Simon's Feed Bag
Originally uploaded by Planet Vicster.

After emptying the bag of Science Diet (Adult Hairball, if you're keeping score at home) into its container, I set the empty bag aside while I got the furkids their breakfast.

As usual, Simon wanted the bag for his second breakfast (mmmmmmm, Science Diet residue)...and he promptly managed to get the bag STUCK ON HIS HEAD. He then stumbled around the apartment, backing into door frames and furniture while trying to shake the bag OFF of his fool head.

Being the concerned, fretful mother that I am, I moved quickly to free his head from the bag...after I took the photo. Apologies for the fuzziness of it. I was laughing so hard I couldn't stop the camera from shaking.

With one last swirl of my pencil in the little Scantron box, I finished up the Spring 2005 school term at a little past 8:00 p.m. this evening. I think I did well on the final. But, by my calculations, I really only needed to score 12-15% to maintain my A for that class. I have no idea what my final grade will be in photography (I'll come back to this subject in a future post).

I've signed up for a couple of classes during the summer, but they're online, so I'll have to see how the workload is before I set my school/study schedule for the summer.

Other than that, I've got some business to attend to. I have one quite urgent project that I've set a rather ambitious deadline for. It's doable (yech, I hate that word!), but tight. And I have a couple of other, less-urgent projects in the pipeline, like a site redesign (for this here blog and for "Visual Cues" which is where the photography portfolio lives).

Also on the agenda is shoveling out the apartment. It's time to be ruthless about de-crufting the joint. I'm still trying to decide if I'm keeping any of the old "family" trunks. I may just empty the damn things and call a cousin to come down and get them, if they want them (ooh, I think I'm wandering into "that's a subject for another post" territory again). And there's still quite a bit of "me" work that needs to be done as well.

If y'all will excuse me, I need to go start breaking ground on that first BIG PROJECT...just as soon as I attend to my shrieking, "neglected" cat.

On the beach
Originally uploaded by Planet Vicster.

Bay side therapy for the end of a very long and VERY stressful week.

One cause of angst was that I hadn't had my walk since last Saturday so I was really missing my Alameda shoreline. And I so much need that walking time because it's where I do my thinking, where I work through some of life's issues.

Instead of my 4-mile round-trip along the shoreline path, I came back on the beach. The sun hadn't warmed the sand too much and it felt good. The water was cool, but not cold, perfect for wading.

The downside of my seashore meandering was that the sand rubbed a big blister on the bottom of my big toe and I've got a rather "sun-kissed" look about my face, neck and shoulders. OK it's a nasty-ass sunburn and it was very foolish of me to wander out without slapping on that factor-30.

Anyway, I heartily recommend going out to the beach, or wherever your "favorite spot" is and just take some time to BE, and to listen to your self. Those were two of the most useful hours I've spent this week.

Doolittle Road at ??mph
Originally uploaded by Planet Vicster.

Note to self: I probably should create a set on Flickr of my commute photos, since they seem to be accumulating.

I took this shot whilst zipping along Doolittle Road at (mumble mumble snicker) miles per hour.

My computer instructor handed out a syllabus at the beginning of the class in January. Buried on the weekly "calendar" was "Research Paper Due." He made passing mention of it in the first class but said nothing else about it. Until late April. Then it was like, "P.S., your research papers are due on May 18, and they should be about anything related to computers."

Uh, gee, thanks for dropping that on us with not quite a month left. It's not like we have other classes, or jobs or a life or anything.

Over the last several weeks, I went through many topic changes. I thought I had a good one with my experience with Buster: Evaluating whether to upgrade an older machine or buy new. I ran it by him and he pretty much poo-poo'ed it. I went through several more topics until I finally went back to MP3 technology and the music sharing controversy.

For the last week or so, in addition to working and trying to finish up my photography assignment (and that instructor lopped a week off the schedule so everything was due at last Sunday's class), I've been busting my brain trying to get that damn research paper researched and written.

The instructor made it out to be such a Big Deal. He commented that one former student of his, someone who had blown off all the classes, wrote turned in such a great paper that she got so much extra credit that her grade went from a D to an A. Now, if I was a classmate of that student, I'd be pretty pissed off about that, if I had turned up every week and done the work every week. But that's another rant.

Anyway, I checked the syllabus to see how many points this research paper would count toward the overall grade. I couldn't find any other mention of it. I checked again...nothing. So I carried on and busted my ass finishing it. The paper was done sometime after 2:00 this morning (I stopped looking at the clock after 2 a.m.).

I get to class this evening only to discover that this paper is worth roughly the same as any regular assignment: two points. TWO POINTS! TWO FUCKING POINTS!!! Oh, it might have been worth more in extra credit if I had turned it in early. But right now I feel like a real muppet for putting so much effort into the damn thing for two lousy points.

Several months ago, as a very stressful school term was nearing its end, I made a promise to myself, in the event that a certain situation would recur. Sure enough, as another stressful school term draws to a close, this situation has indeed recurred.

And so the time has come for me to honour that promise...

I'm guessing someone at Netflix stumbled on my humble little photo of the Netflix Mail Box. The views on that photo are up to 133 and counting.

I guess it's nice to be an artist appreciated in her own time. But if I had known that photo would get that many views I would have had a manicure before heading to the post office (yikes!).

Martin Luther King Park and Storm Clouds #2
Originally uploaded by Planet Vicster.

One benefit of the jet stream rippling over California (instead of Oregon and Washington) is that we've had some amazing spring storms with some of the yummiest clouds!

I could fill my days--not to mention roll after roll of film and CF card after CF card--photographing these clouds.

Perhaps I'm reconnecting with my former Oregonian self...

Lately, I've been seriously considering changing my major. I've been on a path to major in fine art/photography. But I realized this weekend that trying to create art for someone else's approval (i.e. a good grade) has sucked out any joy I've ever gotten from creating art.

In the "real world" when I create a painting or a photograph, if people don't like it it doesn't have a major negative impact (other than being a bit of a bummer). But in school, if I manage get hold of an instructor for whom I can do nothing right, it seriously messes up my GPA and has a huge ripple effect in terms of lost scholarship opportunities and academic recognition.

Yes, the debacle of the drawing class still stings and is weighing heavily on this bit of soul searching. But it's not so much the "rejection" from the instructor that bothers me. What does bother me is that I know that I'm not a C student. I worked damn hard in that class but could never seem to please the instructor. I haven't picked up a charcoal since the day I left the class. As much progress as I was making at the end, I just look at my box of pencils and drawing pads and it's as if they taunt me over my "failure."

In some ways I find myself going through the same thing in the photography class. It's been a real struggle trying to balance creating technically sound images that please me with not tanking my GPA even more because of some disconnect with the instructor. It has been another rather discouraging experience, even though the instructor has been more encouraging lately.

The good thing is I'm not ready to give up on school entirely. I just want to find joy in art again and I think being an art major is going to turn me off of it completely. What my new major will be, I don't know yet. I'm hoping the academic counselor at my school that I trust completely will be back soon from her maternity leave. Then we can put our heads together and figure out which way to go from here.

Zeitgeist
Originally uploaded by Planet Vicster.

You know you've hit it big when you have a post box just for people to mail stuff to you. Not even Santa Claus gets his own mail box!

Has the International Olympic Committee announced a new event? Because Simon has been scattering litter out of his box lately as if he was training fiercely to bring home the gold!

Yesterday, a co-worker had "Kyle's Mom's a Bitch" stuck in his head and managed
to implant it into my head when he sang it while waiting on his print job. I
had had Wilco's "Say You Miss Me" stuck in my head for several days, but Eric
Cartman managed to unseat it. Temporarily.

About 5:00 a.m. this morning, I awoke with a jolt. The Wilco song was (is) stuck
in my head again, only now it's Cartman singing it. With all due respect to Jeff
Tweedy, I'm kinda liking Cartman's version!

D'OH!
Originally uploaded by Planet Vicster.

Yeppers, Buster the iMac is in trouble. Big trouble. The good news is I got the data off of it, though I wasn't able to check every bit of it for intregrity. The bad news is, Tiger wouldn't install, even with the erase/install setting. Then the Disk Utility essentially said, "He's DEAD, Jim!"

Now I need to ask the experts about how difficult it would be to install a new HDD myself, or should I have the Genius Bar deal with it. Or, should I just buy a Mac Mini? I have a gut feeling that there's something else wrong with Buster that caused the HD to fail and by the time I get done paying the Geniuses to futz with fixing it, I will have basically paid for a new Mac Mini.

Decisions...decisions.

I finally managed to figure out how to back my data off of Buster the iMac through DiskWarrior. I started the backing off process of ONLY my user folder and the Library folder at around 5:30 or 6:00 last evening. It's 8:30 a.m. and it's still backing up. (For a girl born without the waiting gene, this is almost too much torture to bear!)

And now, being Monday and all, I have to leave the backup going and head to work--and hope that no errors crop up in the process. But, really, I'd love to have one more day to just finish the damn backup and, dare I hope, install Tiger.

Grrrrrrrrrr!

Beautiful Boy
Originally uploaded by Planet Vicster.

My sweet furball is four years old today!

What's scary is that, as big as he is now, his "breed" is supposed to keep growing up to age five. Billie is especially dismayed at that prospect, given how much Simon loves to sit on her and bite her.

For presents, he got a bunch of new twist-ties to play with (they came with my new external hard drive) and a couple of new ping pong balls. And tonight for his supper I'll make up some Country Gravy, since that's his favourite thing in the world.

But on this day I want to express my eternal gratitude to the folks at Island Cat Resources and Adoption, who rescued Simon and his litter mates and brought him into my life. And I especially thank his "foster mom" who gave him and his siblings a great start in life.

Well, I'd love to report on how much I'm loving Tiger right now. Except that I've spent the last 36 hours trying to revive a dead hard drive. Ironically, the hard drive collapsed just as I was trying to perform a full backup onto my spiffy new LaCie external hard drive. But really, Finder has been dry heaving for a couple of weeks now, which was why I wanted to do the backup and then a clean install of Tiger.

After the photography class lecture this morning, I bunked off to the Apple Store for a chat with the guys at the Genius Bar. I thought I'd end up buying a copy of DiskWarrior, though that was a purchase I was hoping to delay, if at all possible. Instead of queueing up for the Genius Bar, you now go to one of the display Macs and sign in. Even with the signing-in, I had about an hour's wait...absolute torture for those of us who were born without the waiting gene. However, it's no-charge diagnostics and support, so I'm not going to complain.

I had lots of time to look at iPods and hope that I could get away with not buying DiskWarrior today and get an iPod instead (sometimes my dreams are all I have in this world...) because I like the idea of being able to synch the iPod to iCal and my address book, as well as having tunes for my walks. It amazed me how iPods were flying out of the store! It was busy while I was in there, and it seemed like every other customer was purchasing some kind of iPod. I think there were more iPods being bought than there were copies of Tiger. Incredible!

My turn finally came up and the Genius at the bar pointed to the DiskWarrior box in my hand and said, "You need this program." He confirmed that it was a directory structure error (think of a card catalog in a library where the ink gets smudged on some or all of the cards--or they're in a completely random order--and you can no longer use it to find the books). He said it's also good for maintaining the system in order to prevent Jaguar (soon to be Tiger on Buster) from horking up hairballs.

So, as I type on the iBook (which I am doubly grateful to have right now!) DiskWarrior is rebuilding Buster's hard drive. Once that's done, I'm going to just grab whatever data I can and THEN do the clean Tiger install.

As much of a bummer that it is having to go through the expense and gymnastics of repairing Buster's hard disk, this is the first problem I've had in the five years or so that I've had it. How many Windows box owners can say they got that kind of service out of their machine before it had a bad crash? Like I say, it's a bummer, but I have no complaint about my Macs.