Room with a View

I just started my semi-annual desk clutter overhaul. 90% of it is a pile of documents that need to be shredded, which hasn't been done because the shredder can't be plugged in unless I unplug something else. Right now I'm using the available outlets, so it will wait. Meanwhile, I'm looking around at the other stuff I see every day, here by the computer. One of the things I used to do on my forums was ask people to tell me what they saw from their desks... usually got standard answers, but sometimes someone would say "a giraffe" or something equally intriguing.

A few of the random objets d'moi...

• Two foil-wrapped chocolate roses from last Valentine's Day. I could never eat things like that... I hate unwrapping them. And they go along with the marshmallow Santas from 4 seasons ago, the ones with the accidental naughty bits due to a mold malfunction. I should put those on eBay.
• Approximately 5 zillion assorted pens and pencils in a milk-glass container. I can never find the one I want... it usually shows itself right there in plain view once I've stopped looking for it. (I love good pens.. whenever I see a cashier or customer using one in a store, or have to use one myself, I'm always checking out the brand if it has a certain flow to it or writes the way I like. Does anyone else do this? :-/ )
• A giant glass mason jar, formerly full of pickles, now full of bubblegum machine toys. Both former and current contents are obsessions of mine.
• Candles.. candles.. candles...
• A corkboard with the usual gamut of clipped comic strips, snapshots, oddball tags and labels, stickers, souvenirs, etc.
• A pro wrestler kite and ping-pong-ball shooter, among other wrestling-related stuff. Oh, and an air freshener, in case anyone wants to know what "pro wrestler" smells like. Yeah... I didn't open it either.
• A free flyswatter from the insurance company. I haven't used it yet. The best ones were those old wire-handled kind with the plastic mesh on the end... the backs of my legs got swatted more than the flies ever did. Suckers had a good sting to em!
• Old vinyl records and a phonograph. I believe I play albums more often than I do CD's. Next to it is a brand-new iPod I won back in April, and still have not used. I keep moving it to get to the record player knobs.
• A scale replica of a 426 Hemi engine with moving parts and a diecast '59 Caddy Eldorado.
• An old Canon AE1 program camera that I need to get in to the repair shop for a new seal. In spite of having several nice modern cameras, those old AE1's just have a bit of charm about them, and I'd like to use it again. I miss the shuttersqueak!
• A framed movie still of Brandon Lee from The Crow. Naturally.
• Candles... candles... candles...
• A small pile of various sour candies, plus half a roll of Butter Rum Life savers. Hard to find those anymore. Also half a bag of recently-recalled White Rabbit taffy. For the record, candy lasts forever in this house. I rarely eat it, but when I want it, there's no shortage to choose from.
• Fireballs rock. That is all.

It's That Time Again...

It's Fairtime! That means... fair fooooooooooooooooooooooood!

I'm not going to post about it again... those in the know are either drooling or making gagging noises right now, and the rest of you just shrug and continue... but speaking of food:

After so many years here, I still can't get over the differences between what certain foods are called and what said food actually is. For example, "barbecue." A neighbor once said she was having a cookout and making bbq... to me, and to most of the rest of the country, this means there is a slab of meat being cooked on a fire at some point. Around here, it's sloppy joe on a bun. Homemade or not, Manwich does not = barbecue in my book.

Then there's pigs in blankets. When I was a kid, my mom made those, and they consisted of hotdogs wrapped in Pillsbury dough and baked in the oven. Here, it seems, they're cabbage rolls. No weiners involved, and no Poppin' Fresh Doughboy.

How about those mangoes? An older lady at work was describing a potluck dish she was going to cook and said she needed to buy mangoes on the way home to make it. I thought that was an odd sort of combination, but the food here can be odd at times, so I just assumed that mangoes and onions went together somehow and people liked it. Turns out, "mangoes" are what the locals call bell peppers. >.< HOW they came up with that, no one has been able to explain to me.

Now... let's talk pickles. I went into one of the many burger/ice cream places here once, with a mad craving for a cheeseburger with extra pickles. Upon biting into it, I stopped, shocked to the core... those were sweet pickles. Huge, thick-sliced bread-and-butter pickles, my least favorite kind... on. my. cheeseburger. I had never encountered such a thing before but it seems common here. This rude awakening has since been tempered by the discovery of 1. deep-fried DILL pickles (yummm) and 2. homemade dills in a variety of sizes and flavors (forget store bought pickles, or beets for that matter... homemade ones kick their mass-produced butts all over the place.) I've always loved those giant deli pickles, and I'll still buy a pickle-on-a-stick at the amusement park now and then. Yes, it's a deli dill, on a steeeek! Simple pleasures indeed.

Other weird things I've eaten here, which I believe I've mentioned before... chicken and waffles (made with shredded chicken gravy, quite good actually), scrapple, cheesesteaks with Cheez Whiz and fried onions, an assortment of Polish and Dutch food, pickled watermelon rinds, ham with dandelion greens, hot bacon dressing on potatoes, deer heart marinated in homemade wine (not a favorite), and emu jerky, among other things. I'm planning on eating more weird crap at the fair. I don't think I'm quite up to "fried spaghetti on a stick" though. Maybe next year.

By the way... TODAY is Talk Like a Pirate Day. Avast, mateys! Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Birds n' Bees

The eagles are back! YAY! I saw one circling around the nest site this past week. We'll have an eaglet this summer! The robins are back too, and they brought their friends, because they are building nests everywhere at work.

Bumblebees are around too, and so are the wasps and hornets. I encountered the first hornet I saw so far this year on Thursday, and I hope I don't see another in that manner...

I'm driving home with the windows down, radio up, just cruisin' along singing to the radio, when there's a loud THWACK! A very large, fat hornet hits my rearview mirror and lands in the car, on my left thigh. I know that hornets often take a hit and just get stunned for a minute before buzzing back to life; I'm about to brush him off before he gets oriented when the wind in the car blows him straight up the leg of my shorts.

Scene: I'm doing about 60mph... there are cars behind me so I can't slow down, and there's no place to pull over... and there is a soon-to-be-pissed-off giant hornet in my britches. I can feel his legs start to move so I do the only thing I can. I stand up with one foot on the gas pedal and shake my shorts (I'm now approaching 75mph) until the invader falls out onto the floormat. I glare at him for the next 6 miles... "Don't you move. Do NOT move. Stay right there, don't go buzzing around, and I'll let you out at home." He's twitching faster now and trying to turn over, but I make it to the house before he comes back completely and carry him out to the garden.

And that's my excitement this week. :-P

SHE LIVES!!!!!

I've been neglecting my blog as of late. Actually, I've been off the internet in general for a while, except to check emails. My friends all seemed to send me messages at once, asking if I was okay and so forth. Yes, I'm fine! Thanks for being concerned. :-) I miss you all, esp. those of you in OK, SC, and Latvia, and the various assorted forums I typically haunt. There's a new post on my other blog as well.

It's spring season again and work has been... well, I'm sure I've griped about it here before, so no need to rehash the details. It's just been typical for spring: busy and generally aggravating. A little over a month to go before it officially ends... but I don't foresee anything slowing down until at least the end of June, once all the 4th of July merch goes out. In good news (!!!) we got two new hires who are better than I could have hoped. One was transferred to another plant (read: STOLEN from me), sadly... I really liked the inch-long nail he has stuck in his eyebrow... but the other remained on my crew and is doing a great job. Oh... worth a mention... Boss is still on his erroneous "in lieu of" kick. I am thisclose to correcting him or simply beating myself on the head with Webster's until the pain overrides my irritation.

Speaking of spelling... I recently discovered the online game (Virtual world? Sim? RPG? whatever it's classified under) called Second Life. My sister had tried to tell me about it and get me into it quite some time ago, but I was one of those "Second Life is for people who have no First Life" advocates. Then, thanks to some friends who joined via one of our forums, I decided to pop in on a lark (i.e. was dragged in by the ankles, under protest). The idea was to talk to a particular musician related to the forum who was on SL in support of the new band lineup and forthcoming album. Well... he's been there, but I haven't met him yet... I found a buttload of considerably more interesting things to do, none of which I'm going to go into here... my rant is that most people who use SL also use scripted gestures: short audio clips with accompanying character movements and chat text, usually song lyrics or movie lines.

*cue spelling segue*

I want to know who writes the text part for these things. I know they're made by many, many different people, but I'm astounded by the fact that 99% of them can create a scripted gesture but cannot SPELL. How hard is it to look up a song lyric and copy/paste the desired lyric? It's not just songs, either. I'm talking common words... ones even a Microsoft spellchecker can't screw up... yet 4 out of 5 gestures have misspelled words. And EVERYONE uses them. It drives me bonkers.

Note: I've said before that live chat typos are not only exempt, but expected. I embarrass myself with the level of Typonese ability and fluency I've attained, and I make just as many errors as anyone else does on the fly, mainly because I can't type for squat. However... these pre-made gestures are used in place of live text chat, and therefore annoy the bejeezus out of me.

*end regularly scheduled grammatical rant*

On to other things...
People I meet online often ask me where I live, based simply on a comment from me that there is no Starbucks/McDonalds/anything else nearby, and shopping isn't something I can do around the corner. I like it that way. Granted, sometimes convenience would be nice, like when it's nighttime, the little local general store is closed, and I'm out of X necessity and have to drive 10 miles through the narrows (mountain/cliff road frequented by large hoofed wildlife fender magnets) to an open store. The lack of neon lights and 24/7 chain stores, however, tips the scales.

This past Sunday, Hub and I drove an hour to the city for a culture fix (i.e. breakfast cooked by someone else) and on the way home, we left the city route and took a detour through the mountains. It was an excellent day to enjoy the boonies. We saw a deer grazing in a field surrounded by wild turkeys, including a gobbler in full strut, and a red-tailed hawk watching nearby. How does that compare in any way to a view consisting of taillights, banks, and Funky Chicken Used Car Sales? It doesn't, in my humble opinion. We enjoyed the bucolic drive, emerging near another smaller city just in time to stop for a sushi dinner. Best of both worlds right there, folks. Perfect day.

Nothing much else to talk about... no vacation plans yet, but the beach trip will occur sometime before the next snowfall. (Maybe... June isn't here yet so there's always a chance for snow.) I need some sand between my toes and a fishing pole in hand in the worst kind of way. Heeeere fishy fishy fishy!

That is all.

AAAARRRGGGHHH

No, it's not "Talk Like a Pirate Day." At least I don't think so... anyway, picture that as more of a "Charlie Brown flying through the air after Lucy pulls the football away" kind of argh.

I have a very nice, expensive converter program and hardware that records VHS to DVD. Problem is, it was nice and expensive three years ago, and thus is now outdated and slow. It records VHS in real time, meaning it takes the entire running time of a video to upload onto my computer, and almost as long to "render" and convert and finally burn to disc.

This is the source of my argishness. Today was a beautiful, sunny, warm day, atypical for Pennsylvania in January. I could have been out waxing my car and enjoying the weather, but at lunchtime I decided to burn a home movie to disc instead. I had forgotten how long it takes. I'd also forgotten that the software saves on my main hard drive, which is full, so I spent a while moving stuff to the external to make room. (I have no idea how to change the destination folder for a program on the main drive to the new drive.) The video capture went fine, taking an hour and a half, and then the rendering began (another hour and a half) and then the burning. Near the end of the rendering I went to take a shower. Silly me. I came back and my program said the process was complete. I tested the DVD... nothing. I put it in a different player... nothing. It didn't burn. I learned that in order to restart the burn process, the stupid program goes through the entire rendering again.

Yes, I tried burning straight from the temporary file folder. I tried using a different burn program. Turns out the %#*$!!! program only saved three seconds of the movie. And yet, when I open the moviemaker to start the burn process over, it shows that it already used the full amount of space for the entire length and there isn't any free space left.

Before anyone suggests it, I used the computer instead of a DVD/VHS recorder because this way I can edit stuff, like volume control and graininess and all that. And of course I spent half an hour doing that before my movie got eaten. I'm just about ticked off enough to go buy a recorder anyway. Or upgrade my program, or reroute my VCR cables, or have a martini or something.

Argh.

*Update*

My movie is, in fact, saved somewhere on my hard drive. When I open the movie editor, it brings it up in its entirety. It also saved two 3-second snippets for some reason.

I changed the designation folders, so there are no space issues anymore.

It *still* wants to go through the whole rendering process again, but I'm going to set it up and let it run tonight and see what happens while I'm sleeping and not glaring at the screen.

My original VHS tape, the one I'm trying to convert, now has stuttering problems. I hope the burning etc. works this time because I think the (irreplaceable) tape is dunzo.

Caw caw!

In the movie "The Crow" a recurring song (and key line) is "It Can't Rain All The Time." The soundtrack to the film features this song. It's by Jane Siberry and is one of my favorites in that it captures the haunting, emotional tones of the film. By itself it's good; with the now-permanent Crow reference in my mind, it's great.

I always wondered, though... in spite of the title, the lyrics are "It won't rain all the time" and "can't" isn't used. Weird.

Flashback here: It Can't Rain All The Time