Erstwhile Muse

April Showers

Today was one of those days in the Ohio weather scene that I enjoy quite a bit; temperatures around the high 50's–low 60's, slightly blue-grey overcast sky to block out the wicked, evil daystar and an electricity in the air that promises rain. I was walking over to a friend's house after I got done posing for a morning class, soaking in that feeling of potential and expectation, as well as enjoying the wonderful sense of lushness that it granted to the plants around me. Grasses were thick and green, flowering dogwoods and lilacs were at their peak fullness and color it seemed.

Which is when it struck me that 75–90% of the city around me was probably bemoaning what a crappy day it was, and given another week or two most of those will have chopped and hacked their lawns back to a socially appropriate and therefore completely unnatural and visually boring height. The more obsessive amongst them will have scheduled yet another chemical tune-up for their lawn. They will have their concept of a green and healthy lawn to enjoy, unless of course they have children or small animals, at which point they must concern themselves with the small flags surrounding the wannabe putting green detailing the possibility of toxic chemical buildup. What they won't have is the rich visual tapestry I was enjoying today. Sadly though, I don't think most of them are going to miss it.

So I took Sarah out to Momo KTV & Tea Zone for some strangely fruit flavored tea with bubbles, after which we grabbed her dog and headed to the park for a walk. Unsurprisingly the park was rather empty of other people; Ohioans are somehow under the delusion that being in a temperate climate should mean all the plants stay green without it ever raining, and therefore are wholly incapable of doing anything outdoors when threatened with possible precipitation. There were a few diehard joggers out there to join us, but overall the park was deserted. Eventually a light misting rain did start raising our ODI (Overall Dampness Index), but luckily I have friends who are apparently a hardier lot, and we continued walking about enjoying the spring foliage, discussing the ethics surrounding the theft of said foliage—flowers, specifically—from public spaces, and trying not to be tripped by the dog.

Eventually we had our fill and returned to her house. Sarah plied me with coffee, which was good because lack of sleep from the night before was catching up to me. I said my goodbyes and wandered off down the road in the slowly increasing rain to Used Kids, a great used record store down on Campus. I grabbed a few things for my collection—Thomas Dolby, Jello Biafra & Mojo Nixon, and Evanescence (how's that for a combo?)—by which time the rain was now coming down at a nice soaking pace. Unperturbed, I grabbed a bus to head home, get some food and settle in for the night. It had been a good day, a rather enjoyable day, and I was not quite prepared for the first sight to greet me at the door.

All our shrubs had been chopped down.

Bereft of life, they laid in pieces.

I'm assuming the landlord has a reason for getting rid of all the shrubbery in front of our house. I was never even the biggest fan of them; they made it more difficult to get my bike onto the patio.

But to spend all day enjoying greenery and growing things, to come home to a front lawn that resembles something out of The Lorax—well, it's not quite irony, but it's getting dangerously close.

Labels: girls, music

A severe Vitamin DHC deficiency

Give me a Blue Plate Special with a side of Skinhead BBQ please...

One of the problems of having many, many gigabytes of music at one's fingertips is that every once in awhile you lose track of just what it is you have available, and end up rediscovering your own music. This is a problem that seems to be recurring for me when it comes to the Dance Hall Crashers. Now you would think I would be able to keep a better handle on this band; if someone were to ask me out of the blue what my favorite band is—I don't have any one single that is my favorite, but that's neither here nor there—the answer that would more than likely pop out on any given day would be DHC. I was originally introduced the them by Lee, who was lucky enough to be living in Hawaii at the time they were there playing clubs, and they have remained pretty consistently one of my favorite groups of musicians.

Ooh,oooh, hold that thought....

[Kingboy does a little chibi skankin' ala Blue Monday to Whiskey and Gin which just came on.]

Sorry, where was I? Ah yes, the Dance Hall Crashers.

Every once in a while though I will find myself flipping through the directories on my Archos aimlessly looking for something to listen to when I find I've wandered into the Ska folder, and a little light goes on, Oh, yeah...I remember them now. I'll push play, and all is good with the world. I can get picky about music; not as far as genres go, but about what I will listen to at any given time. I need to have my soundtrack match my mood or activity, I can't try and use music to change my mood around, it just doesn't work for me. That's what consistently amazes me about DHC though, they are the exception to an otherwise inviolable rule. I have yet to find a time or mood that makes me unable to listen to them. Why then do I keep forgetting I own their music is simply beyond my reckoning.

Now if you'll excuse me, there's an mp3 player on random shuffle mode waiting for me to continue.

Out on the dance floor everything's gonna be all right.
Out on the dance floor
Dance Hall
Dance Hall Crashers tonight

Postscript:

Chynna Clugston-Major, creator of the aforementioned Blue Monday, is what we in the bidness call a hottie hot hottie. Just so ya know.

Labels: music

Ego and the Bunny-ears

or <q>Does a naked man deliver <em>your</em > eggs?</q>

While visiting with my folks, and especially my nephew, was a pleasant way to spend the Easter weekend, discovering that all that wonderfully tasty food alongside my general lack of proper dietary considerations over the past couple weeks had put back a few of the pounds I had lost since Christmas was not. Needless to say I was a little bit self conscious going into work this morning.

A brief digression for those who don't know me personally—my current mode of monetary compensation entails me removing my clothing for relative strangers. For the moment at least I am working as a model at CCAD, usually in the freshman/sophomore figure drawing and painting classes.

Now this particular class was likely to be interesting anyways, as it was the second session of pose that had me straddling a pair of drawing benches wearing fuzzy white bunny ears. That's right, bunny ears. Add in some dramatic lighting from the floor and you have, on initial appearances, what looks like a prime example of where too much alcohol around the holidays can lead. Either that or the world's strangest poster for a production of Harvey ever seen.

I had already finished one session for this pose on Friday morning, so it wasn't the pose or it's accoutrements that would have me feeling uneasy in my own skin, something that doesn't happen easily. No it was the fact that I had decided to step on some damnable scale over the weekend and was obsessing. Luckily it was an early morning class, and I only had to be conscious enough to take and hold the pose for the first half-hour session. I could do my best to not think about it simply by not thinking about anything. This of course, was doomed to failure; in order to stop thinking during periods of inactivity I would have to stop breathing. What can I say, it's just my nature.

It was a pleasant surprise to get up during the first break and wander about the room to look over the students drawings; this was a figure drawing class doing toned paper charcoal works. Here, quite literally in black and white, was proof that I was being overly sensitive about a number spat forth at me by a machine.

Who would have thought that looking like some sort of depressed naked Easter Bunny could be good for one's ego?

Labels: work

What a surprise...

or <q>IE fucks it up again</q>

So I'm at my parents house today visiting for Easter, and as usual I need to use one of my various and sundry gadgets to do oddish things with their computer. Today's project involves using my Archos to run EAC and copy the resulting .wavs and .mp3s to the external hard drive ( a process which, by the way, doesn't work very well when the external power supply falls out of the socket). All this is running over a USB 1.1 connection, so while it works fairly well, it is on the slowish side, leaving me with some time to kill.

Here's where I get my daily allowance of annoyance for the day, all thanks to the spectacularly craptacular non-compliance of Internet Explorer. Now on my system(s) at home I use K-Meleon as my browser. It's a nice lightweight little WIN32 native Mozilla spinoff project that serves me well on a daily basis. Now obviously, that means I get the benefit of having reasonably up to date Gecko rendering engine in my browser, which is one of the most standards compliant browser bases currently coded. I like standards, they make me happy in strange geeky ways.

IE in it's current form therefore makes me decidedly unhappy. I've spent some time as it is trying to bang Blogger's default template into something a little more semantic and standards based (not that they did a horrible job, they just made some odd choices of HTML elements and such) only to find that, surprise surprise, IE fucks it up once again. It's been a while since I had used IE, and it had slipped my mind that they completely fail to support rather basic element like fixed positioning in CSS. Sure, there are hacks and workarounds, but since this is a personal project and not something I'm doing for someone else, I hate to use stupid tricks to take into account IE's suckness. In the interim, I guess the rightcontent <div> will just have to use absolute instead of fixed positioning.

Labels: site design

A Starbucks on every corner

and not a god damn one of 'em has wireless....

That's right, not a single fucking Starbucks in downtown Columbus has wireless access available for patrons. In fact, so far I have only been able to find one place at all that has access in the downtown area, a little local shop called Skambo, and even that is pretty flaky. Both times I have been here it takes me about 15 minutes of futzing to get my connection working properly. But the point is it does work, and therefore I can attempt to kill time in a relatively productive fashion between classes.

Labels: technology