• On Life and Love

    A Beautiful Birthday Weekend

    What could be better than a trip to Crowders Mountain on a perfect Saturday afternoon? Both the weather and our camera this time was good enough–and we’d just finished our second photography class that morning–to get some vague shots of Charlotte. Out zoom lens (55-200 mm) isn’t quite zoomy enough to really compress the distance, but it was fun trying, especially when we needed to manually focus or do a focus lock. Instead of just doing the 0.75 mile trek to the top and back (which includes 300+ damn stairs), we decided to hike some of the back trails. All in all, I think we covered 5-ish miles, but my…

  • On Life and Love

    Debt Free

    $25,691.32 in student loans, paid off as of today. That’s $30,100 (give or take $100) of debt paid off total over the last 3.5 years of financial consciousness. I think I’m supposed to throw a party or something. I’m still kinda in shock.

  • On Life and Love

    Monotony : Creativity

    I’ve learned that I have a minimal (or maximal?) ratio of monotony to creativity to maintain in order to not go absolutely stir-crazy. It’s about 4:1. For every 4 hours I churn on something that’s difficult to make interesting (office work, house cleaning, troubleshooting a tedious problem), I need about an hour of creativity. And not an hour of editing a creative work, but creating: sketching out a site design; penciling out ideas for an app, story, or novel; throwing down code/tests for a new or in-progress project; writing out a scene in my novel; knitting/crocheting; blogging; etc. But 4:1 is pretty much my bare minimum for getting through the…

  • On Life and Love

    First Ever Sock (and Other Yarning)

    Having already made Gregory a blanket, my next task was to craft up some house socks for him. His current pair were worn to holeyness and ready to be replaced. I dread the idea of working on super-fiddly projects, so I opted to go for a pair of crocheted socks using worsted weight yarn. Cotton, in my case, because acrylic on your feet would be for the birds. The main sock is black, and the heel is brown, despite Greg’s worrying singing of “Black Socks“. Plus, cotton crochets quite beautifully–no fuzz means the pattern shows very well. The heel was disturbingly confusing to me, quite possibly because I had a…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: Travel, Doctors, and Bat Wings

    I spent a fair amount of last week (and all of this weekend) sick, so I spent very little time on the wibbles aside from work. Found a few fun tidbits, though: 40 Beautiful Photos of India – See, now I totally want to tour India. All of it. How to make doctors miserable people (now with data!) – Read the linked articles as well, especially “Doctors as Martyrs“. Any time I read about the stress chamber that is medical residency, I think of 1) Scrubs (sowwy!), and 2) a high school friend of mine who’s a resident now. Oy, vey. Senator James Eastland: The Mike Wallace Interview – From…