Bowling

I'm getting back into the habit of carrying a notebook with me everywhere I go. The following is a vignette from the bowling alley; I just went to watch and write, since I am physically unable to bowl due to what I think is RSI (and besides that, I'm absolutely horrible at the sport [is it a sport?] in the first place…I can't even break 70).

I'm in the middle of packing, so this is the unpolished first draft…you be the editor and I'll change everything up when I get home and realize I hate half of what I wrote. :P

Thunk, wham, Aaron hits his pin. "Something good my last round," he says, and retrieves his grass-colored ball from the carousel. Ian selects the same ball and sends it gliding over the tan lane to its destination. It hits seven pins.

Dad hikes up his shorts, steps up. He's got a Color Head Pin notice, so if he bowls a strike, he'll get a free game. And crap! He hits all but one, one lonesome striped pin laughing at him from under a canopy of fake fish and sea turtles.

New game. Dylan's ball is attracted to the gutter, and Dad pulls him aside to explain how to possibly hit a pin. Dylan rolls again and gets a double snaggletooth — a pair of pins on either side.

Aaron says, "I'll get this form down someday and show you all," then promptly drops his ball down the lane and watches it skid to a whole lot less pins than he wanted. He tells Dylan that Dylan is killing him. (Dylan is winning by one point.)

Dad claims "his" pin, the one on the far left, and sends the heavy orb away.

Someone is eating a Nestlé Crunch; the scent of the sweet and salty bar mingles with the stale air of the bowling alley. Two ceiling fans spin overhead. Bowling pins crash on impact in another lane.

A tall, stocky guy in jeans and a gray T-shirt laughs at himself as he flings the ball dramatically and watches it collide with the pins. His gray hair is cropped close to his head, and his belly rounds out firmly underneath his shirt. He walks stiffly from the lane to the snack bar and back again, curls a pale blue ball under his arm, kicks up his left foot and gives a good-natured laugh when the ball meets two pins.

Dylan's ball heads for the gutter again. Aaron and Ian talk about what sports teams used to be in St. Louis. Ah, Saturday night at the bowling alley.

All right, so I've edited this post upwards of five times now. I need to leave.

Delicious.

My first reaction to del.icio.us (dang it! that was a really cool name; apparently now it’s just “delicious.com”) was, who needs this? I can just bookmark sites in my browser along with the forty-two thousand other sites I have saved that I never look at…

But it wasn’t long before I signed up and saved everything to del.icio.us instead of to my bloated bookmarks bar, because using tags and being able to get to your links from anywhere is a good thing. The problem is that now, as with my browser-embedded bookmarks, I hardly ever look at the 43 pages of my del.icio.us bookmarks. My goal over the next few weeks is to dig up some of those links — mainly related to designing and writing, but with some other things thrown in — and share them with you here. Because I am feeling totally random right now, I am going to pick some random things for today’s postings:

 

Chief Happiness Officer — a blog about being happy while you’re at work. There was a really great suggestion a while back about holding a Ninja Day and having everyone show up for work dressed in black. I really wanted to try that at the restaurant I used to work at. (Well, we did wear all black, but we didn’t have swords or get to fight the customers.)

I Park Like an Idiot — how much fun would it be to go around sticking these bumper stickers on stupidly parked cars? I wish someone would pay me to do this.

Help for Writer’s Block — we all know who needs this one…

Running from Camera — you set the self-timer and run. And hope no one steals your camera in the middle of said run.

Winter cleaning

Oh, dear bookshelf and desk, so full of paper, notebooks, pens, journals, bookmarks, random receipts, manuals and who knows what else.

I grabbed my handy-dandy cameraphone (with the world's most annoying shutter lag…I can never keep my hand still) to document some of the more interesting finds: 

A drawing from the book I made when I was four, based off a birthday card image. I drew this girl a LOT. Don't you love the proportions? I think the arms are genius.

I had forgotten I won an autographed Tait CD booklet. (Yeah, just the booklet, not the CD…)

Paint Shop Pro 8! I remember saving up for this and buying it from Staples in 1999, then worrying that if all the computers went out in Y2K, I would never be able to use it.    

The aforementioned book containing poems and drawings by my four-year-old self. 

The girl loves her notebooks. (These are just the ones in my desk.)

Snow trees

It's 70º today; I love it. Goodbye winter (I hope).

A jaunt to the printer

I have an interview tomorrow, so I spent most of today getting my portfolio ready. (My overhauled web site doesn't match the portfolio at all, but, oh well. At the moment I don't have $100 to drop on a reprint.)

Ian drove me to the semi-local printer, OfficeMax (yes, sad, I know, but it's the closest place that will print 11x17 without making me buy 300 copies), so I could print a customized cover page for the portfolio. When we walked up, he noticed a sticker that said "HSM Security" on the window. Now of course, thanks to Calah, we automatically associate any instance of "HSM" with that obnoxiously bubbly and completely unrealistic movie "High School Musical." Thus we determined that OfficeMax was guarded by an army of off-key high schoolers who would jump off the roof and start singing and dancing if you stole something. 

Then we went to Kmart in the mall. Yes, Kmart is one of the mall's anchor stores, and it is…I don't even know. Creepy? They sell Nathan's hot dogs and fruit smoothies in a modified hot dog cart in the lingerie department. 

But don't worry, if hot dogs aren't your thing, you can choose from sixteen different kinds of beef jerky in the checkout lane:

If that doesn't tell you something about where I live, then I don't know what does.