Crazy crap I’ve done lately	January 28, 2007

School started last week, which is very cool so far.  This semester is a lot easier to handle, schedule-wise, and it’s made me a far saner person than I was last semester. 

But sane is kind of a relative term.  I find that I’ve been filling my spare time with some pretty wacky activities.  Thursday night, for example, I took a tip from Jim Halpert and submerged my coworker’s stapler in Jell-o (Friday was his birthday, and The Office is his very favorite show).  It was a difficult effort – I had some trouble with Jell-o fall-apart (which is somewhat evident in the photo), and I was fearful to travel with it.  So all my coworker got was the pictures, which was somewhat anti-climactic. 

And on Saturday morning, Steve and I got up before the dawn and went to the Kennedy Center to wait in line for the free Sufjan Stevens tickets that they were handing out.  They were to start handing them out around 9:00 and it was about 6:15 when we got there, but there were already tons of people in line (some of whom had been there all night, in tents, in the below-freezing temperatures).

We stood in line for three hours, drinking coffee from a thermos and stomping our feet to make sure our toes hadn’t fallen off.  They had 1150 pairs of tickets to hand out, and it was kinda hard to gauge if there were more than that many people there already – we didn’t find out until 9:30, when they gave the last tickets to folks who were about 100 people in front of us.  It was a crushing blow, but at least we can say we tried!

Yet another step up	January 18, 2007

I’m taking a digital photography class this semester, and when I asked the professor what kind of camera we’d need, he said, “oh, any old DSLR will do.”

After first running home to look up DSLR (which I learned stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex), the next thing I discovered was that these things are not cheap. This going-back-to-school nonsense is getting pricey.*

So after several weekends spent reading camera-nerd blogs that take the Canon vs. Nikon debate to a level of intensity that’s right frightening, I finally settled on my DLSR of choice, the Nikon D40, which just edged out the Canon Rebel XT. Why? The following reasons:

1. It’s new! It was just released in November 2006, so the bells and whistles on it are the newest available.
2. It uses SD memory cards, of which I already have several.
3. The features between the two are similar (zoominess, processor, price, etc), but many of the nerds said that the D40 has a smoother grip and simpler interface.

So, there. I’ve made my decision. And in 2 business days, it’ll be mine, all mine. I’m just hoping that I won’t also have to buy a huge pile of textbooks!

* However, I did my taxes last night, and that tuition credit *almost* makes up for it.

2007, eh?	January 15, 2007

Here’s been the sequence since I last blogged:

1. Christmas got thrown way off-balance, thanks to my inability to make it to the right airport in time.
2. As such, I got to spend some of pre-Christmas with Steve and his family.
3. And Christmas thru New Years was spent in Iowa.
4. I came home, and had to suffer through our biggest craziest work-event of the year, which went swimmingly, but gobbled up way too much of my time.
5. And then I needed a week to recover.

And now I have returned, new and improved in 2007. For now, I just wanted to share a few pictures:

Here we have the gingerbread house that I made a Steve’s parents’ house on Christmas Eve. A tad predictable, yes, but it was my first.	And I’ve got a sampling of New Year’s Eve pictures... here we have Darcy behind the bar.
And here we have Karen with Susan’s ass.	And here is me saying farewell to Susan and Darcy and Karen, because I sadly had to leave early, because I sadly had to catch a plane.