Teaser photo

Sunset over Salt Pond Beach on our last day in Kaua’i.

I’m spending my Saturday morning uploading the best trip photos to Flickr. I’m sure by the end I’ll be wondering why I ever came home. Oh yeah, my mortgage.

After reviewing the photos, I’ve decided one of the reasons I like Hawaii so much is the prevalence of bright colors in nature there. Red, purple, yellow and orange are everywhere, not just in planned gardens.

As opposed to the Pacific Northwest. PNW is beautiful, too, no doubt about it, but somewhat monochromatic, even in spring.

Did you know native PNW’ers have 50 words for “green”?

UPDATE: I’m done! View my Kaua’i photos here.

Technorati Tags: Kaua’i, Hawai’i, vacation, photography

By any other name

From my Valentine.

I am loved.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I got a new job recently. While I stayed within the same company, I left a team I’d been with since 2003.

It was a bittersweet parting. The new gig is awesome - it’s full-time technical writing, which I’ve been trying to break into forever.

You can’t make the best of omelets without breaking at least one egg, and this seemed to take a dozen.

I had to leave a team in which I feel quite invested, having helped build it into what it is today. But more than that, it’s leaving the team members that is hard, and not just because several of them are my personal friends. They have a tough and often thankless job that is all too easy for outsiders to criticize or undervalue, and I’ve been their champion behind the scenes many, many times. As dorky as it is, it’s been hard to trust that they won’t be flayed alive without Mother Uppity there to protect them.

Anyway, on my last day, my old friends gave me a warm send-off that included a ginormous cake, a righteous Wonder Woman Christmas tree ornament, and this fab t-shirt.¹

Besides singing praises to my writing skills, this shirt is also a wonderful motivator to become more physically fit.² It’s a medium-sized baby-doll, which means that its actual intended wearer is a 16-year-old hottie. While I have no desire to be 16 again, I have nothing against striving for hottie status.

Photo by Lachlan.

Technorati Tags: cool gifts, good friends

1. ”Blurbalicious” refers to the portion of my job that included doing all of the technical writing for our team, including the “blurbs” — those annoying canned messages you get when you write to the customer service department of any large company. [↩]
2. Please note that this observation is entirely my own and should in no way be attributed to the gift-givers. [↩]

The True Meaning of Christmas

Happy All NaNo’s Eve

Kevin and I have handed out candy every Halloween since we bought our house. The first year was a kind of milestone: our first trick-or-treaters in our first house together. Awwwww.

Of course, this new warm-fuzzy didn’t come without a price - specifically, the big fight we got into earlier that day in grocery store.

It went something like this: I felt one can never have enough bags of Halloween candy, and Kevin disagreed, suggesting that I was an impulse-buying spendthrift. I countered loudly that he was a party-pooping tightwad. Soon the bags were flying in and out of the shopping cart with increasing violence and nearby children were crying into the backs of their mothers’ knees.

The fight ended with me grabbing the cart and ordering Kevin to “just go away and let me buy the fucking candy.” He stomped off, disappearing into the dairy section to mollify himself with free cheese samples.

We reconvened later at the register, Kevin glaring in stony silence as the cashier rang up approximately 300 bags of mini-Snickers. He stayed mad at me for the whole rest of the day, until the first trick-or-treater showed up at the door, which is when warm-fuzzy kicked in and all was forgiven.¹

We’ve managed to make it through subsequent Halloweens without arguing, mainly because I say “Yes, dear” on the shopping trips and then supplement the candy stash on my own time.

This year it may be a moot point, however. Tonight Kevin will be helping a friend move into a new place, and I will be hard at work worrying about the story I’ll begin writing in just twenty-four hours for NaNoWriMo.

My brain is crowded with vague characters elbowing each other and staking out territory and badgering me for a plot. How can I court the muse with the constant interruption of needy, masked midgets at my door?

Then again, if I hide in the dark all night, I’ll be stuck with 300 bags of candy. And with my luck, all my characters will be doing Sugar Busters.

Technorati Tags: NaNoWriMo, writing, Halloween

1. And for the record, even with all the extra bags of candy I bought, we still ran out too early. Let that be a lesson to all party-pooping tightwads. [↩]

A Bug’s Life

The bug I featured a few weeks ago in this post has come back to visit, this time hanging out on my window screen. I gotta tell you, this bug has nerves of steel; I had the camera practically on the glass in his face and he didn’t move a muscle.

My cousin tells me this is a type of mayfly. But which of the 250,000 species is it? Must be the Fantasticae Fearless Uppitus.

Technorati Tags: bugs, mayfly, entomology

Creature Feature

Photo: Bug resting on top of my car, 07/10/07 8:45 am

The Loafer’s Way, Part 1

I went window shopping at the pet store the other day to see all the cute kittens and puppies that I, Bubble Girl, can’t have. It’s been pretty warm here, and Kitty is sensibly drowsing in her food bowl.

I’m reading the perfect book for summer: How To Be Idle: The Loafer’s Manifesto, by Tom Hodgkinson. If you are a workaholic, this book will show you the error of your ways, how working your fingers to the bone really does just get most of us boney fingers. If you are a would-be idler with one foot in the office and one in the hammock - c’est moi - this book is all you need to convince you to take the plunge.

Why exactly do we work so hard for so very, very little? Because we think we want stuff, need stuff, care about stuff. It’s true that certain stuff, such as food and a roof over one’s head, are important, and thus jobs have their place. But how much consumption do we do that is ultimately pointless?

How much crap do we buy because we think it will bring us happiness - “This is the lipstick that will change your life!” as a friend of mine jokingly said to me once - only to find we’re simply that much more in debt, waiting for the next new crap?

Constant consumption seems to me to be an attempt to fill from without the creative void within. With no time or support for nurturing our own creativity, we consume someone else’s. Chuck the plastic wrapper into the landfill and move on to the next thing. Work, consume, die.

If you really think about this, be careful, because you could end up doing serious self-reflection and reorganization of priorities, a subversive act which, the Idle author argues, is precisely why the “hard work” ethic was created by the ruling classes in the first place. Convince the rabble that they are morally obligated to work their asses off, and they’ll never have the time or energy to figure out you are full of shit.

Technorati Tags: idleness, The Idler, work, kittens

Bee nice.

This is a photo of a bee on my lavendar this morning, just before he got pissed off and chased me into the house.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” - George Orwell

Photo: “Hamlet,” sculpture outside Uwajimaya Grocery, downtown Seattle, WA