Passive vs Interactive entertainment

It’s official. We’ve crossed the line into interactive entertainment! In the next post I’ll tell you all about our fun weekend, but I wanted to post about this separately since we came to this conclusion on Sunday.

We’ve been doing a lot of art shows and plays lately, as some of you have noticed. It started out as a way to meet more artsy people and start networking for Nick’s comic, but we’ve realised that once you start seeing little plays and being entertained, seeing a movie just doesn’t cut it. There are a ton of movies out that we’d like to see, but as much as we love seeing them in the theatre, if we have to choose between a movie or a play, art show, whatever, we’ll choose any of these over the movie.

Even if the play is small and weird, it’s still more fun than sitting in a movie. Hell, we saw an interpretive dance piece set to a Flaming Lips record – I shit you not – and loved it. It was totally weird and totally fun.

The art shows this weekend were so much more fun than drinking at the Con or seeing a movie or even going to a party. It’s hard to explain, but once you get used to this kind of interactive entertainment it really changes your priorities as far as planning your activities!

We hope you locals will give a hollah if you’re interested in joining us for these shows. It’s usually really cheap (much of the theatre stuff is free or “pay what you can”) and very fun. :-)

New Mac and weekend fun!

We ended up having a Flash Party™ with Emily Friday night. Although we’d both had a very busy week, when Emily came over, we knew a party was imminent. Nick passed out around 3am and I finally got Emily corralled and back home (across the street) by 4am. Whew! Long day!!

We slept till around 11am on Sat then got up and started our yard work. We felled 2.5 trees and planted 5 trees yesterday. Oy! We came in around 4pm, showered and collapsed on the couch. The rain started a while later and we fell asleep. I woke up at 6:45pm and freaked because we were supposed to be up at D&B’s at 7pm for Quinn’s birthday bash. We got ourselves ready to go in 45 minutes and were happy to find out that Caroline et al. were also late!

The evening at Dave & Busters was fun! A bit more money that we had budgeted, but that’s ALWAYS the way it is with these things. If you think you’ll spend $50, bank on $100. Every time. That was just for dinner. With the game cards it was $145. Eh, it was fun in any case! Shoutouts to everyone – especially Ken and Deb for their Julie the Cruise Director duties. Well done! :-)

Thanks to the lovely rain all night, the new trees are well watered in. It’s very windy and chilly today, which makes it the perfect day to sit here and work with my new Mac!

I’ve been bitching about my G4 becoming flakey lately, so Nick got me a dual 1.8Ghz Mac off of eBay. We got the Mac, the Apple Care warranty until Sept., keyboard, mouse and a flat screen CRT monitor for $1000. What a DEAL! These Macs go for $2000 pretty much everywhere. The guy who sold the system had just graduated from school and needed a laptop rather than a tower system. The Mac needs more RAM, but other than that it’s pristine. Well, it WAS pristine until frelling UPS apparently dropped the damn box and bent the aluminum frame. :-(

The Mac’s internal parts appear undamaged but the case and front foot is completely bent. It had $1000 insurance on it, which is a good thing since UPS will pay for the repairs which will be $685. The case alone is $500, plus we want complete diagnostics run by Onyx and then there’s labour to install the part. Aside from the diagnostics, however, we’ll probably pass on the $500 case. I don’t care about it and we could use the $500 to offset what we spent. UPS is being a little pissy about this, but I’ll be damned if they’ll rip me off AGAIN. When we ordered the iMac Flower Power for my niece, UPS damaged the plastic on it and we never got a damn dime. We think that the sellers probably cashed in on the insurance if any was ever paid. UPS were assholes to us about it and we lost out. Not this time. I’ll see them in court before they’ll get away with the damage this Mac has. It’s significant damage:

Broken welds and bent frame.
Broken welds and bent frame.

Anyway, we’ve had a busy and fun weekend. Next weekend is the Atlanta Comic Expo (or ACE con as we call it). It’ll be fun, although I have trepidation about the DragonCon people running it. Those people are the problem with DragonCon now, so it’ll be interesting to see if they bring their politics and bullshit to this “new” con. You know which way I’d bet! LOL We’ll be there Saturday and Sunday with a couple of art shows sandwiched in on Sat night. :-) [edit 4/09: ACE made it two whole years before it was “reabsorbed” into DragonCon. Sad. -A]

There is a plan

I have a plan for the problems I enumerated yesterday. I will see a GP first and try to get the sleep issues handled. I have put myself on St John’s Wort for the depression.

I’m fine, as I said at the end of the post, I like to write things out sometimes, it helps clear my head. And it did.

Thanks for the support! I appreciate it!

It’ll get worked out, I’ve just got to get it done.

Another day lost to insomnia

It’s funny. Some people avoid sleep and hate the whole process while all I want is a decent night’s sleep without eating a handful of pills.

Last night I took TWO Sleep Assures before bed and still woke up promptly at 2:30am. I got up, walked around, looked at the moon, drank some gatorade and took a pill cocktail and a double dose of Deep Sleep. I got back into bed and there I was until around 5:30-6am, when I fell asleep for a WHOLE HOUR before being awakened by cats and Nick getting up to feed them. Of course I couldn’t go back to sleep so I did my errands in a fog and came back here to collapse on the couch. I did not sleep, but napped lightly for a couple of hours. I still feel like shit and can’t really think straight.

I’ve lost SO many days of my life to this shit. There must be something I can take to fucking SLEEP.

Insomnia sucks ass.

April Fool’s Day

Is Anniversary #3 for us!

We went to the Titanic exhibit! If you’ve not gone, GO. It’s here until June 2nd and it’s totally worth $20! Nick found some discount coupons for $4 off each ticket somewhere at the Atllantic Station website.

They have a 15 ton piece of the ship and it’s HUGE. It really gives you the scale of the ship. It’s about 30-40 ft wide and about 15-20 high and it’s just part of ONE cabin in the second class section! I was hoping for more stuff, but I understand that there are some other exhibits out there besides this one. Don’t get me wrong, this one has a lot of pieces and takes 1.5 hours, but it still seemed like a relatively small number of things from a ship that huge. This exhibit is the only one with the huge chunks. There is a second chunk that’s “only” 3 tons. It was separated from the larger one after salvage. I loved the personal effects that survived.

There was a surprising number of paper objects that survived. Apparently being in tanned leather somehow kept them from deteriorating. There was a champagne bottle with champagne still in it. There was a perfume sample case that still had the samples in it – and you could smell them through holes in the display! They have an artificial iceberg you can touch, which is ingenious.

The best part is the ticket you get when you start. They match the passenger’s gender with you and give you a replica of the actual tickets used. It has the Class and sometimes the cabin # as well as biographical info about the passenger if there is any. You can find out if your passenger lived or died at the end of the tour. That was fun. Many more women than men made it, naturally, so my 2nd class cabin woman lived and Nick’s 2nd class cabin man did not. It was great fun.

Then we went to Six Feet Under for lunch and ate WAY too much! Note to self: never eat hushpuppies with beer! Can you say bloat? Argh!

Then we had a couple of hours to kill before our friends at Twinhead Theatre did there part of the 365 Plays show… or so we thought. The bulletin said 7pm, but it actually started at 6:30. SUCK. So, once again at loose ends, we hung out with Deisha and the theatre crowd at the Corner Pub for a bit.

We were still semi bored, but also tired, so we trundled home.

It’s 11:35 now and we’re off to beddie. We had a wonderful Anniversary! It’s always fun to hang out with my favourite person in the whole world! I’m a lucky girl to have Nick. We are far, far more together than apart. We’re a team in every sense and that’s why we’ll be together always, I think. :-)

Happy Anniversary, baby! I love you!