« confession is good for the soul | Main | alive! »
Monday, May 16, 2005
what a weekend
I'm taking a break from giving the house a badly-needed very thorough cleaning to post a few notes about what my weekend was like. Because, you know, I really NEED a break, since I've been working without stopping for, what, ten minutes now. THE HARDSHIP. (really it's because words are rattling around in my brain and they won't shut up until I type them out.)
Friday: Was T's Friday off. Um, I think we spent the day at home hanging out as a family. How sad is it that I can't remember three days ago? Oh yes, in the afternoon C and I went for a walk while the boys practiced target shooting (oh goody! pacifist comments again!) in the backyard with their air rifles (read: pellet guns). Then we went to the video store, where we rented "The Phantom of the Opera", which T and I watched after the kids were in bed. I am SO MAD that I didn't go see that at the theater; I LOVED it. I was afraid to watch it in the theater because everyone said I wouldn't like it if I liked the stage musical. That just meant that the "everyone" in that sentence was taking hallucinogenic drugs, or something, because I repeat, I LOVED it. Perhaps this makes me the cinematic equivalent of a fourteen-year-old, but I don't care. (T loved it too. We watched the musical on the first New Year's Eve we were married, in San Francisco; this was one of the HUGE highlights of our pre-kids life together, for both of us.)
Saturday: T had decided that Saturday would be kind of a Mother's Day: Take Two kind of thing, since Mother's Day ended up being a quiet day at home with a (sick?) child. So we went to the zoo. We went to Storyland (basically a huge, shady playground/garden, with equipment, buildings, etc., based on kids' stories, very nice). We went to Denny's. We went to Barnes and Noble, where I spent my gift card on Middlemarch, a CD of Bach's flute sonatas, a collection of Jane Austen's unfinished works, and The Wind in the Willows.
Nothing terribly notable on Sunday: Sunday school, nap, baby shower, quick trip to my parents' so that T could get a tractor part for his cousin and the kids could go swimming in the creek. I have pictures of this but I'm too lazy to post them now.
And now today. I'm listening to Dvorak's "Symphony from the New World" at a pretty high volume level, which brings back high school years in a big way, and trying to undo the disaster that is my living room and kitchen. The kids are supposed to be cleaning their rooms. I hear playing, but I'm pretending I don't.
Speaking of people who are supposed to be cleaning but aren't. Ahem.
Comments
Hi Rachel,
Just wanted to say you take some FANTASTIC pics...what kind of digital camera do you use? I'm in the market for buying one for my trip to New Zealand.
Thanks,
Katie
Posted by: Katie at May 16, 2005 12:10 PM
Katie, first, thank you. :) I have a Nikon Coolpix 5400 and I LOVE it. It's great for someone like me who likes to experiment and learn but doesn't have a lot of experience, AND if you just want to take snapshots like at a birthday party or whatever, it has an automatic mode which makes that easy.
The only two flaws I have found in it are the following:
1) Manual focus. I can't get it to work right to save my life. You don't NEED it for much, unless you're trying to take a picture something that's behind, say, glass or wire (like at a zoo). For everything else, one of the various autofocus settings works just beautifully.
2) The aperture will only close down to an 8. I didn't even know what this WAS until I had this camera; had only the foggiest idea of what F-stop was, and that only because my husband has some old cameras with which he takes astrophotos. So I didn't know that a manual camera stops down much further than that, and that there would be A FEW things I couldn't do with mine the way I wanted to because of its limitations (example: I want to take a misty-flowy picture of a waterfall, and can't. I can't do a really serious motion blur in bright sunlight. That sort of thing). However, if you want to spend the money on filters and adapters, you can correct this with a neutral density filter, which is basically like sunglasses for your camera.
Other than those small things, it's perfect. :)
Posted by: Rachel at May 16, 2005 12:24 PM
i DID see that movie in the theatre and thought it was beautiful, very well done, but did like the theatre version better. (of course). i thought the film was well acted, but that the love story between Erik and Christine was slighted a bit by the film.
other then that though, i thought it was beautiful, have seen it twice since then and agree with you, if you love the musical then the movie is a must see.... :)
Posted by: misty at May 16, 2005 12:25 PM
Hello Rachel--
Target practice is benign as long as the targets don't have human faces! About housecleaning, here's a little help I found 18 months ago: www.flylady.com. Give it a try. It makes housework manageable, not overwhelming. Good luck!
Posted by: Karen at May 16, 2005 12:56 PM
Aw Rachel, we've just got to get used to the fact that we are twins. My car, my house, my DESK at WORK are all always about two notches away from disaster.
Actually, I must say my desk is a bonified disaster right now.
Posted by: Kristen at May 17, 2005 02:58 PM
