Checking in

oh my gosh, so much to talk about!

i got my new mini netbook and i looooove her! her name is isadora. i've been waiting for this, now that i can type literally anywhere, the two of you who read this will be hearing from me a lot more now! yay!!!

i drove to houston today to meet my friend susan at the ballet. it was a mixed rep performance by the houston ballet and we just loved it. it sparked some thoughts & desires about dance & movement.

i had to wear three hats (metaphorically) at church today, it was funny and a little frantic. one of the jobs was to serve as lector, and one of the readings had something that made me think, "wait a minute, i always hear that the opposite way around! funny how it's been distorted..."

if you haven't heard/seen, we have a new "baby"! a basset named Lily. she's not really a baby, she's the same age as Suki, 2ish. I'll get a photo of her on the main page of this blog asap.

oh and i've had a post brewing about a wasted life...

and of course i should report in from week seven of the mc combs plan!

okay so teasers for you and reminders for me. talk to you again soon!

PS In case you've ever wondered - Everything really *is* beautiful at the ballet!

**update** i forgot to mention the post that's REALLY burning a hole in my brain, which is about REAL food and restaurant food and etc.

so now that's noted and will be written about later.

Back At It!

It's been SO LONG since I posted. Then the old computer died a sudden and complete death. I tried to make a short post from the browser on the iPhone, but of course that didn't work. I could create a post title, but for some reason the box you actually type the entry in was not recognized as a text box. So, no mobile entries for me. I can't wait to get a phone that does not make me scream obscenities every five minutes. April can't come fast enough. (That's when Husband is due for an upgrade. He will inherit the iPhone and I will jump ship to Sprint. I will get the Palm Pre if it's out, and if not, something basic to tide me over until it is.

So this isn't much of a post but I thought I'd start making some short posts about random stuff to get back in the habit. Today's random snippets:

I have a weird and annoying rash on my chest the last couple of days. It doesn't itch so much as sting. I did use Retin-A on it a few times (it was prescribed to get rid of a bit of sun damage on my face, doc said I could use it on the wrinkles as well) and that's the only thing that's changed, so for now I'm blaming that. I do use sunscreen every day, SPF 30, and the parts of my face that I've used the Retin-A on have not reacted the same way, so I don't really know what the problem is.

Husband left Wednesday evening to fly to Tokyo Thursday morning, but the flight cancelled. So he stayed in Dallas overnight, and is going to London instead tonight. He'll fly from London to Chicago on Sunday, and get home about 8:30 that night. We don't care about the Super Bowl so that's no problem. Then he leaves again Tuesday for a four-day trip. I need to find some structure in my life to prevent going nuts while he's gone. He's actually got a pretty good layout for February, it's just this nine days gone with one day home in between that's a long haul for me. There are a ton of things that need doing, but I don't do well with unstructured time.

New computer! This little guy is pretty awesome, I have to say. It's the same memory/hard drive as the laptop I was looking at, but for about half the cost. It's a Dell Hybrid. Tiny thing that sits on the desk and uses 70% less power than a normal tower. Came with a wireless keyboard (in my lap now!) and mouse. In getting it to talk to our internet, we got our service upgraded, so between new computer and faster internet, wheeeee!

New computer also came with Windows Vista. Learning curve there, but not too bad. Installed an old (2000) program and it gave me a message along the lines of "this program is old but we've accomodated it". Biggest problem so far is that Vista can't see my expensive Blue Snowball microphone that I use for my voiceover work. This is a big, and expensive problem. Not only the cost of a new one, but also the money I'm losing by not being able to do my voiceover work.

iHate aPple rant of the day: Old computer died a sudden and total death. Not one file was recoverable. Got a new computer. Downloaded iTunes. Went to sync my iPhone (PS iAm sO oVer tHe iWhatever iThing. oLd! sTupid! sTop iT!) and it updated the software, but what about all the music on my iPhone and iPod? Oh no, so sorry, all those CDs you imported? All those playlists you created? Too bad, you have to reimport and recreate them all. Yes, I'm looking at third party software to do this, but really? It's music I purchased and imported legally. I can also legally put it on my new computer. So why is it only a one-way sync? sTupid aPple!!!

I downloaded Picasa so that I could get all the photos that I've posted there onto the new computer, since over a year of photos was totally lost in the computer crash. I then uploaded the photos I've been hoarding on my camera since December 18th. I wanted to use one for wallpaper, but the proportions are wrong. It makes Husband's head look all squished when it's "fit to screen", too big for tile or center. So I want to resize it. I used to use a program that came with old computer to do this. So I'm messing around with Picasa, but while you can *crop* photos to any size, there does not seem to be a way to *resize* the whole photo. Srsly? This seems to me a very basic and needed function. I used to use it A LOT.

Okay, I really need to go take the Giant Puppy for a long walk, for her sake AND mine. So there are the random snippets for today. I'm sure I'll add more stuff later.

Happy Friday!