Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Birthday Countdown - 3 Days

It is now three days till my birthday if you count today, tomorrow, and my birthday.  Which I do.  Today's list will be of three websites I frequently enjoy:

icanhascheezburger.com - because cats with captions are one of my favorite things.  Also dogs, sci-fi pictures, and uncaptioned pictures of cute animals.

xkcd.com - because cats with captions are one of the artist's favorite things.  Also, this.  And always remember to read the hover.  A note of warning: xkcd can be a sketchy comic.  Read at your own peril.  (I am always ready to skip a comic...)

twistedsifter.com - pictures of cool things.  Lots of nerdy stuff.  The shirk report!

There you are.  Three websites that probably should be visited every day.  Or several times a day.

Monday, August 06, 2012

Birthday Countdown - 4 days

Apparently I can't be bothered to blog on a weekend.  But my birthday is on Thursday!  This year it's really been creeping up on me, but I'm finally starting to get excited about presents and people catering to my whims.  In the last year, I have watched many episodes of 4 TV shows, and left other shows to find other viewers.  I really like these shows.  Some are new and some are older.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Possibly the best cartoon of all time!  Seriously, though, this show has it all.  It's funny, creative, and has a great cast of characters.  I have watched the whole series through at least 3 times.  10 pts if you know my favorite character.

Psych - What are my two favorite types of stories?  The answer is 1) comedies and 2) detective stories.  And thus we see that Psych must be my favorite kind of show. 

Fringe - I also like sci-fi.  Fringe is cool and interesting and sometimes I have to cover my eyes because whatever has just happened is too grotesque.  I blame addiction to this show on my roommate who has DVR. Otherwise I wouldn't watch new episodes as soon as they came out.

Legend of Korra - It's a bit of a cheat, because it's the sequel show to The Last Airbender, but it's still awesome.  The graphics are awesome and the story is great, even if I didn't think Mako and Korra made a good pair.  Amon is a great villain.

**In completing this list, I realize that I also watched a lot of Big Bang Theory, which has two of my favorite things as well: 1) comedy and 2) science.  Sadly, it fails in one big quality: watchability with my mother.  The ones above are all pretty watchable with Mom, but she would probably cover her eyes in Fringe even more than I do.

Friday, August 03, 2012

Birthday Countdown - 1 Week

In 7 days is my birthday, if you include today.  I will below list seven books I have enjoyed in the last year.  First, I have to mention that I have slowly become addicted to late 19th and early 20th century literature.  Especially British and humorous, detective, or both.  So.  PG Wodehouse and Agatha Christie have taken up much of my reading for the past year with some American contemporaries and Sherlock Holmes thrown in.  On to the books:

1 Murder on the Orient Express - Awesome.  Everyone should read it, but I feel that they should read some other Poirot books first, to get to know the detective better.

Leave it to Psmith - Everything with the character Psmith is great.  Everything set at Blandings Castle is great.  Read all of them.  But this has both!

3 Death in the Clouds - This one proved to me the futility of trying to guess the villain in an Agatha Christie book.  I just can't do it.  It's too hard. 

4 E=mc2 - I like science.  'nuff said.  Also, it talks about some pretty awesome women throughout the history of the equation.

The Alloy of Law - I know it's crazy, but I liked it better than the Mistborn books.  Maybe it's because I was finally used to the metal based magic by this book, but I liked it and hope to see a sequel soon.  I also enjoyed Elantris, by the same author.

6 Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us - It made me think about different jobs that I've had and why they seemed so painful or not.

7 The Invention of Hugo Cabret - Lots of pictures.  I really liked it, and would recommend it to anyone.

Friday, April 13, 2012

"I don't get you, but I want to."

This post, as you may not have guessed from the title, is about Pinterest. I have been intrigued by the idea of Pinterest, so I investigated. My investigation left me slightly frustrated when I signed up for a membership invite, or something.

Weeks later, after no notification that I had been selected for membership in that exclusive club, I was ready to give it all up. Then something else (can't remember what) piqued my curiosity again. I asked my friend janeheiress for an invite, and she came through in a major way.

I signed up, but hated that it had to connect to either Facebook or Twitter. I quickly removed my link to Facebook, because the thought made me a little ill and started exploring. I learned that I regretted signing up for Pinterest. I had a mild loathing for it and how it works.

I hated that to pin something requires several steps, including my own comment. My most common comment: " ". (That's a single space.)

Soon I decided that I must pin things that I didn't see much of on the main page when I logged in. Soon I was manically pinning xkcd comics and animals from the cheezburger network.

Over the next week, what followed was-to me-a surprising amount of attention from people I didn't know. Every woman who loves animals (actually like 10 women) was repinning my cute animal pictures and several others repinned my comics. Some people I don't know started following me, and several started following one of my 3 main pinboards. I felt popular. Also, strangely proud of my work. Is this mild explosion of repinning what everyone experiences?

I am confused and intrigued by the phenomenon that is pinterest. I would tell you to find me, but I'm not sure how.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Bragging Rights





For my mom's birthday dinner, I made Boeuf Bourguignon. It was delicious. I did not take pictures, although that would have been wise. Let's pretend it looked just like this.


I have never bought wine, so I used a mixture of home-canned grape juice, water, and apple cider vinegar for the wine. I thought it tasted good, but I've never had the no-substitutions version.


"Is is 'Nopf" or 'Ka-nopf'?"


"Who cares?"