When killing your prey in front of my home, please do me the courtesy of either finishing your meal or removing it to a more appropriate disposal site. It is impolite to leave the homeowner to remove two bird wings and a bird skull from in front of the bushes.
That is all.
I scheduled today off of work to take the Intro to Flash workshop that NISDM was offering down at BGSU. Before the class started, the director of NISDM pulled me aside and let me know that, if I was interested, I could take tomorrow’s intermediate workshop at a massively discounted price. I did some quick calculations in my head — mainly regarding my amount of personal time from work, rather than my credit card balance — and told her to go ahead and sign me up.
Good thing, too, because if I’d paid $300 for the learnin’ I got today, instead of $400 for the learnin’ over two days, I’d be kind of pissed right now. It’s not their fault, though. I guess I just knew more about Flash than I thought I did. Some workshop participants really needed the supar-slow pace.
Today, near the end of the workshop, we got into fun stuff like animation. (Of course, I’d already been putzing with moving my little home-grown Pac-Man graphic around the screen by that point.) Tomorrow, we get to learn about Action Script, which is what I’m really looking forward to. I hope tomorrow gets in-depth enough that I feel like I got my money’s worth out of it.
I haven’t decided whether I should call in to work tonight, in advance, or tomorrow morning before I leave for BG. This is going to cost me some half-days I’d been planning to take, for carpooling to drum corps events and such, but I can just take two hours off on those days and make up the time, instead. I’m just glad to have this second day of workshopping.
Like I was telling Sheryl, I’m feeling pleasantly web-geeky lately. Reading my Designing With Web Standards book, figuring out PHP and MySQL and getting a login system going on the new LSM site, taking Flash workshops… hell, you’d think I was a web designer or something. 😉
Yeah, I know. I used to post every day, and now I post about as often as I shower.
OK, OK, not really. *paranoid glance*
I have quite a bit to blog about, but I’ve been working on other things and actually having a social life. Amy came up this weekend, and she and Aaron and I went up to the Ann Arbor Art Fairs. I have some pics to post of that, and I think that will be a good excuse to try my hand at creating a database-driven photo gallery. Anyway, that was my Saturday, and hanging out with Amy in BG was my Friday evening.
My Sunday was a drum corps rehearsal up in St. Clair Shores, MI. The staff shared some new information about our trip to the DCA Championships in Scranton, PA, but some of that is still privileged info. Suffice to say, that last hour of rehearsal was one of “oh shit, we have HOW many rehearsals to get this show clean?!” For me it was, at least. I tend to be a little high-strung about rehearsals, even without the unexpected kicking-it-up-a-notch.
This evening, I planted some Lilies of the Valley that Scott from work thinned out of his garden. It’s not exactly the best time of year to plant, but maybe — just maybe — I’ll be able to keep these full-grown plants alive better than the baby ones.
I also started working on the LSM site redesign again, after a week of slackitude that I could scarcely afford. I now have a userTable and an eventTable set up in my happy content management database. My goal for tomorrow is to complete a functional calendar and event detail pages. I think it’s a reasonable goal, and one I can accomplish in an evening.
And that’s my life in a nutshell. I have lots of details I want to fill in, but goodness knows when I’ll get around to it — that is, assuming I don’t get totally derailed by some other blog topic in the meantime, and end up forgetting to post about my nifty bamboo sax or about the abortion protestor in Ann Arbor.
Man… I wish I didn’t have to sleep. Or shower.
When I came home from work today, Aaron told me that he’d been startled by a THUMP on the air conditioner installed in the dining room window earlier that afternoon. Apparently, he’d looked out the window to see a not-quite-baby bird—say, an adolescent bird—sitting on top of the air conditioner, outside. It looked right at him, and wasn’t afraid. (Maybe not old enough to be afraid of people yet. It’ll learn.)
Anyway, his first instinct was to get the cat. 😀 Instead, he decided to get the camera and snap a digital pic of the birdie. Unfortunately, by the time he got back, the birdie was facing away from the window, and instead of turning back for its photo op, it flew away / jumped off.
Fast forward to this evening. Aaron was gone to work. I didn’t feel like doing anything on the computer (for once), and decided to go outside in the back yard and enjoy the brisk breeze from the impending rainstorm. And what did I see but—you guessed it—an adolescent bird sitting on the grass right by the back door, not five feet from the aforementioned air conditioner.
Time for me to run inside and get the camera.
When I came back out, the bird was still there, hungrily opening its beak and chirping at me. I snapped some not-so-good photos of it, getting mighty close—within a foot or so, if not closer, judging from the horrendous focus on some of the pics (even using the macro setting! I need a fancier digital camera).
With the photo op over, I sat back on my haunches and wondered what kind of food I could drop into a little birdie’s mouth. It looked mighty hungry, and although its mother was seeming to answer it from the nest several trees over, she certainly wasn’t coming to rescue him or anything. I don’t know if the little guy could even take off from the ground yet.
I, like every other good Girl Scout, know not to pick up baby birds. Still, though, I’m really expecting to find that little baby bird still sitting in the yard tomorrow, much worse off than it is today. *sigh*
Damn that Prime Directive, anyway.
In recent memory, there has been no other book that has made me so pensive for an entire day after having read it. Almost melancholy, even. I was distracted all day at work, thinking about the ending and the relationships between characters and what was set up for Book 7.
If you haven’t finished reading HBP yet, and you intend to do so, you might want to hold off on reading this spoiler-laden post.
Continue reading