.work in progress.
Because I’m not quite finished…

I guess I should post something new for a new year.  If you know me, you know that I honestly don’t give a fuck about this whole inauguration deal coming up.  I’ll believe in this so-called change if and when it happens.  I guess something’s wired wrong in my head if I don’t feel the same as the rest of the masses do.

Something’s going on with me and I’m still trying to sort it all out in my head.  All I do know, is that I end up staring at my ceiling fan, writing random bits of poetry.  If the ceiling fan staring bit wasn’t odd enough, the poetry is worse.  I haven’t written in years, but here I am… and it’s kinda making sense.  I usually don’t bother to edit my stuff, either, but I’ve been rethinking a poem about ice and falling and melting.

Max, my lovely camera, has been sitting idle since the holidays.  I eventually plan on taking a day to just go out and shoot pictures.  Poetry is sort of helping me with this creative streak, but perhaps some photos will help, too.

Meanwhile, Cocolulu, my ipod, is suffering through my not-so-happy phase.  The Cure isn’t happy music, neither is all the rest of the stuff I’m listening to.  Two songs are stuck in my head – Gravity by Sara Bareilles and Lover, You Should’ve Come Over by Jeff Buckley.

I’m trying to learn the Sara Bareilles quickly…  if I don’t get caught up at work, I’ll be way behind when the sales contest ends and I’ll be serenading the co-workers…

Not that I don’t mind entertaining them…

I’m going to be so damn tired in class tomorrow/today…

When it hits December, it seems like there’s more to do and less time to do it all.

Right now, there’s school to finish up, Christmas shopping to do, and… things that I want to do. I can never take enough pictures… but I don’t have a whole lot of time to sit down, edit them, and get them posted! I’m still trying to learn how to edit pictures in RAW format properly. AND… I have to figure out an idea for a Christmas card!!!

And of course, the shopping gets tricky this time of year because in addition to Christmas, my mom and my niece are both December babies and I really try not to combine their gifts.

Man, UH pisses me off sometimes. I wish the semester didn’t go so far into December. I think I’m supposed to be finished with things like, a week before Christmas. Then again, it’s UH system and they do dumb things.

In addition to all that, I just want to READ things! You know, Twilight is a different kind of addiction from Harry Potter. Hot, romantic, brooding vampire boy… Okay, I’m hooked and I can’t read this fast enough, even if I have read spoilers online!

Oh, where are the hours in the day?

You know, the personnel working in camera stores are way nicer than the folks working in yarn stores. I’ve only ventured into yarn stores twice… I think it was somewhere around the time that I first started learning how to knit. I had decided at the time that I wanted to play with something other than acrylic yarn, so I wandered into a real yarn store. The ladies were none to helpful, glaring at me as if I didn’t belong there. And heck… I didn’t even have a chance to explain why I was there in the first place!

So you can imagine that I had the same kind of reservations when I ventured over to Lighthaus Camera. But you know… the folks there were cool. I ended up buying a holster case for my camera and I got to play with some tripods and top-notch glass. I want a wide-angle lens… *sigh* $700+ for the very pretty one that I played with. I mentioned to the sales guy that a bunch of my friends also shoot with Canons and I told him about B’s monster lens. I was sold on the place when the guy said, “Yeah, it’s great to have friends with good glass!” Glass – translation, lens. Photography lingo… and I was happy that I caught that! Yay!

In addition to the holster case, I also picked up the December issue of Shutterbug magazine and The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS/1000D Companion by Ben Long. I’ve been eating up books and taking pictures of every little thing in sight, but I mean to learn about every little nook and cranny on Max. Ever since I found out about DSLRs, I’ve asked for one for the past few years. I mean, sure they’re more work than your average point and shoot digital camera, but the results are so, so worth it. And hell.. it’s fun!

It wouldn’t be the holidays if I didn’t have a whine somewhere in the works…  And as usual, it’s about the holiday music.

I guess we can’t really find a happy medium with me.  In an earlier entry, I bitched about Christmas music being played too early. Today, we’re going to talk about censoring Christmas music on the radio. Yes, I know… that really happens? Here in sunny Hawaii on 96.3, whenever N Sync’s Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays is played, a good chunk of the song is censored. With the blessings from above/God sends you his love… is actually left out of the song. I guess if someone’s offended, then censor it, but be fucking consistent! Stop playing Willie K’s Oh Holy Night while you’re at it, too!

Sheesh.

I guess I really couldn’t hold it off forever. And really, what made me think that it would be unavoidable?

So we’re eating turkey and everything and then it happens…

Grandpa wants to know why you don’t have a boyfriend…

I’m 27 and I was under the impression that that particular question was off limits until I was at least 30. I mean… what the hell?! My parents are divorced, my auntie is twice divorced and my other auntie is single. Er, does stopping the pattern somehow come to mind?

Fuck. When in the world did I really turn into Bridget Jones?

One of these days, I will actually WRITE the little tweaks that I do to a recipe. The oven is in use at the moment, so I figured that I’d do the cream cheese topping. I can never really remember what I do to sweeten up the cream cheese and even with Cool Whip added, I’m not quite getting the taste that I want.

Then again, I did spend a while sampling the sauce for Mom’s ribs… so you see, I might’ve thrown off my taste buds.

Oh, back to the drawing board.

You think I’d be tired of math, having to deal with it three times a week at work and two days inbetween during my math class…

Then I think about how I used to be a music major and the amount of math that went on there… Yes, music has math, too!

But you know, back then, I didn’t have it in the volume that I’m going to be having it soon…

Yikes!

And the work folk sometimes wonder why numbers make me dizzy!

I was thinking, I want to go on a photo shoot. Not a model type photo shoot, I mean, just go out somewhere, beach or something and just take pictures.

I did that once, a few years back with someone who used to be my best friend.

It’s not so much him that I miss, but having someone who actually knew me.

In any case… what was I talking about? Ah, yes, a day just to take pictures.

Well, one summer-ish day, I felt like taking pictures somewhere with my old Canon AE-1. I knew he wasn’t up to anything, so I gave him a call… hey… I’m headed out to take pictures, oh, I don’t quite know where… wanna come? So I pick him up, he has his photography gear with him, too. We end up going to the beach, just spending a couple of hours shooting pictures of the beach and of each other.

Yes, I do have a couple of nice pictures of him from that day.

Yeah, I miss days like that.

I’ve got Comedy Central on tv right now, and Bill Engvall is wondering if big fish and little fish talk. You know, to like warn each other about stuff?

I don’t know if they do, but I used to swear that my two dogs would talk to each other. Kuro was the younger and the smaller of the two and Niko is the old man and the bigger dog. Anyway, we used to find the occasional dead bird in the back. I’m thinking that the dogs planned it out. Niko would sit out in front of the dog house, and he would let the birds chill nearby. Kuro would be hiding and when enough birds had flocked around Niko, Kuro would strike.

That wasn’t the only time those two dogs did a double team. I once found a rat… a LARGE rat that killed in the backyard. I thought they’d gotten another bird, so I went outside to take a look. As I approached, a dog stood proud on each side of the kill, as if to say, “Look what I did!” It was… eeww…

So if my dogs could communicate, I’m guessing that fish can, too.

It’s just a phase, you’re in a daze, maybe a melancholy day
Don’t try to fight, what’s wrong is right, it’s just a melancholy day
– Rain All Day, Fleming & John

It’s been raining all day and you know, I really don’t mind those days. I did my usual Saturday thing, watched college football, jaunted out for some food, watched an NCIS, and baked some cookies. I’m kinda glad it rained THIS weekend and not during the previous ones.

In any case, I did another batch of the modified cake mix cookie recipe. I took a couple dozen to work on Friday and left the bag out with directions for one and all to consume and give feedback. The cookies were received well by the co-workers and I said I’d bring another batch in on Monday.

I like having a bunch of guinea pigs for my cooking experiments. Thing is, if it turns out decent, I’ll test run it on people. If I botch it up and it’s still edible (In the case of the Lemon Pepper Chicken gone horribly lemon…), I’ll eat it, but I won’t test it on anyone else. I mean, I gotta save face, right?