Second Week In April 2010

No great thoughts to start the blog this week, but I do have a ton a pictures, and a lot went on, so let's jump into it!

Monday I knew that Joe was going to be out of town, and he has the guitar lesson right before me, so I went in for my lesson early. Guitar lessons are fun and I do really want to learn, but it's obvious that they have slipped down to the bottom my project priority list, and really I don't see any reason to move anything else down. When I got home, I finished my taxes. Thanks to a tip from a friend, I found a $400 reduction in what I owed, so it ended up being quite reasonable. I told my friend I was buying lunch next time he wanted, I'll still be way up.

Tuesday I was excited all day at work, why? Lawn work. I came home, changed lickety-split, and fired up the lawn mower. I love it! If you don't get it, you don't get it, so there. After experiencing the joy of lawn mowing, I cleaned myself up and went downstairs to dance practice. It started a little slow, but we ended up with seven people. It's not necessarily about learning something 'new' for me, it's about dancing correctly at least once a week. I'm fairly sloppy at the weekly dance, so any time spent building proper muscle memory is time well spent.

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed on Wednesday, and went downhill from there. I had a dreadful day, not of my own making necessarily, but how I chose to react to some dumb situations, both at work and at home. I think I was really kind of stressing about my yearly review (on Thursday). I ended up asleep by 2145. By the time I finished my yearly review on Thursday, I was pretty well spent, and had to cheer up because I really had no other place to go. I think I learned a lesson into my heart this week that has been in my head for a long time "don't take it so personally."

Later on Thursday evening I went to CJ's house for game night. CJ lives on Carter Lake and we sat out on the deck and grilled dogs and burgers. I played a game of Settlers of Catan: Germany. I didn't win, but I still like Catan. It was a nice twist with German towns and monuments, same mechanics. I also played a couple of games of pool. I have lost twice on that table, once playing nine ball when I ran the table until I missed the nine ball and left a sitting duck, and the other time playing eight ball when I sunk the eight. Otherwise I love that table, I kick butt

Friday I couldn't take it anymore and packed up the camera and took it in to work with me. At lunch I drove over to Wehrspan Lake and took some pictures of the scenery. You can see the 50 posts from this shoot here.

I tried some post processing on this one and came with a new (for me) effect.

Unsurprisingly, after work, I went dancing. Surprisingly, Linda was there after a four year absence. I hardly knew what to say to her, so I just danced. I took pictures, how about that? It wasn't anything good or noteworthy. I might be done with dancing pictures until Lindy in the Park.

I have a new rule, friends are not allowed to get third floor apartments anymore. Stacy was moving to get a place to live not far from where she works. The problem is that the apartment she was living at was on the third floor. Silly Stacy. The neighborhood is one that I lived in when I first moved to Omaha, and it turned out to be an easy move. I had to tease Stacy because at one point it was her and six men helping her move.

After we finished the move and sat around and ate pizza, I went home, and grabbed the camera and went next store to the park.

This was what I started with and I was trying to get a stained glass effect. I did okay.

On a different subject, someday I hope to understand channels and how to use them. You can see all the photos from this shoot here.

Saturday night was the long awaited return of D&D&D. I must say it was not quite as entertaining as the first time we played, but it was still fun. I think it was too much role play and not enough encounters. We ended up talking until 3:00am.

Of course staying up really really late Saturday night means that making it to week number two of Mass Chaos was trying. You can read about it here if you so desire to do so.

When I got home from church, I took a nap and then started work on uploading about a million pictures from the week. The week ended up with a wild event at Culver's eating ice cream with the Shannonites.

This was probably my most scattered post in a while, sorry readers.