Stalked by penguins...

I'm taking advantage of winter break and bringing home as many pretty books as I can from my wanderings through the library. Nothing non-fiction, nothing informative, just strange books and silly books and fun books and books with nice pictures. I think of it as a service to the library, freeing up some shelf space. This week, that's left me with:

The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide (Douglas Adams, obviously)

The individual volumes were all checked out, but here they are in one place! Plus it's one of those big hardcovers that stays open on a page.

The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes (Neil Gaiman)

The Sandman: The Doll's House (same as above)

Love Mirrormask, never read these. Working through the second volume right now, having trouble not thinking "Rose Tyler" every time our young blonde Rose is mentioned.

The Black Book of Colors (Menena Cottin, Rosana Faria)

The picture books are in great big bins, so you just flip through till something catches your eye. The title of this one was curious; you open it up and the pages are all indeed black save a single line of white text on the left. The rest is for another sense; the words are repeated in braille, and the facing page has raised images representing the color (grass for green, strawberries for red, leaves for brown). Very fun.

A Mama for Owen (Marion Dane Bauer, John Butler)

The tortoise and the hippo. I know the story, though I haven't gotten around to the book yet - the cover illustration is just lovely, very soft and understated.

So, that should tide me over till Wednesday. If not, I've got Clash of the Titans to entertain me.

Oh, and my jewelry finally arrived! Little mix-up in the mail, resulting in the delivery of two (non-sonic) screwdrivers I didn't exactly order, but now it's here and so shiny:

Chose Engineering because, obviously, it matches my shirt.

Toodles.

FIRST

First post!
Of the year, that is.
On this blog, that is.

My New Year's Eve celebration consisted chiefly of eating pretzels and wearing everything leopard-print that I owned.
There's actually quite a lot of it.
Though I just now realized I forgot the pin, the leopard pin. Got the gloves, the shirt, the necklace (yes, the necklace!) but not the pretty stalking leopard with the green gem eyes.
I don't, now I think of it, know where that pin is at all. Dear me. I like that pin.

Moving on. Went somewhere just a little fancy, but stayed indoors and watched the sleet build up on the roads and turned up the heater and read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and wondered just how many hotel rooms in other states could boast a completely unobstructed view of sleet-coated cornfield stubble from their third-floor windows.

Magical.

Was nearly trampled to death in the morning as the previously-deserted lobby filled with families in pajama pants just in time for breakfast. Was very nearly punched in the crotch by a small child who was violently stretching and yawning without paying attention to his surroundings.



There were corndogs in the cooler along with the skim milk and the fruit and the low-fat yogurt. Wasn't entirely sure what to make of that one except that in Iowa we have corndogs for breakfast, and if you have a problem with that well you can just take your lite yogurt and your fruit cup and shut the heck up. Or something to that effect.

I got the first week of my Penguin Project set up, but aside from that have truly done nothing constructive and don't really plan to. Even this blog represents a surprising amount of effort on my part - as reading it has no doubt been on yours. I'm not going to re-read that sentence to see whether it was grammatically correct, I'm just going to go back and sprinkle some random pictures from last year/week throughout the text to make this all halfway worthwhile.

It's almost over....

Christmas, New Year's, 2010 ... the whole shebang.

In case any of my two followers were wondering, my Thanksgiving meal went just fine. Pomegranate sauce needed ... tweaking, but on the whole it turned out quite prettily, if I say so myself.

Classes are finally done with (till next year), and I'm working away on my art while I can. Penguins are popular, from the looks of it, so I'm going all out with that. Shameless promotion of my two newest designs here:

Mardi Gras Penguin by Spiderwebs
See other Penguin Buttons

Fairy Princess Penguin Invitation by Spiderwebs
Make personalized invitations on Zazzle

Normally it'll put related items in that link, so apparently the tags "fairy princess penguin" don't come up together often on Zazzle?

Anyhow, I'm collecting penguins now as part of a fun little Squidoo project of mine called 365 Days of Penguins. I'm going for a new penguin every day (well, 7 per week since I'm too lazy to update daily), which given the glut of penguin designs in recent times shouldn't be impossible. There's really no point or purpose to the whole thing, but it makes me feel as if I'm doing something constructive.

I haven't any gifts for anyone yet, though two are supposed to be arriving in the mail from ThinkGeek any day now. Yes, I buy people presents from ThinkGeek. Because I like ThinkGeek. And we always buy presents for other people based on what we like.

And, that's about it. Work's good, didn't fail college yet, no major baking disasters. It's An Uneventful Life.

Until next time, then. Good night, sleep tight - a merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you all.

Wish me luck

Tomorrow it begins. On Tuesday I make the gingersnaps. On Wednesday I make the cheesecake. On Thursday I make the quail.

The Thanksgiving menu thus far is sweet-potato cheesecake with a gingersnap crust (this is what's known as "using up ingredients that were on sale"), baked sweet dumpling squash, mashed potatoes with some sort of gravy (if I can find something to make gravy out of), and roasted quail with a pomegranate sauce.

Nope, I haven't made the quail or the cheescake before. Yes, I do have a backup plan: Lots and lots of chocolate that was on sale at Walgreens. I'll get back to you in a few days and let you know if I needed it.

Who Dunnit

Worst blog title ever. Acknowledged, accepted, moving on.

Let me just start by saying the Ames Public Library is awesome. Not big on study materials, that's what the Parks Library is for, but if you're looking for fun stuff that you weren't actually looking for in the first place, this is where you want to be. I've spent way too much time in the cookbooks section, the foreign films selection always leaves me impressed, and then there are the TV series.

Don't let me near the TV series.

Every other day when I get off from work, I go straight to the TV section and see if there's anything that catches my eye. There are a lot of popular BBC programs, as well as popular American series, miniseries, and vast amounts of titles I'm pretty sure most people (myself included) have never heard of.

I have about six TV stations, so this little browsing session is how I ended up watching Life on Mars, Psych, Dexter, Little Britain, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Wonderfalls, and the miniseries Fortysomething, Alice, Lost in Austen, Tin Man and Rose Red. I've also looked back on old faves like Veronica Mars, Friends, Quantum Leap and Star Trek. I watch a lot of television.

Most recently, I stumbled across series one of the 2005 version of Dr. Who. I knew shamefully little about the show other than that it involved a sonic screwdriver and a phantom tollbooth - eh, I mean police box. I'll mention now that I only ended up watching through series 2. It's one of those shows you have to take a break from between sittings or else you get overly-upset about changes.

Series one had me pleasantly surprised. It didn't look particularly polished, and I wasn't a huge fan of Rose (her character never did quite grow on me like the others), but it hardly mattered. From the scene with the historic "iPod" in The End of the World, I was pretty much hooked. I hadn't really expected a funny show, but there it was. It was quite a pity when it became clear that there would be no more Doctor #9 in subsequent series, and I wasn't quite sure about David Tennant at first, but goodness - now there's an actor who can just shout nonsense at the screen and still be worth watching. He has just shouted nonsense at the screen, for that matter, and those have been some of the best scenes.

The whole show could just shout nonsense, really - it's one of those lovely programs that runs off pure energy and enthusiasm much of the time. From Eccleston's impossibly ear-splitting grin to Tennant's hectic exuberance and everything in-between (even K-9 sounds impressively cheery for a tin dog), I found it hard to watch without smiling. It looks as if Billie Piper has the same trouble sometimes. And it's not just the purely humorous moments: I can watch the ninth Doctor's triumphant "Just this once - everybody lives!" and the tenth's rather one-sided conversation with Satan over and over, and it puts a grin on my face every time. It's quite possible that I'm easily amused like that, but I do love to be amused.

I don't like quite so much to be saddened, but there has to be a counterbalance for all that mad bouncing around. Doomsday ... ah, Doomsday, that was some acting there. Tennant makes some odd faces, but in my opinion he's best at that sort of glassy-eyed shock and sorrow, and unfortunately he got to show it off quite a bit throughout his run as the tenth Doctor.

Of course, what I love is that just when a series is about to end on a note that might bum you out for the rest of the year, something's thrown in to offset it. Series one's "something," for me, was the new Doctor remarking on his new teeth. Series two had a brilliant little 14-second conversation in which the Doctor's contribution was saying "what?!" four different ways.

It'll be a while before I return to this show, and with the way I get attached to characters I may just skip straight to series 5 before finishing 3 and 4 (I think I'll be able to enjoy the newest Doctor more if I don't follow the tenth too long). It's one of the most enjoyable shows I've stumbled on in a while though, and I'm going to be making annoying references to it for some time now.

Vultures!

On my way home from the library I was whining to myself about not having brought a camera (there are always photo opportunities when you put a bunch of volunteers in charge of dress-up materials), when I saw some crows circling overhead, gathering in a big cloud to roost like I'd seen so many times on campus.
Except for the fact that these weren't crows, they were vultures.
I'd never seen that many vultures in town before, but from the huge amounts of feathers scattered over three blocks, they gathered there somewhat often.
It was several blocks home still, and 90 unpleasant degrees, but I managed to walk-jog-walk-pause-jog home for the camera, splash cold water all over my face, grab a tangerine from the fridge to eat on the way, and then walk-jog-walk-eat-walk-pause-jog-eat-walk back to the vultures' tree.

Some interesting discoveries:

• Turkey vultures resemble turkeys not only in appearance, but in their aroma when dozens of them are clustered in one place.
• Vultures in droves seem to attract mosquitoes in droves.
• Citrus, at least in the quantities available in a tangerine peel, does not ward off mosquitoes.
• My camera's zoom capabilities are only slightly better than those of Shawn's binoculars in the pilot episode of Psych.

These discoveries made for a somewhat lackluster photo experience, but at least I got a few in flight:






Interestingly, in my hurry to free up a little space for these pictures prior to my mad dash back, I managed to delete *all* the other pictures in my camera instead of one.
Well, now I know what that button does.
Serves me right for not moving them to the computer sooner.

Does anyone know how to build an ark?

Well, it's wet out. There's also a heat index of 105 and I've somehow lost my camera, so unfortunately I don't get to take pictures of this one.

We're in the middle of the worst flood in this area in nearly 20 years. During the last flood I lived smack in the middle of the flood plane, and had the great fun of helping my mother put everything on top of the furniture and watching people canoe past the building. The water didn't make it in that year, but with yesterday's flooding several feet higher in some areas, I'm thankful that I no longer live in the flood-prone part of the city. Good luck to all who do - I've been there, and it isn't fun.

The community is currently under a Boil Water Advisory due to several breaks in the mains. Hopefully everything will be back up and running by week's end, and the storms forecast for Friday won't come to much.

As a bit of reference, here's a picture of the minor flooding we were getting BEFORE it rained on Tuesday: