Catching Up

Sorry for my sporadic posting lately - after spending two weeks without internet access, I was very behind on my school assignments, which meant that my nightly Laptop Fun Time turned into Laptop Work Time. Boo. Anyway, here's a quick visual summary of the last week:

We drove around and saw a lot of this, which is so intensely colored that I joked to Ben it looks like the landscape has been badly Photoshopped:

Apparently this is what canola looks like before it's made into oil. It doesn't grow in bottles? Who knew?!

We went somewhere and saw scary clown carnival games:

Two shows for me in a year! Yippee!

And this is my new favorite photo of the three men in my life:

Love.

Things are finally getting back under control after the insanity of the move, so hopefully I'll be able to start posting more regularly again!

Tips of the Day

If you're thinking of moving and have two highly energetic maniacs toddlers, go slam your hand in the car door a couple dozen times instead. It will be less agonizing and certainly involve fewer renditions of "I said GET OUT OF THAT BOX OMG DON'T DROP THAT PUT DOWN THE WINE GLASSES AND STEP AWAYYYYYY."

If you're sleeping on a borrowed air mattress for a night before your real bed arrives, check to make sure the accompanying electric pump is one that you plug into the wall. Otherwise you'll be hanging out on your front lawn at 10.30pm with the car battery powered pump attached to an idling engine. Classy. On the other hand, from that point on you can probably only go up in your neighbors' estimation.

If you're moving into a rental that's been recently renovated, plug in a phone to make sure the phone lines running under the floorboards weren't severed when the owner replaced the flooring, then apparently just stuffed those pesky little chopped up wires back in there where no one would ever notice, am I right? Incidentally, this is also how you get a phone service guy to swear really loudly in the presence of children.

Lastly - and this is not a tip - can I just say INTERNET! Sweet, sweet internet! Has it really been two weeks, my beloved? Never leave me again! *sob*

P.S. Also not a tip, but I'm currently catching up on the bajillion posts in my Google Reader and OMFG you must go read Rex's review of Bride and Groom. Make sure you watch the video as well - I snort laughed at least four times.

Project 365: take two

As you may have noticed, I've fallen off the 365 bandwagon. Excuses include, but are not limited to:

• Working full time + studying part time + family = not a lot of Lisa Takes Photos Time
• Winter here means short days, which means only pre-dawn and post-sunset Lisa Takes Photos Time, which means the sky isn't exactly conducive to natural light photography
• I am a lazy git and copped out when it got hard

But now that I'm officially unemployed (though still studying), I have Lisa Takes Photos Time slotted into Pirates Take Naps Time. Woohoo!

Today's offering is a spectacularly crappy shot of flowers I found growing in the backyard, where we have a stunning array of plants...just not the lawn that's actually supposed to be there.

Meh.

Could be worse, eh?

Geeking up

I'm a big ole documentary fan and, as I think is well established by now, something of a nerd. Lately I've combined these things into a blissfully geeky way to kill time by watching a lot of documentaries either on nerdy topics or about nerds themselves.

I've talked about my love of The King of Kong and Helvetica before - which I try to make everyone in my life watch at some point - but here's a shortlist of what else I've been vegging out to lately:

Darkon
Focuses on the struggles between factions of a war gaming LARP (live action role playing) group. Interesting, but veers into "aren't these people sad and nerdy" territory a little too often to be a truly evenhanded documentary.

Monster Camp
Similar to Darkon, but a bit more evenhanded in its approach toward the LARPers. There's a lot of emphasis on the sense of community between the players, which is a nice touch as that's a big part of the draw for most of participants.

Get Lamp
A history of text adventure gaming, which is where modern computer games originated and remains a fascinating sub-genre. The editing is a bit jumpy at times, but overall it's not a bad effort...and kind of makes you want to go try to create your own game at the end of it.

We Are Wizards
This one about Harry Potter fans (especially emphasizing bands who were inspired by the books) and is currently waiting in my viewing queue. It's not very highly rated on imdb so I'm trying to keep my expectations low.

There's got to be another geeky documentary viewer out there. Anything else I should check out?

SAHM

I just realized that things have been so hectic lately that I haven't posted about us moving! Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Ben was offered a kickass job in a town a few hours away, and after much conversation we decided to take the plunge and relocate.

I hadn't expected to leave our cozy house that I love. I hadn't expected to leave the job that I changed career paths for. I really hadn't expected to be a stay-at-home mom for the time being, and even though I've only been doing it for a week, it's taken a lot of mental adjustment. I've gone from dealing with nonstop patron inquiries and problems to doing a lot of this:

And you know...it's kind of awesome. I get a lot of personal fulfillment out of my job and will certainly go back to work in the future, but for the time being? Hanging out and coloring with my two best dudes rocks my socks.

I know nothing

Erica over at And Baby Makes Four has gone on a well deserved vacation, and for some reason she decided it was a good idea to ask me to write a guest post. I typed up a little something about all the shit my kids do that I don't understand - so click over and marvel at my incompetence!

Ages 7 and Up

So. I just watched this movie trailer:

Yes, that's Battleship as in the board game, and I wish you could see the expression on my face right now. There is some serious WTF-ery happening there. Look, I love me some Liam Neeson, and board game movies can even work - see the awesomeness that is Clue - but this means Hollywood has officially run out of ideas.

I'm guessing this means we're in for a Hungry Hungry Hippos movie (obviously about rampaging hippos who escape a top secret government laboratory where they experimented with mutating genes to create hyper-aggressive superbeasts) any day now.

Two cuties. And their mother.

Most of the time I'm the person behind the camera, which means that I can count on one hand the number of photos that we have featuring both the Pirates and myself. Last weekend we tried to remedy that, and after about 582 shots got the following:

Will is crabby that the photoshoot won't end, and Dash is giving his best, "Hey baby, like my spring-loaded playground car ride?" look at the little girl off camera, but hey, it's got all three of us in it!

By the way, have I mentioned how freaking cute my kids are lately? Because they are.

As you may have surmised by now, this post has pretty much no point except to show off my spawn. Hey, it's my blog and I'll post what I want to, right?