i’m thinking of redesigning my wordpress theme and the top idea would rely on some smart color theme generation.

thinking about this made me think of stuff people have done with the flickr api and color, which reminded me of this awesome toy:

retrievr: http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/

it lets you paint a picture and then looks for images on flickr with similar color distributions.

i don’t think i have linked to it before, and it brings me great joy, so i pass it along.

hopefully if i decide to upgrade my theme, you’ll notice, though the amount of time it takes to notice such things is my key lamentation with feed readers.

sigh.

naptime.

i was watching an eckhart tolle lecture on dvd about the flowering of human consciousness, wherein he says at one point that the limitation of our consciousness begins with our name, which conditions us to think of ourselves as both isolated from the rest of the world and defined by language. later on he jokes that we can still keep our name, though, even after we figure out that the self as we normally conceive of it is a delusion and language and thoughts are only a part of our consciousness. “when someone asks you your name,” he says, “you don’t have to say ‘i am beyond names and labels’… which is basically saying ‘i am more important than you’ and not answering the question.”

maybe it was just that all the jokes before that had been subtle faces and eyebrow raises and so the humorometer for the lecture as a whole had a pretty low baseline, but ‘i am beyond names and labels’ in his calm german accent was freaking hilarious and i laughed for like a minute and a half.

it was also a very good point.

then just now i was reading a lifehacker post that says:

The EPA has a nifty tool to help us all figure out just how much of an impact our homes are having on the environment with the (somewhat unfortunately named) Personal Emissions Calculator.

i read that parenthetical twice before it sunk in and then i just couldn’t contain myself.

i had just been thinking that i hadn’t blogged in a few days, so it seemed fitting to share some of the diversity of my day with you.

i also started season 3 of 24, wrote some email, bought some groceries, ate some indian takeout, took a shower, did some of my cross stitch, tasted the rogue chipotle ale, and watched everything is illuminated.

meanwhile, in outer portland, it rained off and on and was generally cool.

man, taxes are different than when i was a kid
;)

(that’s a joke because i’m not very old… hahaha… the irreverent nostalgia of the information age…)

anyway, after postponing my taxes for 75,000 years (all condensed into the past few months… it’s been exhausting) because i was worried about my overseas income, i finally realized that said overseas income translates to about 75 cents as far as the IRS is concerned, and the only real reason to dig up all the paperwork would be to talk to the UK about it because i could probably get money back from them. given that whole 75 cents bit (which is roughly 37.5 pence!), i’m thinkin the effort->reward ratio there is too small. or big. whatever.

NOT WORTH IT.

which means my taxes are easy after all!
and i only worked for 6 months!
woohoo!

after realizing this, it of course made me procrastinate further, but tonight, out of the small fear that something huge would crop up and i would enjoy at least a day to deal with it, and fueled by my first home-delivered pizza in portland (from this place. short review: “***! shows promise! but the white spinach pizza needs salt.”), i decided to tackle the task, and now thanks to turbotax online i’m done! less than an hour later! sweet!

i owe $125 because my withholding at IU was all messed up and i never got around to fixing it. it’s nothing close to what i owed last year, however, and i am better suited to deal with the hit, so especially after thinking that this year was going to be atrocious, it feels like a bargain.

indiana owes me $34 but i just told them to give it all to their birds and fishes fund because it seemed easier than telling them to send it to me.

my sense of accomplishment will now buoy me up as i spend the rest of the evening watching howl’s moving castle rather than writing some emails i’ve been postponing.

sorry mark and the f&l crowd!

since this year i will make more money than i ever have, save more money than i ever have, and give away more money than i ever have, it is reasonable to predict that this is the last year in the foreseeable future wherein my taxes will be simple.

i pause a moment to acknowledge this milestone before pushing aside the official paper pile beside me and skipping gleefully to refill my pepsi.

may all of you have happy tax stories as well this weekend. i know i always say this so you have no reason to believe me, but i really am going to write more soon. my mom wants to know what i do at work, and i bought a cactus!

now, however, i might have to get cable. so i can get showtime. so i can be a part of the first season of the this american life tv show.

isn’t that logo awesome?

those folks push my buttons on so many levels it’s kind of embarassing.

anyway, i think if i get cable i might get the dish network because it’s cheaper and would have the perk of allowing me to avoid comcast. to tempt me to order before my brain kicks in to think about it, they are throwing in something like a free mansion (complete with butler!) with new subscriptions, but i’m not tricked.

there’s also a 3 month trial of showtime, though, which would help with that whole killing birds with small numbers of stones thing.

any warnings or advice?

on a similar note, i’m probably going to buy a monitor that can double as a tv. so if you have thoughts on that matter, i would also be interested.

now back to your regularly scheduled blogging.

but i will report that we have made it safely to chicagoland, and the hotel here is already way ahead in the contest with our former pad in baltimore. i’m about ready to go enjoy the cushy bed.

but first, i point you to the newly added photographic summary of my last few days, which were spent in a veritable candyland of medical paraphernalia.

we also managed to hit the famous aquarium, so you can also check out our stylin’ tourist selves.

and a few pretty fishies.

and a chilled out amphibian or two.

unfortunately the aquarium killed my camera battery so i have no documentation of our lovely visit with my dear friend jen, her husband mike, and the -3 months and counting baby ?brandon?, who live (and gestate) in the greater baltimore area. all of them are doing well, and it was awesome to get a chance to see them, even if only for a couple of hours. next time i promise i will bring an extra battery.

i’m in the windy city until friday morning, and some of the points on this hotel’s scorecard are wireless internet and a room of my own, so some more thoughts on business travel soonlike.

it’s going to be an interesting nine months of work.

well, in case you didn’t figure it out, i made it back to the country, and back to indiana, and romped around bloomington for a bit before continuing my westward trek to oregon.

last night i landed in portland, where i am staying with tiffanie and jumping through the hoops required to begin a short-term contracting job with welch allyn, a midsize medical diagnostic equipment company. we are designing a heart monitor. which kind of rocks, huh? i’m pretty excited.

all the logistics are not pinned down yet, though, so i’ma not gonna curse em.

tomorrow i will find out a few major news items, and i’ll try to get back into the swing of more regular reportage.

til then, night night.
it’s early here, but late in indiana, and even later in amsterdam, so bed will come soonlike for the kynthiabird.

if you’re considering reading options for a flight and you’ve narrowed it down to “A History of God” and “Psychedelics Encyclopedia”, at least consider and prepare for the potential reactions of TSA employees if your bag is selected for a random search in security. it’s best not to be caught off guard with your reaction on that one.

for those taking notes, i’m in london for one more day, though i have relocated outside of the city proper and am staying with a friend from scotland in lovely welling, about 30 minutes southeast by train.

apart from seeing a movie tonight, we have toured some of the nearby shops, and i went into town yesterday to say hi to tania on her way to the airport to go to brazil. i also got the chance to visit the national portrait gallery, which was a lot of fun. tomorrow i’m going to see rock n’ roll, tom stoppard’s latest theatrical offering, and if i get up in time i’m going to go to greenwich to stand in two time zones at once.

after my final british culture spree, i get up early on thursday and head to dublin for 5 days, where i’m visiting an old friend from bloomington and her new irish husband, both of whom i am excited to see. next week i head to amsterdam for a bit, and then i will be back in indiana for a short time. i don’t know the actual date of my arrival yet, but when i do, i will let you know, and hopefully many of the folks reading this will have the chance to see me and eat avers or play sink the biz or guitar hero 2.

i will send a pigeon with the details once they are known.

lynn and i saw blood diamond this evening, and it was a sobering experience. first and quickest, there is the disconcerting feeling that comes from seeing leo play a character that is so firmly an adult, and therefore being forced to admit that he, and consequently I (since we are close enough in age that i can say things like it seems like just yesterday he was competing with kurt cameron for the charming badboy title on growing pains), are now firmly in the ranks of the grown as far as the cultural machine is concerned.

another reminder of this occurred the other day while i was washing dishes in the sushi bar where i worked for a couple of weeks to make some spending money before leaving the country, when the ‘safe but stylish’ pop mix on the intercom played nirvana. i know that the beatles and the stones were piped into department stores and arranged for cello and bassoon as soon as their principal audiences acquired enough purchasing power to merit such undertakings, but it still felt a little weird to be reminded that the cycle was continuing by learning that smells like teen spirit can now be lumped in with mack the knife for marketing purposes.

but i digress.

blood diamond, while still in the cloud of first impression, was quite impressive. a fair measure of predictability, sap, and emotional manipulation was surely to be had, but it was deftly executed as such, and the characters succeeded in convincing me that they knew that they were a bit cliched but still believed their story worth telling despite such hindrances, and that is an attitude that i can respect, particularly with a story as important as the abuses of the diamond trade. ed zwick, whom the poster can tell you was the director of glory and the last samurai, and my own early-nineties geekdom can tell you was also the director of legends of the fall and one of the key producers behind my so called life (in case there aren’t enough references to cultural icons of my youth in this post already).

jennifer connelly’s character was a bit too clearly there to fill the love interest gap, but she had some good moments of her own nonetheless, and i think that i am coming to like her.

djimon hounsou was very good, but i feel bad that i know him only from this and amistad, because important as the stories both are, i feel like his africanness is inseparable from my image of him as an actor, and i feel bad about that, though perhaps it’s only

and leo

acting grown up

no diamonds for vday
at the oscars?

well, i forgot my camera, so you’ll have to take my word for it, but i did manage to spend the whole day out of the house yesterday and quite a day it was!

i had an appointment with the sushi restaurant job, and i am taking it! starting next monday i’m working every day for the following two weeks, and hopefully i won’t have to spend it all on a place to stay for the second week, because i’m set to leave the room i’m in now on the 20th. all the other people in the flat are leaving as well (except the one who’s coming back to the room i’m in), so part of me is hoping that one of the rooms will stay empty for a week while they look for someone new and i can just crash there. but no guarantee of that, so we’ll have to see.

in the meantime, i’ve got to start getting my tourist on before i’m working all the time, and i started after my interview with some museums and a polish cafe. it was fun!

the polish place was one of the cheapest listings in my lonely planet for the neighborhood i was in (south kensington/knightsbridge), and borscht and potato pancakes sounded good to me, so i searched it out for lunch. it didn’t open until 12:30, so i killed time in the natural history museum. the moral of that experience was: natural history museums are kind of boring when you’re not a kid. Or at least when you’re not With a kid.

i mean, it’s not that i have No interest in the eating habits of the saber-toothed tiger, but it’s also rather easy for me to just let that knowledge slide. i decided that a phenomenon is in effect that is something like: i know enough about what makes a mammal a mammal and how cells work that i don’t feel compelled to run and push every blinking button that offers another pearl of wisdom on those matters, but i Don’t know enough about the details of such things to derive geeky entertainment from scrutinizing bone fragments and commenting on the authenticity of the dioramas. so as a result i just float along in this purgatory of both knowledge and ignorance, and can’t really be bothered to look too closely at the things passing by.

that’s a rather accurate description of the plague of everyday adulthood, actually, so maybe natural history museums just bring it into stark relief.

that really isn’t entirely fair, though, because i have quite a capacity for fascination in everyday things, and i also have a very fond memory of spending a day in the new york museum of natural history when i was a freshman at nyu. i had the rather opposite takeaway experience then, actually, because i was enlightened by the exhibit on the differences between egglaying and internal gestation, and i felt saddened that we didn’t spend much time as adults just wandering around and learning things about the world around us.

so it might just be that the london exhibits suck and haven’t really been updated since the 70’s.

a downside of that whole “the museums are free!” bit, perhaps.

either way, the building itself was gorgeous, and i’m not saying that i regret the visit. i just didn’t stay for long.

i went to lunch at the polish place, and the lonely planet did itself proud. the borscht, which they made a point to recommend, was excellent, and the potato pancakes were just fine, served with very good chunky applesauce and enough sour cream. i also had a taster of cherry vodka because it was quite cheap, and the waitress recommended it (along with “bison” flavor, which totally left me stumped. google says it’s bison grass, which makes much more sense. but sounds gross.)

i didn’t think about the potential olfactory associations with cherry + alcohol until it arrived and i took the first sip but, yeah, to modify a friend’s comic witticism regarding cilantro and soap: it Did taste like cough syrup, but it’s the only cough syrup i like.
so that helped me to see how people in eastern europe can take vodka seriously for things other than completely smothering with juice, and that tolerance surely makes me a better person.

after lunch, i ended up deciding to leave the neighborhood and go to the british museum instead. i had thought i would take advantage of being right near the science museum and the victoria & albert, but since i wasn’t going to pay for an imax movie or anything i suspected the science museum would feel much like the natural history had, and the v&a sounded good but the british museum sounded better. seeing that it was also a higher priority on the “must see” list, and i could go to the v&a any day before or after work now, it seemed wise to take advantage of my flexible afternoon and go to the british museum right away.

this was a good plan, and it made me excited.

you see, as i had begun thinking more about the places i really want to visit in london, i realized that the british museum is high on the list not just because it’s really famous and would probably be cool in general, but also because i am actually quite geeked out by one of its most famous attractions – the rosetta stone.

as i get older, i am realizing that one of the quirks about me that could potentially mature into one of my adult armchair hobbies is that i really like alphabets. i mean, i like languages in general, and am not very secretly envious of those people who somehow learn to speak some double-digit number of them, but i also just really like alphabets, which i think is rather less common. i went to russia once for 10 days and, before leaving, i taught myself the cyrillic alphabet just so that i could sound out the signs. then a few years ago, after the revelation that my name only has six letters in greek because of θ, i decided to learn the greek alphabet, too, which i still sometimes use, to david’s amusement, to make crosswords harder when they are otherwise too easy. the fact that these could be signs of something more than just the weird ways i choose to pass the time first occurred to me when i read a whole book about the idea of the alphabet (as in, the idea of using a relatively small number of symbols to phonetically represent speech, rather than using pictures to represent whole ideas), and was completely fascinated. i mean it Was a short book, and very wittily written, but still…

anyway, the rosetta stone strikes me as particularly cool, and indeed, it was kind of amazing to look at it for a while and think about actual people chipping way each of those letters, and then academics poring over them thousands of years later to figure out the language underneath. it had that funny glow of something deservedly famous, even though what it actually says is quite mundane, and i stared at it a few times because those museum planners know their stuff and they put it near a hub where it’s easy to pass by rather than way in the back somewhere where traffic would jam up.

the british museum on the whole was very impressive. that whole sun never setting on the empire bit gave them quite a bit of daylight during which to collect stuff of all varieties, and the museum is immense and dense. i don’t really think they need that many greek vases, actually, but what can you do?

i didn’t see everything, and if i have time i might go back with my camera, but i spent a few hours there and saw a lot of neat things before my artifact appreciation circuits fried themselves and i began walking by exquisite chinese porcelain with a yawn.

then i went home.

before i left i bought a few souvenirs, including… are you ready to know this exists? a blinking rosetta stone pin.
i mean, come on.
because they have to fill as many souvenir niches as they can, right?
and people like things that blink!
i made a rather loud guffawing noise when i saw it, but as i began to put it back part of my brain was like “seriously, kynthia, one day that is going to be the Perfect accessory for something, and you are going to smack yourself if you don’t spend £2 on it now.”
no arguing with that logic.
i got a chocolate one, too, with a reusable mold, so if only i hadn’t already had that alphabet birthday party…

the other thing i got is more respectable as a museum souvenir, in that it’s one of those things that is a bit gimmicky but also rather clever, and so you buy it in acknowledgment of this even though it costs too much.
it’s a fold-up ruler that gets to be 2 meters long, and has a timeline of history imprinted on it along with centimeters and inches.
i am roughly the same height as when nightgowns were introduced, and if i wear heels i can be as tall as f=ma or the collapse of the mayan empire.
good to know, that.