fine whine

What does it say about me about that I've been wearing a watch all day, and only now, at lunchtime, have I noticed that I forgot to set it* this morning. What does that say about me?

Other than that I need to get one of those automatic watch winding machines?

But would one of those really help? Half of my watches (of the ones not broken) are set seven minutes ahead or more and the others are within seven seconds of real time.

Too bad I can't remember which ones are which.

* It's one of my automatics. The Waltham, if it matters to you. What mattered to me, other than the fact that it was self-winding, was that it had an orange second hand. That, and it was a really cheap Waltham.

I do, in fact, still exist, and I haven't completely abandoned this site. For some reason I just haven't felt like writing lately, which does not portend well for my Nano novel.

On another note, I bought a nice new digital camera, an early Christmas present of sorts. It's a Canon A610, and I'm happy to find that gphoto is able to grab pictures off of it even though it doesn't directly support that exact model. Now I just need to wait for the knockoff lens adapters to appear on eBay.

Today is so-called casual Friday and as such I donned a t-shirt instead of the polos I wear the rest of the week. This is nothing new, really, as this is how I dress pretty much every week.

Today's t-shirt was my bright green one with the flocked yellow Atari logo. Jessica bought it and another one with the logo, but on a blue tee, and gave them to me as gifts. I like them both, but rarely wear them. The blue one has 3/4 length sleeves, and I have difficulty with that sort of thing. The green one, though, has totally normal sleeves. The only downside of it is that everybody notices it.

I get more compliments (or at least comments) on this shirt than any of my other ones, save perhaps for the Darth Vader/cK shirt. Atari is just cool, you know.

A lot of people have bought this shirt, mostly for significant others. While that is an interesting tidbit, it also means that this is by far not a unique shirt. I like having unique shirts.

Oddly enough, despite buying it at JC Penny so many years ago, I've never seen anyone else wearing another dV shirt. Not a one.

It would seem that t-shirts are my hobboy of sorts as of late. When making my wish list I scoured the web for e-tailers with cool shirts, and I watch threadless for its new shirts and the submissions for the ongoing contest.

I'm working on doodling up some designs of my own to send them, but probably won't have anything I'm completely happy with let alone capable of winning. Still, it's worth a shot.

I've also fed many a slogan to their sister site OMG, which operates on the same principle except that anybody can submit ideas in the form of a slogan, not a finished design. They're much slower to print new shirts, and so far none of my submissions, clever though I may think them, have been made into a shirt.

Of course I'm not new to the t-shirt making business. As a kid I painted many of them with fabric paint (some of which are cool, others are merely neat copyright infringement) and even once recently, and I even once screen printed a tee in high school, which was later lost. I spent a lot of time working on that shirt, too.

I'd like to print some more. If I recall correctly it was messy but rather fun.

It's been a long week for me at work. Monday and Tuesday I stayed well past the 5:30 mark, and even today when I was intending to leave at noon I wasn't free of my shackles desk until after three.

I drove downtown to meet Jessica at the Columbus Arts Festival, an event that draws us every year to the shores of the mighty Olentangy even though our wallets (and often aesthetic sensibilities) prevent us from walking away with any objets d'art.

This is not to say that we did not see interesting things. Many a booth had something new and unique on display, and then many a booth had stuff that didn't interest us or was bland or nearly commercial.

I find it very difficult to get excited over geometric abstract art (in the Mondrian mold and so forth) in that such paintings seem to appear en masse in the halls and above the beds of hotels and nowhere else, though I suppose sometimes humans (artists, even) are responsible for their creation.

Likewise the booths upon booths of handmade jewelry, largely a bunch of bent metal with the occasional gemstone or bit of enamel thrown on to justify the triple digit price tag. Minus the bent metal this applies also to all of the brightly-hued, busily-designed shirts and muu-muus and other clothes and loungewear.

The wooden toys are often neat though there is very little innovation between booths (and years), which I take to be some indication of the timelessness of the whole thing. Or the fact that everybody works out of the same project books instead of designing something new; take your pick.

One school of paintings I hadn't noticed in years past, and I have a pretty good situation-specific memory for such things, was the pictures of windows and doors. A typical such painting would depict a blandly neutral wall around a window. Presumably what matters isn't the hardwood floor or sparse decoration inside the room portrayed, but the view outside the window (or door) that shows this house or whatever to be situated overlooking Lake Tahoe or some other breathtaking/beautiful/relaxing vista. The whole painting doesn't show the nice landscape, just a little window inside it.

At least three different artist were showing such art. It's gotta be a trend.

I have a number of theories about this:

• The painter is lazy, wanting to paint a nice landscape but not at full size. Building a room (well, a wall with a window) around a small picture means the size of the 'real' painting doesn't increase even though the frame does. It's like a matte, just part of the picture. Painting blank walls must be easier than mountains and forests and lakes, anyway.
• Art buyers want something a little different from the usual painting of mountains or forests or lakes. This is a sound theory, I think, at least until these things really catch on, in which case the rebels will need to find another way to differentiate their collections.
• The current popularity of interior 'makeover' and redecoration television shows has prompted an overall interest in the great indoors, the likes of which was until recently relegated to the pages of Better Homes & Gardens.
• The current popularity of interior spaces is not due to television shows specifically about them but television in general, as well as video games and online computer use, sedentary activities all. America is becoming a lazier, fatter nation and people anymore just cannot relate to the outdoors except in postcard-sized form. To show another set of walls just reinforces the comfort zone, buffeting the viewer from the troublesome (and less comfortable for lounging) outdoors.

Of course that last entry, if taken to its furthest conclusion, would lead to realistic paintings of the McDonald's drive-thru window and perhaps the Krispy Kreme counter, and maybe even for the more-seasoned traveler, the buffets of Branson Missouri.

Today at lunch I fled the office for what I called 'some errands' though what I really amounted to was 'shopping'.

I went to Target and Lowe's, to look at digital cameras and bricks, respectively. Target had been clearing out display models over the weekend and had some rather nice deals on warranty-less and non-returnable cameras that I wasn't willing to grab on Saturday when I was last there, and today I found all the good stuff gone. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I purchased twenty eight more bricks for our back yard. We're trying to make it look like somebody's done some work back there, not just put holes there (as was the result of our dandelion purge that is still ongoing). It was nice to get away from my desk, as today I didn't feel like working very much. This is not to say that I'm not working, just that I'm not fond of doing so.

In further Honda Odyssey news, they're still all over the place. I saw four on my drive this morning, and another six at lunchtime. There is only one in the parking lot at work, and it's a light-grey/silver new model, probably less than half a year old.

The most striking one, however, was the bright yellow taxicab. Columbus residents can likely call 444-4444 and request cab 216, which is probably one they use for groups headed to airports and whatnot.

I realize that I could pay attention to any common vehicle and see so many and it would stand out (such as the new Mustang or the Mini when those first appeared) but this... this borders on uncanny.

Sometime a while ago I stumbled across t-shirt e-tailer Threadless, and at the time I filed it away as a neat idea but the shirts were a bit pricey. I also thought it would be neat to create a design for them, and promptly forgot about ever actually doing that.

Fast forward to today when I discovered that they were having a weekend sale with a decent discount, and as I was in a buying mood at the time, I decided to mull it over for the rest of the day. In the end I bought two shirts, after looking through my closet at my pretty sorry collection of cool t-shirts that I am able to wear more than twice a year.

I'm looking forward to wearing this shirt on casual Fridays. Now that zombies are cool again I should be the epitome of hipness, even without needing to watch reality television.

Speaking of TV, when I browse through photos (on flickr and elsewhere) I find myself drawn to images of broken and destroyed televisions. So this shirt really appealed to me, and I don't have too many brown t-shirts to boot.

So yeah, I splurged, but I can rationalize my purchases because they were on sale for a third off. The sale ended tonight but anybody who wants to buy some (still reasonably-priced) t-shirts would do well to follow this link and I'll get some minor compensation. I'll make it back up to you in karma and goodwill, or perhaps some other small bribe.