OK. I put the photos in a new place. Go here. I'm only allowed to upload 10 a day, so there will be more tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day aft ... you get the idea.
posted by Kate at 9:48 AM link/comments
Friday, June 11, 2004
Hmm. Damn link. I'll move the photos somewhere that allows public viewing. Sorry about that, y'all.
Paul, congratulations on graduating, and I think you should have all the corn chips and TV your heart desires. You deserve it after getting all those degrees, and I'm sorry you have to adjust your eyes to the cruel reality of the dark world. I've been stumbling through it for six years now, stubbing my toes and smacking my head on walls I didn't know were there.
There are so many goddamned walls.
Today, though, I got to move back into my office. You have no idea how wonderful this is. I want to roll around on the mold-less floor, nuzzling my cheek into the hideous multi-colored, made-for-office berber. Maybe it's just the high from inhaling carpet glue fumes, but I'm positively elated to be in a room that doesn't contain two other people, where I can listen to my own radio and don't have to stifle my belches.
On another note, can we please bury Ronald Reagan now? It's not that I'm sick of the media coverage (ok, well, maybe just a little), but rather that this is all taking far too long. Having worked through more than my fair share of funeral proceedings for various relatives over the past 10 years, I feel fully qualified to say that funerals are exhausting.
In my family, funerals involve a day or two of viewings, where people show up and stare at the corpse, followed by a morning of mass and cemetary services, all with appropriate sobbing and hugging, and then everyone goes to someone's house to eat a shitload of pierogi. It takes about three days, and it is the most tiring exercise in the world. A week? A week of this? And flying back and forth several times across the country? That's just cruel. I can't say I've ever been Nancy's greatest fan, but for the love of god, give her a break. Put that man in the ground so she can eat a plate of haluski and get some sleep already.
posted by Kate at 10:14 AM link/comments
Hello all.... so i always tell Tower that i check the blog every day, but never remember to post when I am at home, where the link lives to post... so here i am posting... i actually wanted to ask kate to fix the link to the snapfish site... i mean, the link is fine, but it brings up a login page that i dont have a login for, nor am i sure that if i create an account, that it will let me see your pictures... as for memorial day, i too would always rather be doing those kinds of things... i mean libations, high-calorie food, friends, fire, furry animals, you just can't go wrong! plus, the addition of the hot tub was VERY welcome... all in all, a good time was had by all, or at least if they didn't have a good time, they didn't bother to complain to us!
posted by Becky at 12:09 AM link/comments
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
Graduating is hard.
Well, getting your picture taken dozens of times and getting up too early and waiting to receive your empty diploma cover and then waiting some more for everyone else to get theirs--that's more or less easy.
But being out here, in the world, with no direction or guidance except that which I must provide with my own little will? You can have it. I want to eat corn chips and watch TV.
posted by paully at 5:56 PM link/comments
Friday, June 04, 2004
How was Memorial Day weekend for you? I spent mine doing stuff like this: In case you're wondering, that's pretty much what I'd rather be doing at any given moment of any given day. This was especially welcome after the past few weeks, weeks that have consisted mainly of one big shitstorm, both literally and figuratively. One of the cats crawled into a cold air return and we spent 8 hours' worth of our Saturday trying to dig him out from beneath the floorboards, and when we realized that wasn't going to work, Melinda had to take a hammer to the walls of her brand new house and smash out a cat-sized hole so we could get him out of there.
Then Marc lost his job at the World's Most Evil Coffee Company. While I don't want to get into specifics, the reasons for the dismissal were a face-slap reminder of the kind of senseless bullshit that can be perpetrated upon service industry employees, and indeed went a long way toward proving that the World's Most Evil Coffee Company is just that. Y'all know damn well which company I mean, and I'm serious when I tell you that if any of you patronize the World's Most Evil Coffee Company ever again, you had bloody well better not let me find out.
The good news is that he gets to collect unemployment for a while, because even the State of Ohio is on our side. They sent us a letter that said "no reasonable person" could be convinced that his dismissal was justified. For once, I'm willing to give this bizarre state a little credit. Now if someone down there in Columbus would come to the conclusion that no reasonable person could be expected to believe that the state's schools are funded fairly, and that our governor isn't a big gap-toothed dufus with no discernable evidence of a soul, we'd be getting somewhere.
Moving on. About a week after the firing, there was a huge thunderstorm, and the combination storm/sanitary sewer that equips my office building backed up and flooded about two inches of good old-fashioned raw sewage into my office, and I spent the next week saying words and phrases like "pathogens," "airborne," and "I'll be goddamned if I'm gonna sit in an office filled with" to facilities managers who truly seemed bewildered by the fact that I didn't want to spend 40 hours a week in an office that by the end of the week had begun to sprout black mold. In the end, they agreed to replace my office carpet. I'm displaced at the moment, waiting for the carpet to be installed, and sharing an office with good-natured coworkers who pretend not to mind that I sneeze approximately 7,300 times a day.
So it was with great relief and joy that I hopped in the car with Laura and Steve over Memorial Day weekend and made our annual trek to Jen's parents' house near Rochester, NY, where we spent three days eating highly caloric food, drinking all manner of libations, playing with alpacas, strolling the shores of nearby Lake Ontario, and, on the way back, taking a brief jaunt into Canada to make my yearly duty-free stop. Here are some photos, all of which were taken with my brand new camera:
So it turns out that a low shutter speed combined with lack of tripod makes this sort of thing happen. That UFO-like cluster is actually the moon.
Fires are good for sitting around.
Lake Ontario is worlds nicer than Lake Erie, because unlike Cleveland, Rochester hasn't spent hundreds of years dumping hideous industrial pollutants into its lake and trying to make everyone believe that the dumping of hideous pollutants is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Again with the niceness.
So nice, in fact, that even the algae is pretty.
Nice enough, even, that Laura thought she should shove her whole head underwater.
We found this hunk of driftwood, and when we stood it up, it totally looked like a deer head. Here's our friend the deer looking longingly out to sea. Or out to lake. Or something.
Steve, skipping stones.
This sign was hanging on a park kiosk. So, um, I guess we found us.
Here's half an alpaca head.
To see the rest of the pics, go here.
posted by Kate at 3:40 PM link/comments