is that I did this long before Twitter existed, or Facebook was opened to the general public. My point is that I'm an early adopter. I'm not an über-early adopter, mind you. I joined Flickr a little more than a year after its start, and I thought Twitter was stupid when I first heard about it, so I didn't join that until January of 2008. But, relatively speaking, I'm on it. (Foursquare? Dude, Brightkite has been doing the location-based thing for years, but without all the stupid Mayor crap.)

So it was interesting for me to see how political candidates used social media last year. It's interesting to see how businesses decide to use social media.

And inversely, it's interesting to be reminded that not everyone is like me in this regard. I read about this next thing I'm going to talk about (notice I said "talk," not "write," heh) last week, and thought I might blog about it, but I put it out of my head until I saw this tweet from @dvs earlier today. The link in his tweet goes here, but I read about it somewhere else (and for the life of me I can't remember where). Whatever, again, it doesn't matter. What matters is the gist of it: This post on Read Write Web rose to near the top of Google rankings for the search "facebook login." (But it never got to #1, as far as I know.) Some people who went to RWW were confused and thought it was a new Facebook. And they left disgruntled comments on the blog entry saying as much! 

So what, right? But this means that people don't use the address bar of their browser to go to websites (or bookmark them). They go to the Google and search for it. And this kind of shocked me, Alison, who has ten different website tabs set as her Firefox "home" page.

It makes me want to tilt my head in that way that Kyle (or Stan) does on South Park and say "Reallllyyyy?" 

Now, some of you are longtime readers of this blog, and many of you are bloggers yourselves. A lot of you are like me, and I know this, because we are contacts (and some of you are friends) on other social media sites. Perhaps you already know all about the RWW/Facebook login and are mocking me because I'm posting about it nearly a week after it happened.

And in the defense of those who use the Google, I will admit to Googling when I'm not sure of a website's URL. (Like the website of the food company I mentioned above. I just looked it up a few minutes ago.) But for a website I go to on a regular basis? If it's not in my home tabs or bookmarked, Firefox remembers it and the URL auto-fills in my address bar. 

RWW had an interesting follow-up post about the FB login entry. It gave me something more to think about. 

What about you? How do you get to your most-visited websites?

In Key West

Edit: I'm not actually in Key West. I took this photo when I was there last month.

New News

So we got a new couch today. We ordered it before Christmas, and it was supposed to be delivered around March 1st. The store called us last Monday to tell us the couch was ready, and would we be available on the 13th?

Um, okay, we said.

And so there went our plans for painting the living room before the couch arrived. We've got color samples on the walls and everything. Island Orange*! Persimmon! Chickadee! Field of Daisies! Somebody, PLEASE give me a job naming colors.

We'd planned to paint after my kids went back to France on the 19th. And that's still what we'll do, after much fretting on my part whether we could at least prime and paint the wall the couch sits against—Chickadee it is—but we'll just cover the new couch in about 18 layers of plastic, after we move it to the center of the room.

It's no big deal. (She said, after stressing about it the entire week.) But I'm not going to put the books back on the one shelf you can see below until after we paint (we had to move the shelf so that the delivery guys could get the couch through the doorway. And then they couldn't angle the thing through, so they had to go through the garage). And before I reshelve the books that live on the shelf? I'm going to purge them. Bookcrossing, here I come again!

Here's a photo I took of the old couch when it was new, back in May of 2006:

You're probably all like "Whaaaat? Your couch isn't even four years old and you're getting rid of it?!"

Well, yes. We are. We're relegating it to the basement, where it will live out the rest of its years.

And here are the photos I took today, via PhotoBooth, so they're not spectacular:

Before (but after we moved the old sectional into the basement):

 

After:

 

I really have to take a proper photo with my camera. And I really have to purge more than just my books. Those baskets underneath the cocktail coffee table are driving me nuts.

*This color is painted on a wall I haven't photographed.

Is It Just Me?

I'm not really excited about The Olympics. Although I am kind of getting into the opening ceremony right now. Yeah, that lasted as long as the I countries did.

I guess I just preferred it when the Games happened every four years. It made it more special.

And this is probably the most boring entry I've ever written. Sorry. I'm not in the best mood right now.

Dangit

I have 50 minutes to post a blog entry. GAH! It was a busy day, full of entertaining characters at the store, including one woman who called it Rump Arena. I got my kids hooked on a couple of books: Hatchet for my son and Night World No. 1 for my daughter.

Some other thoughts:

• The commercial for Shutter Island scares the bejeezus out of me, yet part of me wants to see the film.
• Google Buzz seems like a lot of extra noise to me right now. You?
• All the cats are sleeping. It's like they know something I don't.
• Meh. That's all I got.

An Early Post Today

Last night I looked up some information about bikram yoga. I know the essentials, but I was trying to find images of the postures so that I could see what my body is supposed to look like. That might sound really stupid, but my glasses don't stay on my face very long during class, and I'm pretty blind, so I can't see myself in the mirror. Forget about looking at others; when you're in a pose, you concentrate only on yourself. So I go into poses by following the teacher's instructions, and I try my hardest to get my body to do what it's supposed to.

During my surfing, I came across this video, and I wanted to share it. If you ever wondered what bikram yoga is like, this explains it really well.

One other thought: it did strike me that this yoga has gotten under my skin in a way it never did before. It would seem that a slow and steady start is more conducive to long-term success than jumping into a 30-day challenge.

At A Loss Again

I really don't know what possessed me to sign up for NaBloPoMo. No, really. Blurg. I have no idea what to write about. So here's another photo.