Oowataweek

What a week it’s been! I just finished my school assignments for the week. They’re due on Sunday, but I prefer to have them turned in by Friday so I get the weekend for fun. This week, I made it! Okay, that had as much to do with David working the late shift Friday as me budgeting my time well, but ya use what you’ve got, right? This week I had a Friday night on my own.


Baseball Countdown

It’s been a little nerve racking in the baseball world. I went through some emotional trauma to get us tickets for the first game of the Division Series in Detroit. The first really good thing that happened was the Tigers clinched the Central Division, so there was USE for the tickets! The tickets came in this week, a pretty Division Series logo, Comerica Park and Game 1 on them with our seat numbers. The date, time and opponent TBD, to be determined.

As things stand right now, well, as they stand right now they need to keep standing that way. In the Nanicentric world, The Red Sox will be in town on Friday. The replay of our first date and no matter what the outcome, ONE of us will come home a winner. I’ll add that in the Nanicentric world, Game 1 is in Detroit on Friday so we’ll see Justin Verlander pitch.

The trouble here is so many things that are threatening to go wrong, not according to MY script. The Red Sox have been slumping and even after that phenomenal winning streak, the Tigers slowed way down with the first loss. The Orioles haven’t been much help with recent games against both of our American League teams either. We even found ourselves cheering on the Yankees when they played the Devil Rays. Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows, huh?


The Hook

One delivery box that came in this week was from Fox Sports. I needed new Tigers earrings for the playoffs. I have a couple of older pairs that are posts. Well, that’s one of the MS challenges I have to admit I have. Post earrings are next to impossible to put in! I’m right handed and I have a lot of lost sensation in my right hand and it definitely takes two hands for post earrings. I can wear French hooks. I have a couple pairs of French hook earrings that I got when we went to the Reds game last month and I just love them! I especially love the flat silver hoops with the reds logo floating in the middle. I’d love them no matter what kind of wire, but they are French hooks too! I wore those one a lot on vacation.



When I was looking for Tigers earrings online, I came across the very same earrings, but with floating Tigers logos. THOSE were MY earrings. I had to have them. The other cool thing about my favorite Reds earrings is that they only cost $8.50. The Tigers earrings? Same thing. $8.50 and about that much in shipping. So, in order to justify the shipping, which I hate paying but was going to pay anyway for those earrings, I picked out a shirt too. It was still under $30. Happy Nani!



Staying Away From the Studio

The last round of the layout competition started yesterday and I went to see who was advancing and what kit the finalists would be working with. I closed the browser window and, I’ll visit the Studio again in a couple weeks. If I’d made it to this week, I’d drop out. They will be working with a “Halloween” kit. ::shudder:: It’s a kit with spiders, huge spiders and tons of them. And they aren’t drawings of cartoon spiders. They are extractions of the creepiest and most hideous arachnids to be seen! EW! I am still getting chills writing about it because the image of the preview is just burned into my brain. BLECH!

Of course, the layouts done with that kit will be all over the gallery and I want NOTHING to do with them. Yeah, I kinda feel like there was some horrible plague there now. I’ll get over that. It’s the scrapbooking site I really love, just right now, I kinda feel chased out. Someone needs to make a Spider Spray scrapbook kit to fumigate the gallery!


Facebook, What A Mess!

That’s been big news in the last couple days. Facebook launched a new version that is the most invasive version yet. It pretty much turned off all the privacy settings and you can go back and reset them, if you can figure out how. There are no more current news feeds on the home page. There’s a little box that scrolls with current status updates, including every little action anyone on my friends list makes on their cyber farm, notifications I HAD turned off before, every time someone “likes” something and every comment they make on someone else’s page whether or not I now that person or have a clue what they are talking about. It feels creepy, like I’m eavesdropping on things I’m not supposed to part of.

But wait, there’s more! There isn’t news from my friends in chronological order of them posting, not even an option for that anymore. Instead, Facebook thinks it knows what the most important news to me is. Today, that would be my sister-in-law’s new hairdo. That’s SO much more important to me than the silly updates from Scotty’s sister, Jill, with doctor reports while Scott’s in the hospital. Right now, tests have shown nothing super wrong, but he has pneumonia. I’ve got an in-room number to give him a call this afternoon. The point is that Facebook thinks Laura’s hair is more important to me than one of my best friend’s health. They’re DEAD WRONG!

Jill and I have been keeping in touch in a private message, so I don’t miss any of her updates because I don’t live on facebook hanging on every song my teenage friends listen to, restaurant my cousin eats at or croissant my fiends serve in their play coffee shops.


So, instead of changing the settings on everything I look at, I just took some of my information off my profile and locked out all of my photos. I still have friends who use facebook instead of email, so I can’t close the account, but I don’t have to USE it for anything but private messages. I did start an account at Google+. I have a few friends that have accounts there already and it’s a much cleaner and more private interface.



Worldwide Photo Walk

This is sort of a segue from the Google+ talk. One of the people I follow on G+ is Scott Kelby, the chief orchestrator of Worldwide Photo Walk! He and Matt Kloskowski are on Google+. They are both great photographers, Photoshop artists and digital creative masters! Matt actually wrote one of the books I used in my Imaging class Spring Semester. It is totally cool to interact with them and with others in the posts about Worldwide Photo Walk

Worldwide Photo Walk is next weekend, October 1 & 2. Our group is very small. Right now, it’s just Sheri and me confirmed, but we’re waiting for a couple other responses. For the photo walk part, you select an area, scenic or trendy, to photograph, walk and photograph for 2 or 3 hours, then meet the Photo Walk group for coffee or lunch and compare photos. What a totally cool idea!

We’re going to Frankenmuth, Michigan, on Saturday. They have sculptures on Main Street this year from artists from the Midwest. Just in case Frankenmuth, Michigan's “Little Bavaria” isn’t cool enough! We’re going to go to the Bavarian Inn or Zhender’s for chicken dinner after we shoot photos. This is an unofficial Photo Walk. We didn’t have it solidified that we were doing it until just after the deadline to apply for an official Photo Walk, but I’m going to put up a page with details and open it up to anyone who’d like to meet us in Frankenmuth for photography and fun.



Cats

For anyone that read the blog Carla posted at Behind Orange Eyes, Kaline’s eye is doing much better! We still have to put ointment in it through Monday. Kaline doesn’t like the ointment and is now pretty much suspect and ready to flee whenever we get near her and she senses it not just to pet her. She’s not a dumb cat. She knows when it’s medicine time and she spends time with us, just not when it’s “that time” I’m kinda looking forward to Tuesday Morning – no more ointment!




Links:

Join me on Google+

Worldwide Photo Walk Information

Frankenmuth, Michigan

Frankenmuth Art Walk

Behind Orange Eyes