Color me Obsessed.

May 16th, 2008 Melissa

I have always held a deep affection for bright or rich colors. My husband sees in blue, red, or green while I see in royal blue, rose red and forest greens. I say there are thousands of different greens, he says green is green is green, some light, some dark.

It’s funny how men and women generally see or consider color so differently. Some of us women folk have four color receptors in our eyes instead of the standard three, so we really do see things differently!

I do believe that color influences, subtly, our moods. I always think of yellow as daisies, dandelions and summer sun, thus the color always brings me happier memories. Blue carried with it the smell of Nova Scotia sea-salt, endless waves, reflection on sun warmed rocks while the water crested on the shore and yes, on occasion, sadness.

Brown is warm things; worn out old boots and homespun sweaters, maybe floppy slippers and the color of earth. Comfort.

I love red too! Bold, bright, vivid, passionate, anger–and then the softer side of red has become my favorite later in life: pink. Pink reminds me of innocence, little girls, cliche-but-happy-princess and soft, soft things.

What are your favorite colors? What emotions do they evoke in you? Do you surround yourself in a soothing color, or happy color, or comforting color where you spend the most time?

Posted in Creative, Photography | 1 Comment »

Time for a Change

May 14th, 2008 bariguy

As I’ve posted here before, I’ve been a conservative for a very very long time. Without going into too much fine detail my primary reasons center around less intrusive government and lower taxes. Basically, I’m the kind of conservative that doesn’t care whether you screw 6 hookers high on shrooms as long as you keep my taxes low and don’t expect me to pay for your health care.

Until recently I have considered the quest to keep government out of our lives more important than other considerations and have sided with the party most likely to do this. Each party or liberal/conservative leaning has it’s drawbacks. Conservatives are just fine as frog’s hair when it comes to proselytizing from the bench as long as fetuses are involved. Liberals would preach from the white house on pretty much every issue except drugs and abortion. I took the lesser of two evils and stayed with the party that at least pretended to be interested in keeping government small and out of my face.

Well, I believe the time has come to re-evaluate how and for whom I vote. Over the past few years I’ve watched more and more press and blogs talking about atheist rights and watched the greater community react. During my observations I’ve noted that the frequency and intensity of the attacks on atheists increasing. Members of our government are simply allowed to tell us we don’t matter… or worse, are dangerous… without fear of reprisal or even a slap on the wrist from the greater community. Our rights can openly be questioned and no one even seems to notice.

There is not a single atheist running for president that I’ve been able to find. Even the “Best-we-can-do-party,” the Libertarians, are nominating the openly religious Barr. Hell the guy even tried to ban witchcraft! And not because it’s silly, but because it’s “satanic” and his imaginary friend doesn’t like that. It has been established that the majority of Americans would rather vote for a gay scientologist than an atheist regardless of what the person’s stances were. How insane is this? And how is it that I don’t get a benefit or some sort of special parking space?

Well, for what it’s worth, I think it’s time for a change. As Atheists we cannot simply keep supporting people that actually believe in mythology just because they agree with something else we like or support. How can you support a man or woman that wants to teach our children Intelligent design just to keep your taxes low? How selfish is it to ignore the fact that a man says he’s going “to do God’s work,” just because we like the healthcare package he’s pushing? How can we hold ourselves out to be better than the militant Islamists when we ignore the fact that most of our country actually believes Jonah was swallowed by a whale and that Noah fit two (or more) of all the animals in the world in a boat? Is getting 72 virgins for blowing yourself up really so crazy an idea in comparison?

So, beginning with this election, I have decided I cannot and will not support any believer of any religion regardless of their stances. The bare minimum a thinking person can ask of their candidate is that they don’t believe in some imagined grand-father or -mother in the sky. As with all such decisions, they are pretty meaningless if only followed through by one individual. However, estimates of the Atheist population of the US are somewhere around 7%-10%, making us a potentially powerful voting bloc, especially in this age of races decided by less than 2%. The more of us that use the power of the vote to encourage more rational leaders rather than the ID crowd the better off we’ll all be.

This November, I’ll be writing in my vote.

Posted in Misc, Oh the humanity, Writing | 1 Comment »

Kumwhats? Kumquats!

May 14th, 2008 Melissa

You may remember my recent posts asking which camera I should choose. Shawn decided on the EOS Digital Rebel XTi.

Well, it arrived on Monday and since then, I have been taking pictures of the most random crap around our house, evar!

The cat. The cat eating. The cat sleeping. The cat washing herself and eating and sleeping, and of course, licking her butt fastidiously. Cats are, after all, dainty and polite little creatures. Pictures of my garden, of the basil growing in it, of the dill just flowering, pictures of the cat in the garden through the just flowering dill. I took a few pictures of the sad and lonely single red cayenne pepper growing in the garden as well as one of Shawn’s feet, my feet, cement on the porch, the dog, the kitchen floor the–well. You get the point.

Out of all of them, however, I think one photo may have actually turned out better than all of the rest so far. This shot of our neighbors kumquat tree came out pretty awesome for me. I did use a circular polarizing filter to take it and I did, of course, adjust layers and sharpness in adobe photoshop. But to me, this image holds so much greater quality as well as promise than most of the images I’ve been taking with the S700.

This image represents a whole new level to my brand new love affair with my camera. More and more lately, I have been looking at things…I have been really looking. The color of something, the shape of it, the way the light frames around it or across it–the expressions on faces, the curve of hands, even the dirt on the carpet becomes a potential picture in the ‘camera’ inside my head. I’ve begun to look at things in my mind as what I think it would appear as if in a photo.

I’ve gotta finally admit it. My messy, amazing, wonderful life turns into something absolutely amazing and beautiful. Even the worn spots on my desk could, if taken right, make an amazing texture photo.

I hope some day that I’ll be able to show the world this and I hope that they’ll feel the same way too.

Posted in Photography | No Comments »

Dear DHL. Stop mouth breathing.

May 12th, 2008 Melissa

A video post from yours truly.

Posted in Rants | No Comments »

Thanks, Mom, for leaving me in that grocery aisle.

May 7th, 2008 Melissa

I couldn’t think of a tribute that would fully encompass all of how I feel about my mother. I wasn’t able to write something moving about the bond between daughter and parent, every time I started something this week I deleted it.

So instead, I give to you a list of Thank-you’s to a woman far braver than I.

Thank you for leaving me to scream, cry, and flail alone in the grocery store aisle. As I reached out with chubby little hands and demanded you buy me a bag of chips—you put your foot down and said no. The louder I became, the more adamant about your decision you were. As my face turned purple and I started screaming my lungs out after hitting the floor wailing and carrying on—you didn’t give in. You simply told me quietly that when I am done and was ready to act like a decent human being you’d be in the car. You took your grocery cart amidst the gaping onlookers of the store and left me there in the aisle to continue on with my idiocy until my teeny tiny child brain could catch onto things.

You could have caved and bought me those chips just to shut me up, to stop me from making a scene. You didn’t. Thank you for teaching me that acting like Paris Hilton gets you nothing in life. I have not forgotten your lesson.

Thank you for spending the first three years after I was born in a near perpetual sleepless state, washing baby clothes, cleaning up spit-out peas, trying to figure out why I cried for hours on end for no reason and not going insane from it. Thank you for not giving up in those long nights when I wouldn’t be comforted as a baby. I didn’t know it then, but this was part of a lesson in unbending patience and love.

Thank you for not strangling me when I came up with the stupidest ideas on the face of the earth. Like that one time I decided to pull up our neighbors tulips simply because one of the older boys told me it would be an awesome idea. You made me march right over to that lady’s house with my most precious doll in hand and made sure that I handed it over in compensation to her flowers. At the time, I thought that you were tearing my heart out with toothpicks and splattering it on the wall, because that cabbage patch kid doll was the most important thing in my whole world EVAR—but I realized as I grew older that you were trying to teach me that stupid decisions hold consequences. I am trying not to forget this lesson.

Thank you for getting mad at me when I wouldn’t do something I should. Thank you for hounding me about the home work, the science projects, whether or not I was taking notes in class. Thank you for the heart-wrenching disappointment when I failed—reminding me that there was someone behind me in the first place cheering along side me. When I was a teenager I hated this with the passion of a thousand white-hot suns. The constant push to do better, to study, to get good grades; I did not believe I could while you did. I did not think it was worth it while you did your very best to try and tell me it was.

I failed you in this—I didn’t understand you weren’t doing this out of some sick pleasure because OMG LIKE, YOU TOTALLY JUST WANNA LIKE, RUIN MY LIFE!—you were doing it because you loved me and it broke your heart when I did not succeed.

Thank you for telling me outright when my friends sucked. You always knew; either it was mother’s intuition or just plain keen instinct, you always knew when a friend of mine was going to be trouble. You were older, wiser, and you knew what to look for yet every time you told me a friend was no good, I, like the idiot most children are, thought you were some how trying to take away things that made me happy.

This wasn’t true of course, and I was being the usual teenage retard. Inevitably, the friend you’d warn me about would hurt me deeply and leave. I would conveniently forget your advice then and wonder why that person did what they did and how I didn’t see it coming. Thank you for not smacking me upside the head hard enough to leave a dent then, as I would have deserved it. You taught me to listen to people.

Thank you for being my mother. Most of my teen age years were spent lamenting over how awful I thought things were. It is a shame how much time I wasted before my eyes were opened and I realized the best thing I ever had, had always been by my side.

We never truly got along and we don’t always see eye to eye. But I understand now and I will always love you.

Happy Mother’s day.

Posted in Oh the humanity | 50 Comments »

I have two words for you…

May 4th, 2008 bariguy

Fucking. Awesome. That’s my concise and completely accurate review of Iron Man.

We went to see the movie earlier this morning. I had been building myself up for this movie all week and had been anxiously awaiting it for the past couple months. I was in perfect position to have my hopes dashed, much like they were for the first Hulk film. It’s pretty hard for a film to live up to what a anxious movie go-er might imagine before they actually get to see the movie and usually I force myself to have lower expectations. For some reason I decided to let myself get excited about this film.

And I was not one bit disappointed. Not a single bit.

The movie had the normal phenomenal special effects. This day and age this is something that I expect from a film in this genre. That’s why I go to superhero films. I don’t go to see comic books I loved since I never read them. I go to see unreal things made real. I am honestly far more impressed with amazingly good animation effects in films like The Incredibles than am by appropriately shiny metal and wicked explosions in an action film. Iron Man was filled with plenty of good action shots of the man in the iconic metal suit doing lots of hero-ey stuff. The action wasn’t overbearing and it didn’t overwhelm the story.

The story was surprisingly good and very much so character driven. The genesis of the character has been changed to better reflect the times and still managed to keep the “war profiteer turned do-gooder” vibe that is in the genesis of the original comic. The names had that familiar comic book feel to them; short and descriptive. The hero is Stark, and so is his view of the world as a whole at the beginning. The peppy sidekick? Why Pepper, of course. Pepper Potts to be exact. Why, the name almost personifies a cute freckle-faced assistant. Just saying it makes you peppy. As a whole everything fit together as it should in these films. The production values were high and the writing punchy and surprisingly smart (especially between Pepper and Stark). The only negative I had was the butchering of the song Iron Man during the end credits. C’mon! Don’t screw with things that don’t need to be screwed with.

But this film had something special and his name is Robert Downey Jr.

Most of the superhero films these days have heroes that look like they belong in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They’re all perfect little people between the ages of 17 and 21, it seems. The recent Superman movie, though a film I enjoyed, suffered from this. Lois and Clark look like they just got their BA from some ivy-league mass-production preppy machine, not like they’re old enough to be established journalists; one of whom has won a Pulitzer. At the beginning, Downey brings his trademark sharp witted playboy to the fore, no doubt from years of practice in real life. It works marvelously. I ceased to see Downey pretending to be Stark and began to see the two as the same person.

But where Downey really shines as Stark is when the mood turns serious. Eighteen year old models don’t have weight (either physically or emotionally). When the story turns dark and you can begin to see the change come over the character, Downey’s age and lack of physical perfection lends him a sense of gravitas that the kids just haven’t been able to pull off yet. I believed he felt regret over what he’d created and how it had changed the world. This alone makes the film worth seeing. Add to this that his character wasn’t changed by some sort of magic bullet or cosmic radiation… that he *chose* to be better and to make the world a better place… and you have yourself something different and so much better than the normal super hero fare.

So my initial review stands. Fucking Awesome. Go. Now. Why aren’t you going?

Posted in Geekery, Misc, So awesome it will melt your face | No Comments »

Camera gurus, geeks, freaks, artists and lovers: I need your help.

May 2nd, 2008 Melissa

Image via Wikipedia

First Question, Pretend time with me. The backdrop:

Your minimum spending price is 550$, your maximum (including tax) you can afford is 800$. And, you can ONLY buy it from Dell–which camera do you purchase from them and why?

Second question: The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT Silver 8. Does anyone own one? What’s it like? What’s the response time? The LCD? How’s it feel in the hand? What’s your impression of it? Was it worth buying for you?

EDIT: We’re looking at the EVOLT E-510 Black 10 MP Digital SLR Camera by Olympus as well. Anyone want to share their experiences with that as well?

EDIT 2: And we’re also looking at the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi SLR Camera. Thoughts? Opinions?

Third Question: All restrictions aside but the above price range, would you recommend something different than your answer for question number one? If so, what would that be?

The reason I ask is because Shawn’s the most magnificent man alive and is willing to spend this much on me and a camera and I really haven’t a clue what to purchase next after the FujiFilm S700.

Halp.

(God I am so excited!)

Posted in Photography | No Comments »

Sleep: 0, Insomnia: 1

May 1st, 2008 Melissa

Image via Wikipedia

I have my battles with sleep.

I don’t remember specifically when they started. There’s no pin point of light brightly resting on the year of my life in which sleeping at night time became difficulty.

It just…became.

One year I was a good little girl who could not stay up past ten p.m, and the next year I was an adult watching the time and hours tick by me while it seemed like the world slept.

The biggest, most overwhelming feeling I have late at night when trying to rustle through all of the many different cluttered-thoughts inside my skull is how much of a waste of my life sleep essentially is. How many more photos could I snap at night with the right equipment? How many more awful poems could I write? How many more words? How many more people could we reach out to if we have those eight hours back?

I don’t think I’d want to be a Beggar in Spain, however, never sleeping ever again, never dreaming. I think I’d be alright if two or three hours a night were enough to keep me going.

Eve has a really good post about how to get back into sleeping like a human being, as well as tips for sleep–but occasionally, just nothing works anymore.

Have you found your sleeping patterns futzing up as you’ve grown older? What are some of your personal tried and true remedies for insomnia?

Posted in Oh the humanity | 2 Comments »

I am too Naughty for Social Spark.

April 28th, 2008 Melissa

As some of you may know and remember, I signed up a while ago to payperpost.com. It’s a chance to line my pocket with some extra change and practice writing whenever a subject or product comes along that I can write about.

Payperpost.com opened a second site, which is in beta, called Social Spark. Social Spark has quite a bit in common with Payperpost given they’re created and backed by the same company. Social Spark, however, carries a lot of features to inspire community that aren’t in Payperpost. So I decided, what the hell, they’re from the same company, right? I like payperpost.com, and I’m liking what I’m seeing so far with Social Spark.

So I go through the same rigmarole more or less for Social Spark as I did their other site, Payperpost. I put in their code, I wait for blog submission–this goes without a hitch. Then I submit 2phatgeeks.com to their Customer Love. I can’t take any opportunities without blog acceptance.

Our blog for Social Spark was rejected.

Apparently, Social Spark’s standards are much higher than Payperposts? Because I use(d) strong language in several of my posts, Social Spark denied 2phatgeeks.

That started a whole lot of head scratching on my end. Are they more concerned about how Social Spark looks than Payperpost? Do they not care at all about what’s seen on one site, while they do the other? Why the difference to begin with?

I can’t really see myself as that much of a rebel, but according to Social Spark, […] Continue Reading…

Posted in Oh the humanity | 8 Comments »

Signs Mel Need Sleep:

April 26th, 2008 Melissa

Holding my cat, Flora, up to the ceiling and exclaiming: “Kunta Kitty!”

And then after a second, rocking up on tip toes to put her paws near the ceiling (I’m short, okay.) then singing Spider Cat, Spider cat.

Really, I’m like this almost every day.

Posted in Married Life | No Comments »