I bet Q shops here.

Home : Euro Spyshop

After a small scare during my week from hell, when my MP3 player displayed an 'HD ERROR' and refused to turn on, I began researching new ones. iPods are EVERYWHERE. Everyone I talked to who owned one raved about how wonderful they were. (I began to wonder if they were broadcasting subliminal messages.) My aunt even went out of her way to stop by my work and show me hers so I could see how it worked. My main disappointment was the storage space. There was nothing available between 4 GB and 30. A 10 GB player would have been ideal for me. (Hear that iPod? Hint hint!)

I bought one today, after traveling to three different stores looking for one where a salesperson would actually HELP me. Right now I'm scared to death of it. It's so TINY! I just know I'm going to drop it and then lose it.

Below is a photo I took, comparing my current player with the new one. You can see why I wanted a new one. (Turns out the battery had just drained on the old one. I recharged it and it's fine. Now it's intimidated so it had better work properly!)

All right. Four dollars later, my final project is in the mail.

I scanned the boards in before I mailed them. You can see thumbnails here.

NOW it's hopping time. Keep your fingers crossed!

I want to hop up and down, but it's not official yet.
Official is when it's in the mail. I can't call it done because I still need a few stickyback squares and some extra color chips, and the craft shops and sherwin williams have the nerve to actually be closed at 11 pm at night.

Prepare for celebrations at the post office.

I'm really too tired to hop up and down.

Well! Just another day in a very bad week.

To top off all the other crappy stuff this week, I had my first major Xacto incident in years.

Once again, I was working on a dollhouse - this time, on the flooring. I got two rooms done, finished a third, and then pulled it out so I could trim the outside edge. The knife caught on one of the thin strips of wood, and hopped over the metal blade and into my finger. Fortunately, I got to the bathroom before the bleeding started. Stopping it proved to be a bit of a problem, but I think I managed it. I didn't get woozy til I tried to look up online what I should do for a cut finger. I don't think I need stitches, because I certainly don't see how it could be done.

Now I feel quite useless. I can't work on the house or my clay projects, and I'm having a terrible time typing.

Perhaps I should stay in bed under the covers tomorrow. At the rate I've been going, I'll be dead by Wednesday.

006wo.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)

Go ahead. Press the Button.

I've been fighting with this big ugly bug that flew into my room yesterday. It buzzed while it flew, and was probably an inch and a half long. Kinda dark brown in color, the body wasn't very segmented. Was attracted to light. Did I mention the horrible buzzing? It finally came to rest on one of the pull cords to my ceiling fan, and I left the room. Late that night, I encountered it in the hall, and whacked it a few times with a magazine.

This morning I woke up and it was crawling on my curtains. Great.

When I got home from work, I grabbed a can of bug spray from the garage and went after it. Nowhere in sight, actually. I waited, then heard the ominous buzzing. He was in the other curtain this time! Two good sprays, awful smell. He sat there, hanging on the curtain. I retreated and waited. A little while later I looked, and see him slowly crawling upwards. Aww, crap. And then, when I'm not looking, he disappears. A hesitant, careful search reveals nothing. I retreat downstairs.

Naturally, I've appealed for help several times. Every time someone finally comes to help, he's disappeared.

Just a little while ago, when I came back up and turned the light on, I saw a dark shape buzz directly for it. GREAT! I return downstairs and tell mom, who promises to come up and help in a minute. I went back up, and found him buzzing around on the floor near my shoes. I quickly grabbed some cardboard and the lid of the bug spray can and trap him. Then I ran into the bathroom and flushed him.

Standing there, watching him spin around, it dawns on me that no one else has seen this bug. Perhaps I'm imagining it? Some sort of buzzing bug hallucination?

It's possible. It's been a rough week.

Over the weekend I made an expensive decision. Why shouldn't I buy high quality miniatures? It's not as though I'll ever be able to own the real thing.

I finally visited the new(ish) mini shop I'd been planning to go to for ages. They had a nice selection, but the lady running the shop was incredibly talkative. Overly talkative. And relaxed. So calm and slow and relaxed. And talkative. It probably took a good half hour just to get checked out!

I ended up buying not one, but two pieces of Bespaq furniture. A Louis XIV Kane corner china cabinet and a Coco victorian style chair that matched the colors of my Edwardian living room. I wouldn't say that Bespaq furniture should be considered the best of the best miniatures. They're possibly the best mass-produced furniture available on the market, though. The pieces were well done, although one of the legs fell off the china cabinet when I got it home! Easy fix, fortunately.

I've been working on my house again. I ripped out the trim in the dining room (always a painful thing to do - not to mention the twinges of guilt!) and yesterday I began laying out the flooring in the living room. Last year I bought a big box of those cheap wooden coffee stirrers to use as floorboards. Mom refused to believe that they'd make a nice floor, and was absolutely shocked at the results I showed her. I don't glue the sticks to the floor, I cut out posterboard and glue them to that instead. That way I can hide wiring underneath it and still have access if something goes wrong.

I haven't done any wiring yet. I'm not sure where or how to run it! I have several ideas, but I think I need to FIND lighting before I do anything. Which is why I've put everything off for so long. I don't like half of what I see, and can't afford what I do like! It's not a victorian house, but I can get away with using some victorian fixtures. I think I need to just get on with the redecorating and worry about lighting later. I can use all floor lamps and all ceiling lamps and ignore the walls. OR, because of the time period, I can run the wiring on top of the wallpaper and get away with it!

First, I need to do all the wood flooring. Tile goes in the bathroom, possibly in the main hallway. I need to tear out the wallpaper in the living room and halls, and patch up any damage to the walls. I need to figure out wall coverings. The paint I have just doesn't hide the wood grain of the plywood walls! After all that, I can worry about lighting.

I had forgotten about ominous blue screens of death. Imagine my shock when it showed up on my editing machine. Paging errors! Physical memory dumps! random shutdowns! Naturally, I'm in a panic. I have a vague idea of what the problem is and no idea what to do about it. I have a lot of editing going on and a lot more in the future.

And I'm the one who has to fix it!

Right now I'm dropping finished shows and mostly finished shows to DVD. It will randomly crash if I use the export to video feature, but if I play it through in the timeline it seems to work. I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping it's not my lovely terrabyte drive that's going bad.

Yes, I've been complaining about my rubber bands. but I had good cause! This past weekend I started noticing huge spots swelling up in my mouth, big enough to cause my lower lip to start swelling, too. The skin was turning bright red, and it hurt if I stretched out my cheeks too far. I had noticed this in smaller doses when I wore just the one little band, but these were covering a lot more area. I finally called my orthodontist, told them what was going on, and made an appointment. I had two happy days of not wearing rubber bands and waiting for the swelling to go down.
I'm back in rubber bands again, but these are non-latex. She admonished me to call them if the same thing happened again. Well of course I'm going to call! I got the subtle feeling that they thought I was trying to get out of wearing them, as they kept stressing the importance of wearing these bands. I'm perfectly aware of that fact, and I don't really mind them at all as long I'm not having weird reactions to them. I just like having something to complain about . . .

Worth1000.com | Photoshop Contests | Are you Worthy™ | contest

Did I link to this? It's a collection of what would happen if pirates ruled the world. Lots of skulls and patches. fun!