randomness, snippets Leave a comment

Chillin’

Some evenings, all I want is to kick back and watch some Good Eats.

Sure, I had other stuff planned, like uploading some photos and packing up some shoes to return, but none of it was urgent.

My son didn’t get up after lights out (for the second night in a row! w00t w00t!), and I enjoyed a carefully planned after-dinner snack and a decaf with two episodes of my favorite TV show.

(Well, I mean, not my ALL-TIME favorite… I can’t diss Next Gen like that… but it’s my favorite at the moment… even though it’s been off the air for years. Hooray for Amazon Video.)

Anywho, tonight just felt like one of those nights where I wanted to chill instead of being productive. And I’m OK with that.

randomness Leave a comment

Digital Clutter

I have years and years of documents, projects, photos, and music stored on my two external hard drives.

I probably haven’t opened 75% of these files in the past two years.

Nowadays, when I have a few minutes to an hour to sit at my home PC and do some “work” — post-processing photos, mostly, either for uploading to Flickr and the blog or to print for my photo album — sometimes I find that I can’t find what I’m looking for.

All I wanted to do was to print a couple of collages I’d put together a few months back. (I’m printing multiple photos on one page, as an experiment, laid out like you’d see on Flickr with the photos resized so they fit nicely in even rows.)

I couldn’t find my damn Photoshop files.

Had I saved them in their own Project folder? Did I put them on the Desktop, since I knew I’d be accessing them soon? How about just in the folder with the other photos from the fair?

I finally did find them, and got them uploaded to print. In the process, I discovered how hopelessly behind I am in printing individual photos for the family photo album.

I need a new process. We live in this highly mobile era where I can (and sometimes do) order prints straight from my iPhone, yet I also want to print film photos and photos from my Nikon, and keep them all in chronological order in the photo album (mostly).

I can’t make myself prioritize clearing digital clutter over clearing physical clutter, though. I’m bad with both, honestly, and it comes from not putting things in their place as soon as possible — or not having a place designated for the thing, and just putting it somewhere for now.

All I know is that clutter is frustrating, whether it be physical or digital, and it keeps me from being efficient at whatever I’m trying to accomplish. I’m seriously going to just have to carve out some time to deal with the clutter.

All of it.

randomness, weight loss Leave a comment

12 Things That Are Always In My Refrigerator

In my fridge

Our favorite supermarket stopped carrying Philadelphia Fat Free Cream Cheese a couple weeks ago. It’s such a staple in our fridge that we looked at a different store for it this past week, to no avail — Aaron had to buy that store’s brand of fat-free cream cheese, instead.

It got me to thinking about the things we always keep in our fridge. I think this probably went around as some sort of meme years ago, but now I present to you, just for shits and giggles and in no particular order, twelve things we always have in our fridge (at least, right after grocery shopping).  Continue reading →

randomness, writing Leave a comment

2017 Resolutions: Q1 Review

In the I’ve Got This column: posting daily to my blog (only missed once), posting weekly photos to said blog, trying new recipes, and going easy on the clothes shopping.

In the Needs Work column: sticking to a budget, and shopping Amazon with mostly reward points.

I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who really cares about the deets on these, but if you’re interested, read on.  Continue reading →

college, music 1 Comment

Spotify Premium: Like Scour in the 90s, But Legal

Who remembers Scour?

I have vivid memories of working at my college job, sitting at my desk in the office next to my co-worker, Jeff, and one of us getting a song stuck in our head. Off to Scour, to download and listen to something random, like the theme from the A-Team, or some esoteric 80s song, or some freedom rock (turn it up!).

Did I know it was shady? Sure. Did I care? Nope. It was available, and there wasn’t exactly another avenue for me to quench my immediate musical desires back in 1999, and it was before the days of packet-sniffers that would throttle bandwidth or flag me for peer-to-peer activity, so…

Fast forward 18 years to 2017.* When I get Billy Ocean stuck in my head, I pull up Spotify on my work laptop — I pay a subscription fee of about $10 a month for Premium — and search for “Caribbean Queen.” I get an entire compilation album of Billy Ocean’s greatest hits, and I listen to the sounds of elementary school for a good half hour. Unlike some 20 years ago, though, I don’t have to wait 15 minutes for a 3MB mp3 to download over the 10/100 BaseT ethernet connection.

And it’s completely legal.

*Side note: I still can’t get over being 40 years old and so vividly remembering multiple decades.