The Middleman

There's a new show on ABC Family entitled The Middleman which is bloody brilliant! It makes fun of every scifi and sitcom out there in a way that's seriously not expected of ABC let alone ABC Family.

I watch the ironic, the cheesey and the embarassing when it comes to TV. There are a few TV shows which I recommend including Heroes, Weeds & Chuck, however, the one that has gone unmentioned from pop culture is The Middleman which America's pop culture has left un-named.

I'm amazed by the ability to make me rewind because I missed a single line of dialogue. There are many movies and tv shows out there that make me happy (ie August Rush which made me smile like a silly woman reading LOLCats) and even a few other ABC Family shows that should be deemed craptastic that I still deem worth of a slot in my TiVo recording, however this one is actually good. No seriously, I may giggle madly at post on icanhascheezburber.com but this is better because it seriously makes fun of both hour long soap operas, scifi geeky comedies and punaliciousness all at once.

It subtitles locations in a way that would normally be deemed cheesy and trying too hard, but in context makes so much sense. The puns are punalicious (quoting from the Seattle-ite on Project Runway - yes I'm admitting to my bad tv watching habits); the pop culture references are sublime; and the jokes don't try to hide themselves behind intelligence. They're just funny - they don't disguise the humanity, hillarity or geekiness behinde it. I guess the main thing going for this show is the unexpected embrace for geek-ity along with reasonably good puns and the fact that who the hell watches ABC Family???

I actually recommend it... SERIOUSLY!

my version of skewed world perception

Lately I've been eye-ing a wintertime trip to Australia. The entire thing sounds perfect for me the way I've laid it out - especially given all my constraints.

I haven't booked yet for a myriad of reasons... yet there's one that stands out 'cause it makes me laugh and be aghast at myself (because I like thinking about myself in the third person apparently).

Australia seems too tame and mundane to me. WTF!!! Is this a trophy to be collected? It meets all my criteria for my vacation... but tame and mundane? This is what happens when I become the spoiled well traveled girl who's got a long list and thinks that Australia appears superficially the most boring of them all. All the rest of the reasons for my hesitation are more "normal" (fear, cost, trying to pick the right dates), but thinking it's so much more average than Thailand or the Galapagos or Morocco... I guess it will seem more normal being an English speaking country so there won't be the basic communication barrier, but I have a feeling bits of it will be completely different.

I make myself laugh with the thoughts of "oh how normal" reminding myself that it only seems normal due to my previous travel destinations. And then I remind myself this is the last continent I'll probably ever go to (Antarctica? I wouldn't say no to an all expenses paid by someone else trip there, but it's at the bottom of my list otherwise) And they have dang cute koalas (hopefully not nearly as nasty as monkeys who hide behind their cute faces).

travel bug caught

I have the travel bug again and my list of places to visit is longer than ever... let's see what my brain comes up with on this midnight ramble so I can potentially plan myself a wee lil' vacation since I've accrued nearly 8 days...

Places near and far:

• Galapagos Islands
• Croatia - coasts and hiking
  
• Turkey - Istanbul and around the country
• Tokyo
• Toronto
• Austin, TX
• Hawaii - don't care where - just want a beach break
  
• Germany - the entire country tour
• Carribbean Island - same as Hawaii plus a bit of wondering for some other personal history reasons
• Singapore
• Argentina - whereever Kim tells me to go
• Portland, OR - can you believe I have never been? sacrilege!
• Australia - not sure where in that big beautiful country - but that wouldn't stop me
• New Zealand
• Portugal

I don't have any upcoming travel plans other than those related to work.. Hrm.. Must find travel buddy.

rather than coding, I'm thinking about pictures and my own history

In egocentric attempts to recover memories of times gone by, I started posting my Semester at Sea pics again to my Flickr account.  I realized that all the photos I recovered via teh intrawebz back in Sept 2006 after the robbery didn't get organized correctly and I was missing a lot of pics and data about my Semester at Sea experience.  (I'm also missing craploads of Dartmouth day pics and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they're backed up somewhere out there on CD in my one unpacked room.)

So I started reorganizing my MacBook at home to try to get a handle on my digital library of photos.  And while doing that I'll be doing a country-by-country (re)upload of photos from Semester at Sea.  I took down the old subset of photos so that I won't have dupes and this time I'm labeling as I go.

The amazing thing about this is that even just seeing what's captured in a photo of a moment sometime between September and December of 2000 brings me back to that place.  I can remember where I was, what the food tasted like, how sunburnt or homesick I was, and all sorts of other trivial details.  I'm able to recover data from my brain I didn't know I remembered like what monuments were called, when I saw them, and who that one random person I met for one hour of my life was. 

I'm having my own egocentric "oooo wow that was fun!" set of photo flashbacks.  And yeah, it's making the travel bug rear it's ugly head.  Galapagos Islands seem of great interest to me at the moment as does traveling in Turkey - talk about diverse.

But thankfully I'm on my work laptop and no where near the digital library of memories, so it's time to go back to work so that Sunday when I'm recovering from a day of fun-in-the-sun and housewarming party I can lazily label and post more photos.

Stuff Yvette Likes

Someone else posted in their blog items from the Stuff White People Like blog. I thought it was ingenious and went through the blog again to find all the stuff that applies to me! So here's the list in order from most applicable to least applicable to me from my point of view... The top 10-12 are pretty close - depending on the situation or whatnot. 

1. Traveling (leaving tomorrow)
2. Gentrification (look at my new house)
3. Study Abroad (Semester at Sea)
4. Dogs (puppy!)
5. Outdoor Performance Clothing (I think between K2 and North Face I should own stock)
6. Recycling (yup, I'm a recycler)
7. T-shirts (woe is my closet)
8. Indie Music (anytime)
9. Apple Products (iPod, iPod Shuffle, MBP, MB, iPhone, iMac, iBook...)
10. Bad Memories of High School (therapy please)
11. Netflix (subscriber)
12. Wine (drinking it now - mighty fine)
13. Microbreweries (I live in the pacific northwest - of course)
14. Bottles of Water (goes with the recycling - it's expected)
15. Standing Still at Concerts
16. Living by the Water
17. Irony
18. Farmers Markets (ironic since I don't go that often)
19. Breakfast Places (ironic since I don't even eat eggs in egg forms)
20. Grocery Co-ops
21. Difficult Breakups (hehe!)
22. Modern Furniture (look at my recent credit card bill - then you'll understand)
23. Idea of Soccer
24. Plays
25. Expensive Sandwiches
26. 80s Night
27. Apologies
28. Kitchen Gadgets
29. Arts Degrees
30. Having Gay Friends (but I do!)
    
31. Bicycles
32. Making You Feel Bad About Not Going Outside (I haven't been outside enough today... I even make myself feel bad!)
33. Japan
34. Diversity
35. Organic Foods
36. Being an Expert on Your! Culture

If you haven't read the blog - it's bloody brilliant!  Go read it!  And if you have then you'll know I'm pretty low on the scale with only choosing 36 out of the current 96 possibilities.

toe throbbing to the sound of a tennis ball smacking grass

I was driving home tonight from work around 10:30pm with KEXP blaring on my radio and my possibly broken toes throbbing to the beat of a song I'd never heard before.

I kept thinking about my comment this weekend to a friend about how I'm stubbornly independent... and suddenly out of nowhere there was a flashback. I might have been stubbornly independent putting up a 2 person required for assembly and preservation of one's toes book case this weekend, but dang, I've always done things that are a bit on the ludicrous side of proving my independence... like going to Wimbledon.

I couldn't remember if I'd ever blogged about my Wimbledon experience during the summer of 2006. Apparently I had. Rereading the post I was amazed at how I didn't mention all the points during the night where I freaked out and nearly gave up... at the airport in London, in the tube station, missing the night bus, on the night bus, getting off the night bus at the wrong stop, walking in circles in a dark neighborhood with a scary drunk on the corner... those were all times I wanted to stop and go find a hotel where I could lock my door and hide and give up and cry myself silly with patheticness. Instead I called my mother once or twice for fortification - I figured if she was freaked out for me I could be less freaked out for myself - it didn't quite work, but it was a valiant effort eh? Poor poor mom!! I think I gave her a few heart attacks during my Wimbledon adventure.

I never really knew why I didn't give up - and I still can't fathom what kept me going. I think not having a backup plan was part of it; wanting to get to the dang tennis match since I'd so carefully read up on how the entire thing worked was another; knowing I might see Agassi live drove me on for a bit there too. But part of it was just wanting to do it - knowing that I could do it if I just kept going - even if the going felt like scary trudging - and that was that end of story.

In the end that's the night I slept on a sidewalk for a handful of hours before getting ridiculously sun burnt. I think of the entire escapade and laugh and wish I could do it again. So possibly broken toes or not, I guess I am stubbornly independent - and dang it's fun to feel your toe throb to the radio station as you head to your new home late at night knowing that persistence really is a virtue..... sometimes!

Scrambled Brain

Disclaimer: Since I have a bunch of things I'd like to write about I'm going to start with a bulleted list of all these scrambly thoughts and see where it takes me.

• I really like python. I like python a lot more than perl. And django just seals the deal after learning mason since it's so much nicer. Although I think I'm biased since the perl/mason I was doing was working off of a huge existing codebase of other people's code and most of the python/django I'm doing is brand spankin' new. But I'm going to stick to liking python regardless of my possible biases.
• For the past year I haven't spent hours on end coding until today - I forgot how much it futzes with my brain and makes me feel all scatterbrained to finish up a really good productive day where everything I did was code. Now my job is much more random and although I get to code a lot it's not constant so I jump around more and I think that leaves me feeling less scattered at the end of the day since I was scattered during the day. I've always thought too fast - but now I realize it comes out differently when I'm coding or not.
• The plasma tv I ordered didn't fit in my brand new house's brand new living room on the brand new mantle because the brand new beautiful ceiling was in the way since the dang new fireplace is way too tall. I sent it back with the delivery guys and have a slightly smaller HD LCD tv coming Wednesday.
• I have fewer boxes and I'm officially out of my apartment. This is all due to my mother's good influence.
• I have a shopping list 12 miles long and I'm really really good at spending money. Thank goodness I'm employed. If anyone asks me if I'm ever going to get thing B or K or Z though again I'm going to scream. I may have a job but that doesn't mean I have unlimited resources and I don't want to rush the enjoyment of the hunt for the "perfect" item. I may dislike shopping sometimes but I love love love researching and browsing so I'm going to enjoy it.
• I'm starting crazy travel again. This all comes after making sure my hours are all packed - of course this means I need to go to CA, NV, NY, and who knows where else in the next month - let alone more than the next month. I already know I'll also be in CO, MT and OR as well this year sometime. Oh, thank you alaskaair for having my frequent flier miles. With you my dream of using miles to fly to Hawaii might come true. Now who wants to go to Hawaii? Oh, but before that I need to make my NV/NY trip reservations... I should do that now.
• I told you this list would be a brain scramble - you're even getting stream of conciousness.
• Goodnight.

oh there's not that much all nighter...

Today I took the day off to pack and get some of the more annoying to pack things over to the house (so I wouldn't have to pack them well enough for movers). I was done with my first run to the house by 12:30 today and pretty much cleared out the downstairs other than the dishes in the dishwasher, furniture & books. I don't have much left right?

Ok, so I procrastinate.... and procrastinate.... and suddenly it's almost 8pm and guess what - I went upstairs and holy crap I have a lot of $#!* in my closet! How did it all fit in there and how the heck am I going to get it all to the house and holy crap I'm freaking out.

So what do I do? Well of course I need to write this blog post about it rather than tackling it. And then I'll make dinner and watch some TV. And maybe after that I'll go back to packing packing packing...

I wish I could just leave my car in the alley and slowly load it as I find stuff but instead I have to get everything that will fit in the car packed up then load the car. But it would get towed if I did that which would not be the way to end my night.

While most people are out relaxing on their Friday nights, I'll be making a trip or two over to my new house with crap in my car swearing at my tendency to procrastinate. So raise a glass to me to wish me luck getting an hour or so of sleep tonight and getting past my ability to procrastinate with the best of 'em!

well huh

Today is the Hallmark holiday of Valentine's Day (Happy Valentine's Day all!) and I wasn't even the bitter single girl. I didn't have the energy since I somehow managed to let a flu I had last week turn into pneumonia this week (and I thought it'd just become a sinus infection). It's not horrid - just really ridiculously annoying and tiring and painful - ok, so maybe it is horrid. But y'know, I wasn't bitter a la single-dom since I'm embracing it - I was just a cesspool of germs. And to add to that, someone bought me dinner (including dessert) and gave me chocolate for Valentine's Day. I kid you not. I got my groceries from Amazon Fresh this morning, and they'd thrown in a free bag of chocolate. Then when I finally got hungry after not eating all day (not even my chocolate) I called for a pizza and when it arrived it was free and they'd brought me gelato too.... huh. Happy Valentine's Day to me. Now do cupid's arrows clear up my lungs so that I can talk without coughing? If I don't move, laugh or talk I can go quite a while without coughing....... but! Hehe.....

Puppies, Quilts & Houses

On March 7, 2008 I will be a homeowner if everything goes according to plan.

Today I sat in the home-office of my fantastic real estate agents and initialed and signed so much paperwork my signature started to look funny to me. I was doing this with the cutest puppy begging for some loving with his head in my lap. An hour later my agent called to tell me the offer's been accepted with only one legalese change (doesn't effect me much at all - costs me a whole $20 - so yeah, I'm ok with that).

Today my mom started hand cutting out pieces to the quilt she's making me with her friends. They can't follow any nice pattern pieces to do it and make it easy either. They have to measure and cut every single awkward triangle in this quilt and it'll be gorgeous. It may take her 2 years since it is a queen size quilt of only odd dimensioned triangles, but it'll be heaven in purples and greys.

Today I spent a lot of money.

I want a puppy to love everytime I sign away my life. I want a puppy period!

OMGP0N13S!!11!!!1!!!!!1!