kate_nepveu | Week in Review

Not such a good week. Too much time working (including one e-filing at 11:30 p.m., which I never want to do again), caused in part by computer issues (whee, involuntary upgrade to XP on a machine with 256MB of memory!), and getting sick at the end of the week, meaning staying home Friday and basically no work done then or this weekend (very bad).

I did manage to do my own research on digital cameras, confirming the recommendation of montoya that the Canon PowerShot A95 was best for us. Best Buy and Amazon had it online for $310 or $315, so that's what I had in mind when we decided yesterday to go buy it.

Well, we went to several different places closer than Best Buy, all of which were selling it for $350 (or didn't have it in stock), and because I'm cheap, we headed for Best Buy. Except, Best Buy doesn't have the same prices online as in its physical stores! You guessed it, $350. Well, I was exhausted and strung out and furious, the last enough so that I agreed to Chad's suggestion to not give them any of our money. Of course, the next place we went didn't have it in stock, but did have cheap memory, and eventually we bought our camera.

After we got back, we put up the tree we'd also bought that afternoon, while playing with the camera (some of these aren't that great, but we're still practicing):

The undecorated tree
The ornaments we made at the Corning Museum of Glass, propped up on some tissue paper
The decorated tree
A hand-painted porcelain ornament that I really like
Two little soldier guys, part of a set from Chad's childhood

And, of course, we took some pictures of the otherwise-neglected dog:

Today, I did more shopping—I think I'm basically done except for cards and some gift certificates, which is not bad—then fended off the nudgy dog, who was upset that Chad had left her for the day to go help his folks with some heavy lifting. Right now there's a truly cheesy movie on TNT, The Librarian and the Quest for Plot Tokens (or something), which has been so cheesy as I crop images and type this up that I'm actually going to have to stay up for the last twenty minutes to see what depths it descends to at the end. Really, it's amazing.

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Mmmm...beautiful glass ornaments! We still don't have the tree up, but we did get the Christmas Village (http://www.livejournal.com/users/missysedai/428973.html) and the outdoor decorations (http://www.livejournal.com/users/missysedai/429393.html) done.

Emmy is entirely too cute, and almost makes me actively want a dog (I like other people's dogs, but prefer cats myself). We had a temporary dog (http://www.livejournal.com/users/missysedai/430846.html), but found her people (http://www.livejournal.com/users/missysedai/430944.html) the very next day. Now Mark is mopey and we're having the dog discussion again.

Oh, the dog! I knew I forgot something.

The dog last week:

Two separate days of bad diarrhea, one day of vomiting.

Several days of not eating her food without serious coaxing (because if she doesn't eat, she throws up.)

One morning of coming back into the yard after diarrhea, snapping up a piece of stale bread that had blown into the yard from somewhere, and me sticking my fingers into her mouth to try and get it out. After a long standoff where she refuses to open her jaws any further and I can't pry them open, she decided to try swallowing--which, you guessed it, involves closing her jaws! Ow, ow, ow.

(She didn't mean to bite me, I'm sure of it, and she didn't break skin. But it also hurt like crazy.)

Plus the aforementioned moping about Chad's absence.

Don't let the cute fool you!

Ack! We have days like that with Schiller, but at 17 he's a very elderly cat and that sort of thing kinda goes with the territory. (Yeah, the accidental biting, too. We stopped putting tinsel on the Christmas tree years ago, because he used to eat it, and I'd get nipped up trying to pull it out of his mouth before he swallowed it all the way.)

Mark is talking about getting dog in the Spring. Only, his idea of what would be appropriate (puppy) is different from mine (older, pound rescue). This'll be fun.

Puppies = housebreaking = far too much of a commitment to take on without everyone, including the person who is home most of the time, agreeing.

At about a year old, you get most of the puppy energy and none of the housebreaking. Ideal.

(Our old cat nearly strangled herself in garland one year. I forget why we didn't put garland on our tree--did we buy some and just forget?--but tinsel I don't like.)

Quest for the Spear. I mean, really, could they be more Freudian if they tried? Still, it's nice to see librarians being the sexy heros for once. *waves at her librarian friends*

I dunno, it didn't seem so much like librarian-ing to me, rather than playing Sherlock Holmes to a knockoff Lara Croft.

It was a weird beast, approaching but not quite achieving self-parody.

Not that it helps this time, but what might have worked would be to order from bestbuy.com, picking up in the store. That should give you the online price and no shipping charges, though I think there's a 24 hour lead time before you can pick up the order....

Hmmm. I am not giving them my money any more if I can help it, but thanks for the tip anywya.

Oddly, my roommate has been looking forward to that cheesy movie since they started promo-ing it. She didn't watch it tonight, though. Yay Tivo.

Well, it's TNT, so even people without Tivo will be able to see it repeatedly.

(Is it a Noah Wylie thing?)

I actually have no idea why she wants to see it.

Nice tree! Is it a Fraser fir?

Chad says Balsam fir, or something other than Fraser, because the Frasers were expensive.

I mean, this was too much, especially compared to the twice the size, half the price tree Chad helped his parents get the next day. But the Frasers were even more.

Thanks! We like it. I'm just debating whether the silly little S-curve on the very top should stay or go. I tihnk it's growing on me.

Yeah, Fraser firs were the most expensive ones at our lot, and I have no idea why.

I bet your balsam smells fabulous. We woke up this morning and our whole downstairs smelled like pine. (We have a Douglas fir, which is what we get every year.)

Yup, the smell is quite pleasant. It doesn't seem to have been as strong when we brought it home, either, as last year--it was overwhelming at first and Chad had to reassure me that it would fade to manageable levels fairly quickly.

(I still would be fine with a fake tree, honestly, but Chad considers that heresy, or blasphemy, or something.)

We watched that movie last night! I have to say we enjoyed it tremendously and, as I remarked to Jordin, "If their tongues gets any further into their cheeks they're gonna sprain something." We took it as complete parody/satire. I mean what else can you do with a movie where Bob Newharts slams someone headfirst into a wall and says, "Hey, I used to be a librarian too." Besides, as a librarian, I love the whole kickass librarian thing. Besides, Noah Wyle, way cute.

And the line, "Hey! Get your own geek."

MKK

Chad and I saw it as just a shade too far away from parody.

Did you really think he was much of a librarian? I mean, I'm all for librarians (ook!), but he seemed more like random genius/Sherlock Holmes.

Oh well. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

1. I would boycott Best Buy, except that all the alternatives (Circuit City and CompUSA, basically) are even worse. And even then, I'd go all-Internet, except that I frequently have to return stuff for not working out, and that's such a hassle with shipping.

2. The pictures look nice. Main tip: Tweak 'em up in a photo-editing program, something like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop Elements; simple brightness/saturation adjustments along with some amount of unsharp mask can be a nice improvement in not much more time than it takes to resize 'em for the Web...

Yeah, I was in a hurry last night. Also, while I played a lot with brightness & contrast to get this icon working, I still don't entirely trust my laptop's monitor for that kind of work--at some level I'd rather blame the camera than what I did for any weirdness.

"Unsharp mask" means what?

Week in Review

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