Questing

Friday was my birthday! Woo, now I am 23, go figure. I’ve had a good year. Well, certainly eventful. Lost my job, searched for a new job for 3 months, ended up at a poor job, left that, and now have been here at Roto Zip for several months in a row. Woo. Married my best friend, and biggest crush. And well, generally survived. Ooh, and well I lost those 20 lbs before the wedding!


By this time next year I’d like to lose another 40 or so lbs. It’d be something I haven’t been since high school. I’m also excited to see how my artistic talents will have increased from now. I’m going to be putting a lot more effort and practice into building a viable art portfolio. Yes, this means many elves will be drawn.


Friday was my birthday, I took off of work an hour early, and went home for a quick nap before going out to dinner with my Husband and parents. Parents who are inconceivably cool and who bought me a real, honest-to-goodness Wacom tablet! Woo! Finally! I was almost in tears, it was such a surprise. I honestly didn’t think I’d get anything from them. (I’m so silly) Mostly, because of the Wedding this summer. But they wanted to get me something a bit nicer because of silly tax refund mess up thingy. And they love me. Heh. They also gave me a cool fashion art book called ‘9 Heads’ , which was, apparently my father’s idea. And it’s also very cool, talks about general fashion illustration, as well as good figure drawing and S-curves. Just dreamy, really.


Carlo got me an awesome wooden deskset, it has two little drawers, and some places to put writing material, and a wooden box for pens and pencils. He also got me some DVD’s, yah for dvd’s.


Saturday we went to Lambeau field, for the pre-season Packers vs Dolphins football game. I happily scored some free tickets to go on Friday. We went with Doug and his girl Tracy, and had a great time in the rain. Several things to remember about the game.

• Lambeau is much smaller than it looks on tv.
  
• Ponchos are a wonderful invention for keeping humans mostly dry.
  
• You don’t get a choice silly drunk people will sit behind or beside you.
  
• We had an awesome time.
  
• My husband missed the 4th quarter, he was there, he was watching it, but was so focused he missed the change to the 4 th quarter.
  
• We had a great time.
  
• The Packers won!!!
  
• We were very thankful that Doug drove.
  
• We got in at 3:30 or so.
  

Sunday was pretty low key, had the transplanted birthday cook out at Wendy and Drews.

My pirate name is

Bloody Grace Bonney

Every pirate lives for something different. For some, it’s the open sea. For others (the masochists), it’s the food. For you, it’s definitely the fighting. You can be a little bit unpredictable, but a pirate’s life is far from full of certainties, so that fits in pretty well. Arr!

Link found via Josie Nutter

---

Imood tells me this

‘You currently feel blah.

You normally feel happy’


In fact, it seems I’ve chose happy as my imood more than double the next popular (excited).


Thats a good thing to note. so…noted.


According to the Pooh-sonality test

---

I am a Tigger type

Absitively, posolutely splendiferous!

You’re just like Tigger, who is brimming with irrepressible entery. Tigger is the origanal bounce-first,
think-later type. He is busy enjoying himself and he just assumes everyone else is having
as much fun as he is. It’s just that he doesn’t think about how his antics affect others. The world was made for having fun and Tigger is going to have it — in leaps and bounds!

---

Mmm, I ate a bowl of sunshine for desert today, yummy golden pineapple chunks. Quickly chilled in the freezer and served in a bowl. Such a great way to redeem one’s mood.

Last night I fell asleep in the arms of my husband. Facing him, over and under blankets and pillows, I cradled his head and shoulder with my arms and hands. His arms embraced me too.
Such a secure, and overwhelming happy feeling to have right before drifting off. I made sure to tell him that various things in my life might be making me
unhappy, but he only makes me happy.


I’ve been really frustrated lately, with a variety of things, from work issues, to social issues, to weight loss issues, to money issues(those always tend to hit us at the bottom of the month, silly bills) .
And I know everything will even out, be paid up, submitted, and solved. But it’s still frustrating.


We went for a drive on Sunday, in the jeep, up around campus, up around where we dream of living someday, near the lake in these beautiful old and big houses, full
of architectural wit and character. Old money, we say. We know that fabulous houses won’t make us happy, if we aren’t already. He sees getting one of those houses as just a problem to be solved, overcome. It was nice when he parked the Jeep, and we went for a short walk around the dorms, on the dirt path down by the water, I feel like I’ve missed being outside the whole summer.



Sometimes our dreams seem so far away, and I know we just have to take it bit by bit, step by step. If I must look only at my feet, while I pass through life’s problems, I know eventually I’ll have walked the distance. Sometimes my dreams seem indistinct, I still want so many different things, directions. I wonder how I can accomplish them, when I have trouble accomplishing a clean apartment, made bed, laundry off the floor. Seems like I’ve gone from a who might I be to a, who are we, who do they think we are, who do we want to be?


This might be just Dayquil addled brain sloshing, or perhaps just looking towards Friday, where I’ll be 23. I have these weird thoughts, some that say, ‘Stacie, you’re only a bit out of school, what did you expect to have accomplished by now?, to ‘what haven’t I expected to accomplish’, and ‘where next.’


Where next, indeed?

I was totally in an ill mood all day, just plain bad temperment. And I wasn’t the only one at work feeling down. So, after lunch I ran out to piggly wiggly (local supermarket) and picked up an iced coffee for myself, and a tin of ready to bake brownies. Strange, me finally thinking of the people in my office, and wanting to help them have a better day. The though of it made me feel better, though I had almost grabbed the ready to back cookies, and we don’t have a cookie pan here at work.


And now I have warm brownies, on my desk, the nice warm chocolate smell filling the room, making us all smile.


I’m in an instant better mood. Inhaling the air, I feel suddenly calmer, happier, more at peace. I know it’s a transient thing, food comfort. But, some days you have to bring out the big guns…

Went to a Photoshop seminar thingy today. It was really good, I decided not to do the web track, which seemed way to basic for me. I really didn’t want to sit and listen to someone talk all day about how to use imageready, and what hypertext was, and meta tags… even if he was really entertaining during the introduction.


I opted instead to sit through the hours of instruction on advanced Photoshop, where I learned many wonderful things about masking, and channels, and style sets, and set sets and whew. It was a lot of info, hopefully will help me out day to day. Still, I struggled staying awake all day, it was tough to be away from the net, addict that I am, and tougher still to be away from the computer doing about 5 things at once at any time through out the day.


I tried to implore people to page my phone while I was there, but I don’t think they heard me.

Anyway,


tried to go down to the SCA tonight to see if anyone was throwing weapons. Turns out not much of anything was going on, about 6 fencers, and perhaps 10 people just wandering around. I didn’t realize that this super big Pennsic war was going on, and everyone went there, I’m so out of the loop. I might even be in the loop, my mail tends to get filtered all over the place.


But I called Brian and Sarah(whom I met through the SCA) , and we’re going to hit Perkins, a block from my house, for a bit. Asa will be there as well, seems he’s moving in with Brian, and will be attached to his hip from now on. It’s so cool those 2.5 call me to do things, even when I’m sometimes busy and overcommitted, it’s nice to know they think about me, want me around. I call them too, with offers of karaoke and ren faire. (actually looks like they are going on sat, and I can’t then, because I’m video taping a wedding) while we were thinking of going on Sunday. Still, nice of them to ask. They are fun to hang with.


Nancy has taken a job which requires her to move away from karaoke. (And us!) we’ll miss her dearly, but think it’s way supa nifty that she’s taking a teaching job, and gets to do all sorts of neat things. (plus, email is a wonduras invention, and we’ve always had tons to say)


It’s been raining all tonight, the roads are slick and wet and beautiful, reflections of the lights appear to sink twelve feet into the black pavement. I drove home on beautiful concrete mirrors, almost distracted by the lights dancing under the wheels of the Jeep.

Ok, so I’ve been working on a simple php photo gallery script.

I know you’ve already seen most of these pics, but you can see the script in action here with the

I’m still tweaking with the design and stuff, but it pleases me that it works. Something similar will hit metahari, for a long term art project I’m starting.

Oh, it was such a nice weekend. All the humidity has been swept away, we spend a good amount of time with Tony and Michael and co. Played V&V, ate good food, and then I watched a movie (the hidden) with Maria, while the boys talked game mechanics and physics (neither of which do I have much in the way of contribution).

Sunday, Carlo and I pretty much vegged, did some laundry, but mostly we each played dreamcast in different rooms. (I beat the hero version of Sonic 2, and he spent the whole day racing Grand Turismo 2, via Bleemcast) Tony and Mike dropped in after an afternoon of car searching, and we hit Chili’s. (According the the correct time on Mike’s food clock) and then they headed back to Mike and Maria’s home for real dinner and brownies, while we hit the cheapie theatre for The mummy returns.

It was nice to relax…

Woo, my birthday’s next week! It’s odd though, I do tend to associate my birthday with the start of school.

Ok, so, not many very original things to say, except of course, that it’s very hot here. It’s unbearably hot outside, it’s hot at home, it’s hot at the office. It is, thankfully not so hot at my parent’s house, where we’ve been on and off all week, taking care of the dog, and eating food out of the fridge. (Is the food in your parent’s pantry always better than the food in your own?)

GenCon was a lot of fun, even though I didn’t get to see James Marsters, the shining star of Buffy the Vamp slayer. I’m a bit bummed, but no where as deflated over the issue as Heidi. Poor fangirl.

We bought a few things, some game books for Carlo, I got 2 catgirl decks of a game called Brawl, it’s very cute. And we both got 2 sets of dice, he got dice called ‘ninja’ and ’stealth’, when they asked me what mine were called I said ‘lick me’ and’ they laughed at me, and looked at the actual name on the dice label, which said ‘frosted pink’ . I also got some ‘frosted blue’ dice.

I hadn’t bought dice for a couple years, it’ll be nice to have some new matching sets to roll about.

And we dressed up on Saturday, it was a lot of fun to walk around in garb at the con, with my sword securely attached to my bodice, several people stopped us to take pictures of/with us.

Hard to see, but this station has the Xbox logo on it, the game looked really beautiful, it’s running on a devkit though.

And this is a PS2 dev kit, you can see the box says TEST. ICO is a very cute game. We got a free PS2 hat and neck lassos at the booth.

Buildings in Milwaukee

Then we came back the next all dressed up in our Ren Gear.

Carlo with the creator of Cyberpunk

We also went to Toy’s for Chinese dinner with Joe and Tonya, Ryan and Katie, Ted and Angie, Paul and also Puck. It felt like old times from Platteville.

It was not so hot last weekend, it was pretty nice, and looks like a nice weekend weather wise coming up also.

Ps, Props to Wendy, she’s finally redesigned

Whew, survived till the weekend, yah!


And we have fun things to do, GenCon and Ren Faire, and fun people to see, Spike, and friends at Gencon, and woo! It’s FRIDAY!

Eric swung past madison this week, on his great american road tour. We (Carlo, Heidi and I) took him to Ella’s Deli. It fit right in with his plan to visit House on the Rock. His trip was inspired by Neil Gaiman’s new book American Gods
. I haven’t read it yet, but I will, I love, love love, Gaiman.


Here are some pics from Eric’s visit, taken with an aiptek pencam. (works great in sunlight, not so nice inside.)

Ella’s is very eclectic.











We finally got a table that wasn’t right in the aisle, and it was a fun table with sharks and a diver toy, but wasn’t working, some of their other tables have train sets, or pez collections, or magnetic faces with wands stuck in the side of the table.













We’ve been married a bit over a month!






Anyway, we had a great time, and it was fun to hear of his previous journey and what was coming up for him, we love to have visitors up here in the Cheese Nation. Heidi and I also think it’s really odd that people outside of Wisconsin have no clue what cheese curds are.


We went to Heidi’s house after not being able to find cheese curds for Eric, and drooled over her new ibook, and talked databasy stuff until I had to take my self home to bed. I managed to grab a couple pics of my new pink Game Boy Advance, sorry for the quality, even under that lamp, the pictures are a bit fuzzy.