So the front label says that it's Stoli vanilla flavored Russian vodka. But the label up at the top by the cap says this:

Genuine
Russian flavored vodka

Surely I can't be alone in finding this hilarious...

...but one of those things that is a little freaky. Last night I was driving home from some friends' house and I inexplicably got super driving anxiety about being in an accident. I started wondering how they'd contact Dan since he'd probably be asleep and wouldn't answer his phone... started wondering if I died in a crash would he not find out about it until the next day... blah blah blah. I was totally OBSESSING on it on the drive home. That was at about 10:30. At about 10:20 it turns out, my friend Meghan's mom called her to let her know that her niece had been in a serious accident, and Meghan ended up hanging out at the ER until 2am with her niece (who survived a really bad accident with relatively minor injuries, thankfully!). But I find it strange that my friend gets this really bad news and is no doubt thinking "car accident! injury! worry! stress! crash! aaaaahh!" and moments later I'm thinking the same thing completely out of the blue and for no apparent reason. Hmmmmm.

So the professional photos from graduation are done and I got the little thing in the mail trying to get me to pay scads of money to order them in every shape and size. I did order an 8 x 10, but will be scanning and printing at home for any additional copies/sizes. Decided not to buy the $50 plastic frame that holds a 5x7 plus your tassel (5x7 and tassel not included) or any of the other totally inflated crap they offered :)

My mom and Dominic were sitting quite far away, though, and so I don't have any kind of good picture of me graduating, so it's worth it to buy one copy.

I uploaded a new folder of photos to the gallery--it's the "Wedding pics by Lindy L" album.

Check it out!

Today's goal:
1) continue the Laundry Cavalcade
2) pack up the books

I must say, I love my Kindle 2. Best Graduation Present EVAAAAR!

...whoa... I don't really have a lot to say about it other than just... whoa.

After hundreds of hours of observation and analysis, I can reveal my findings to the world with confidence in their veracity:

My cats are very, very silly.

I know it comes as a shock, but I have ample proof to back up my statement.

Does Verizon's network have sand in its vagina or is there something wrong with my phone? Calls are getting cut off right and left recently and it's driving me batty!

Oh dear, if I go on a spree buying books like this one for my new Kindle, I'll be broke in no time!


;)

My mom gave me some money for graduation which she specifically forbid me to spend on bills or anything like that. I was supposed to use it to buy myself nifty gift stuff that I'd enjoy and keep around. Well, I'd been kind of depressed at the idea that in moving, we'd be boxing up all of our books and probably leaving them boxed in storage for the foreseeable future (chances are, the first place we live will not have enough room for all of our bookcases).

The solution was obvious: I used graduation money to buy an Amazon Kindle 2, which can hold 1,500 books electronically, includes unlimited access to Wikipedia and the Oxford English Dictionary, and which has a text-to-speech function that means I can listen to my books in the car. It even remembers where it left off when you decide to go back to reading it yourself again. It should get here on Thursday. Woohoo!

After many months of worrying about it, I'm reaching the point of despair. We're moving to Boston and our hopes of getting anything even close to a big enough rental house are miniscule. It's looking likely that much of our stuff will remain in storage for the next three years, and given the size place we're likely to be able to afford, I won't have the space to do any of my painting, so that stuff will all go into storage as well. This prospect depresses me greatly. I think that the surroundings in which you live affect your mood to a rather large extent, and being crowded into some shithole for three years is sure to do a number on mine. We had talked about buying a house, as the prices are low right now, but we can't do that. The rental market is obscenely inflated, so we're forced to rent, and will only be able to afford something extremely small and old and crappy. We currently have a 3 bedroom house (with a den and a rec room) FULL of stuff and that we're already going to have to get rid of a ton of things that we own just to fit into said shitty small house. Not that our stuff is great stuff, by any means... a lot of it is furniture we got for free or for really cheap at yard sales and stuff... but some of it I really like, like my dining room table, which we're leaving behind because it would take up too much space in the moving truck, and we probably won't have room for it wherever we move anyway.

Add to that my job prospects... the economy sucks right now and getting a job of any kind is difficult. I'd been assuming that I'd have to get a crappy job in food service or working as a receptionist/secretary/data entry/filing person/etc but Dan had been telling me that no, having a college degree meant that I'd have a lot better options. I had been skeptical, but had decided to look into it. I'd been looking into it and was horribly intimidated by everything I saw. I've pretty much accepted that my initial expectations are far more likely, especially given that in Boston in particular, with all of its art schools (largely the reason we are moving there--so that I could go to graduate school, which it's now become apparent that I can't do because we can't afford it), has a large population of people with art degrees who are far more qualified for the jobs I would want than I am. Also, given that I'm applying from out of state, and indeed won't be actually living in state until the end of August... (though for much of that time I'll be in New Hampshire, about 2-3 hours away)...well, my prospects for getting any kind of art-related job are just about zero.

As a last resort I posted about this on a message board, but that just made me more depressed and I gave up on it--to which the response was that oh at least I'd given it 2 hours of thought! HA! 2 hours. Try more like six months or a year! I've been fucking stressing over this shit for a very long time. Those idiots don't seem to understand that just because I only had a thread about it for 2 hours doesn't mean that that is all the thought I've put into it, or that they are the only people I've talked to about it. They also have no concept of the idea of "venting" whatsoever. I've decided that the self-important asshole factor on that board is too high for me to deal with right now. There are nice people there, but the assholes outnumber them and outshout them and invariably I end up feeling far worse than I started when I try to spend more than a few minutes there. It used to be a nice place, about 10 years ago. I set up an email filter to delete any mail coming from there, so that should help. Maybe once things have stabilized in my life I can go back and post to the threads about the TV shows I watch and stuff, but my desire to post anything substantial there has all but disappeared. They're like piranhas and they delight in belittling people and revel in hostility. (Again, not all of them, but those that are like that outweigh the nice folks just by their loudness.) Hell, they have an entire forum dedicated to flaming each other and being nasty.

Anyway, I feel like curling up in the corner and crying... which is pretty much what I did last night, and again when I woke up this morning. I imagine it's what I'll be doing daily. It doesn't help that I'm all by myself except for the cats.

This is the video that played (partially*) before the ceremony at our wedding (though I did add some stuff later, since I had some time).

Dan and I met in 2004 at a juggling festival in Buffalo, NY. This is a retelling of that story, with some…err…artistic liberties taken. And fancy special effects. Very fancy.

Special thanks to Jack and Jeri Kalvan, Michael Karas, and the Flying Karamazov Brothers: Mark Ettinger, Rod Kimball, Paul Magid, as well as all the other people who agreed to appear on this video. Thanks to Michael Rosman for officiating the ceremony. Thanks to Emily Lester for her invaluable help with the Very Fancy special effects. (George Lucas, eat your heart out!)


See the video (smaller size)
Got a fast connection? Go to full-sized video.

I have posted some of our honeymoon pictures!


Right Here!

Woohoo!

I'm proud to say that this is the minister who married us, with our best man's wife on his shoulders, about to ride a unicycle at our wedding reception. Tell me you've seen that at every wedding you've been to! (Though I daresay it will become a trend once people realize how fun it is...)

This isn't a very good quality video, but here is Dan and Ash in the groom/best man dance from our wedding:



We didn't tell Ash about this beforehand, we just called him up and put him on the spot. Our friend David came in and joined them later. It was a lot of fun!

Also, I've started to get pictures that people took at the wedding (this is the hard part! getting everyone who had a camera there to send us all of their photos and videos!) so I've got an album started in my gallery for the wedding:


Wedding Pictures

Here it is... all those essays and exams and projects finally paid off:
( Read more... )

Somebody took this video of me juggling knives (a wedding gift from another juggling family) at the reception. Woohoo!



( More wedding videos )

Did you know that when there is a football game in Rome, it is illegal to sell alcohol of any kind that day? We had no idea, and were surprised when we couldn't get wine with our dinner. We hadn't even known that it was the Champion's League Finals while we were there...

Can you imagine in the US if they didn't serve alcohol the day of the Super Bowl?