Hello LJ friends!

I am hoping to write an actual post sometime soon, but meanwhile:

1. I have a Twitter now, it is much more active than my LJ because I only have to think of 140 characters to write at a time. I am @barnswallowkate.  (And if you don't have Twitter you can always add it to an RSS reader if you'd like.)

2. I will have a morning to bird in Sacramento next week while I am on a work trip. Do any of you know a good place to go? I have never been to California so I am hoping for a lot of lifers. Thanks for any help!

3. I have been taking pictures (as always) even thought I haven't gotten them on LJ. I do have them on Picasa:

I give up on trying to get myself to post.  I just feel like whenever I am home I have to be doing something "productive" like cleaning or working on a project.  It's really boring and not-fun =P  So here is a recap of the last two months in random order and with lots of pictures.

Last week I tore myself away from chores to meet some eFriends (technically Internet Strangers, but I was brave!) - Ryan and Diana.  They were visiting DC so Carlos and I went downtown to meet them and visit the American History Museum (and get completely soaked and lead them on a wild goose chase to find food).  Proof that we all exist:



It poured rain from then until this weekend, what a mess.

On April 29 it was our 10th dating anniversary.  We went out to a restaurant in Bethesda, and I wore a dress even though it was cold.


I guess we have grown up a little...

For the past two years I've shared an office with my friend Ben. Tomorrow morning I have to pack up and move out. I will have to leave two years of singing (that was all him, I sing like a tortured cat), discussing sci-fi TV shows, tea times, Family Guy quotes, complaining about society, baked goods, and Solstice Trees. Ben introduced me to Journey and Bon Jovi and tried his best to get me to like the Beatles. Sure, we can laugh about xkcd over IM, and we'll still have lunch together, but it won't be quite the same.

And then tomorrow night is the Galactica series finale, where I think they are going to kill everyone I like and leave only Gaius Frakking Baltar behind.

I am going to be pretty sad tomorrow :(

Carlos and I went to Petsmart today to get Loki food, and as usual we ended up looking at the adoptable kitties. But this time an employee was there and started describing one of the cats to us. She's 8 or 9 months old, friendly, vocal, and loves to play with other cats. They said when she plays with other young boy cats she can push them around and has a lot of fun. She is adorable and her personality sounds perfect for our Loki.

So now the questions are (a) does Loki need a friend and (b) can we deal with the additional life hectic-ness that another cat would bring?

I think Loki would be fine with another cat, but I am not sure he needs one.  But he is alone 10+ hours a day during the week, and then we are sleeping for another 8-10.  So he only gets 5-6 hours of attention from us each day.  And then we are usually cooking or cleaning or watching TV when we are home.  Maybe a little sister would keep him company and make him happy?

Another cat would mean more food, more litter, more attention, more fur (my whole family is allergic, and so is my best friend), more furniture scratching, and more cats sleeping on Kate at night.  If we don't pay enough attention to Loki now, will they really entertain each other or will we have two cats who want attention? What if Loki doesn't want a sister?  Would this really be better for him?  I know it would take them some time to get used to each other, but what if they never get along?

But she was sooooooooo adorable, and sweet, and sounds like she'd play with Loki a lot...  We can't decide!!

What do you think?  If you have more than one cat, have you found it to be a good thing or a bad thing??

Yayyyyy Inauguration!  It feels like Christmas!

So I know people would pay thousands of dollars to stay at my house this week.  And that this is a once-in-forever historical moment.  But as you can see from the fact that I am posting, I am not on the Mall.  I just knew I couldn't handle the crowd.  If a crowd is dense enough that I am touching other people 50% of the time, and big enough that I can't immediately get out, I get all claustrophobic.  That crowd on TV looks insane, and I wouldn't get out of the city for hours.  It gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.  Thus I am watching the inauguration in HD from my nice warm sofa (even better than being there, right?).  Don't worry, I'll be properly jealous of all of you that went down there when I see your pictures.

It's exciting just watching it on TV, too, even though nothing's really going on yet.  Seeing the crowd really makes you feel how important and amazing this is to so many people in our country.  I know he's just one man, I know our country is a wreck right now, and I know he can't fix it all by himself or quickly.  I know it will be hard, after this initial emotional rush, to motivate our set-in-its-ways population (I include myself in that assessment, of course).  But based on the influence he's having on our citizens right now, he just might be able to do it, with all of our help.

So exciting

(Also crazy exciting but super depressing: Galactica is backtica.  But what the frak is going on??)

(Less exciting: water main break outside my house, we are losing water for the next hour or so.  That's what I get for working from home.)

Stay warm and safe if you are downtown, and enjoy your inauguration day, everyone!

You might think from all my bitching about Twilight that I consider myself to have impeccable taste, and that I only like things that are generally accepted as "good."  This really isn't true - I understand guilty pleasures.  There are plenty of things that I like that are less than perfect, but still entertain me greatly.  Key words: "pleasure" and "entertain."  If Twilight had bad writing but a story and characters that entertained me, I could deal with it.  The problem really was that it made me want to forcibly remove my eyes and brain :)

[Side note: I'm not alone now that the movie is out.  This is my favorite review so far:  "I can only hope that their precious tome has been unmercifully butchered in its trip from the page to the screen because if this disaster actually is faithful to its source novel, then what that says about the collective taste of its rabid fan base is too unspeakably depressing to contemplate."  Most reviews say the movie is very faithful to the book - the book really is that bad!]

Back to my main point: here are some things that I really like that aren't super-popular or award-winning .  They are almost guilty pleasures, except I don't feel very guilty about any of them.  And look, the first one has vampires!

Sookie Stackhouse books / True Blood
My friend lent me the first three of these books and I liked them a lot.  It took me a while to get into the first one because I kept having Twilight flashbacks, but by the third book I couldn't stop reading.  Bill is super boring, like all "good" vampires are, and I am tired of vampires vs werewolves in every single book and movie and show.  But Sookie is tough and sassy and saves herself most of the time.  I can't wait to read the rest.

I have been watching True Blood to see how they translated the books into a TV show.  It seems more graphic than the books (which is backwards to me, you'd think they have to tone things down to put them on TV.  I guess not on HBO).  Maybe I'd like TV Bill better if his hair wasn't so dumb.  Anna Paquin is great as Sookie, except Sookie's been annoying the crap out of me for the last half of the season.  I really like Sam (unless he's around Sookie, then he turns lame).  I love how detailed and important they've made the minor characters from the books - Tara and Lafayette are awesome.  I can barely stand the wait between episodes, and I don't know what I'll do after the season finale this Sunday.  (It also helps that my favorite TWoP recapper Jacob does True Blood's recaps.  He makes it even better, just like he does for Doctor Who and BSG.)

Supernatural
Yes, it's a sci-fi/fantasy show on the CW that gets invisible ratings.  Yes, it's basically Buffy with two brothers instead of one Slayer (especially this season, with all the "chosen one"-ing, apocalypses, and raising demons for Halloween).  Yes, even though the individual episodes have been spectacular so far, this season could end up being ridiculous (I usually only want to hear "God has a plan" from a platinum blonde robot hallucination, you know?).  But I love Dean (click that, seriously), the brothers' relationship, and METALLICAR.  The show can be scary, funny, and badass.  Also, after an episode at the beginning of the season, I can bump up Supernatural's "Time Travel" score in my TV Show Comparison Tables, moving it closer to the top!

Psych
This show is super-goofy, sometimes the mysteries make no sense, sometimes there are plot holes, and I always laugh when I see them pretending that rainy Vancouver with waist-high ferns is actually California.  But Sean and Gus are awesome (I think Gus is funnier, even though he's the sidekick) and I laugh the whole way through every episode.

Secret Diary of a Call Girl
It's unbelievable (even though Belle supposedly exists), soapy, and teaches you things you might not want to know.  Some people think Billie Piper looks like a man (I disagree).  The show went to hilarious lengths this season to hide her pregnancy (ugly clothes, hiding her behind pillows, using a body double that looks nothing like her).  But I love Rose Tyler the hooker with a heart of gold.  She's so funny and cute, and I am got stupidly caught up in the love triangle this season.

Temeraire books
I know Naomi Novik used to write fanfic on LJ (so do several million other people who want to be authors someday).  I am sure some people don't like the old-fashioned style she uses in her books, and they can drag on (haha, see what I did there?) a bit.  But Temeraire is cute and funny and smart and heroic, so I can't stop reading these books.


See?  Now you can roll your eyes at me the way I roll my eyes at Twilight-obsessed teenage girls.  Enjoy.

On my way home today, I was waiting at a light when a cop car came through the intersection, lights on and siren blaring, turned left in front of me and drove off into the night.  Following a little behind and above it the whole way, like a kite tied to the bumper, was a big owl.

I have zero explanations for this.

(And speaking of owls, that one I saved out of the road back in March turned out to have a broken leg.  They fixed it up and released it a few months later.  I am a little bit proud of myself for that one.)

I love Election Day. I have since I was a kid - I remember watching the Dukakis vs Bush Sr. election, when I had just turned 6. And I remember in 5th grade when we all thought Clinton was super-cool because he played the saxophone, and our homework was to color in states based on who won. In 2000 I turned 18 just 3 days before the election and was so happy I'd be able to vote.

I think I feel about today the way normal people feel about the Super Bowl.  I cheer for a team to win, watch mesmerized as they tally up the points as the night goes on, and feel like I'm part of something that everyone else in the country is part of too. It's so exciting every year, and this year the excitement is especially high nationwide. I've been so excited about Election Day that I keep forgetting it's my birthday!

I had an easy time voting this morning. I didn't get there until about 9:30, and I think I only waited in line for 15-20 minutes. The person checking me in noticed it was my birthday, so she said happy birthday and that she hoped I would get the birthday present I wanted. I said that's why I was there! I can't wait to see the outcomes tonight, this feels so momentous.

Dear America,

Yes, my birthday is tomorrow - election day, yay! I am very excited too! So you know what present you can get me? A Democratic President!! GObama!

Love,
Kate

PS: I hope you are all voting. I vote because it's my duty as a citizen, and because if I don't vote, I can't complain about the results. And you know I love to complain.
PPS: An iPhone would be OK too.

I never thought I would be as lucky as urbpan and get to see a slime mold.  But a few weeks ago at lunch I noticed a big yellow pile of foam around a plant near a Starbucks.  At first I thought it was just that spray filling foam you get at Home Depot, but then I realized that made no sense.  I looked closer and realized it was slime mold!! Score!

I didn't have my camera with me (I broke one of my own cardinal rules) so I borrowed my friend's cell phone to take a picture.  It's not great but you can see the slime mold!

I went back with my camera the next day and by then it was almost gone.  You can still see a few gross remains though.
( I'll at least spare you one gross picture )
I feel truly blessed to have had this experience.  Unless it's just actual dog vomit, then I just feel dumb.

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I will officially enter my late twenties on Election Day.  That means it's time to stop screwing around and learn to be an adult.  And what better place to learn maturity and responsibility than the interwebs?

One site I have been learning a lot from is ZenHabits.  I first found it through the post about minimalism.  I love the idea of a minimalist house (and life), but as a packrat I haven't quite put it into practice.  Here is our attempt at a minimalist bedroom.  You know it's never actually this clean.

( One more room picture )

(On the wall to the left, I have this picture and this picture next to the window.)

ZenHabits also has a post about minimalist chores, which made me realize that (a) chores have to be done, (b) no one likes to do them, and (c) smart people find a way to do them with as little effort as possible.  I realize my parents tried to teach me this my whole life, but I don't believe anything unless I read it on the internet.  I have been trying to embrace the "clean as you go" method because it makes a huge difference.  Again, I am not the best at putting it into practice, but I'll learn.

ZenHabits' creator has written an ebook called "Zen To Done," a list of strategies and practices to help you get things done.  He lays out the list on the website as well.  I think I am mostly following the "minimalist version."  My favorite idea from the list is single-tasking.  We've all been gushing about multi-tasking for years, but the truth is, you can physically only do one thing at a time.  You can't have your eyes on the TV and on your homework at the same time, you can't write about two topics with one hand, and you really just need to accept that and focus on one thing at a time until it's done.  Combine this with his idea of prioritizing and you'll really start knocking tasks off your To Do List.  I know many of these ideas are covered in other books and websites, but this is where I first learned about them. 

ZenLinks
Thanks to ZenHabits, I read Dave Ramsey's book "The Total Money Makeover."  It is very practical and lays out a few basic steps.  We already have a budget that we mostly follow, and enough savings for emergencies.  We save 5% of our post-tax income for "Short Term" (things like furniture and house repairs), and 10% for "Long Term" (money that isn't supposed to be touched unless something horrible happens).  Carlos and I have started applying the debt snowball method detailed in the book, starting with my car.  We will have it paid off in January or February 2009 (instead of September 2010), and then we will direct that payment towards Carlos' car until it is paid off.  Once that's done we'll have a lot more space in the budget and we can save a lot more.  Besides the cars, the only real debt we have is our house, which we now have a 15 year mortgage on.  That makes the payments really high but is going to save us hundreds of thousands of dollars over the long run.  (Want to scare yourself for Halloween?  Look at how much you pay for your house over the length of the mortgage *shudder*).  According to the book, once everything is paid off, you just save like crazy and invest so you never have to use credit cards or get loans (even for houses) again.  We'll see how all that goes ;)

ZenHabits also introduced me to Unclutterer (or maybe it was the other way around) and LifeHacker (I love their wire-free workspaces ).  Now if only I would stop reading blogs and actually go clean!

I forget when and how I discovered xkcd a few months ago. I guess it doesn't really matter how we met, just that I am completely in love. I'll try to explain why.

I'm sure you already know this, but just in case: Galactica is back(-tica) on January 16, 2009 at 10PM! Yessssssss! If I were super cool I'd be watching it on this, but alas, I will have to settle for just a Dradis Screensaver.

Also, if you are the lame kind of nerd, you might like these pictures from the upcoming Star Trek movie, starring Spocklar the scary Vulcan who steals powers out of people's brains. Right? No? Whatever, I am not a Trekkie. There is too much optimism on that show, and the captains say things like "You can't do that, it's against the rules." I prefer the soul-crushing hopelessness and airlock-happy Presidents that BSG provides :D

Is it frakking January yet?

Wtf, my officemate just got Rickrolled over the phone

Oh, the magic of the interwebs.

This is a test post - I am trying to use RSS to feed LJ posts on to Facebook, I can't tell if I did it right...

Ooh I think I did! If anyone is reading this on Facebook, the post right below this (on my Wall, not in My Notes or whatever) is the oldest, and the one at the very bottom is the latest (they all got imported today).

Over Labor Day weekend we went up to silberzauber and Eric's cool new house for a party. Because I am lame I didn't take any pictures at the party, but the next day we went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I've been there before but not with my "real" camera, so I took a ton of pictures! It's such a cool museum, they take whole rooms (and temples and buildings) from around the world and put them inside. They also had some really cool weapons. Admission is "what you deem appropriate" on Sundays, so I encourage you to check this museum out if you are ever in the area.

Of course there are a million more pictures on Picasa.

(Also Xanga does cuts now! I would use it if I were allowed to end the cut and keep going, like on LJ, but I can't figure out how to do that.)

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Then the next weekend Tropical Storm Hanna came through. Carlos and I went out walking around in it at the peak, but I didn't bring a camera. The stream behind our house was so high and so fast, and the ponds down the street were almost all the way up to the path. I went back out a few hours later (I had a bad cold so I was too worn out to go right back out with my camera), and by then the stream had gone down a lot. It was still really high, check it out!


I also have a video of the stream on Picasa, you can hear how loud the water was. (I am not sure if that worked right, please tell me if it didn't.)

I was too tired to go down to the ponds so you don't get any pictures of those, sorry!

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Coming soon: slime mold, I <3 Gmail and Firefox, and xckd.

If you weren't a middle school girl in the mid-nineties, you may not have seen the very awesome Newsies. That means you haven't seen The Dark Knight sing about running away to New Mexico, or seen him do a little cowboy dance. Let me fix that for you!
( Video behind the cut to be polite )

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Milestones
Today is my sweet devil cat Loki's 2nd birthday, yay!! We thought he would have calmed down by now, but he is still as hyper as he was as a kitten.

Other recent milestones were:

• Our 9th anniversary at the end of April
• 2 years of engagement at the end of June (oops)
• 2 years of living in our house at the beginning of July
• Carlos and I both found our first gray hairs over the summer. I hope mine comes in salt-and-pepper like my dad's. I also hope it doesn't come in like that for a few more decades =P

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We have battened down the lawn furniture here, waiting for Hanna's weekend visit. I hope everyone in her path stays safe and undamaged this weekend :)

Against my better judgment, I read New Moon and Eclipse to see if they were as bad as everyone said. They really, really were.

Let me explain Eclipse to you. Just pick one option from inside each set of parentheses. Feel free to jump from line to line in random order, and no fair matching boys to boys trying to improve the story with slash!


Seriously, I got all of the stories/details from the recaps I read with slightly less boredom, I should have just stuck with those. I hate every character in these books so much.

I don't know if I can suffer through Breaking Dawn...

But at least I can laugh through stoney321 's recap of Twilight where she explains how it is a retelling of The Book of Mormon, with sparkling vampires!

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Also speaking of sucky, Carlos and I watched Step Up 2 the other day. The final dance-off-winning performance was awesome, I have to admit. Plus I was so happy to see the privileged rich kids with years of training kick the asses of the poor kids from the street who had to teach themselves how to dance! Oh but it's ok because the rich kids were only 90% accepted by the other kids at their school

It's a miracle, two posts from me that aren't 3 months apart!

I mentioned in my last post that we were going to some lake this weekend.  It was Rocky Gap Resort, which is in Rocky Gap State Park.  I should have remembered that  =P

My mom took Carlos and I, and my brother and his girlfriend, up there for Saturday night.  She thinks we are super-boring because we are too poor to do anything so she took pity on us (thanks Mom!).  We got there around 1PM on Saturday and left around 3:30PM on Sunday.  Normal people would probably relax but I tried to pack everything there was to do there into a little over 24 hours.  Carlos and I rented a canoe, I swam in the lake, we took a pontoon boat ride, walked to an overlook to see the sunset, had smores by a campfire, and watched the Olympics at the bar, all on the first day.  On Sunday we only had time for a breakfast buffet (which I had issues with - I don't think sausage gravy is meant to have onions in it), a hike around the lake, and checking out the aviary.

The hotel was pretty cool but definitely geared toward richer people than me.  They also had a bunch of guided tours and activities that you could do on your own for free (like a $25 tour of the aviary, which consisted of 6 small cages with very informative signs on them).  Luckily we figured that out pretty quick and did everything on our own.

And of course I took a ton of pictures.  Here are a few and there are many more on Picasa.

I read Twilight a while back, and wasn't a huge fan. With all this hullabaloo about Breaking Dawn and the Twilight movie coming out, I thought maybe I would give it another try, since everyone seemed to like it so much. Then as I searched the interwebs I found out that I am not the only person who doesn't like it and I don't feel so bad! Luckily I saved myself from books 2 and 3 by reading cleolinda's awesome recaps (check out Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse). But her recap of Breaking Dawn (Parts One, Two, and Three) almost make me want to read that one (for the lulz, as they say). Should I do it? Have any of you read it and seen if it is as bad as it seems? Is it entertainingly bad or just bad bad?

Also the movie looks sooooooooo awful :D Wow I heart schadenfreude.

But like I said before, part of what made me want to read the first book was that it was set in the Pacific Northwest. I love the descriptions of all the rain and green forests. I know you are supposed to hate them because Bella does (she prefers Phoenix, a place that I would not live for any amount of money - all the open sky, flat land, and tiny trees freak me the hell out) but I love it. Are there any GOOD books set there that I can enjoy (besides Snow Falling On Cedars which I have already read but probably should again)?

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I finally watched the Olympics Opening Ceremonies online last night. They were freaking awesome! At the beginning I was all "Ok cool lights zooming around and then making rings whatevs" and then the rings FLOAT UP FROM THE FLOOR BLACK MAGIC OMG. And when the printing blocks turned into flowers it like touched my evil blackened heart somehow. wtf.

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Speaking of touching my heart, Doctor Who Season 4 finale actually made me cry. I BURST into tears. Actual tears came out of my eyes for a whole 2 minutes. I don't cry at movies or TV ever (EVER! even Doctor Who Season 2 finale!), I don't know what was going on. And I wasn't even crying at the sad Donna part like a normal person should. No, no, I was crying at the FINALLY DOCTOR AND ROSE KISSING YAYYYYY part. I have so many issues. That season was so awesome though, I love Donna even though I expected to hate her with a passion.

And that reminds me that Laura Roslin almost made me cry about a million times in this past half-season of BSG. What is wrong with me.

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How about some pictures!  Yes I am going to be lazy and link you to Picasa instead of resizing them and including them in the post.

In mid-June I took a few hundred pictures of one really gorgeous sunset.

At the end of June we went to Bethany Beach.  I took a bunch of pictures (as usual).  One day the water was super blue and super clear, it looked like the Caribbean.  And I did actually go birding once, I saw Willets which I don't think are on my life list (I have to check), and added Boat-Tailed Grackles to my life list.  I also saw a Brant on the beach, in the middle of many blankets of people, not trying to run or fly away.  I bet he was hurt and I didn't do anything to help :(  That's a lifer at least.

I went to Redskins Training Camp a few weekends ago, and thanks to the girlfriend of a coworker I was in VIP. This would probably have been more exciting if I had (a) watched a full game of Redskins football any time in the last 15 years and (b) a clue who any of the players were. Which I didn't.  I still had a lot of fun.  I got about 7 autographs for my brother and took a lot of pictures (and got horribly sunburned). Click for pics.

I found some pictures from the first time we went to Niagara Falls (I think it was back in 2003).  Some are from the Maid of the Mist (which we didn't go on the second time we went there) and there are some of me petting and feeding a killer whale, sweet.

This weekend we are supposed to go to some hotel up in Western MD that is on a lake and supposed to be pretty. Hopefully I will take 10000 pictures like I usually do on vacation.