Thinking Locally and Acting Locally

My friend Christo sent me this today, and I felt it was worth reposting (one of these days I'll get off my ass and actually design him a blog or something):

Whenever you hire anyone to work for you, go to the local store, book shop, whatever... you might start to ask about their feelings about policy issues. If they are more or less in line with you, go ahead and give them the $$ patronage. Otherwise, find someone else to provide the same service in the future.

I have observed for years that Fundies hire other Fundies (psych dept at UMD, accounting firms and so on).

George and I want to keep SF and the Bay Are strong on gay rights so whenever we can we get our home repairs done by gay workmen. We can't always do it but we make the attempt whenever possible. That helps insure directly that we are supporting the living efforts of people who will vote and spend as we do. It makes San. Fran. a local gay power house. The mayor NEEDS our votes and will listen to us. So will the whole city assembly. And we as a group have the clout to make zoning decisions, put up a giant gay flag in the Castro, and so on. There is the clout to put gay and gay friendly allies in power.

Example: the tax assesor decided to use her power so that when one same sex partner dies, the other doesn't have their house re-assesed for tax purposes. This is a HUGE deal in California (we don't regularly re-asses here, only when a house is sold or inherited by a 'non-spouse').

So what can you all do? (I'll assume you'll forward this to a few people)

Get some local left leaning newspapers -- look in the back and see what people are advertising their services. Going to hire someone for lawn care -- then why get a Republican Right Winger's son to do it when you can support the college savings effort of a potential future liberal lawyer? Need a tree taken out? That is really expensive -- throw the bone to someone who thinks more like you do.

We use a local gay paper first -- when I needed hauling done this month, I called a guy from the back of that paper and had him do it. That will go towards helping him and his partner stay in the Bay Area. I had to get the hauling done anyway, why not support him.

I continue to believe that voting with your dollars is the only vote that gets heard. The things you buy and who you pay money to tell the world what you think is right. Every time you send money away from your community you tell the world you don't think your own community deserves that money. And they believe you.

# Posted by ayse on 11/29/04 at 5:26 PM | Comments (1)

That Was Short, This is Long

I'm back in SLO after what feels like a very short holiday break. Rosie came back with me because Noel has a conference this week, and we had a good talk on the way down about how too much traffic sucks, and how we're not going to get to play as much this week as we did last week, because it's going to be very busy.

I did all the talking, of course.

This week is my last week of school, with a crit of the model I need to finish building in studio on Friday afternoon, then next week I have three final exams in a row, all early in the morning (my intro lecture, engineering, then physics), so of course I'm getting off to a good start by staying up late reading a knitting message board (knittyboard) and ruminating on how I'm really not a modern knitter-type.

For one thing, I'm really not all that into Stitch and Bitch. I have it (thanks, Mommy!), and have read it, and will probably make one or two of the patterns from it, but I don't think it's the greatest thing to hit knitting since yarn. I prefer my old Vogue Knitting, plus a couple ancient books I have on pattern drafting. I'd like a couple of other knitting books (like The Lacy Knitting of Mary Schiffman which looks terrifying and interesting at the same time), but for the most part right now I'm looking at patterns, and I'd rather not get a book of patterns with a bunch of "how to knit" in the front, because frankly I don't need it and would rather not be paying for it.

Also, I am only now learning how to read patterns, although what I've ended up doing is taking the instructions and charting them out in the patterning format I developed for myself, which I don't think is cheating because all the books say to make copious notes when reading through the pattern before beginning. Apparently, most knitters start out with patterns (for a stockinette scarf? Heavens) and only later branch out into designing their own stuff. I would like to thank my mother for not pushing me in that direction, because I have some great handmade stuff I would not have today if I had to rely on commercial patterns.

I've noted before that I don't have a stash (though for some reason certain people keep trying to encourage me to build one). I buy yarn for the project I'm working on or planning to work on, and that's pretty much it. I don't save yarn or buy it on sale and try to figure out what to do with it later. This is pretty much entirely due to yarn being so fricking expensive -- I tend to make large projects and buying enough yarn to account for a huge sweater or wrap isn't the sort of thing I can afford to do on a whim-- but also it's because I go through long periods of not knitting (or, now, crocheting) at all, and during those periods, yarn takes up a lot of room and attracts cats who nest in it and leave it all furry. Apparently, this makes me rare in the knitting world, because everybody talks about their stash and how they're trying to knit their way through it.

Now I've also noticed that I'm a one-project kind of gal, and this is unusual. I have one thing going at a time, and I work on it until I'm done. This is not due to some random chance, but it is entirely due to an understanding of myself I came to after years of self-observation: if I can switch away from doing something to doing something else, I will, and neither thing will ever get done. So in the interests of getting things done, I don't let myself start something new until the first project is finished.

This also means I only need to own enough needles to do one project. This evening I followed a link to the web page of a woman who has eleven unfinished projects going, and just sat there and marveled at her investment in knitting needles. I have four pairs, myself (sizes 3, 5, 7, and 8). I've got two circular needles (stolen, I believe, from my mother, because I've had them for so long), and no double pointed needles at all (I've always made my own patterns based on sewing pattern design, so no knitting in the round was called for). I'm a real minimalist knitter. But then again, I'm not totally obsessed with it. I like knitting thing to wear, not knitting just for the sake of knitting, though I do find knitting itself relaxing and it's good exercise for my hands.

When I was getting my first degree, I knit while doing schoolwork, because schoolwork was usually reading some long treatise or going over verb tables or something like that, and knitting occupied my hands and helped me concentrate on not trying to track down and bludgeon every deconstructionist still living. I'm finding that this time around, my schoolwork and knitting are incompatible. You simply cannot knit and draw at the same time (or at least, not doing a decent job at either one). On the other hand, knitting limbers up my arms and hands for drawing, so I do want to keep doing it, even if it doesn't go as quickly as it would if I could double-task.

And now, to bed.

# Posted by ayse on 11/29/04 at 12:38 AM

Paradise

Yesterday we took Rosie to the beach at Morro Bay to play. We do this every time she and Noel come down to visit, and she loves it more than anything. So much so that she refuses to do her business anywhere else, because she wants to force us to take her there sooner out of concern for her insides. A little later today, she and I will go back, because although Noel left this morning (to get to an afternoon gig in Sebastapol), Rosie stayed behind to spend the next couple days with me before I go home for Thanksgiving break.

You want pictures, you say? Allow me to oblige.

...

The beach itself is fairly calm, freezing cold as all California beaches North of LA are, and relatively quiet, because the surf doesn't get high enough to be attractive to that crowd.

Most of the time, Rosie just runs back and forth, in and out of the water (she likes shallow water) and stopping now and then to sniff piles of seaweed.

But every now and then another dog comes along, and they play together.

Or she sees some birds take flight and runs along with them, until the water gets too deep to run in.

We always seem to arrive at the beach as the tide is going out, so we get to see all sorts of lovely little temporary tide pools, which will drain as the tide gets lower. But when the ocean is still high enough, they are full of water and sparkle.

There's been a huge offshore flow lately, with strong winds that have reshaped the beach. They made these ripples in the dunes just above the high tide mark, and it was recent enough that nobody had walked on them yet. We walked around them.

# Posted by ayse on 11/21/04 at 11:57 AM

Overreacting a Bit?

Showing the back and shoulders of a woman is pornographic, but the nearly-nude bodies of the women below aren't?

Give me a break. People in this country need to step away from the TV set and stop pretending entertainment is real life.

# Posted by ayse on 11/18/04 at 5:06 PM

Faint Praise

I've been reading pie recipes this evening, and one thing I will say in Martha Stewart's favour, even though almost everything I've made from her recipes has come out strangely due to some gross error in the directions, you will never, and I mean never, see an MS recipe that calls for frozen dessert topping in the ingredients list.

Seriously. I'm aiming for edible. Quick and easy are bonuses but not ends in themselves.

# Posted by ayse on 11/17/04 at 7:01 PM

Boring Desert Spaces

I stayed up until about 2am finishing some watercolours that are due today in studio. The thing about watercolours is, you really can't rush them. So I have one watercolour that took three days and is very nice, and six that took several hours each and are OK. Looser, to be sure, but workable. One is drying as I type this from a final layer of paint. Of course, they're all of the same basic thing: the Arizona desert.

...

Next big due item is a combination essay/drawings for my intro to the field class. I finished the essay last night (I can write a 600 word essay in my sleep) and most of the drawings, which I will finish today sometime before I go get signoff from the studio teacher who has to sign off on it (rolls eyes).

After that, lessee, we have a splot of engineering homework, a bunch of study models, whatever my digital imaging teacher comes up with... it's all moving very fast towards December 3.

# Posted by ayse on 11/17/04 at 7:21 AM

Sheepish

I finished crocheting my sheep tonight. Once I was done with the main body, it went very fast. The legs were a bit of a pain, but I decided to soldier through and now it's all done. Check it out:

OK, it kind of looks like a pig. And I didn't have the right yarn for embroidering the face on. But it's mostly done, done, done, and ready to be off to a baby in the midwest. I'm thinking of doing a lace shawl for my next project.

# Posted by ayse on 11/15/04 at 9:10 PM | Comments (2)

Head vs. Stomach

There's a new craze among the "allergic" to everything crowd, and it's the elimination diet. The concept is pretty simple: you remove all possible irritants from your diet and slowly add them back in so you can tell which one is causing the trouble. The problem is, from what I can tell from a discussion with one of these people over the weekend, they're going about it all wrong.

...

First let's talk a bit about allergies. Most people don't really understand how allergies work, and what an allergy is. There are real allergies, and there are intolerances, and there are irritants. Irritants are things like dust and smoke that irritate your body. Everybody is affected by them. You're not "allergic" to smoke. Smoke is just irritating. I'm allergic to tobacco -- my throat swells up and begins to close when I am around it, whether it's burning or not.

Intolerances are when your body just doesn't react properly to something, usually something you eat. Lots of people are lactose-intolerant, which means they can't properly digest lactose and end up in gastric distress from consuming it. Cruciferous vegetables and beans can provoke similar reactions. A very small number of people are actually allergic to milk, which means their throats swell up and they get out of breath if they consume it.

See where I'm going, here?

If you have an allergy, or your doctor suspects you have an allergy, the way to test for it is with prick tests or blood tests, not by potentially exposing you to a lethal dose of the allergen with a dietary test. Noel is allergic to milk. They found this through a blood test. If you're really allergic to a substance, they can test for it without putting you through a complicated diet routine. If you have an intolerance, it's fairly easy to eliminate the most obvious suspects in one go and figure it out, based on the symptoms and when they show up. The only reason for an elimination diet is to figure out an intolerance that is not obvious. So if you're doing an elimination diet, the first thing to know is what symptom you're trying to treat. If you have hives on your hands, an elimination diet is not likely to tell you where they are coming from.

So let's get back to our dieter. She (why is it almost always a she? For the same reason that "hysteria" got its name, originally) started out by basically going on Atkins, eliminating carbohydrate sources like vegetables and breads. But not nuts, which are the cause of plenty of allergies, or fats, which cause excess bile production and acid reflux. She did eliminate milk and soy. So basically no sources of calcium.

In contrast, when an actual doctor had me on an elimination diet, the first four days I drank a glucose/water syrup and was more hungry than I've ever been in my life. I could have eaten a whole cow, live, maybe even unwashed. Glucose is a completely digestible sugar. it's what your body breaks food down into. The idea was to have enough calories to get through the day, and enough fluid, but nothing that could cause problems. If you're allergic to glucose, you're allergic to life.

Then we added slightly more complex sugars, working our way up to complex carbohydrates like whole wheat. Some people have sugar intolerances, so the idea was that we'd find them right away. You keep the diet totally simple so there's nothing else to worry about but the intolerance. In contrast, my friend added vegetables in after a week, then soy (which is, um, a vegetable, but OK).

After a week of adding carbs, we began with possible irritants like fruits and vegetables known to cause intolerances or allergies, like strawberries, cruciferous vegetables, beans, and so on. One a meal from my ordinary diet. Still almost no fats (we now had vegetable oils) and no meat or dairy. By this time my doctor was almost convinced it was milk that was causing the problem, so we added a glass of milk. That was before I took the antibiotic that made me lactose intolerant, so nothing happened, so we added in an egg, and still nothing. Oh, the frustration. On the other hand, I was no longer spending two hours a day in the bathroom. Small mercies.

Let's contrast to my friend, the allergy sufferer. She's got a fairly complex diet already going, with no reactions. Meat and nuts, vegetables, now soy, and what does she add in? Citrus. Seriously, citrus. Which is not a type of fruit that tends to cause allergic reactions. It can cause acid reflux, because it's high in acids, but heck, if you have a tendancy to acid reflux anything can cause it.

Next she adds in yeast. A lot of people think they are allergic to yeast, or have some sort of sensitivity to it. I think they're just squeamish about eating live animals whole.

The next thing I added into my diet was chicken, which sent me running to the toilet ten minutes after lunch. We have a culprit, ladies and gentlemen. Odd that I can eat eggs and not poultry but there you have it. Chicken is usually considered a mild food, so our best guess is that I'm having a reaction to some drug the chicken is dosed with. I do have some antibiotic allergies, so it might be that.

In the meantime, my friend has added wheat to her arsenal. Some people are gluten intolerant. Remarkably fewer than you would think given the number of people who claim to be gluten intolerant when I start talking about how much I love bread. I can sit and listen and be appreciative while somebody talks about how good a burger was and what the qualities of a good burger are. I expect the same level of politeness from meat eaters who abstain from the goodness of wheat. Never going to get it, though.

The last things she adds in are all the Major Sins of the anti-food world: white sugar, chocolate, and alcohol. Some people are allergic to chocolate, but if you are you know it already. Some people have control issues with alcohol, but that's not going to be picked up by an elimination diet unless you go through the DTs. And some people have blood sugar issues, but that's best tested for with blood tests, not diet tests. But a stunning number of people tell me that they have a physical adverse reaction to white sugar. It gives them blinding headaches, makes them unable to concentrate, causes their muscles to ache, in the tiniest of doses. Sugars from other sources don't have this effect: one of the people who made such a claim to me was drinking a mango smoothie as she told me how she had to avoid sugar at all costs.

The real problem here is that a person with very little scientific or medical background is trying to do a scientific study of her own body with no controls and little or no understanding of what she's looking for. The person in question was trying to find out why she was so tired. The first place you look for reasons for low energy is not diet. It's mood. Since she's a chronic depressive, that might be the reason, and she should spend more energy on treating the depression first before messing with her diet. She didn't know what she was looking for, didn't know how to deal with the results she got, and yet had this vague, insistent belief that somehow chocolate could be the cause of her low energy level, rather than a chemical makeup that inclines to low seratonin levels.

And she was not the only one. When we were talking about this, two other people nearby mentioned that they'd either gone on or been considering going on an elimination diet recently. "It tells you so much about yourself." I had to hold myself back from explaining in great, boring detail just how little the sort of diet they were doing could tell them. I wonder if there's some sort of fake-medicine newspaper that these people are getting that includes all these bizarre ideas about holistic medicine and how food can be poison. It's a convenient way to avoid taking responsibility for your own health and body, because obviously you thought wheat was fine for you until you discovered that it can be a poison! For a small number of people, allergies and intolerances make some ordinary foods more dangerous. For most people, the source of your problems is elsewhere.

# Posted by ayse on 11/15/04 at 8:21 AM

A Special Kind of Sick

I've never been sick in quite this way before. Usually, sick for me means mounds of used tissues following me around the house. This time, it's relentless coughing and what feels like an ear infection. In fact, my hearing in my right ear has changed so much that everything is out of tune, which makes listening to music unbearable.

...

I drove home last night after studio (actually, after taking a nap after studio, because I was up late coughing and didn't want to be sleepy on the drive) and it was very nice to see all the animals and Noel. When I woke up this morning, I was under a pile of cats, which is ever so nice and normal.

I decided to stay in bed all day, in hopes that I would feel better. This plan is working out well so far, but I have notoriously low patience for being in bed when I feel like getting up and moving around. Of course, it's raining out, so there's not much to do if I do get up. I guess I could drive Rosie up to the park or something, but being out in the cold and wet (as opposed to inside in the cold but dry) does not seem all that appealing.

Technically, I have school tomorrow, but I'm far too unwell to think about driving back tonight and going. Or even to have gone if I'd stayed in SLO. I had to leave studio twice yesterday because of uncontrollable coughing jags. You really should not be in school when you are sick like that. So since I'm skipping school anyway, I'm going to enjoy my first long weekend at home in a long time. So nice. I can read any book I want instead of the handpicked few I bring with me to SLO! I can pet my kitties! I can roll my dog on the floor! Or I can lie in bed and cough.

# Posted by ayse on 11/11/04 at 10:36 AM

What Do You Have to Complain About?

If I'm totally honest, this is not a time in my life when I should be whining. I had a great weekend.

...

Noel came down, rather than having me drive up, which was very nice because I would have had to drive up three weekends in a row if that were the case. In order to do this, he left the Bay Area after his Friday gig, and arrived here at about 4am (he stopped in Gonzales for a nap by the road).

He brought my own sweet doggie with him, which was wonderful beyond compare. I love my doggie. I wish the cats travelled better but they are cats, after all.

Yesterday we went to the beach where dogs can go, and Rosie ran and ran and ran and ran until she was all pooped out. And I found like a hundred million sand dollars (OK. Nine) and a bunch of other nice shells. Then we went to the waterfront in Morro Bay and had fried seafood and french fries, and we saw a bit elephant seal in the water who kept trying to talk to Rosie, but Rosie was more interested in the seagull poop on the dock. The seal thought we should all go swimming together, which sounded pretty nice to me apart from the FREEZING COLD WATER part.

Then we came home and the dog and boy had naps while I puttered around, and when they woke up we watched some very funny DVDs I got (Margaret Cho's I'm the One That I Want and the first season of the Chapelle Show) and laughed and laughed and drank wonderful white wine from Navarro and talked about food and how we can fit eating more of it into our lives. I'd thought maybe we would go on campus and pick olives from the Engineering courtyard, but I kinda didn't feel like gathering all the necessary items. Anyway. A good time was had.

But then today I woke up with a sore throat and a headache, which at first I attributed to half a bottle of Navarro's finest. Noel made me pancakes, then we went to the beach again, and more running and sand dollars and other shells ensued. And Noel helped me try to fix a problem with my computer, which may be caused by a faulty USB hub, but we'll see. But then it was too late, and time for him to leave. We made one last trip to the drug store (Nyquil), and then he was gone. And I was left behind to finish a bunch of drawings, only I forgot my good drawing pen at school so whatever, I guess I will do them tomorrow night.

The only real downside to the weekend was that I realized I made a fundamental mistake with the stupid crocheted sheep, and I had to undo a lot of it. So I think now I will retire to bed and crochet some. My head aches and I'm getting drowsy from the Nyquil anyway.

I hope you all had good weekends with whatever your dog beach equivalent is, and if you're in the Bay Area maybe I'll see you on my long weekend this week.

# Posted by ayse on 11/07/04 at 7:22 PM

I Knew it Couldn't Last

I've managed to avoid all the various bleurgs that have hit friends and family for the last couple months without getting sick. So of course now I find myself feeling that achy flu feeling, and coughing, and having a sore throat (which at first I chalked up to having burnt myself eating too-hot brownies). Because of course I have two midterms and a vacation next week.

I mean, I knew I was irrationally lucky in avoiding the illness, and I knew I wasn't allowed to get a flu shot this year even though I should have one every year until 2006 because of that pneumonia episode, but it still sucks.

# Posted by ayse on 11/07/04 at 11:58 AM

Sheep's Head

I've been crocheting a sheep.

...

I figured I should try an easy project, so I chose a sheep from a book of beginner projects, and of course it turned out to be a thousand time harder than any of the string crochet projects I've worked on, and I ended up re-doing the nose of the sheep fifteen times, yes, fifteen times, and that is not an exaggeration.

But now I'm in the middle of the sheep's back, somewhere around the shoulder and things are going better. I haven't had to entirely pull out a row since the neck. It's quite relaxing doing these repetitive rows, just the same pattern, no increases or decreases. This is why people like scarves, I guess, though I find them kind of dull. Also, how many scarves does one person need? Not all that many, I'm sad to say.

So when I'm done with this sheep, I think I will send it to a friend of ours who just had a baby. We have lots of friends with new babies, so I can make tiny sweaters and stuffed animals and not have to suffer the consequences of storing them, which are chiefly convincing a lot of people that I have some sort of weird complex about being childless that I don't have. Also, we don't have much space for storing tons of crocheted or knitted stuff, although with the apartment in SLO, I could store a lot of stuff before Noel caught me at it and held an intervention.

I think I'm going to crochet some baskets for my next project. No pattern, just me and some yarn and a little minor insanity. Reading all these patterns makes my eyes want to cross, anyway.

# Posted by ayse on 11/05/04 at 6:13 PM

Vehicular Storage

The other day a bunch of students put black plastic over the Dexter Lawn, with white stripes painted on it and statements about parking lots around the edge. As it happens, I've been thinking about parking lots and storage space lately, and how they relate to each other. And they relate to each other strongly, as random as that seems.

...

It's an old saw of the organizing business that if something is stored, you won't use it much. The harder it is to get to the thing, the less you will make the effort, even if it's one of your favourite items. So if you really love your wedding china and want to use it, don't pack it up in a complicated storage system and put it in a rental storage unit, because you might as well be throwing it away for all the use you'll get out of it under that system.

So that brings us to cars, and the way cities deal with them.

Anti-traffic people, folks who want to make the cities safer for pedestrians and bicyclists, are always trying to limit parking and reduce the number of hours when cars can park. So you get residential neighborhoods with 2-hour parking meters or odd-side/odd-night systems.

The catch is that a 2-hour parking meter guarantees that at a minimum, there will be two cars driving on that street every hour for every parking space, if not more. Rather than discouraging people from owning cars, the system encourages people to drive a lot more just to avoid parking tickets. The simple fact is that inconvenient parking doesn't make people choose not to have a car, it just makes them spend more time and energy on their car.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I mentioned, because I've been really enjoying putting my car in the garage at school -- it's safe parking, easy to get to and from, but I have a strong disincentive to move the car because I'll lose my primo parking spot (obtained by arriving at school at 7:30am, when most of the rest of the population is sleeping).

In fact, if there were such a parking garage in most towns, I would use it and leave my car there rather than drive through the city center. A series of free, unlimited parking garages on the periphery of a city, with good, fast, frequent buses or light rail into shopping and working areas, would be basically irresistible. Unless you're buying furniture or heavy bulky items, most of the time when you're shopping in a city a car is a liability, anyway.

Think of it: under the usual order of things, you drive into the city and park in a metered spot. You put in $8 worth of fricking quarters and that buys you two hours of time. You dash off to the stores you want to visit, but you have to limit your time and keep an eye on the clock because you need to move your car. Two hours later you come back and move the car to another 2-hour spot, lather, rinse, repeat, assuming you don't give up altogether and go home after the first round of this foolishness. So the city gets $8 in parking revenues, but misses out on some major sales tax revenues from your missed shopping, not to mention the benefits of the stores' profitability.

And for residents, the peripheral garages would be like heaven. All the intercity convenience of a car, without the localized hassles of street parking. You can still have a car and use it to buy furniture or drive to another city, but you don't need to worry about it when you're in your own city. In places like San Francisco, inconvenient car storage would take a lot of traffic off the city streets; commuters from outside the city could park in the garages during the day, and commuters from inside the city could park there at night.

What's the catch? Well, there's the obvious requirement of fast, frequent public transit. Most Americans are unwilling to pay for a public transit system; they want it to operate at a profit. That the profit is not cash does not seem to occur to them, so transit projects that are not freeway widening and street repair rarely get much funding.

The other major catch is that if the plan is really going to work, cities have to severely limit traffic in shopping and work areas, maybe even closing off streets to anything but pedestrians or buses. The idea is to make it less convenient to have a car in the city than to park in the garage and use public transit. Maybe on the periphery of the shopping areas, you have a few streets that have loading zones for bulky package pickup; if stores were really smart, they'd offer curbside delivery of purchases in that area, so you could shop all afternoon and not have to carry your bags around.

But the biggest catch of all is that this system requires a change in attitudes towards walking. I like walking, and I especially like municipal systems set up to encourage people to walk around. But I'm in a minority. Most Americans would happily drive from store to store all day, idling in their cars to try to get a parking spot within 20 feet of the door, rather than walk a little extra. This is why we are fat. I can see something like this working better in a European city, like Paris or London, than in any American city. Not because Europe is better than us, but because Europeans are not afraid to use buses or walk a mile instead of driving.

# Posted by ayse on 11/04/04 at 9:44 PM

Distractions

I'm finding all sorts of things to do tonight to keep my mind off the election and my hand off the mouse refreshing CNN.com.

...

For one thing, I made this little snowflake thing, which has some kind of messed up places, but is my first successful adaptation of a project to a different thread/hook size.

I'm actually quite happy with it, although it did not scan very well and the first thing I see is the place where I had to figure out on my own how to do something that didn't make much sense. Anyway. For whatever reason, this project was much easier to do than the stupid sheep, whose nose doesn't ever seem to come out quite right.

Also, for those who are curious about my new digs, and how pleasant they are or are not, here are some blurry photos from the phonecam:

(the kitchen and a peek into the bathroom)

(looking from the kitchen across the main room to the bed)

(looking from the bed to the kitchen)

There are a lot of lights on because I was doing homework that includes a lot of detailed loading diagrams.

The place is still kind of soulless, but it's very pleasant when there's light, and it's quiet and safe and free of psychotic landladies, which is a major point in its favour. I got a poster over the weekend, which I have in front of the desk, and that is nice. Also, having the table means I don't have to sit on the bed for everything I do that is not working on the computer, and I like that. Especially having a place to eat dinner.

# Posted by ayse on 11/02/04 at 6:01 PM