dangerblog

Packing for Vegas

I'm up late tonight because a) I stopped to get a red bull on the way home from work and b) I've been picking out clothes for my Vegas trip, which essentially means that I tried on everything in my closet.  Everything.  Now I've got everything in nice little neat piles and hangers all over my room, ready to be packed up tomorrow, assuming I have enough luggage.

Pairs of shoes I am bringing that are some shade of pink: 5

Total pairs of shoes I am bringing: 8

Number of pink shoes with less than a 3-inch heel: 0

Total pairs of shoes that are not high-heels: 1

Number of purses: 4

Number of pink purses: 1

The good news is that this is the first time I've tried on my summer clothes from last year, including my bathing suits, and to my surprise, everything pretty much fit.  I can tell I am a little bigger than this time last year, but I really thought I might have a hard time picking out clothes to bring.  But I was very pleasantly surprised.  As an added bonus, I get to bring three new dresses that I have never worn: 2 are ones CK gave me that fit me so well and the other I bought in New Orleans on my last trip.  I don't know if we're going anywhere that I can wear them, but a girl's gotta be prepared, right?

Vegas is the only place where I feel like I have to bring a ton of clothes.  (I am usually a stellar packer.)  You never know what you'll be doing and the weather during the day when the sun is out is so vastly different from the weather at night.  I hope I've got my bases covered.

New Songs to Download

I haven't had time to sit and pore through all the music sites this week like I have been doing.  Luckily, I have a huge backlog of free stuff that I am listening to and enjoying.  I considered making a list of party music since I'm heading off to Vegas, but there were just so many songs that I wanted to include that were more mellow, so the playlist turned out to be a lot more mellow than party time.  I hope you enjoy.  If you like (or hate) any of these songs, I would love to hear about it!

• "Primitive" , Ambulance Ltd.
• "Wonderwall", Ryan Adams (a soft, lovely version heard on "The O.C")
• "On Peak Hill", Stars (similar to Her Space Holiday, search for "Stars")
• "Spanish Teeth" , Robbers on High Street (search for Robbers on High Street)
• "Surprise!", +/- (Plus/Minus)

Short-Timer

Even after I had a relaxing weekend at home catching up on my art projects and DeLush, I still started out my week stressed out.  I've got a deadline of Friday on my current assignment at work, the day I am supposed to leave for Vegas.  It's not like the world will crash down if I don't get everything done by then, but since I'm becoming permanent, I want everything to look good, work right, and be on time...for a while at least.  I've been putting in some extra hours while I still work on an hourly wage to make up for missing Monday and Tuesday (and Friday afternoon for that matter).

Maybe it's the impending vacation or maybe it's just that I'm incredibly worn out, but I don't feel like doing much of anything, at home or at work.  It's all I can do to carry my dishes from the coffeetable to the dishwasher.  Actually, it's all that I can do to make myself something to eat, even if it only takes 5 minutes.  I haven't eaten anything that really qualifies as dinner in days.  Maybe that's why I have no energy...hmm.

The other reason I'm not so into eating is that I was all gung-ho last week to lose a pound or two or five before the big trip to Vegas, so the only things I really have to eat around here are spinach salad, asparagus, bell peppers, chicken (that I would actually have to prepare, so that may never happen) and my beloved partially baked french rolls.   Have I lost any weight on this weirdo diet?  Of course not.  All it makes me do is eat all the little snicker bars in the candy dish at work.  I'm sure I'm destroying my metabolism with every passing day.  I know how to eat healthy.  I'm even a pretty good cook.  I'm just extraordinarily lazy this week.

Tomorrow: new downloads

Get It While It's Hot

I am not a huge, huge fan of Ryan Adams, although I do love a few of his songs.  One of my good friends turned me on to "Hey There Mrs. Lovely" recorded at Nashville's Exit/In a few years ago, and that remains one of my favorite songs that he's ever done, and I always wished I had the album version of it.  But there wasn't one.

Apparently, he recorded that song before his first album in a session called "The Destroyer Sessions", which was never released.  But, thanks to Salon pointing me in the right direction and the awesome wonder of the Internet, here is the link to the unreleased tracks from that session: http://www.tobeyoung.org/destroyer.php.

I will warn you that these songs are not as polished as his published albums and this version of "Hey There Mrs. Lovely" is not as good as the live version.  This is not my typical taste in music...it's really folksy and that's just generally not my style.  But if you're like me and are compelled to download albums when you have the opportunity, you should go get this before someone figures out that it is up, like they did the Fiona album.

My Art Teacher Is Famous

My art teacher let it slip that at his last exhibition some of his works were well...not so well received.  He is an expert at printmaking, and a lot of his latest works deal with religion, specifically Catholicism.  The main work in his "Heartlands" exhibit that really got everyone's blood boiling was a representation of the Virgin Mary on a collage of prostitutes' business cards, which was supposed to represent a facet of Catholic guilt.

As you can imagine in the current political environment, he has generated a lot of criticism (like this or this or this and believe me I could probably find a lot more).  Now, I do not claim to "understand" his works of art, but at the same time, I'm kind of excited about having a teacher that has generated such a stir.  All publicity is good publicity, right?  My art teacher is famous.

Yesterday Was a Crappy Day All Around

Yesterday, after it took me AN HOUR AND A HALF to take my drug test and I already wanted to go back to bed so that I could just start the day over, I had major issues with my computer at work.

I clicked on a link from Google while I was on the phone.  That may have impaired my reflexes, but I am not entirely sure that I would have been able to prevent it even if I had shut down my computer immediately. 

Basically, my computer got taken over by a spyware/virus/spawn of satan which a) replaced my bookmarks with such winners as "Free Porn for 7 Days", b) produced pop up ads for porn approximately every 30 seconds, c) placed pseudo-applications in my systray that looked like Norton Anti-virus warning me of spyware activity on my computer, and d) put hyperlinks on every site I went to that linked to infested web sites.  There was probably more but I didn't spend a lot of time testing it out. 

When I couldn't make it go away after about 20 minutes, I made the executive decision to call security, because the last thing I wanted to do was get fired from the position I haven't formally started yet because I was looking at porn.  They came upstairs and attempted to remove the evil spawn of the devil from my computer with no luck.  So today, they began reformatting my hard drive.  I didn't lose what I was working on, but as I am a computer programmer, this had an impact on my productivity.

Although it was somewhat amusing to be ridiculed for being both the only girl on the team as well as the team's only certified porn hound.

Drug Test

I am in the waiting room waiting to take my drug test. Actually, I
already tried to have it, I went through the whole paper signing and the
whole process and I sat there I and I just couldn't go. This has never
happened to me before - I have always been able to just go on demand.
But not today.

So they gave me my maximum 8 oz of water and now I'm sitting out in the
waiting room trying to think thoughts of running water.

It's not like I didn't drink a cup of coffee before I came here. I hope
this doesn't go on my permanent record.

The Music Obsession Continues

I posted new music reviews finally!  They're in the right sidebar.  I've been buying a lot of music lately, but I had no idea it was really that much.  And there's more that I still need to post reviews for.

I want to tell you about some of the other bands that I am currently in love with.  I don't have their albums yet, but I've downloaded one or more free tracks (legally) from the web, and I keep hearing them on satellite radio, and I wanted to pass on some neat tracks.  Just click on the band same and you'll be redirected to the site where you can download the track I've listed. If you like what you hear, let me know and I will keep posting new bands with free downloads.

• The Dears, "Lost in the Plot"
• Dios, "All Is Said + Done" and "You Make Me Feel"
• Her Space Holiday, "Tech Romance"
• Iron + Wine, "Woman King"
• Pinback, "Fortress"
• Pitty Sing, "We're On Drugs" and "Bleeding Hearts" (just search for Pitty Sing in the search field provided)

One more thing:  if you're a Fiona Apple fan and you've been waiting patiently for her new album...it's never going to get released, but it did get leaked to the Internet here, while it lasts.  Sadly, it's not as good as her previous albums.

Foiled Again

I was planning to go to Cincinnati to see CK this weekend, and I've been really psyched about it for a while.  I have even been working some extra hours so that I could leave early on Friday and get started on the drive.  I haven't seen him since the first weekend in February, because, if you'll remember, the last time I was supposed to see him there was a big snowstorm for one, and my mom decided to visit me for another.   Well, he wrote me today with the bad news: because of family obligations, he had to cancel our weekend.  We're both really bummed.

Tomorrow I have to go take my drug test for my new (old) job.  I still haven't talked to my current team lead about what will happen when I become a permanent employee.  In all likelihood, I will be taken off of his team pretty quickly and moved to another assignment in our group, most likely as another team lead.   It's really going to impact him because I was supposed to be leading up the design on the next big thing, which is due in June.   My new manager wants to talk to him first, but it's really making me feel bad, so I think I may broach the subject with him tomorrow so that he's prepared.   Since I am potentially leaving him in the lurch, I've been trying to do a really good job on my current assignment.

Now that my weekend plans have been cancelled, I'll probably work some extra hours in preparation for my next trip to Vegas in two weeks with L.  If it's really going to be 80 this weekend like they're saying, I may also work on my tan a little so that I don't look like a ghost in my party clothes. 

You know, I really need to chill.  Who starts making their weekend to-do list on Tuesday?

Music Overload

In case you were wondering, I decided to take the job.  They didn't go for my counter-offer exactly, but it was close enough and I am happy to have that decision behind me.

Tonight I celebrated by...staying at home.  I talked to CK for a while.(He's got the flu, poor thing.)  My main activity for the evening was downloading music.  Ever since I got the satellite radio, I've been listening to new music non-stop and totally loving it.  I took the list of all the songs I liked home with me for the weekend so that I could buy whatever tracks were available on the Internet.

I started out looking at the free sites, and I was really amazed at the amount of songs I was able to download at good quality.  There's a few really great sites that I found through Salon.com's Audiofile column:

• Better Propaganda
• InSound
• and, my absolute favorite, 3hive

They don't have much, if anything, that they play on mainstream radio, but they have a ton of the tracks they are currently playing on XM's college radio channel.  I just made 2 CDs with 20 songs apiece of the best of the songs I downloaded tonight.

I go through phases with music where I discover a new channel of music and I get really obsessed with everything that's out there and buy a ton of new CDs, which are followed by (usually longer) periods of time where I listen to my own MP3s or CDs and am not exposed to new music at all.  The first phase I ever went through was in the early 90s, when I discovered "120 Minutes" on MTV.   I spent all my babysitting money on CDs, and I babysat A LOT.  I remember watching videos from Pearl Jam and Nirvana on there well before anyone called it "grunge", but I also got into a lot of bands that are still pretty obscure.

The second phase I went through was when I had been working for a little while and discovered that I could stream Internet radio to my PC and listen to channels that really targeted my taste.  I bought a ton of CDs then, too.  I was even buying out of print CDs and CDs directly from the artist.  Ah, those were the days when you could actually stream music at work without getting in trouble with IT.

I went through a music phase when I discovered LaunchCast, but that was pretty short-lived, although, as usual, it did result in the purchase of several CDs. 

I am definitely heading into a big music phase right now because I am exposed to so much more stuff on XM than I was with regular radio.  The first day I got it I was amazed at how much I didn't know.  I'm starting to get a handle on it now, although I still hear a band every day that I have never heard before.  And I am loving it.

So one of these days when I don't start my post after midnight, I'm really going to put up some new music reviews.