a day in the life of sleepyeve

Um. My DirecTV DV-R recorded blank nothingness in place of my American Idol results show for tonight. UGH! After a crappy day, this was not what I was looking forward to…

And P.S. I hate garbage day.

So awesome.

http://xkcd.com/

You ever notice the little candy wrapper that gets stuck to the bottom
of the garbage can? You toss out the the garbage giving hope of
freedom but the little guy just sticks to the bottom: trapped, smushed,
destined to endure at least another week of garbage being dumped on
it.  And when garbage day rolls around the next week, the poor little piece of
cellophane STILL can’t seem to get free to join its brethren in the
freedom of the open landfill. 

I empathize with the little guy.  Maybe next week, Little Buddy.

We went to to Su’s Mongolian BBQ tonight for dinner. The guys we usually go with at work can’t seem to get it together to go without my planning for whatever reason, and with the holidays late last year, then Christian’s show kicking off this year, tonight was the first night since maybe… October that we’ve had a chance to go.

Now, I mention the holidays because that’s typically the time of year you end up gorging on food and gaining 5 pounds. Well, eating out at Su’s is the equivalent of a holiday feast, so I schedule the Su’s outings sparingly.

This place is no-frills good eats. Although, it never fails that I come home feeling like Jaba the Hut. Thank goodness we only go once every few months.

I wish I took some pictures of Su’s – maybe next time. Check it out on local here.

Eat light during the day if you decide to go for dinner in order to prep yourself for the feast to come. And don’t forget to save room for soft serve!

I played around with my laser pointer and camera and it was so much fun – it’s the little things in life

This one is for Christian:


And this one is a little different. Painting the roses red.

Our two big trees got some much needed grooming earlier this week. Trees, like hair, can grow wildly out of control if not managed. After 3 years of uninterrupted growth, our trees looked like this:

Once we called the Bay Area Tree Specialists in and had them work their magic… voila!

They now look slimmer, trimmer, and healthier. And when fall comes around – WAAAAAAAAY less leaves to rake! Woohoo!

Stuff like tree trimming reminds me of how expensive it is to be a homeowner, but in the end, I still think it’s well worth it.

I spent an hour tonight trying to take pictures of the awesome lunar eclipse and all I can say is that I have nothing to show for it.

I don’t have a fantastic telephoto lens for my camera so I borrowed Christian’s camera while he was at rehearsal tonight. The eclipse started at 7 and ended at 8. I wanted to climb up onto my roof to set up and take pictures, but I had to work later than I thought I did and didn’t have a whole lot of time to get ready before it started. I quickly grabbed the ladder and leaned it against the side of the house to do a trial climb first before I decided to hoist the camera and tripod up with me. It was a good thing I made that climb because when I made it up to the roof, I panicked and didn’t know how I was going to get down without tipping the ladder over. I fearfully clung on to the roof for a few minutes like a kitten stuck in a tree and then slowly inched my way over to and down the ladder. I nixed that idea.

I jetted back inside, grabbed the camera and tripod and headed outside to set up in my driveway instead. By this time, the eclipse had started so I was rushing to mount the camera and struggled trying to attach the stupid remote control. Once I finally figured it all out, I started tinkering with the settings and the focus and took a few shots. I spent a good couple of minutes fumbling with the camera trying to figure out how to review the pictures (because I was stupid and didn’t bring a flashlight so I could see the camera controls) and then tinkered with a few more settings. I tried to figure out how to zoom in on my preview pictures just to make sure they were in focus, but because I wasn’t able to see any labels on the camera, I never figured that one out. So I took a gamble. I wasn’t about to leave the camera outside unattended while I ran back into the house to hunt down a flashlight. Nor did I want to break down the camera set up and take it all back inside because I was already late. So I stood outside for an hour taking pictures that I thought were in focus. I was so wrong. And now I’m so mad.

Hopefully, by 2010 when the next lunar eclipse comes around, I will have purchased myself a nice telephoto zoom lens and can avoid using Christian’s camera – nothing against it – it just hates me.

And now I’m going to go eat my cold dinner that I prepared while I was trying to get everything set up (in case you need a point of reference, that was after I was done working and before I got stuck on the roof).

My wonderfully domestic Christian. I knew there was a reason I married him.

Okay, so there were lots of reasons I married him, but look at that laundry pile!!! I jumped in and helped out of course, but what a great head start he had.

There’s so much stuff I want to blog about this week, but I need to go watch American Idol, so stay tuned this week!

I would make the worst housewife ever and this is why:

It’s all CLEAN and I laid out the wrinkleables so they wouldn’t wrinkle, but this has now become a 3-week old pile of clothes screaming to be folded. And guess what – I ain’t gonna do it today. Why? Would YOU want to deal with this? Well, me neither.

Christian got me this great book specific to my dslr (Canon Rebel XT) that was signed by the author (David Busch) for Valentine’s Day. Well, I got over halfway through the book tonight and played around a bit with my camera based on some stuff I read about.

This is our ceiling fan light (3 bulbs). I played with something called bulb exposure and drew hearts!

The below picture is much less exciting. I was reading up about depth of field and manual focusing. I manually focused this thing and created a narrow depth of field. (That book that’s in focus is the one I’m reading!)

The book has tons of interesting info and I can’t wait to get out take some pictures of more interesting subjects.

Time to go watch LOST. I know, we’re a little late in the game this week – we just kinda forgot!

I can’t even begin to tell you how thankful I am to have a three-day weekend after the nightmarish day I had at work. My only problem will be to filter work thoughts out of my head. I really suck at that. I resolve work issues in my dreams sometimes and I don’t wake up rested at all. Insane in the brain, I tell you.

About 6 or 7 hours into my work day today, the people who were sending me all the work started leaving. That felt great. It’s happened to all of us. And it’s no one’s fault… sort of… It’s Friday. Who wants to be stuck in the office late on a Friday? For the past few weeks, I managed to find a nice break in the late afternoon to head home and finish the rest of my Friday work in the comfort of my warm fuzzy robe. Today was not one of those days and man, it was brutal.

Despite the painful workday, I’m still very thankful to be employed. We’re about to fork over a lump sum to get our trees trimmed – Gotta pay for it somehow!

Well, I’m spent. Have a great weekend, y’all!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

http://sleepyeve.com

Today was so much worse than I could have ever imagined. The nerves and stress started to build yesterday when I was asked to move my meeting for today at work to another conference room and realized that the rooms all over campus were reserved all day for what they called a “Special Project.”

I cried in bed last night from fear and uncertainty for Christian and myself. I cried for those people who would ultimately get hit, some of whom I was sure to know one way or another. I cried this morning in front of the computer as people were being called away. I spent the entire day with my stomach in knots, even after knowing that we were safe this time around because I couldn’t stop thinking about those who had headed home.

I still feel sick inside. I wonder how long it takes for the feeling to go away.

And no, I never folded the laundry.

The distress of thinking about what fate may befall on us at work this week pales in comparison to the distress I feel over having to conquer this:

That is a mound of clean clothes that has been building up for almost 2 weeks. If there’s anything I dislike more than having to do dirty laundry, it’s having to fold clean laundry. This, ladies and gentleman, is what happens when I procrastinate.

And just imagine: before I worked at Yahoo!, I was a costume manager at Great America where I managed a team that did loads of laundry for 50+ kids everynight during the summer. Talk about good times.

I just had to show you all this adorable progression of little Ethan blowing out the birthday candles on his cake:

LOL! Poor kid! Good thing he has a smart mommy who believes in dressing him in layers!

Happy Birthday Ethan!

This is a tad on the nerdy side, but I learned about favicons the other night and decided to put one up for sleepyeve.com:

Isn’t it cute??! Take a look at your address bar! Or for those who happen to have my page bookmarked, it’s there too! Hopefully, the folks from Happy Bunny won’t mind… shhhhh…

It’s the little things in life…

I had to work a little late tonight when I got home from work… you all know that is… always on a Friday. Anyway, I finally turned off the lights in the home office as I closed up shop for the night and violent flashing of lights caught my attention. It was this thing:

Our router was going nuts. I guess that’s what happens when I try to back up my work laptop at home. Anyway, it looked kinda cool so I took a shot in the dark.

LOL – that was comedy gold! Okay, maybe comedy silver. Admit it, there was a little smile before you rolled your eyes at my photo joke

I baked bread for the first time yesterday:

I think I needed to activate the yeast a bit more because it was a little dense. Still good, just heavy… Christian loves it, apparently. It’s a good thing he has three loaves to eat up.

I made cupcakes the other day because I wanted to… and I could… so I did.