the thoughts and experiences of Heather Meadows
This is fantastic!
On Kim Possible, Ron’s visiting a rich old man at his mansion–a man who happens to be voiced by Adam West. Just as I realized that, Ron found a red button inside a bust, pressed it, and slid down a pole into the “Ferret Cave”…!
The music is very fitting, too. :D
I love Adam West!
Edit 2:06pm: There’s some neat trivia about this episode over on the imdb :D I remember Will Friedle from Boy Meets World, myself.
I don’t understand this. The animation is pretty cool, and the sculpture is beautiful, but I don’t get the whole fourth dimension thing. I always thought the fourth dimension was time. Can anybody explain this concept to me? Specifically, I don’t get this:
In the three-dimensional world, there are five regular solids — tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron — whose faces are composed of triangles, squares or pentagons. In four dimensions, there are six regular solids, which can be built based on the symmetries of the three-dimensional solids. Unfortunately, humans cannot process information in four dimensions directly because we don’t see the universe that way. Although mathematicians can work with a fourth dimension abstractly by adding a fourth coordinate to the three that we use to describe a point in space, a fourth spatial dimension is difficult to visualize. For that, models are needed.
In my head, when I put those three-dimensional shapes together, I just get another three-dimensional shape. Like building with blocks. What, exactly, is being built? Does each three-dimensional shape represent a world or dimension or moment in time?
I remember doing arrays back in high school computer science. Mrs. Murphy told us to think of fourth dimensional arrays as putting a “pocket” into the third dimension. I always hated that, because I didn’t think that was accurate, and I didn’t want to base my understanding on a fallacy. I didn’t want to skip the difficult part so I could get my work done. I wanted to understand it.
Am I capable of that?
I’m going to have something done.
Something that promises to be quite painful.
Something that will improve my life.
Something that is completely vain and unnecessary.
And to top it all off, it won’t even last. In a couple of months I’ll have to have it done again.
So, a question: when it happens for the first time, should I blog about it?
Because I will. In detail.
You have been warned.
///
Read the other chapters in the Brazilian Saga! (Yes. Yes, I did say Brazilian.)
Part One: Oh the Hair, the Hair!
Part Two: I totally caved
Part Three: OW OW OW OW OW OMGWTF OW
Part Four: The Day After
Epilogue
Bye!
…and I haven’t even had a shower yet.
Bah!
Found this great list over at Joe Stump’s blog. He got it from The Drunken Lagomorph, who got it from Random-Abstract, who got it from a Craigslist posting. (I just like following links, mmmkay?)
A nice thing happened today. I was at Wal-Mart buying toiletries and soda (and considering buying a camisole, but I put it back) when my cell phone rang.
“Hello, is Heather Meadows available?”
“This is she.”
“Hello, this is so-and-so with WJBF.”
The TV station? What, did I apply for a job there?
“You registered on our website…”
Ah, so it was a job.
“…to win two tickets to the Summerville Tour of Homes.”
…Oh. Oh! “Oh yeah! Yes, I did.”
“Well, you won!”
:)
So that’s pretty cool. The Summerville Tour of Homes takes place this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, and apparently you get to tour some old homes with traditional architectural features. I’ve never been, but it looks neat. I’m going to be all touristy and take pictures. (I haven’t really taken many pictures lately…) Mari’s having a pumpkin carving party on Sunday, so I’ll hit up the Tour of Homes on Saturday. Brooke has graciously agreed to accompany me. :)
While I was at Wal-Mart, I picked up the widescreen version of Batman Begins, the one that comes with the bonus DVD with 2 episodes of The Batman. I watched the second DVD when I got home; it was a two-parter about Clayface–“The Rubber Face of Comedy” and “The Clay Face of Tragedy”. (Hey, given what happened in the episodes, I totally see what they did there, with the titles. Nifty.) The funny thing about this DVD is the art on the back of the package…it’s got a huge Batman looming over a big building, scowling, his spiky fingers reaching out towards a much smaller, rather vulnerable-looking Clayface. Good episodes, all told, though I really wish they’d gotten Mark Hamill to be the Joker.
When Sean got home, he and I played TextTwist together for awhile. I didn’t plan on that; I just opened the game because I was bored, and he started chiming in. We did pretty well :)
And those are pretty much the big events of the day.
Tomorrow I’m going to head downtown to pick up my tickets, and I’ll meet up with Brooke for lunch. And on Friday, after Brooke gets off work, we’ll meet up to walk like we did on Tuesday, and then we’re going to come back here and eat teriyaki stir-fry chicken and vegetables with rice and watch Kyou Kara Maou. The rest of the week is looking pretty fun. I’m really looking forward to it :)
Ever since the fire, I have felt horrible guilt.
I have always been a selfish person. I love for people to give me presents; I love to own things. When I was younger I started to recognize ways in which I could manipulate people into giving me stuff…and I used them. Later in life I decided to stop such behavior, but now I have trouble telling if people are giving me things because they came up with the idea and they wanted to give something to me, or if I have subconsciously manipulated them into it.
There were so many things in the apartment that were precious to other people. Perhaps more precious to them than they were to me. Among them was a bookshelf my mother’s grandfather built by hand. I’d been using it in my bedroom back home, and when I moved here, we brought it along. My mother was surprised to see it when we were unpacking. “I didn’t know you were taking this,” she said. I hadn’t even thought about it. I tried to get her to take it back home with her, but she said for me to keep it.
Now it’s gone.
My grandmother had a hope chest when she was a girl. It was kept hidden away in one of the rooms of her mother’s house; she wasn’t allowed to use it. When she moved out initially, she was living at the Y and didn’t have a place to put it…and when she got married, settled down in a house and started having children, her mother told her she didn’t want the kids to mess it up. Grandma never got to have her hope chest.
When I moved to Georgia, many years after my great-grandmother passed away, Grandma had the hope chest brought to my parents’ house from the farm and gave it to me. Beautiful, heavy, very old, it was sturdy enough to use as a bench, which I did, in the bedroom of our apartment.
Now it’s gone.
My mother lets me go through things in the house to pick out stuff to keep every now and then, so I’ll have a little bit of home even when I’m away. One of those things was an old mug tree that she used to have out on the counter in the kitchen, but which ended up stored away in the pantry to make more space. “Take good care of this,” Mom said wistfully. It was one of her very first pieces of “furniture” in her very first apartment when she moved down to Lexington after nursing school.
Now it’s gone.
When we first got married, my Aunt Bev very generously offered to buy Sean and me either a bed or a dining room table, something that we needed. We had Sean’s futon, so I opted for a table. Aunt Bev asked me to go through the IKEA website and pick something. I did, and decided I didn’t like any of it, and went looking around other stores. Finally I saved pictures from other websites of dining sets I liked, and sent those to her with the question, “Does IKEA have anything like this?” The picture for one of the sets, which cost at least double what I think Bev was expecting to send, had the filename “JCPenney-myfavorite.jpg” (or something similar). Bev wrote back, “Please send me a link to the set from JC Penney. It is a lovely choice.” I sent her a smarmy letter saying I hadn’t intended for her to actually buy one of my examples. But I also sent her the link in that letter…and she bought me that set, despite the price. This incident was the point at which I really started to hate myself for my manipulations.
And now it’s gone.
Cheryl loaned me quite a few Christmas decorations over the years, and I stored them in our hall closet. I had two porcelain Santas, a full set of Christmas dishes, two Santa stocking holders, and two stockings…the original stockings from when Sean was growing up.
Now they’re gone.
There are so many things that now I feel like I shouldn’t have even owned. And they were all destroyed. Why was I so selfish? Why did I want to own all that stuff? Now, thanks to me, none of it exists anymore.
If not, go. Go, my children!
I can’t wait until November 18!
Apparently traffic bottlenecks at Butt Bridge (I imagine it does, it’s an old two-lane bridge with zero visibility, but I wouldn’t know firsthand because I never seem to go that way when I’m downtown). It’s gotten so bad that the bridge was going to be demolished and replaced. History buffs (and people who, like me, love the name Butt Bridge) protested. After some serious wrangling, a compromise seems to have been found.
The eventual compromise, which required – literally – an act of Congress, authorized Augusta to use its $15 million allocation for a series of road improvements that would improve traffic flow by other means and leave Butt Bridge intact.
Yes, the only reason I quoted that was because of the line “which required – literally – an act of Congress”. Yes, I am a dork.
If you’re wondering what Butt Bridge is:
In 1914, President William H. Taft visited Augusta to dedicate Butt Memorial Bridge to his aide, Maj. Archibald Butt, who had perished aboard the Titanic in 1912.
CNN: Study: Fewer wars, less deadly
A study issued paints a surprising picture of war and peace in the 21st century: Armed conflicts have declined by more than 40 percent since 1992, and genocide and human rights abuses have plummeted around the world.
The only form of political violence that appears to be getting worse is terrorism — a serious threat but one that kills markedly fewer people than open warfare, it said.
Who needs wars when we’ve got Mother Nature?
Seriously, does this mean that more people are content with their lives than ten years ago? It seems to me that you have to have a lot of discontented people before you can get a full-blown war. Is a general sense of complacency the reason some people turn to terrorism?
Professor Andrew Mack, who directed the three-year study, said there has been a shift away from the huge wars of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s where million-strong armies faced each other with conventional weapons.
“The average war today tends to be very small, low intensity conflict, fought with ill-trained troops, small arms and light weapons, often very brutal, with lots of civilians killed — but the absolute numbers of people being killed are … much, much smaller than they were before,” he said.
Armed conflicts have not only declined by more than 40 percent since 1992, but the deadliest conflicts with over 1,000 battle deaths dropped even more dramatically — by 80 percent. The number of international crises, often harbingers of war, fell by more than 70 percent between 1981 and 2001, the report said.
There’s plenty more interesting stuff in that article. I am, of course, interested in the whys. I don’t know enough about history to make very good guesses. What might have caused the violence to go down? Better and faster communications? A desire not to repeat history? Improved standard of living?
Anybody out there care to speculate?
Yesterday, in a chat window, my brilliant nephew typed the following:
we can play and run and eat and
Unfortunately he didn’t type that to me (Mom pasted it), so I have no idea who he was talking to or what he was talking about. But look at that spelling!
He can also type his name :)
There’s another Art Lad up. As you all know, I adore the writing of children. (I rather wish Connor had a blog, but you know.) This post had me oohing and awwing like an absolute ninny.
What made it especially fun were the Magazine Man references that only people who read MM can truly appreciate. Par exemple:
Dad writes all day and sometimes all night. He says it is the only thing he is good at and he tells really good stories. He says people gave him money for writing and that’s how he bought our whole house and everything inside it except the stuff Grandma and Papa send us.
That was totally precious. But then I got to the end…and one of the best in-jokes ever.
Want to see more?
I will tell you later…
(Dad said to put dots at the end. That means you have to wait)
Bye!
Evil! Evil! I about died laughing.
Kathy B. Steele, who lives in Augusta, has published her first novel–though it isn’t the first novel she’s written. Rocks That Float