Halloween through the years - 1986

me as a cabbage patch kid

boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew

I've come to the conclusion that raw vegetables are DISGUSTING. i ate some carrots yesterday, and am attempting brocolli today, and i am just completely grossed out. of course i had ranch dressing! what do you take me for!? but still, just absolutely bland and feel like i'm eating thick watery cardboard, except without the fibery taste. BLEH! man, i gotta get some better pre-gym snacks. (i will concede that i enjoy both of these when properly cooked)

and, 100 million cool points to whoever knows the reference from the post title.

good ole boring Illinois

so.... looking at some pictures this morning of the latest California wildfire i had a thought.... as much as we (we being the general population of suburbian Chicago) complain that Illinois is boring, that in reality can be a good thing. Yes, it's true, there's no much in the way of topography and interesting natural features. It's no Grand Canyon, no Mt. Hood, no Marco Island beach, and no rocky coast of Maine. On the plus side, however, we are not prone to earthquakes, volcanoes, threat from tsunamis, huge landslides, hurricanes, or raging wildfires. just, you know, the occasional tornado - and even those not so much. so, for all it's boring-ness, the Chicago area is a pretty safe place to live, naturally speaking. I'll try to keep that in mind next time i want to go friggin do some interesting.

Halloween through the years - 1981

in which trying to be nice gets you an uncomfortable 4 hours

or, Cleveland Air Travel Adventures

Last thursday I headed out to Cleveland again for work, via Southwest from Midway, as usual. We boarded the plane ontime, and as I had a "B" seat I was able to snatch an aisle seat. However, the flight was full, and the middle seats also began to fill up. There was an older and quite tall man that asked if my middle seat was taken. Feeling that i could be nice and that "it's only a 40 minute flight," I offered to just move over and gave him the aisle seat. All seemed well. Except for that I didn't get off that plane until nearly 4 and a half hours later - due to bad weather mainly inbetween Chicago and Cleveland. And then, this guy was reading a book and elbowed me in the ribs virtually every time he turned a page. whatever. i'm not bitter. : )

this flight also brought the worst turbulance I have ever experienced, which happened as we flew over and around a lightning storm below that made it look like the world might be ending. After having quite a long chat with God on that flight, I was definitely more than relieved to land safely....

the return trip at least was infinitely more fun, having randomly met someone at the airport restaurant who, as chance would have it, was also on my flight back to Chicago. And, was absolutely hilarious. All in all, that 24 hours was me totally out of my comfort zone- but some really great things came out of it.

Halloween through the years - 1982

ya can't beat that!

monday

welcome to another monday. brought to you by the letter "q."

i love weekends, (duh, right?) but it's hard when they become a fuzzy blur or activity. while hanging out with friends, getting lost in corn mazes, and pumpkin carving are a blast, my weekend didn't leave me a whole lot of time for resting... so that today i feel like i still need to recover from last week.

mondays should be a day of sleeping!!!!!

nearly there...

it's wednesday night.... and in 48 hours from now i'll be finished with my PG exam. hooray! I have logged in 90 study hours. 90! yikes! and i'm sure i'll do a few more tomorrow, maybe 5 or so. Ok, so it's not the 100 hours like i had wanted, but i think it's a darn lot.

I really have no idea what is in store for me friday... there are some practice questions and exams that i've been looking at, but they're not endorsed by ASBOG (the official testing committee), so it's hard to know for sure what the questions will be like.

It's an 8 hour exam, 4 hours for "Fundamentals of Geology" and 4 hours for "Practice of Geology."

I'm not working tomorrow, so that i can study a bit more and also just relax. Although there have been some days this month that i have studied less than others, there certainly haven't really been any fully 'relaxing' times, with the need to be studying always in the back of my mind. So i'm not really sure how much i'll be able to rest tomorrow, but i certainly want to feel good going in to friday. and for the most part, except for some occurances that jenny knows of, my feelings this entire month have been fairly supressed. aside also from the complaining that i'm tired of studying. it's really been an entire month of working and studying and not much else.

and.... i guess that's it. i don't really know how it's going to go. i certainly hope it goes well.... I feel like there are a lot of expectations for me to pass, and i would definitely not like to go through this study effort again.............. i hope it's enough.

wish me luck!

still holding on to summer

yesterday i went rollerblading and got dairy queen. it's still summer to me!

over 2,000 served, er.... scanned

Since last winter i have been involved in a self-inflicted : ) family project. When i was growing up we did what my family called "pictures on the wall" - where we would take down one of the big paintings and project our 35mm slides onto the off-white wall. I always loved that, having the pictures be enormous. And everyone could see a picture at once, instead of needing to pass them around. I have a lot of great memories of being in a darkened living room, hearing the hum of the projector and the mechanical whirring sound as the next slide rolled into view.

Well.... the slide projector is becoming obsolete, is "going the way of Colecovision" if you will.... and my parent's projector doesn't really work any more, and hasn't for a few years. So there are roughly 14 years of photographs that we can't look at, because we didn't start using regular print film until I was in high school. And of course, we never made prints of all these.

To have them professionally done would cost a fortune. It's something like 30 cents (i just realized my keyboard doesn't have a "cent" sign!) a pop. Which, multiplied by 14 years worth is a heck of a lot of mula. My parents bought a scanner a few years back that has an extra light in the lid, and a special setting for slides..... so i have it at my place, and have slowly been going through cube after cube, slide after slide - making electronic copies that we can crop, edit, and eventually print. 16 cubes to a box, 12 boxes, and up to 30 slides per cube - you do the math. And it takes about 3 minutes per slide to scan. *sigh* 2,078 and counting.

BUT! it is fun seeing all these pictures again.... and it'll be awesome to finally have the prints.

Here's an example for you, the raw scan before i crop it - my brother and i circa 1982.

yep. i'm awesome.

testing out this video option....

Blogger now offers an option to upload video, so i thought i'd try it out. I think that it's pretty neat, except for that uploading the video takes forever. And this one is only 47 seconds long. So i imagine, if i use this it will be for fairly short videos. See what you think...

A little video from the camping weekend.... after Rachel had just finished hanging her own hammock. And there was much rejoicing! ....yay......

just a TAD bit itchy

The view from Mt. Baldy

Mark buries Tim in a wave of sand

Dune jumping - Swany style

Dune jumping - Mark style

Dune jumping - Tim style

Beth and Mark nearly fell through a hole to China

Rach = so cute!

Ahhh.... hanging out in the comfy camping chairs by the fire...
Tim looks like a kid at Christmas. He loves camping, folks!

This weekend my small group went camping. A fabulous idea by JULIE, who was, unfortunately, unable to go.... Due to the need to study, I wasn't able to go for the entire weekend. I drove out Saturday morning to meet the group at Indiana Dunes - where we spent the day at the beach. We braved the *slightly* chilly water, got some sun, ate tons of food, and played around on Mt. Baldy - the sand "mountain." This involved such past times as jumping off the dune, rolling down the dune, and panting to death trying to climb back up the dune. If not for the having to climb back up part, i would have rolled down that dune like 20 times. (i did roll on my side, and then also head first. but that one gives ya kind of a headache). We had FANTABULOUS weather. that would be except for the EFFING mosquitos. They were out for blood. (heh, literally) My bite count is at nearly 40 - so many it is hard to keep track. ( I was applying bug spray nearly every 5 minutes). And I've done exceedingly well at NOT scratching them. Although, i gotta say, i'm quite fond of the three on the bottom of my right foot. Especially the one ON THE UNDERSIDE OF MY BIG TOE. Grr!

schedule update

Well, i am behind the schedule somewhat. I've discovered that studying for 8 hours in one day may be - extremely difficult. I've got just over 40 hours clocked in. This week i think i'm going to try to step it up a bit during the week so that i don't have to rely on the weekend quite so much.... I definitely want to accomplish a lot this week....

i think the picture speaks for itself.

Rachel Rocks

This was my birthday card that Rachel made for me this year - she's AWESOME!

I'm smart enough not to rob a bank

Yesterday I went to the bank to deposit a check, and as I was walking back out the doors towards my car I noticed something.... that on the inside of the door to the bank there are two vertical colored lines, one is red and one is green. There is a 5 in the middle of the green and a 6 right in the middle of the red. I remembering seeing these before, and wondering what they were. As i got into my car it occurred to me! Everyone going into the bank goes through those doors. And likely there is a video camera on that door at all times. So if you ever rob the bank, they know how tall you are! There's the 5, the 6, and then the red-green interface line is 5'6." Maybe you all have seen this before and are like "well, DUH Swany, you didn't know that before?"

But my advice to you - if you ARE planning on robbing a bank - crawl into there on your hands and knees. Don't worry, they won't suspect a thing... : )

this one's for you, Beth

Well, I see what you mean, Beth - look what i caught on film?! (Click on the picture for a closer look)

What was in that banana-cake-tryin-not-very-sucessfully-to-be-undercover-as-carrot-cake that Rachel made??!?!?!?!?!!? And what will the side-effects be?

ahoy

well, i actually had this fabulous idea to create a story with these pictures, but since that probably won't happen for another month.... i'll post a few now and come back to it later....

Searching for land....

Smile everyone!

The Crew

The crew hard at work with the "lines"

smooth sailing...


Rach is concentrating REALLY hard.

MARK IS DRIVING THE BOAT!!!!

The guys catchin some rays

hooray for heroes - again!

An extra reason to look forward to Heroes - as if i needed an extra reason. This season Shalim Ortiz joins the cast - one of my favorite latin singers! In fact, it is his song "Se me olvido tu nombre" (I forgot your name) is why I decided to learn español!!!! Qué fantástico será para mirarlo este otoño!

the ledges

Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

I was in geological heaven, if only for a half hour. What a fabulous break from "the real world"

Last thursday, on the way back to the Cleveland Airport, i had a small amount of time to spare. Departing from my instinctive urges to be ungodly early to everywhere i go - i detoured. *gasp* I had no idea what there was in this park, and after chancing by a small visitors area, i found a map - with a picture of an interesting geologic formation called "the ledges." I drove over, and being short on time, ran the 1/2 mile from the trail head to the ledges, tried to hurry through them (although that was hard, i could have spent hours there), and then ran back... i was crazy giddy. you have no idea.

it was, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, the most magical half hour i've had in a LONG time.

A 'ledges' overlook

Iceman cave

yeah. i'm gonna call this one "elf house" :)

look! you can see the cross bedding, well, under the moss. that one's for you, Frano.

Awesome mossy sandstone layers - for those of you that are interested, this all would have been deposited underwater in the Pennsylvanian (over 250 millions years ago, or before dinosaurs walked the earth)

adorable, but tired, shyla!!!

Julie's fabulous new puppy-girl!

this is your life, are you who you want to be?

a seemingly insignificant occurrance of events led to a conversation in my head that has been welling up for some time. for how long, i can't say... there have been times where it seeps out, venting small clouds into my thought proccess, but never fully taking over. it was always squelched and smushed back down into dormancy, and i would continue about my everyday life... with everyday problems, everyday annoyances, everyday disappointments, and an everyday me.

but i'm getting ahead of myself. first i'll go back to the "occurrance." I had an evening out tonight with some friends - Julie, Beth, and Amber - for dinner and a movie. The movie of choice being "The Nanny Diaries." (now, don't give up on me just yet.) The credits were rolling - on this film that stressed that money can't buy you happiness, that showed just to what extremes materialism can go, and that people can get so caught up in having the latest thing, the latest trend, the latest convenience. I reached for my purse, and in the process of unzipping the front pocket, stopped. Did i really need to turn on my cell phone just now? I hadn't been expecting any calls, and i wasn't planning on making any.... but yet i still had this feeling that i should turn it on, because that's just what you do. And to NOT do so? would be social, technological, and 21st century anarchy. in defiance of what my instinct told me to do i said, "hmph. i am not turning on my cell phone. take that." and sighed just the tiniest bit of weighless relief - at which point i turned to my left to find the three faces of my friends alit with the bluish glow of a fresh cell phone screen, staggered perfectly for my vantage point, gazing intently down towards their hands, as if this were scripted.

Now, the moment lasted only fleetingly, and then we were up and on the move - but on the drive home from the theater my mind had been set in motion. Everything in my life seems so much about DOing, but not really at all about BEing. How am I ever supposed to know who i really am if i can't see through all of the stuff i'm doing? The murky stagnant pond that has become the everyday. and the everyday me. All of the suppressed seeps, the vents of locked up self came bubbling to the surface again, making new cracks, wider fractures, breaking apart my surface self. This time daring me to try to patch them up, to cover them over with more nothingnesses. These revelations come with the tagline - THIS IS YOUR LIFE, ARE YOU WHO YOU WANT TO BE?

The answer, simply, is no.

Can i really let myself ignore this again? That my instincts are more to rely on a piece of plastic in my hand than my own heart? not now. I am tired of waiting - waiting "for my life to begin." Because waiting only brings more waiting. Or even worse, more DOing. DOing just to fill the time.... i'm sick of complaining about my life instead of living it. I'm exhausted from feeling like i need things so much... weary from all the procrastination.... and i'm done watching time go by as i get further and further from BEcoming who i want to BE, who I AM.

I can't wait for you all to meet that girl, if she can just flow free of her shell.

merlin in his outside spot, helping me study

you know summer's nearly over when.....

it's football time!!!!!!! cold temperatures, sleet, and snow are soon to follow!

canton, ohio