anecdotes 1 Comment

The Perils of Suburban Life

There’s some sort of little-league football team that’s been practicing in the vacant grassy lot across the street from our house. Mind you, we live on a dead end, so when all the parents come to watch little Tyrone and Jamal play football, they park their cars / trucks / minivans / SUVs such that our comings and goings are challenging at best. They don’t seem to comprehend that it’s a big, open field, with plenty of room for you to park your vehicle. No, they have to park either on or in the street, often simply stopping to idle in the exact middle of the street, forcing me to come to a complete stop and glare at them until they get the idea and move to the side so I can get around their giant SUV and actually park in my own goddamn driveway.

We were upset on Tuesday morning, when the garbage men actually took the giant branch that had been sitting on our curb for two weeks; that branch had kept the annoying minivan fucker from parking in front of our house. Somehow, though, the inconvenience must have trained Minivan Fucker not to park in front of our house anymore, as she’s continued parking in front of our neighbor’s house.

We’ve had quite enough of the peewee football practice, thankyouverymuch. We’re ready for it to be over, or for it to move elsewhere.

This evening, they seem to be having some sort of cookout. There’s a charcoal grill puffing smoke and tables laden with buns and paper plates. The boys are playing football without their pads and uniforms, and someone is booming rap music out of their truck.

The good news is that this could conceivably be the end of peewee football season. The bad news is that I have to put up with rap music and hollering kids (and parents) for a few hours.

I think it’ll be worth it in the end.

otaku 1 Comment

Those Crazy Japanese

For anyone who hasn’t seen this yet…

Along the lines of All Things Japanese, this site was helpful for me in deciphering why it was amusing for an anime convention to be named Nan Desu Kan. I’d heard enough Japanese to recognize it (or, rather, “nan desu ka”) as a common turn of phrase, but the Learn Japanese website explained that it means, “What is it?”

I’d love to take a Japanese class. I don’t think there are any local evening classes taught by native speakers, though. I want to be able to do more than count to twenty badly, ask “what is it,” and other fun otaku tricks. If the Learn Japanese site had audio clips to confirm pronunciation, it would be even better. I’ll have to look into some of the podcasts on learning to speak Japanese.

Not like I’m ever going to make it to Japan any time soon, unlike *some* people I know. And, yes, I do know more than one person who either has been or is going to Japan. ^_^

weight loss 1 Comment

Averages

Isn’t that the nicest little chart you ever did see? It’s my average weekly weight, as calculated by my DietOrganizer program. I only just discovered that particular chart today, and boy, does it make me feel good about myself. 🙂

I’ve also been using the “Google 15” widget for my personalized Google homepage, which does a very similar thing by charting both your daily weight and your running average.

(I really only use the personalized Google homepage so I can see the headers of my Gmail at work, since accessing webmail is not only near-impossible with the web-browsing countermeasures they’ve installed, but is also an offense punishable by termination.)

At any rate, it does my heart good to see those numbers going in the right direction. It makes for less drama when I get on the scale every morning (o noes! i gained a pound overnight!).

In other news, my gut seems to be deflating. My upper abs not so much, but my lower ab fat is definitely shrinking like an old balloon. Maybe this Saturday’s bimonthly weight-loss photos will make me a happy camper.

P.S. – It’s interesting to me how difficult it is to share someone else’s weight-loss joy when you’re kind of in a rut yourself. For me, anyway. When James at work is all excited about losing weight, but I’m holding steady, it’s hard for me to give an enthusiastic attaboy. Likewise, when I showed him this chart today, he seemed happy for me, but seemed to remain bummed that he’d gained over the Black Swamp Arts Festival weekend, what with the fair food and friends in town and all. I can also tell it’s kind of awkward for Aaron to be excited for me when he’s not losing as fast as he’d like.

It’s kind of the negative side of having diet buddies, I guess. When neither side is very competitive about weight-loss, all bets are off.

P.P.S. – I took my bodyfat percentage and did some calculations yesterday, and figured that my current lean body weight is probably around 135 lbs. Interesting factoid. Assuming my muscle mass remains a constant, that means I need to lose about 6% bodyfat to reach my initial I’ll-be-content-here-for-a-while first goal of 190 lbs.

Getting down to my ultimate-ever goal of 160 would require me to be… *does calculations* …15.6% bodyfat. Hmm. Unlikely, but not impossible. Honestly, I can’t even imagine what I’d look like in that body.

randomness 2 Comments

I Give Up

I designed some stickers for Aaron’s podcast. They were adapted from the t-shirt design, which I also designed (with some editorial help from Garza).

The stickers were to be 4.25″ x 2.75″ big. The printer’s online instructions said to submit files at 300dpi. Since I’d resized the design from a larger t-shirt design, I opted to ignore their suggestion and submit the design at 1200dpi instead. This saved me from having to rework the entire design and optimize it for a smaller print size.

The stickers came in this week. All the fine detail is lost. The fantastic black background blends into the mascot’s hair and skirt, because my hairline divider stroke failed to print properly. The katakana surrounding the mascot is illegible. All because I can’t follow directions.

I spent two hours tonight reworking the design from scratch, which was harder than I’d expected. I created a layer of halftone dots (a la newspaper photographs) for shading, then went through the painstaking detail work of cleaning up said halftone dots around the edges of the drawing with the eraser tool. Only when I went to throw in the fantastic black background did I realize that I should have been painting in white instead of erasing. The mascot’s cute mug became akin to some sort of monster movie villain, being that half of it was suddenly filled in with black.

I wanted to have this done tonight. I wanted to tell Aaron I’m sorry, and that the next batch of stickers are on me, and here’s the new design. Instead, I’m going to bed without making my lunch. Again.

Excuse me while I go have a nice cry, then beat myself about the head until I fall asleep.