2. Where am I moving? Well, I met with a couple guys in an intentional-community-type house yesterday -- 'twas very cool. We'll see.
3. I am a web developing MACHINE! A few of us AmeriCorps kids are preparing for a hostile takeover/redesign of nweec.org. I want to have three designs to propose tomorrow morning, and here are the first two: uno, dos. Sweet, huh?
4. Omg, Homeward Bound's on the tv here at the coffee shop.
5. Speaking of web development, I am starting to seriously consider trying to do it for a living starting in the fall when I go back to school. The catch: I'm somewhat lacking in the experience department. So... if anybody wants a PHP/MySQL/CSS-type website for super-cheap, we should chat.
- Location:Revolutions Espresso
- Mood:
bouncy - Music:Some sort of groovy mash-up
I've been working a lot (well, not more than 40 hours a week, but I see my coworkers every damn day), harassing my kitties and boyfriend, cooking a bit, and (mostly) playing WoW.
( Oh yeah. )
Any other WoWers out there, or am I talking to a whole bunch of brick walls?
- Mood:
awake
I know I've said it before, but this time I've finally got the sleeves worked out. Last time I picked up my armscye stitches and tried a few different ways of using short rows (kind of like the first part of turning a sock heel, but in the round), and I kept ending up with a horrible combination of puckering and poofing. It seemed this sweater really wanted to be a vest.
But! With the help of an experienced designer and the pythagorean theorem, I've got a sleeve pattern written down that should work.
In other knitting news, I am *this close* to finishing my Goodwill raglan. I have a few inches of the second sleeve to go, and I've decided to make it a Weasley sweater, because apparently everything I knit has to be Harry Potter. And what's happened?
I fucking ran out of yarn.
- Mood:
busy
The kitties are being super cute, all cuddled up on the window sill. ( And here they are being all cute, snuggling in the laundry basket. )
Yes, I am trying to post more frequently.
- Mood:
almost awake
On Thursday I had my first Earth Club (afterschool teaching goodness) where I was the only "teacher", and it went great. I brought a computer microscope that someone donated years ago, hooked it up to my laptop, and we all took turns looking at honeybee wings, dog hair, and algae, and learning how to change magnification and focus. (Have you ever seen a kid use a microscope for the first time? It's awesome.) I've got 7 kids from grades 1-5, so it's going to be challenging to come up with activities that will be fun for both extremes of the spectrum, but my only 5th grader seems keen on being my helper.
Yesterday a few of us went up to a conference on environmental education in La Conner, and afterwards drove up to Bellingham to enjoy The Boundary Bay Brewery. Chris and Shannon were so excited about it that they brought 5 gallons worth of jugs and growlers to fill up. Their beer is fantastic, but I didn't realize until the first sip of my IPA that it's the same beer I always get at the bar a damn block away from my house.
Man, it's actually sunny and beautiful out today. What the hell am I doing in here?
- Mood:
chipper
The last project was the website. I can't even tell you how OVER that I am. I've never been so thrilled to complete something before. (Technically though, it's not *totally* completed -- but I'm working on it only a couple days, rather than 40-50 hours, a week these days.)
Now we're working on the apartment! I mean, we've been living here for FIVE MONTHS and still just struggle with keeping it clean, let alone pretty. We got this great book, Apartment Therapy, and have spent the last couple weeks trying to take its lessons to heart.
We've been rearranging what little furniture we have, talking about color (a lot), and went to Ikea on Saturday night to spend the remainder of our Christmas money. We even bought a couch! Yay!
It goes in our TV room, which we have some really nerdy ideas for... but I'm getting ahead of myself.
It's comfy. Oh yes. So cushy. Ignore the fact that the throw pillows don't go together at all.
If you're really all that interested, the other photos are here. In that last one, you can catch a glimpse of the new paint in the living room.
We're somewhere between the *before* and *after* states on this one.
Angelo wants to put up a bunch of animation cels or photos from movies over the closet, put mirrors on the doors, and a padded bench sort of thing in the space between the shelves (under the window). Here's why I think his ideas are bad: mine are so much better.
I want to buy this rug, which is super soft and fluffy, but isn't quite shag. The closet doors need some curtains -- not because I like the look (I don't), but because we can't replace or paint the doors themselves, and they're sooooooo big and ugly. I guess we probably need curtains to replace the horrid mini-blinds on the window too, huh?
That's all well and good, but here's where the nerdy part comes in: the walls. I will paint them. With murals. Of our favorite movie/TV stuff. (In this kinda style.) Frodo over the TV, Harry, Hermione, and Ron under the window, cast of Firefly and Cowboy Bebop hanging out together over the couch. Yeah?
Well, I think it's a good idea.
- Mood:
creative
Go look at it, please -- but resist your urge to submit the sign up form riddled with obscenities, as the results are emailed to my boss and coworkers.
My favorite part of the site? Meet the Staff. In true AmeriCorps fashion, we decided to draw names and write each others' bios. ("It's teambuilding.") Chris (to whom I am ETERNALLY grateful for taking over all the CSS when it started to eat my brain) wrote mine:
Jenny comes to Seattle and the Portal from San Francisco, via a one year layover in Boston to work at a doggy day care. Her previous stint as an east-coaster involved attending a college without grades. A current and/or recovering nerd, she likes good coffee, knits a mean scarf, and doesn't eat marshmallows.
That's me in a nutshell, alright.
ETA 2: Nevermind, Chris awesomed the CSS up again, and now it is perfect in every browser imaginable. Yes it is.
- Mood:
relieved
My brain is fried, and I can't sleep, and it is way too late. I keep glancing over at that stupid page that isn't quite right in Firefox, and looks so very wrong in Explorer. Fuck Explorer. And you know what else? Fuck CSS. Yes, it's better than dealing with nested tables and mountains of markup intermingling with what should be pristine code, but it's got one hell of a learning curve. Trying to implement CSS in a logical way is like writing a novel by taking all your thoughts, writing them out in cryptic code on hundreds of millions of sticky notes, and sticking them up on the Great Wall of China in random order.
This website is supposed to be done by Tuesday. It's a self-assigned, self-enforced sort of deadline, but I've been working my butt off way too hard to miss it. I have a new plan of attack:
- First and foremost, FUCK the design. Let someone else in the office try to tackle that one. It is not my strength, and it is certainly not a priority.
- Get some goddamn passwords and security up on the backend so that we can take the site live ASAP and --as much as it will break my heart to do it-- remove my database full of LOTR dummy data.
- Crack the whip and get the other EP staffers to upload their data, while I make some search and sort functions.
- Time permitting, build a dynamic calendar page. Even more time permitting, think about making it pretty.
</geek-out>
- Mood:
frustrated
Accomplishments of the day:
- got coffee
- went to a planning meeting for a grant I'd never heard about before
- attended a (very interesting) forum on the achievement gap in Seattle schools that was redonculously irrelevant to our program
- got back to the office, heated up my lunch
- got a call from Angelo, saying it was snowing and that I should drive home before the freeway turned into an icy clusterfuck again
- ate my food, knit a little, and drove home before 3.
Waste of a day!
I've been making smashing progress on my Remus sweater though. I abandoned it a while ago when I realized the pattern's directions for sleeves would look awful, and couldn't figure out how to alter it (having never made a set-in sleeve sweater before). It's been in a weird unfinished-vest-like state, but last night I picked it up and did the math on some short-row shaping for top-down sleeves. I even went out and bought some beautiful buttons tonight. WILL POST PHOTOS OF THE FO SOON.
I can't wait until I've got this website up and running so I can have a little bit of my life back. I needs gets more knitting time in before Xmas.
- Location:my favorite red corduroy chair
- Music:Dandy Warhols
Now, I have a totally crap eye for design, as I'm sure Mark can testify. I Photoshopped a mock-up of my idea, and I'm hoping y'all can give feedback. Please?
| new design This shows what the page looks like when you roll over the first image. If you roll over the second, it turns all pretty color-ified, and a similar bar saying either "Members" or "Organizations" shows up. Same with the third, it'll say, "About". The blue, bold text beneath represents links to pages in that category. The images are stolen from Mark and a google image search, and as such will not be on the real website. We'll have to take our own pictures of happy students and nature scenes. I also haven't added the bottom bar with our contact information and sponsor images, because I was totally bored with the whole thing by the time I had formatted all that Lorem Ipsum. |
 |
| Bleh. Just for reference, this is what the website looks like now at my screen resolution. The menu items turn white on roll-over. |
 |
- Location:Revolutions Espresso
- Mood: working
FTW??
Geez, you think you know someone...
- Mood: flabbergasted
And another: Do not let Angelo grab the half and half when grocery shopping -- or at the very least, check what he's putting in the cart. He almost always gets "lite", and this time he's gone so far as to unknowingly get a carton of Mocha Peppermint. New Holiday Flavor my ass.
- Mood:
tired. so very tired.
Don't get me wrong, I do like the job. My boss and coworkers are very cool people, and I'm ecstatic to have an *actual* job with my own desk and responsibilities, none of which are cleaning up dog poo. There are going to be some serious challenges though, from working with kids and speaking in front of people to time management and organization. That, and my desk is about two feet from the giant printer, which was running the WHOLE time I was in the office yesterday, and my headache from that still hasn't gone away.
- Mood: tired and head-achey
Also, I had entirely too much coffee this morning. How is it that I'm still on a caffeine high?
Wish me luck on the jobs. And on calming down so I can go back to my knitting.
- Mood: excited
It was so nice to go to two events last weekend that were the exact opposite of bullshit. Mark and Velma's (or Mark and Velma, if you prefer) hitchin party was beautiful and awesome. Peter brought every ounce of his charm into that ceremony, Velma looked gorgeous and totally made me cry, and the princess-dress-flower-boy was aboodabooadorable. (Oh yeah, and Mark was there too.) It was everything one could hope for in a modern-day hippy-dippy wedding -- redwood branches and all. Smashing.
I'm glad I went to Stacey's (Aaron's mom) memorial too. I can't say I knew her very well, but enough to know she was a genuinely kind and graceful woman -- and the memorial reflected that beautifully. There was dancing, Aaron's step-mom sang a beautifully sad song, and gazillions of people shared stories about Stacey.
Blargh, I did have more to say, but it's escaping me now. As weird as it may sound, the weekend has inspired me to live my life with less bullshit. It's so refreshing.
- Music:The Cranberries - Dreams
The point is this: I am tired.
But really, I am posting because I finally checked my email for the first time in forever, and decided that the amount of spam I'm getting at jec03@hampshire.edu is completely out of control. I haven't received any personal email from that address in the last, oh, couple years -- but I wanted to make it official. So.
PLEASE do not send me anything at jec03@hampshire.edu, as I will never ever be checking it again.
- Mood: tired
No reason.
- Mood: bouncy
"But not this year," I told myself.
I even made Angelo install FileMaker on my new lappy so that I could keep all my knitting on track this year. I figured that, if I complete 2 ⅓ projects a week from here on out, I'll be fine. (For the record, I've already done 3 ½ this week.)
But then, earlier tonight, STUPID Angelo had to STUPIDLY remind me that I knit his STUPID brother a STUPID hat for his STUPIDSTUPIDSTUPID birthday in August. I've set a precedent. And the whole damn family was there to see him unwrap it. There's no denying it.
He has three sisters, one brother, two neices, one nephew, not to mention mom, dad, step-dad, aunts, grandmas, and significant others. By my count, there are 15 of them that I've spent enough time with to feel like I ought to give them something. Oh jeez.
32 + 15. We'll see.
- Mood:
overwhelmed
- Mood: avast!
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