n00b in the b00nies

Do you ever feel you’ve landed inside the plot of a novel? In the book in my head, I’ve always been the feisty heroine in an adventure tale, overcoming hardship with ingenuity, wit and grace. Lately, I have felt more the bumbling anti-hero. And I think this may be a tragicomedy.

After the Great Yard Sale Fiasco of 2011, I decided to regroup. After several rounds of donations, I still had excess stuff.

I decided to try Craigslist again.

Mind you, I’m rather wary of Craigslist. I know that some people have used it successfully, but I have heard plenty of horror stories. Or at least general annoyance stories. But I decided that it was worth a shot.

In addition to a few for-sale items, I listed a free futon mattress. I got an email response pretty quickly:

i would like to pick up or if i remember u r really close if u could drop it off either way works for me i’m in [town] were r u located?

No, I couldn’t “drop it off,” as “really close” in fact meant 40 minutes away. And I was giving the thing away. For free.

tomarow would b fine is there a way we could meet half way its about a 40 min drive it would only b 20 if we met up ?

Hmmm…I’m giving something away to a total stranger, and you are asking me to drive 40 minutes (round trip) to give it to you? On the other hand, this would mean that I wouldn’t need to give said total stranger our address. I decided that since our grocery store was 10 minutes in that direction, and I had to go grocery shopping anyhow, I could meet him halfway.

He also wrote:

do u txt ? if yes txt me to set something up with me

Actually, I don’t really text. I have a relic of a cell phone, and I am slow and incompetent at it. However, I didn’t want to admit this. I sent him a txt.

No, really, it was a text. I am txt illiterate.

I painstakingly tapped out a few short lines using my numeric keypad. Several minutes later, after proof-reading and editing, I sent the text.

He responded within 30 seconds.

After several more similar back-and-forths, we agreed to meet at a school parking lot halfway between our towns.

I don’t want you to think that I was writing out full paragraphs or anything. I didn’t even include any parentheticals or subordinate clauses. There were several instances where I let capitalization slide, and even once where I left out a comma. Because I’m hip like that.

I found myself rather amused, and even slightly charmed, by the exchange. Here was this kid, likely half my age, who was fluent in a written language that I could decipher, but was otherwise pretty alien to me. Meanwhile, he must have found my own writing to be very formal and old-fashioned. The equivalent of how I might feel about a hand-written letter from an elderly aunt. I imagined myself sitting at an antique secretary with a sheet of stationery, dipping my pen in the inkwell, using my most careful cursive:

Dear Sir,

As regards your previous inquiry, I would be amenable to arranging our rendezvous at a point that is located in between our two places of residence. I suggest that it would be most suitable to determine a location with adequate space that we might easily station our vehicles within close proximity to each other, perhaps a sizeable place of commerce or educational institution, that we may most advantageously complete our transaction.

I hope that you will forgive the brevity of this missive, but I am presently due to deliver a platter of petits fours for the fornightly meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary Horticultural Society, and further I must hasten to catch the postman on his daily rounds.

Warmest regards,
Mrs. Bottomham-Pantsbury

Fast forward to this morning. John helped me shove the futon in the car. It was too big for the trunk, and we didn’t want to remove the carseats, so we lay it across the tops of the carseats. We had to have both back windows open.

At 9:56 a.m, I got another text:

Still good for today at 1130 right?

“Save for unforeseen obstacles, I shall be there as pre-arranged, fine sir.”

Ok ty c u latterZ

I got a phone call shortly before leaving, so I was running a bit late. I spent 5 minutes composing a text saying I was running 5 minutes late.

At 11:35 sharp, I found the school. The parking lot was conspicuously devoid of compact cars of the type mentioned by my text buddy. After a few minutes, I sent a text. At 11:47, the guy called to say he’d overslept. (Dude, you texted me at 10 am! Whatevs.) The guy was really apologetic and said he felt like crap for doing this to me. He said he could be there in 20 minutes. Not really enjoying the thought of another 20 minutes sitting in the hot sun in the abandoned school parking lot with a futon sticking out of my windows, I suggested I could drive out 10 minutes further and meet him midway. The trouble was, there looked to be exactly nothing between the two towns. No, that’s not true. There was a state forest. I couldn’t really see arranging to meet with a strange guy in the middle of the woods. (Well, I could see the headlines.) But I had the damn futon in the car, and I’d gone this far. I was either handing it off to him, or abandoning it in the school parking lot. I don’t litter, so I offered to drive the extra 10 minutes. Making the new driving total 80 minutes roundtrip.

It might not surprise you to learn that I arrived at the designated shopping center first. But the guy did show up. I helped him transfer the futon, and he even gave me $5.00 for gas. (If not for the $5.00, I would have felt totally scammed. As it is, I only feel partially scammed.)

So that’s how things are going with Project Get Rid of Stuff. Several hours of my time wasted and close to a couple of gallons of gas. To give the futon away. For free. To a complete stranger.

(Next up, do you want to hear about my adventures as an Amazon Marketplace seller?)

looking through the glass

Just as I was getting ready to go pick up the kids this afternoon, I took a drink of water. Looking through my glass as I drank, I thought, as I often do, how cool the distortions looked. I had a couple minutes to spare, so I thought I’d see if I could capture what I was seeing.

Here is the glass on the counter. I used this to gauge the distance for focusing on the bottom of the glass.

Then I held up the glass to look out the window.

I love how changing the angle of the glass a bit changes the scene. (Especially with that big drip of water rolling around in the glass…)

Just about everything looks more interesting. Case in point: the dirty dishes in the sink.

Then I grabbed this stray wine glass from the counter, where it’s been sitting for no good reason ever since its failed appearance at the yard sale fiasco.

I was thinking about dropping it off with my next donation run, but I may have to use it for a few more photos, first.

‘Cause, ooooh, swirly!

(I’ve been trying to catch my breath, and get caught up with things beyond breathing. It was a crazy couple of weeks with lots of time away from home. We are back home for a bit.)

lessons

Here are some scenes from my violin lesson.

(There’s a story behind these photos, but I can’t get into it now, since it’s almost midnight, and I have to get up early in the morning to pry two overtired children out of bed to get them to daycare and preschool so that I can head to a lab meeting that I talked my bosses into scheduling for tomorrow since I couldn’t make the Tuesday meeting in person and I was sure we’d be back from my in-laws’ by Wednesday at the latest, and I need to get to bed since I’m tired after a long day involving packing up two stir crazy children and driving with them over 4 hours, much of which included stop-and-go traffic, only to get home half an hour before needing to leave for the violin lesson, which was rescheduled from Monday, and still needing to get the children to eat dinner before leaving for the violin lesson and half of dinner ended up being graham crackers in the car, which sounds like an intriguing name for a dish, kind of like pigs in a blanket, and I’m so tired right now that I think I’m starting to see things since I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a large floating guinea pig in the house when we left last week.)

a flower and two stumps

We’ve stayed down at my in-laws’ for a couple of extra nights to help out, so I’ve had some bonus photo time. Here are some things from the yard that I found very pretty.

The stump of a mimosa tree.


The stump of another kind of tree.


A daylily. (Actually, I found the stumps more interesting. But I liked the lily shot, too.)

sharing a chair

One of my regular pursuits is to try to get a good picture with both Phoebe and Theo. They are often like bouncing atoms, rarely at rest at the same place at the same time. Today at lunch, they were fighting over a particular chair at the kitchen table. I have no idea why that chair. But then they finally agreed that they could sit in the chair together. Oh, the cuteness! I had to get a picture! Of course, my hands were full as I headed towards the table. I turned around to set aside the plates of food I’d been about to serve and pulled my iPod out of my pocket. As soon as I had the camera pointed in the right direction, though, Phoebe decided she was over the moment. She ran off. However, we were able to talk her back to the table, and amazingly, both of them stayed put (without glue or other restraining devices!) while I aimed the iPod camera at them. Rejoice! There was much cuteness to be had. (Not shown, though, are the shots of the kids with food hanging out of their mouths.)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

(I do find myself wishing I’d grabbed for my real camera, since the iPod photos are so grainy. Instagram filters are fun and all, but I’m pretty sure I’ll grow tired of them…)

of spoons and spools

We are down at my in-laws’ again this weekend. I realized that I typically take a lot of pictures when we are here. Here are some reasons why:

  • When we come down here, I go into travel mode. Because we don’t have childcare when we visit, I don’t typically expect to do much work. This seems to lead to a bit of a sense of vacation, even though I am usually still busy all day with the kids and helping out my in-laws with meals and such. But I keep my camera handy!
  • The yard here is more amenable to playing outside. (We live in the woods at home, and if there is no breeze, our yard can be ridiculously buggy.) It’s nice to take pictures of the kids out with natural light. (For that matter, the light inside is also better. Living in the woods as we do, our house is often pretty shady.)
  • The inside of the house is much less chaotic than our own home. I can take pictures of the kids without being annoyed that the background is dominated by gigantic piles of papers or toys or whatnots. (It’s the whatnots at home that bug me especially, with their annoying whatnottishness.)
  • There are lots of different odds and ends here than are at our house. (I feel like, especially with project 365, I have pretty well tapped our house for subject matter.)

Case in point: there is a rack of spools of thread in the basement, right by a very classic looking sewing machine. I’ve also frequently found myself taking pictures of utensils and housewares. Not that we don’t have housewares at home, but they are different ones. Our spoons have different shapes. So, yes, I took a photo of the spoons in the silverware drawer.

So I posted my spools on Instagram, with the caption “Spools.” Then I posted my spoons, with the caption “Spoons.” And it pleased me well to notice at that point that they were only one letter off. Naturally, I tried to think of other things that started with “spoo,” but there were no spooks or spoofs readily available to photograph. I did, however, take a photo of this juice glass, which I think I will have to dub a spoob. Or maybe spoop. Spoot? You be the judge.

Spools.

Spoons.

A spoo_.

playing with Instagram

First with the Tumblr, and now with the Instagram. It would appear that I’m all about jumping on the social media bandwagons. (Or maybe on the trailers that follow the bandwagons, since the bandwagons passed me by ages ago. I’m a late wagon jumper.) (Not that I’m about to start a MySpace page. That wagon is long departed.)

Having been without an iPhone, or other mobile device with a decent camera, I had only looked on to the Instagram posts of others with interest and some envy. The cool filters! The hipness of it all! But for my birthday, John got me an iPod touch, which comes with not one, but two cameras. Woo-hoo! I rushed to load the Instragram app. (Well, maybe not exactly rushed. It was probably over a week. I was busy.) First I played around a bit with some very lackluster photos taken with the iPod, with disappointingly lackluster results. But then I figured out that I could use photos I’d taken previously, with my real camera, and futz with them in Instagram. I have to say, I find the filters a lot of fun.

Here are a few photos I’ve played with. For most of them, I failed to make note of which of the many available filters I used, so I tried my best to reconstruct. However, if anyone can tell that I’ve got the filter wrong, please speak up.


This was a photo I took on my commute during my first week or so of Project 365, in August 2010. (I think this filter might be the one called X-Pro II. You can see the unmanipulated one on flickr.)


This one I took on my trip to Japan in 2004. It is (I believe) an old cemetery in the hills just outside of Kyoto. I love the photo, but the highlights were blown in such a way that I’ve had trouble adjusting it. Putting it though an Instagram filter gave it new life. (I think this might be with the filter called Walden. Here is the original.)

Here’s one where I tried applying the tilt shift doohicky, as well as a filter. (I think this filter might be the one called Sutro.) I like the composition of the original, but I really think that changing the focus and the palette adds to the nostalgic feel.)


I joked that this one was a composite photo of John’s and my 1977 school portraits, with the filter called 1977. Although I realized since posting that the school portraits were probably actually from 1979. (How I could I have been so far off?) Actually, in this case the filter didn’t add much, but it amused me so. Here is the “original,” which John made a few years back from photoshopping our two scanned school portraits together. (We didn’t know each other in the 70s, and lived on opposite sides of the country.)

So there. Instagram is fun. (If you are on Instagram, you can find me there as alejna99. Yes, the username alejna was taken. Again. I haven’t yet dared look to see who is using my name.)