rolanni | To-Do

~~1. Rectify November's books, SRM and Saltation~~
2. Answer professional emails ~~(2)~~ (1)
~~3. Wash dishes~~
~~4. Laundry -- in process~~
5. Write Yule cards
6. Clean house
7. Write

...I need a To-Do List with "Write" at the top. ...which will happen soon enough, there being only 262 days before we need to hand in Ghost Ship, whereupon the house and the accounting will once more begin the long slide toward entropy.

Yesterday's excitement included the Great Water Heater Bleep-out, possibly caused by the wind, and which contributed to the Completely Unreasonable Pile of Dishes that I slew this morning. Warm water is a wondrous thing, surely, and? My next house is going to have a dishwasher. Or a maid. Or both.

Today's forecast is for snow. I'm having a hard time believing in this forecast, given the blueness of the sky and the yellowness of the sun. We Shall See.

Only a week and three days of day-job fun until winter break. I may be anticipating winter break a little too much. It's like, "Eight days and no more day-job!" Which is, yanno, true, but for a limited time only. Unless my back-brain knows something I don't; and, to be fair, it often does. Well. Movie deal? Winning lottery ticket? Delivery of that crate of gold bars that's been sitting all this time on a dock at Dubai?

I'm reading everyone's camera recommendations with interest -- thank you! My timeline is that I would really like to have a new camera in time to take it with me to our GoH gig in Orlando. I'd had my eye on the Olympus FE4000, but there appear to be shutter-speed issues, which Won't Do At All. Also, I see that lots of folks like their Canons, but they seem to have a problem parsing in-door lighting. Since conventions mostly take place inside, this is kind of an issue.

...and now, back to the doing of books-as-in-bookkeeping.

What's everybody else doing that's fun?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

About cameras:

In subcompact range, I'd look for something in the 8-10 MP range. There are actually problems with image quality that arise when you try to cram too many pixels into such a small sensor.

All digital cameras struggle with the color of indoor lighting. As do all color film cameras, and all photographers, since fluorescent light made their debut. It's just a fact of life, so it shouldn't a disqualifying thing for a camera, unless it's truly horrible at it. I'll skip the light color lecture explaining why, unless you really want it. :-)

And no, I don't have a recommendation. I know what I would buy for myself, but I'm willing to up my pocket size and thin my wallet to get features most people don't care about. :-)

A good "convention" pocket camera is the Panasonic LX-3. Sadly it's not particularly cheap but it has an F2.0 lens meaning it will take good pictures indoors without firing off a distracting and disfiguring flash. It also has a 24mm wideangle setting which helps when shooting groups of people. The tradeoff is the zoom range is limited. I figured it had been designed for the realtor market, to take pictures of house interiors and make them look brighter and more spacious than they really were.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0807/08072102panasoniclx3.asp

Believe me, a dishwasher becomes an auxiliary storage cabinet, and the dishes pile up in the sink until you have re-used most of the ones in the dishwasher.

My next house is going to have a dishwasher. Or a maid. Or both.

I hear you.

In the alternate universe where I didn't wind up with a husband and four kids, I think my apartment has a housekeeping service. (Let it be made quite clear, I actually prefer this universe to that one. It's just that some days, I get kind of wistful, if you know what I mean.)

Believe you me, if you are a single or double with no children, a dishwasher takes about a week to fill up to capacity...unless one is a specialty cook and uses lots of dishes. And you don't want to run it until it's full - wastes electricity to heat the water and run the thing.

And I'm having the interior rooms of my house painted (yesterday and today) (Thank heavens for painters who need jobs and will work weekends.) I'm moving from room to room as they do. But clean walls will be nice for Christmas: and the carpets get done next week.

Have someone paint our interior rooms? Whoa .. .good plan.

I keep putting that on the schedule but inopportune things like paying for car stuff, vet bills, and what such keeps getting in the way. If I think too hard I think at least one of these rooms has only been painted once since we moved here back when we feed our pretty black Beretta for around a buck a gallon. My pro painter brother was going to help... but he's down with Lyme disease bigtime ... so that movie deal would be useful (are you listening universe?)

I'm cleaning house not in the cleaning sense but in removing as much to the recycle bin as possible sense. I am doing this because I'm supposed to be grading.

As to dishwasher, I have dish drawers and love them. I run one at a time and only run the both at once when I've been doing a lot of cooking/dinner party. They were expensive but that is made up for in the ease of use/quiet while running/energy efficiency.

Sewing, crafting, kicking back. Vacation is great (though the unpaid part of that is... not so much).

I'll bet *my* completely unreasonable pile of dishes could beat up *your* completely unreasonable pile of dishes. It's been a week since I reported to the rental agent that my water heater was on the fritz, and nothing's happened; I'm going to go in on my lunch break and complain.

And the hot water's actually been out longer than a week, because it took me a while to tire of the idea that it would start working by itself, without needing to call anyone in, if I just switched it off and then on again in the magically correct way.

(Possibly I'd be treating the whole thing with more urgency if it weren't summer here.)

Well, Steve would look awfully cute in the outfit. [weg]

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re: your maid