cranky pixels

So I’m doing this thing, this “30 Tiny Moments” thing, which in theory will result in a post every day, assuming I am that organized. Which, I have been weirdly organized lately. Don’t tell anyone.

Jessica at Kerflop summarized the project thusly:

“I imagine casting my eyes over the usual chaos I’m constantly surrounded by and instead of throwing my hands up in despair, finding something comforting, something real, something I’d like to remember and capturing it with my camera.”

This is the one actual spontaneous, unposed photo from today’s batch…Not So thought I was focusing on the baby. Who was totally vogueing, by the way. He will get in front of the camera and stay stock-still until the flash goes off. It’s freaking hilarious. But, so, Not So, and his water bottle. It is a pretty cool water bottle.

Taking a break from the novel, seeing as I’m premenstrual and liable to begin using the delete key in a decidedly unhelpful manner. A long time ago I figured out that my creativity is cyclical, and trying to force it along is always, always a huge mistake.

Besides, I’ve got work projects galore, and happily THAT sort of creativity is pretty much always on tap. My logo project is coming along nicely, and the new ecommerce client promises to be more fun than kittens. And kittens? Are a lot of fun.

I’ve got a great idea for the redesign of the Cranky Pals site, too. Because CLEARLY it needs another facelift. Pretty much since I stopped rearranging the house at regular intervals or dyeing my hair a different color every six weeks, I’ve been pouring my energy into website redesigns. It’s a sickness. But hey, it gives me something to do, right?

Speaking of, I turned neumanbeck.com into a Tumblr page (redirect isn’t live yet, but it’s here) and gave it a lovely custom skin. This is how I spend my free time, people. This, and gossip blogs. (Hey, it’s research.)

You know, I don’t like Oreos much, but these Back to Nature Classic Creme cookies? Dude, they are the bomb. Not So says they taste insufficiently Oreo-like, but I love them with the heat of a thousand suns.

I am eating some right now. In case you were wondering where that came from.

In other news, I am writing again (yay!) but decided to chuck 20,000 words of my 40,000 word manuscript (…boo). But I’ve written 5000 words in the last week, and that’s something, right? You know what’s funny, I read Neil Gaiman’s blog, like, constantly, and I was getting all set to sit down and write about my writing process (as he does, on occasion), but then I realized two things: 1) I am not Neil Gaiman and 2) nobody cares. So I decided to have some cookies, instead. Good times.

So I got sick of my BlackBerry Pearl – which I still love unreasonably, by the way – not playing nicely with my Mac and downloaded the Missing Sync the other day. Oh my god, it is cool. My phone suddenly has this whole new level of functionality. I can upload! And download! Things are the same on my computer as they are on my phone. I have this weird computer organization fetish, so this fills me with glee.

Well, and I also geeked out and created thumbnail photo icons for all of my contacts (both on Highrise and in my Address Book), which – viola! – are now in my phone as well, so when people call me I see a friendly little picture of them on my screen. THIS IS SO COOL. (In a related note, yes, I am aware that I am an enormous geek.)

It also lets me easily download all the images from my phone’s camera, so now I have, like, a year’s worth of crappy snapshots to look through. The camera on my Pearl is kind of suck, which is fine – all cameraphones are kind of low-quality, right? – as long as I faithfully ignore photos taken with an iPhone. (The iPhone camera fills me with unattractive envy, so for my purposes it does not exist.)

I do like having a camera on my phone, though. It’s handy, and it makes me feel pleasantly tech-geeky, and I always have it with me, unlike the enormous Nikon which requires its own backpack. But I’m lazy about uploading images because (until now) I’ve had to do it over Bluetooth, which is somewhat lugubrious and effort-intensive. Seriously, only one picture at a time? Who has the attention span for that?

Now, though, I can transfer all my pictures at the same time I’m syncing my phone, so I just uploaded a bunch of badly-lit, poorly composed, out of date images to Flickr. YOU ARE SO HAPPY ABOUT THIS.

So now I’ve got my phone syncing with my desktop, plus the revamped Google Mobile suite (gmail and maps on the go, whee!) which means my phone is, like, the coolest thing ever. I think I might need to make out with it for a little while.

I need to slow down.

Maybe it’s the Wellbutrin, maybe it’s the whole “death in the family” thing, maybe it’s just that I’m constantly doing twelve different things at once, but I can’t seem to muster up an acceptable amount of enthusiasm about, well, anything. Even things that are fun (like reading, or drawing, or playing with the kid) feel like chores. Ugh, you mean I have to have a good time now? Can’t I just work, instead?

I’m noticing this because I need to buy Christmas presents (yes, we celebrate Christmas; no, I have not yet drowned in the deep, deep lagoon of my hypocrisy). Usually, Christmas shopping is something I plan months in advance. Granted, I always leave it for the last minute and then scramble to get all my gifts overnighted so that I seem reasonably competent, but I have a party making lists and figuring out what the perfect gifts for friends and family would be. Same with cards; I collect cards, so on holidays and birthdays I will have the absolute best cards ever, and I love sending them out and dorkily picturing people’s faces when they see a card in the mail.

Except this year. This year, I think about sending out cards and it just makes me sigh. Cards. Meh. I’ve bought a couple of gifts for the kid (who has a birthday in three days and then Christmas) and one for Not So, but my usual gift-giving fever is not there. Not So was all “I don’t want to get the kid a whole bunch of gifts for Christmas, just a few things he’ll really like” and I was all “Sure, whatever.” Even the Santa photos (see: hypocrisy, above), which I have theoretically been looking forward to all year, are just another thing I’m probably not going to do because, meh. All the getting ready and going out and being enthusiastic and having a good time sounds exhausting. I could be working. I have plenty of things I need to do.

Which is just lame. Hello, priorities, where are you hiding? Maybe it’ll be better once I’m done with school (which will be, er, Saturday, and my thoughts on that are a totally different rant for a different day) and can ramp down my work schedule a bit. Because sometimes I look at my kid and I think I am going to blink and he will be grown, moved out, gone and it just devastates me.

I was going to post a picture, but I’m on Not So’s laptop, which means I’m only using one browser, which means – you really want to hear this? Okay – I’m not logged in to Flickr under my Cranky Mama alias, so I can’t grab the code for the image I want. The short version is “because.”

Today I went to the office, where there is STILL NO BLOODY INTERNET, and spent the day stitching together the various and sundry body parts of a new batch of Cranky Pals. Then I came home so I could work some more! My life, you wish it was yours. Also, I wore unflattering jeans, but that’s okay since I haven’t exactly been feeling like a sex beast, what with the death in the family and the…death in the family. Yeah, weirdly, that’s not hot. I was surprised too.

The kid is currently sleeping on my chest (I’m in bed, which is the beauty of using the laptop). You will note that is is 9pm; he’s been out since 8. Miracle? Why yes, if you call the Great Nap Boycott of 2007 a miracle. At least it means I can get some work done without anyone jumping on my head. Yes, cats, that means you.

*…not really. But it made me giggle, so it stays.