She's Alive!

The November/December time crunch is on, but I had to update you all:

• I have been accepted into UNT's PhD program in Higher Education!! Horray! (And eeek!)
• Appropriate gifts to commemorate the occasion include these sassy t-shirts.
• No, this has no bearing on when/if we're having kids, and furthermore, that's none of your business. Um, not that I'm sensitive about the subject...
  
• Thanksgiving with 18 of our family members was great fun.
  
• My hair has been re-dyed and is now slightly less fire-engine red. Very, very slightly.
• Alex and I are flying to Las Vegas for a real--gasp--vacation on Christmas Day, for 4 days/3 nights.
• I'm flying on four different trips during December, evenly divided between work and pleasure. Yikes.

And that concludes the news portion of this program. Thank you, and good night.

Rolling My Eyes

Did you hear about the latest "Da Vinci Code?" No, it's not another book/movie controversy--some musician/computer guy claims to have found a hidden musical composition in Da Vinci's Last Supper.

Oh. Come. On.

Even if I didn't have that master's in art history giggling at that one, just my general sense of logic would have scoffed at this one. "Pala first saw that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table as well as the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note." Riiight. Because hands and bread loaves so closely resemble musical notes. Oh look, is that a knight of Templar over there in the corner?!

Yeesh. You think you get away from the kookier interpretations by sticking to old paintings in naturalistic, non-abstract styles... but there will always be some bizarre theory that makes your whole discipline look foolish. Maybe that's why I wrote my thesis about liturgical objects instead of paintings. When an object is used for a particular function in the church, and it bears a particular image, it's a pretty safe bet that that image is obviously tied to the function of the object. It's not too far a leap, there.

Then again, maybe there were hidden musical notes in St. Veronica's robes on one of those altarpieces I studied... wonder what that means, hmmm?

Meandering Tuesday Thoughts

So I keep composing blog posts in my head... doesn't get them published, unfortunately. As soon as I get that T-1 to my brain, we'll be set.

Anyway, I thought I'd give the "general life update" on things, for the curious. Last weekend, I worked on Saturday but took Alex with me, and on the way home he treated us to dinner at Prairie House, which I've been longing to eat at for years. It was tasty--not only did we enjoy three scrumptious kinds of BBQ meat, but we also indulged in a fried cheesecake. Yes--cheesecake... fried... in cinnamon and sugar... with vanilla ice cream. Sunday, we did a few errands and then celebrated my father-in-law's birthday. Alex and I came home to watch Spiderman 3... meh.

I mean, it's not terrible. It's at least evenly blah--whereas Spiderman 1, I loved the first half, but once Macy Gray starts singing it goes downhill fast. But 3 is not a movie I need to own. I saw it, and that's that--leave the franchise at 2 with its glorious peak, thank you.

Alex said Fantastic Four 2 was better, and I believe him, although I chose to only watch the last fifteen minutes (I also bypassed the first one, because the trailer indicated a high cheese factor). At least FF2 had the Silver Surfer to redeem it. I didn't even like Peter Parker or MJ in S3--the only moment I really *liked* was when Spidey smashed Topher Grace's camera. But that's more because I like Topher's reactions.

We've been watching movies here and there, but nothing is standing out in my mind. We did finally buy Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, which makes me quite happy as I've been longing to re-watch it. Alex is similarly thrilled that we bought The Librarian 2, which will be a good addition to our "adventure" genre that we watch so much of. It's nice that there's been a huge increase in fantasy movies in the past five years, but could studios start making more adventure movies now? Those are effects-heavy, too, people. Sahara and National Treasure were steps in the right direction, but I could do with a few more.

I'm not even going to talk about Indy 4 here.... too frightened, yet hopeful.

Oh, we did rent Transformers--hey, it wasn't half as bad as I was fearing. It was quite a lot of fun and not so painfully cheesy as it could have been, and it made up for any cheese factor with its gorgeousness. And, um--have you seen the HD-DVD trailer for Transformers? If you're not drooling, it's obviously because you haven't seen it yet. Go watch it at Best Buy and then see if that doesn't convince you to make a semi-sudden impulse buy of awesomeness.

Other than that... it's been a week and a half of long work-nights for both of us, so little to add. Tihleigh got us hooked on "How I Met Your Mother," and sad to say that we have watched 3 DVR-ed episodes of this, but as of yet none of this season of Heroes. They're right there, on the DVR... but we watch SGA instead, or, much as I hate to admit it, the uber-cheesy Flash Gordon. The only excuse for that being that it has the jerk boyfriend from Smallville in a fun role, and they also show BSG shorts during it.

The previous weekend, we took a day trip to Austin for our nephew's fourth birthday party--and it was a lot of fun! Because it was at a park, the little kids running around were fun and cute, rather than weary-making as it can get indoors. I've now got so many pictures on my SD cards to edit, put on my hard drive, and selectively upload to Flickr that it doesn't bear thinking of.

Sunday, Alex bought GH3 for the Wii, which he's been waiting many, many, many months for, and I finished some homework. Then we watched the Red Sox joyfully tromp on the Rockies (sorry, I do like the Rockies, but... man, it's the Sox, c'mon!). And thus, sadly, ends our baseball for the year. Always depresses me.

I did get some free coffee at Jazzman's (UNT's Starbucks knock-off) this afternoon, which was much happy-making. And now, on to more things... like graphic design and such.

Remember, Remember the 5th of November

My apologies to those who read both of my blogs. Just in general, really--but also because this is re-posted from the Geeky Artist Librarian.

So, this is another illustration that you should befriend your IT people. Besides the obvious necessity for keeping those that run all our technology happy, and thus getting some bang-up fast/awesome service, there are things like this.

One of our IT guys, who is an English grad student with a penchant for comics (thus our friendship--he loaned me the rest of Planetary over the summer) just dropped this by my office:



He made them for friends around campus to wear today. How cool is that? (And if you're totally wondering what this is about--it's Guy Fawkes Day. Go read/watch V for Vendetta, and you'll get it.) Remember, remember, the fifth of November...

A case of Mountain Dew and some friendly words go a long, long way, people.