Rain and Roses

...the newest member of the family.


I haven't been posting a lot of personal stuff lately, so I'm not sure if I ever formally mentioned it, but our beloved Adora Belle went missing while we were on our honeymoon.  The door got left slightly open, she and Dexter both went out, and only Dexter ever came back.  We posted notices and set out a trap, but no luck - the only indication we got that she was even still around was a dead mouse left at the bottom of the stairs a month ago.  So a couple weeks back, after a neighbor found her collar (it was designed to be the break-away sort if it caught on anything), we just decided to let her be and hope she was happy being feral again.  Considering how poorly treated she'd been in the past when her people abandoned her, I can't really blame her for wanting to leave before she ended up somewhere else with awful people.  I just wish we'd been able to explain to her that we loved her and were coming back.

On a happier note, however, we have a new kitty!  His name is Leo, and he is a golden tabby with the whitest white fur you have ever seen, on his paws and chest and half his muzzle.  His paws are also huge, as is the ruff of fur on his chest; between those features, his remarkable jumping ability (he doesn't so much jump onto things as lazily leap), and his uncanny intelligence (within five minutes of arriving in his room he'd figured out how to open the hanging closet doors, and within a day he'd learned how to knock things inside the closet over to push the doors outwards and give him more space), we think he's probably at least part Maine Coon.

Leo comes from a rather happier background than Adora Belle did.  He was rescued as a kitten from under a neighbor's porch by a kindly family who wanted to keep him and his sister, but eventually discovered that four cats was just too much (something I can certainly understand, given the way feline presence seems to multiply exponentially to the actual number of cats).  His sister Jade was adopted out, so he was there all alone at the shelter, and when he jumped up in Brian's lap and put his big paws on his chest it was pretty much a sure thing.

Normally he's a tad shy, but he warms up to you pretty quickly, and his purr is almost as loud as Mr. Jerry Brown's was.  I'm pleased to report that he and Dexter seem to be getting along well enough, so I hope they'll be friends like Dexter and Adora Belle were.  But, much as I've been ambivalent about adopting a new cat so quickly, I'm very happy that Leo has done such a thorough job of snuggling up into my affections.

...Yes. I would vote for this. If only because it would make C-SPAN far more entertaining (not that that takes much):

Finally got the link to the gallery for the professional photos, which are absolutely lovely. (If the website asks for a password, it's "adamson".) Look, share, enjoy, order prints of any you particularly like - Seanna O'Sullivan is a very talented photographer and cool person well worth supporting.

I look rather...better fed than when I last regularly wore outfits like these.  Ah well. :)

I've seen this picture on no fewer than five different ads for various moneymaking schemes - the "work from home cashing checks" one, the "get an Obama stimulus check" one, the "make money posting links on Google" one, and a couple of others I can't recall offhand. Every single time, it's accompanied by a different set of names and backstory, usually something to do about "This is my wife and me on vacation/in front of our new house/doing XYZ with the money we made". Psychologically speaking, providing a picture of attractive people of roughly the social class/age/race that you're targeting isn't a bad idea, as people respond more strongly to faces than text, and more positively to faces of people they perceive as being "like them". But I find myself wondering where, exactly, the picture came from - is it the scammer? Someone in his family? Some random couple who, through chance, ended up with their faces plastered all over various scam advertisements? How old is it? What were the actual circumstances under which it was taken? (Also, am I going to get a nasty note from the owner of the scam site for hotlinking and stealing his bandwidth?)

The other bit that amuses me about those ads is the way they're specifically targeted to read your IP and insert the name of your hometown in the text = "My name is Scott and I grew up in the Juneau, AK area". Again, classic affinity scam trick - but I find it particularly amusing in my case because Juneau's a pretty small town, and if someone from here was making $10,000 a month posting links on Google they probably would have made the local paper.

This is a little different from my usual cocktail-recipe posts. I post recipes for drinks that I find noteworthy in some way; usually it's because it's something particularly delicious. But this one definitely didn't stand out taste-wise; it was perfectly drinkable, but tasted more or less like any kind of generic girly cocktail you'd get at a bar.

That said, both the taste and the color - of which I'm sad I didn't get a picture, but Google Image Search helped me find something close - were so completely and unutterably pink that I thought I'd post it anyway.  I honestly can't think of anything that would taste pinker than this (although I'm willing to test theories, should anyone wish to posit them.)

So, the recipe:

Raspberry Cosmo

1 1/3 oz raspberry vodka
1/2 oz triple sec
1/2 oz fresh lime juice
1 oz cranberry juice

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Garnish with your favorite Cosmo garnish along with fresh raspberries.

Actually, old drink recipe, but with new (very cool) illustration, courtesy of Brian getting creative with the camera and one of his flashlights last night.

This is probably the most artificial-looking cocktail in my regular repertoire.  It wouldn't look out of place at Quark's Bar.

Green River

1 part Midori
1 part Sour Apple Schnapps
1 part sour mix

Shake together and strain into a cocktail glass.  Set on lit coaster or flashlight.  Be sure to thank alien patron in his/her/its native language.

Bleh. Going to my mum's house tomorrow and I have a cold. What a way to start a vacation.

But! Brian finally got me one of the pictures of Monica's outfit for Halloween - the one we put together from a combination of my closet and my sewing skills. Unfortunately, the shot doesn't get my black patent-leather platform-heeled boots, which sort of complete the goth-fairy-tale-character look, but you can at least see most of it. And day-um did it come out well, if I do say so myself.

( Oh Grandma, what big eyes you have... )

Props to Monica for being able to quit being bashful long enough to pose for the camera, as well.

And now, I'm going to zone out in front of Kurosawa. Later, all.

First day of new job went decently enough. The folks at the city all seem to be pretty cool people, and the ones in the immediate office were most helpful and patient. Hopefully I'll pick things up quickly enough.

I haven't been blogging much lately, mostly because there hasn't been a whole lot of note going on. I've been trying to avoid getting the early-winter blues, with only some success; hopefully the new job will help with that, though. Brian and I have also been getting out and volunteering at the community radio station; appropriately enough, we'll be picking up the blues program (entitled "Walkin' Those Blues Away) this Saturday from 5:00 to 7:00 PM on KRNN - if you want, you can listen online. Any requests?

And because it's been that kind of a day, I present this without comment:

I attended a Master Class last week, taught by a classical soprano, and one of the first things she told me was that, when performing, I needed to ditch the glasses. Apparently a singer's eyes are the most expressive part of her face, and glasses obscure them.

I've spent most of my life wearing glasses, with only occasional breaks (until I got tired of futzing with contacts), so I was at first hesitant to imagine doing so regularly. But I took a couple of quick pictures with my MacBook webcam to compare, and I think I see what she means. After thinking about it a bit, I realized that that's probably why I like my glasses so much - they give me a sense of being one step removed from other people, and without them I look more vulnerable.

But I'm not the best person to judge, so I'm asking you fine folk: Imagine I'm dressed up for a performance here (instead of just going to the Viking), and tell me which picture makes more of a connection with you, the audience member.






or

...but Brian finally got his MacBook Pro, which meant he could process pictures without his computer dying, which meant he could get me the properly-processed versions of my 80s-night costume pictures.

I need a photo printer now, so I can put these up on my wall here at work with the caption "From my audition for Mad Max 4".

( Because they're even bigger than my hair... )

Okay, cue the uproarious laughter in five, four, three, two, one...

I'd like to introduce the newest member of the family: Miss Adora Belle.










Adora Belle came to us from the shelter with a different name and a rather sad past. While we don't know the details, we do know that she'd been adopted out multiple times and abandoned at least once, and her skittishness makes us believe that she may have been mistreated at one of her previous homes. Thanks to some efforts from a kindly shelter employee, she has recovered somewhat, and while she still startles easily, she is very affectionate once she gets used to your presence.

We spent some time debating what to call her before settling on "Adora Belle". It's a bit twee, but there's a character in a book series Brian and I like named "Adora Belle" who's a chain-smoking tough-as-nails kind of dame. So we're hoping some of the assertiveness will rub off on her. And for all that the name itself is cutesy, she is an adorable cat.

She spent the first week in the library (which we had prepared to be her room), alternately spending most of her time in the corner, in the kitty condo, and behind a painting. She would occasionally come out, and although she wouldn't approach us, she would let us come forward slowly and pet her.

Introductions with Dexter have gone remarkably well. We had a gate between them for a few days before introducing them properly, and they've not been hostile to each other at all aside from a bit of posturing. I have heard them tearing around the house at night, but I haven't heard them fight at all. Which makes for a nice change. And Brian's seen them grooming each other, definitely a good sign.

After about a week of her being in the library, Brian and I came home to find the lower part of the gate pushed out and Adora Belle under the bed in the bedroom. (We'd been trying to decide when to let her explore the rest of the house, but it seemed that she had made the decision for us.) And this morning, for the first time, she jumped up on the bed with us for cuddles. She seems to be acclimating rather faster than we expected, which makes us both quite happy. Hopefully soon she will get used to our comings and goings, and not flinch away when we raise a hand to pet her.

First off, I know a few of you have been wondering what this adorable Lydia person I've been continually referring to actually looks like. So here are a couple pictures of Lydia, her mane of hair, and her cherubic face:

( Not to mention her rather impressive assets... )

Special Friday Bonus Picture Time: Brian rented several different lenses for his camera to take with us on our upcoming PAX trip, and they got here this morning. So, naturally, he was wandering around the office taking pictures of random things with them to see how they worked. These were taken with a wide-angle lens, which is normally used for shots of things like large rooms and landscapes, and thus produces some interesting distortions when used for portrait photography:

( In the words of Lewis Prothero, 'My nose looks like Big fucking Ben!' )

...I shouldn't be finding this anywhere near as arousing as I am, should I?

(Link potentially NSFW. Not explicit, just...*coughs* Blatant.)

...time to stock up on some more batteries...

Another hilarious bird picture, courtesy of Brian. This one didn't even cost him a set of bruises, as it was taken from the relative safety of Marine Park. But all that aside, I can't decide if this one or the one of Orbax the Angry Tit makes me laugh more...

I think somebody must've shown this guy a dish towel.

Brian got that shot while out on Sentinel Island for work today. He has several bruises and sore sports to show for it (apparently the rocks were slippery), but I can't get over what a hilarious picture it is. The poor guy's so tiny...and so very, very angry!