Kaua'i 2013

Adam and I went to Kaua'i at the end of June/beginning of July this year. It was good. We've been to Maui together before and look forward to visiting other islands in the future.

Where as our time in Maui was spent mostly in the water, we spent a lot of time hiking on this trip. I was delighted to see these huge bamboo groves at one of our trails. The cliffs were amazing, be they overlooking other cliffs or the ocean. Our room (acquired here through VRBO) was lovely and spacious with a view looking directly out onto the ocean. It was a little stuffy at night, having no A/C unit, but I didn't mind. The unit was super cheap- yet not gheto- and centrally located. I highly recommend staying there if you visit the island.

Normally I say "if you want to know more, ask us in person!" but for some reason I seem to continuously fail to talk about it in depth, even when folks ask. It was a nice get away, it was green, I recommend it. I think I liked Maui a bit more but I enjoy snorkling & safe swimming over any degree of surf. Adam however loves boogie boarding (or whatever it's called) and was much happier with Kaua'i's water offerings. There were some low points- seeing a young girl's knee get fucked up by the surf, the death march of death, and getting beat up once pretty bad by some surf- but overall it was great and I maintain I prefer my Hawaii vacations over any international ones we've done so far.

There was a Natural History Museum. I loves me some Natural History Museums! It was super old and crusty, but I liked it and found it informative. It's also in a super great location, in Kokee National Park.

In closing, we took well over 300 photos on the trip. Of those, we uploaded over 80 into a general Flickr gallery. Not many people want to actually dig through that so we then whittled it down to our top 18 picks. Also, the NHM has warranted it's only tiny gallery/view on Flickr.

G.I. Joe

Dr. Sketchy's is one of the best things in my life these days. Everyone is nice, the music is good, and I always am happy. At some point I'll feel guilty about placing in the contest so frequently... but for now my ego needs it.

The sheer number of folks on the stage was overwhelming and fantastic. The poses were so much fun, none of my sketches did them justice.

There was an incredibly detailed Transformer on stage with them (with a good natured girl inside) but was not for me. I don't know how to.... "summarize" mechanical things (yet!) and so any doodle would have taken > 20 min... As it was, the military clothing will all their do-dads and patterns and folds was killing me. I'm trained on bustles, lace, ruffles, and lady curves. This was definitely outside my sketch comfort zone and I loved it. I am certain I will try to catch these guys (the Cobra 1st Legion) one of their other events for further sketching attempts.

I placed second with my Recondo G.I. Joe sketch (which in no way followed the contest theme- shame on me!) whose outfit was totally what I wished I had though of for Jaya.

Chillen'

Just spending a nice and mellow evening at home with the boyfriend. We met over a game of Catan and it's still quite nice to just play some Race for the Galaxy together even if our overall boardgame playing has dramatically declined in recent years.

Denver Hackathon went well. Made something that I find useful-- haven't uploaded it yet anywhere. Will do so... "soon". Just ordered some more parts/accessories for my Arduino and plan on picking that project back up again... "soon".

Also I have a new quilt in the works. Most of the fabric cut, time to start sewing.

Not-Work at Work

Work, the location, should be somewhere you enjoy going. I find working at home to be too distracting (or rather, distraction to be too accessible) but a dull workspace makes me depressed. You can't control your coworkers (for good or bad) but as long as you don't work for crazy dictators *coughcoughAcuituscoughcough* you can make your space into what you need it. And I need it to be "interesting".

One of my coworkers was super awesome and ordered a box of 36 mixed succulents from Amazon. He then distributed one to each member of the team and then other random awesome devs around the office. This made me happy. My friend Suko was awesome and used her Google-fu to sleuth out that the plant I got was a gasteria disticha.

It took me some time, but I eventually pulled together a teacup monster to house my new little green companion. I've named it Gretel after a book character I'm currently enjoying. Turns out Dremeling through cups is a bitch. Had to break it up over the course of several nights, so horrible was the sound and so tedious the grind/cooldown cycle. The legs didn't really turn out the way I wanted-- initially had hoped for a more realistic clay/resin type of leg... but I had to settle since I'm actually quite bad at sculpture. I'm not that dissatisfied with how these turned out. Adam pointed out they were rather elephant like, which makes me smile. I still have 2 more teacups so I might take another stab at it...eventually. Once my ears stop bleeding- ugh.

Another thing I do at work some times that makes me happy is bake. I think I've mentioned we have a fantastic oven there. Nice little well-stocked kitchen as well. The Friday before my vacation (you know, the day when it's near impossible to focus on work) I baked some bread at work that I made from scratch. In the office. Working somewhere that allows for such sillyness makes me extremely happy. I didn't waste *too* much time doing it and those who sampled the results seemed very pleased. It was one of the best loafs I've made in a long time.

I chopped up some strawberries and mixed them in with a normal batch of bread... which resulted in ridiculously wet dough. It was quite difficult to work with, I had to keep adding flour, and took over half an hour to work into a reasonable state. After its first rise (which went perfectly) I spread it out, laid down more slices of strawberries, honey, and M&Ms, then rolled it up. Pushed it into a bread tin, waited for the second rise (also nice), and then into the oven. So good. SO GOOD.

Coding with the aroma of baked goods filling the office is a good way to spend an afternoon.

Yay

Time Flies

Wow. It's already mid-July. Crazy. A lot of stuff has happened in the last month (though none of it all that important)

There was a hack-a-thon at work early early June and I got *really* into my project. Picked up my first Arduino and made a Next & Start/Stop external button for Rdio using the Rdio JS API and Chrome's USB API for apps. I had an intense weekend of non-stop coding and yet didn't quite finish the project (input works, but I haven't gotten output yet). I mean to finish it yet! Soon...

Adam's mother visited and we went to see The Tales of Hoffmann (an opera) which was quite fantastic. The Doll Song has always been one of my favorite pieces. Then Andreas visited and then we went way for a much needed vacation. Obnoxious vacation post to follow soon once we get our photos in sorted out.

Tonight was another fantastic Dr. Sketchy's. The dedicated Mercy Beaucoup posed as Beatrix Kiddo from Kill Bill. I appreciated Mercy's great outfits and ambitions/creative poses. I've sketched her before (as Wonder Woman) but the pictures were lost on my way home! Luckily I managed to hold onto them this time. I'm thankful that I won tonight's context with the below image. The prize was this super awesome book The Art of Sketch Theatre Volume 1 which I look forward to reading after this post is done.

Speaking of reading, I've been doing a lot of that lately as well. Was horribly let down by Robin Hobb's Rain Wild Chronicles which I dropped mid-series. Am struggling not to be entirely consumed by the thrilling magic realism World War II series by Ian Tregillis. I accidentally staid up till 3am finishing the second book (on a work night no less! shame on me!) and I'm worried the third book will lead me to a similar fate. Bitter Seeds (Milkweed series) is the first book and I'd probably recommend it to most folks.

In less happy news I installed Minecraft for the first time this weekend and lost several hours of my life. I regret it and wont be doing so again. Sigh. Having re-read World War Z and watched the movie (and surprisingly not hated it) I've a strong hankering to play some Left For Dead again, which I will not regret. But there are better things to be doing with my time. Like sketching. Quilting. Finishing my hack day project. Writing letters. Cleaning.

Pacific Rim was great. Not perfect, but what it delivered it delivered well. You should go see it. Now.

Fun with work

I finally finished a new little monster. His mouth is a binder clip, one of those large ones, and he looks quite dashing on my desk. He holds several of my business cards for me for easy access. I have business cards now because I went to FluentConf! Network network network!

I enjoyed the conference and the people I met there. Not sure if it quite lines up with where I am right now, technical skill wise... But I worry that a more advanced conference might leave me in the dust. Makes me miss college a little.

Enjoyed hearing about things that are coming down the road (ECMAScript 6, Data Parallelism) and some things that are here right now (Content Security Policy, some programming concepts). Esprima is magic. Paul Irish is a stupidly good speaker. There were lots of women attending and presenting.

Dr. Sketchy's this week was fun but I was totally not in the right mental space for it. Not a single scan-worthy sketch. I was rocken' my doodles of the speakers at the conference though. I only failed to sketch two of the sessions I attended. You can see the full set here

Tomorrow is my second Hack Day at work and I'm excited. Am not certain which little project I'm going to do, perhaps several. There's a nice oven at work with which I've baked bread and cookies so far. Someone else used the stovetop to make delicious... somethings. The sense of community cooking fosters is extremely pleasant. I'm hoping to bring more dough in tomorrow.

Tomorrow is also Friday Tie-Day.

Dream night of May 23rd

A very vivid dream last night. There were multiple stages.

I was flying a plane. A little biplane. I believe other people were with me, flying their own planes. I kept going up too quickly and stalled out my plane a number of times.

A some point my father went missing.

It was nighttime. While I was in my plane, or perhaps atop the roof of my parents house, I looked out and in the distance I saw destruction. There was a large... tripod like monster/robot. Very tall. Much taller then in my sketch. Very War of the Worlds. It was sweeping the land in the distance, burning everything.

I was with my youngest sister. We were going through a city, gathering supplies. The tripods were coming and we needed to hide. We came across a coworker of mine who has a leg brace and I was concerned he wouldn't be able to escape in time. As we were parting ways Lindsey fell down an embankment and hurt her leg and I knew we weren't going to be able to get back home in time.

I went and ran around, looking for somewhere safe to go. Somewhere below ground. Where I was searching was this open boardwalk space with lots of outdoor restaurants and hedges. I went down a narrow brick staircase and found a tiny room and... an astronomer? living there. He said we could stay the night (which is when I knew the tripods would reach us). We piled down into the tiny space.

Before night fell I realized the world would be burned to ashes when the tripods passed-- or at least our immediate area. We would need supplies if we were to last more then another day. I ran up above ground and began to gather greens. There were lots of pea pods and vines which I started tearing down can piling in my arms. In the back of my mind, I knew that this would not be enough to survive. I uprooted some plans with the thought of replanting them the next day in the ashes but... I knew that they would be unlikely to live.

I returned, arms full of greens. Eventually the tripods came, which we could tell by the immense heat and great shaking and sounds. They had passed and things quieted. A worry rose within me- how deep did the burn go? Had our stairwell been filled in? Were we trapped by ash? If so, we could probably dig ourselves out and would eventually die if we didn't.

The dream ended with me convincing everyone in the bunker to go back to sleep, that we would investigate in the morning. I didn't say it, but I thought that if we were blocked in by ash we probably would be better off dead, dying peacefully in our sleep, then struggling to survive in the remaining baren world.

Thoughts:

• Again I start a dream flying, but doing so poorly
• Again my father goes missing
• Again witnessing a destructive & horrible thing behind my parent's home
• Again in the company of my family
• The bleakness towards the end is... uncharacteristic of me. I'm a fan of post-apocalyptic stories, but mostly to embrase the spirit of survival and hope from starting anew. This had a feeling of The Road, which I found horribly depressing.
• I do not wish for more dreams like this. Would much rather get back to my classic dream themes- rescuing children, hiding, searching, etc. Stressful, but not nearly so... devastating.