i am a sucker for beautiful sites. you know, the ones you find and just think, wow, am i still on the internet? like this one, for example. i mean, come on. look at it! you want to click on the links just because they're linked from such a pretty site! don't miss the alternative skins she's got listed, they're all worth a view. what a treat--thanks for the vacation, bubs.

someday, when i have time, someday....

so, on that note: i had a horrendously embarrassing blonde moment this afternoon. i was in wegmans (the shopping experience!) and decided to exit through the video store. so i walked through the aisles of hollywood and found the door. except see, there was no exit sign, no 'push' sign, no decals or lettering of any kind on the inside of this door. i was a little taken aback--that's jes a bit unusual for a commercial establishment, and i've been in video stores where you can't go out the main entrance for security reasons. so i thought to myself, i thought, self, better make sure you're not to set off the alarm if you open this door. went back to check with the video store lady: "can i leave through here?"

the look on her face was priceless. embarrassing, but priceless.

"you want to go out the door?"

ah well, p'raps i brightened an otherwise humorless day.

got some template action in last night. this blog now validates as xhtml 1.0 transitional, i'll have pretty buttons up at some point. (actually, i have a lot of buttons to put up...)

had yet another great lesson yesterday. got a few new etudes, a wienawski caprice, another bloch hebrew-style suite, and some ideas for my senior recital. i know i've said this *cough* a few times, but i love walking out of my lessons feeling optimistic, feeling like something was accomplished. i will miss my teacher, come fall. it's been so nice to have professional teaching, rather than relational, how-do-you-feel, wish-wash. ah well, hopefully the new one will be just as good. heh, it'll be interesting to see what he does with my funny fourth-finger (pinkie, for the unenlightened) funkiness, which my teacher just discovered. i'm a bit double-jointed, so my knuckles have 'catch points'--like the clicks on the volume knob, you can't really set it before or afterwards. to properly place my fourth finger on the fingerboard, i have to twist my wrist rapidly to get the finger to 'lock' in the right position. very strange. every teacher i've had has at first thought i was being anal retentive about vibrato. when they grip my wrist while i play to keep it still, they get a confused look on their faces and say, 'what are you doing with your fourth finger?" eventually, they come to the conclusion that i'll just have to make do as well as i can. i've been dealing with it as long as i've been playing, but it would be nice to find a way around it--i definitely suffer in the agility department.

o right, recital ideas! if i can, i'd like to get me mum and me brother in on the action--i've such a musical family, it'd be a shame to waste the opportunity. my recital is on telemann's birthday (march 14), so it'd be fitting to do something from his portfolio. daniel wanted me to play a paganini duet with him a while ago--tough violin part--so that could be fun too. we'll see.

o while i'm at it, shrek 2 is out. not near the caliber of the first film, but it really is funny. spoofing another well-known movie or dead horse of a cliche every thirty seconds--mask of zorro, lord of the rings, the usual fairy-tale fare, ken dolls, etc. plot was minimal at best, but it's worth a video-store rental. cast includes john cleese, julie andrews, rupert everett, and antonio banderas, along with the usuals.

[how pathetic--i really enjoy writing and designing and modifying and tweaking, but my life just isn't that interesting. have to start topical posts.)

i'm blogging from an email compose window. this is a concept post, to
see if/how the whole thing actually works.

so i think i'm a moron late at night. i just went in and manually edited
all of my blog posts that included my own images, so the images would
display when you're in 'permanent link' view. but see, instead of just
using src="/images/image.jpg", i did src="../../../../images/image.jpg".
(both work, obviously, one is bordering on the ridiculous.) so here's an
image link, just to confirm that i
am, in fact, a moron late at night.

i've just launched that new layout i mentioned. it's over half done, so figured i'd give it a little beta testing. no images used (except the profile photo), it's all css. validates as xhtml 1.0 transitional and css (for the most part; i have a lot of hand-editing posts to do later), i'll have buttons up soon. anyway, as i said, still under construction (e.g., the 'normal text' over on the right top bar). please leave comments, errors, etc. (i've already got a bunch, but don't let that stop you. *grin*) enjoy.

ah, almost forgot. this layout works in internet explorer, but it's extremely boring. and not particularly attractive. now, i could certainly jump through the myriad of hoops that most developers take to make their designs work in both standards-compliant AND non-standards-compliant browsers, but i just don't feel the need. i'm not interested in bowing to bill gates' empire. if you're using internet explorer, you need to be using something else. anything else. i'm a fan of firefox, standards-compliant and open source to boot, but really--anything but internet explorer. here's a sample of what you're missing.

actually went biking this time! short--7 miles--but satisfying. felt like it was all uphill into a headwind. those are the best kinds of rides, really. the euphoria after you finish is almost addicting. and there's such a sense of accomplishment, to feel your legs shuddering and lungs burning and look at the mile of hill in front of you and want to quit, but keep going by sheer force of will.

anyway, it was just as well we only went seven miles, because the nightly downpour started as soon as we got back in the car. this weather is getting ridiculous. for the past week (at least) we've had beautiful, sunny, breezy days, and thunderstorms every night. catching up on dryness in april, perhaps? (anible's dog has about had it. terrified of thunder, just sits and shivers with her tail between her legs. poor babe.)

[winampage: supposed to be norah jones but i forgot to start it - oops need sleep]

was going to go biking this afternoon. really, i was. set it up to go on a 15-mile run with anible, up coddington road and back down 79. hauled my bike over and everything. but then, see, we got to this hill. not a big hill, really, just your plain old ordinary incline. cake, considering my usual diet. but cake, it seems, is too rich for my poor, pathetic, undersized quads. they managed a tentative nibble, and then threatened to spontaneously combust...it was too bad. would have been a good run. ah well. there's no time like a little while from now!

anible, at least, got in his exercise for the day. i went with he and me brothers to the pick-up soccer game that happens every monday/wednesday/friday. i love watching soccer, i tell you. i get such a kick out of it (no pun intended. seriously.), now that i'm old enough (read: not in second grade) to look at a game on a field and see the whole picture, rather a mass of discrete objects running around at random. probably couldn't do it if i were actually playing (one of the many reasons i don't play), but it's muchly fun from the sidelines. got some good pictures, as you can see, until the clouds and lightening and downpours (and lack of battery power) sent my camera back into its bag. (do you know, i use socks as camera bags, because i'm too cheap to put out the $10. i wonder if anyone else does that...?)

small bits of unrelated news: haloscan now offers trackback along with their commenting engine, so i've added it to my comment links. i've also started archiving posts to individual urls, thanks to some new blogger features. daniel and benjamin have launched a new site for ithacan halo-ers, somewhat reminiscent of the old a-c laser tag site. so if you're from ithaca and you play halo, go check it out.

that's all.

anible and i started reading this book yesterday. (this is the first non-fiction we've done aloud, very different experience.) the author, jeremy s. begbie, was educated at both the royal academy of music in london and the universities of edinburgh and aberdeen. so naturally, he currently teaches systematic theology at cambridge. *grin grin* his book is fascinating. we're only about twenty pages in at this point, so he's just laying the foundation, but still--this is the kind of material i expect to cover in hijleh's music and christian perspective graduate seminar next semester.

begbie says his basic premise is that music's temporal properties give it insight into aspects of christian theology. i can't get much more specific than that because i don't have the book with me and he hasn't covered that idea yet, but his 'this is how the book is laid out' paragraph sounded almost revolutionary. if he's right, music could be an invaluable theological tool, able to illuminate areas such as eschatology, election, salvation, etc. in a completely unique way. (he is ordained in the church of england, so it'll be interesting to see how his own doctrine manifests itself in his book.) so far, he's just been covering some basic premises about the nature and 'meaning' of music--also interesting stuff. he commented that ideally, a few live performances (not recordings of live performances) would be included along with his book. he believes to think of music as being contained in a score or a recording is to diminish it; the actual performance is as much a part of the music as are the notes on the page. he briefly discussed how music inevitably exists in a socio-political context, because it comes from the minds of human beings who inevitably exist in socio-political contexts. music doesn't spring out of a vacuum. lessee...also went into the emotional content of music for a bit. he rejects the idea that our emotions rise and fall when we listen to music because music has direct corrolaries in human mental states. instead, he argues that our reaction to music is a sympathetic response to a fictional object. (we become sad for no real reason, etc.) because the object is fictional, music-hearers (as he calls them) are emotionally free to follow the music--there's no real object constraining their emotions to a particular kind.

so this is looking to be a really interesting book, from the first twenty pages. definitely looking forward to the rest of it.

in other news, holly was up visiting anible on sunday night. (i tagged along.) she's on her way to el paso for the summer. was much fun, we went to the lost dog cafe for dinner and showed her around cornell a bit. tried to get up to mcgraw for a concert, but they weren't playing. it was a lovely hazy day, so we sat at the foot of the tower instead and enjoyed the view. walked around briefly at that one waterfall downtown that has a name i can never remember. watched love actually. it was a good time, good way to spend a lazy sunday afternoon.

so it's been a while. not terribly interested in rehashing the past three weeks, i've got other stuff on my mind. suffice to say: i survived finals, ended up with my lowest semester gpa yet (still 4.0 in violin), don't particularly care, had lots of fun in hatteras on the beach, and it's wonderful to be with anible again.

that said.

it's been another anible day. went over at 9-ish this morning, to provide moral support etc. during his interviews at the national technical institute for the deaf. he'd applied to transfer there from marlboro earlier this spring, to enter the interpreting program. (his two passions, you know, asl and linguistics.) anyway. today he had an interview and a skills assessment. (keep in mind, here, he hasn't been around the deaf in about a year and a half.) the assessor said that the skill is obviously there, but he's rusty. he's going to take a ten-week accelerated asl III course this summer to refresh himself. if he meets ntid's entrance requirements after that, he'll be admitted to the aslie program. otherwise, he'll be admitted 'conditionally,' and take non-interpreting classes along with more asl refreshers. either way, he's in.

please understand, this is very exciting, and not only because he just got in to one of the most highly respected interpreting programs in the country.
anible will be in rochester next fall.

*jumps up and down, dances around*

*cough* so. yes. contintuing. we got back from rochester at around 4/5-ish. had dinner at the anible's, really good rice stir fry. chatted a bit with the anible parents, then anible and i took off to downtown ithaca. i didn't realize how much i missed it. white skinny guys with dreads and birkenstocks, perpetually stoned; hairy womyn in linen (and birkenstocks, for that matter); the house of shalimar and its tibetan sundresses; the row of used book stores on the commons, racks of clearance advertising $2 per book! what a city. anible and i grabbed the latest issue of the ithaca times from the library and sauntered over to autumn leaves, our favorite bookstore/cafe, to peruse the concert listings. settled on joe papas at the moosewood, turned out to be an accomplished classical guitarist. we sat and were serenaded for a while, soaking the the intellectual swank and hippie chill that is the moosewood. great place, yo. i felt guilty about going there two nights ago and not ordering anything (went to hear djug django, fantastic old-school jazz band), so this time i got myself a fresh strawberry ricotta mousse. mmmmm...i think i'll make it a habit. ...crikey, that was good. (my mouth is starting to water.)

joe finished up at around 9:15. anible and i walked around the commons for a bit, taking in the smells etc.--it really does have a distinctive smell. concrete (or wet concrete, tonight), and cedar chips, and stale exhaust, and fresh food. it's a great smell. (no, really, it is.) 9:25 we headed over to cinemapolis to see eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (jim carrey, kate winslet, kirsten dunst for good measure). excellent movie. bit distressing *cough*, but still excellent. i'd give a good long review, but i hate to give even the barest bit of plot away. it's an extremely existential movie--very much relish life because you're alive, there doesn't have to be a point and it doesn't have to be perfect, existence is an end in and of itself, don't be content to just exist, the moments are all we have and they're worth it, live as if you won't be able to tomorrow, etc. the acting is superb. i don't know what it is recently, i've been seeing a lot of really good acting--i think the popularity of reality tv shows is encouraging directors to include more ad-libbing in their movies. anyway. the composition of the film is incredibly effective. and i'm just rambling now because it's 1:30 in the morning, but really. it's a great movie.

o o, we also (inadvertently) visited the cafe run by twelve tribes, a somewhat sketchy sect of christianity. got to be the neatest interior decorating scheme i've ever seen--walking in is like stepping into a jungle. everything is solid logs, leaves, amber lighting...the kind of place i would frequent if it weren't run by who it's run by.

it started thunderstorming during the movie. when we got out, we went up to ecovilliage to watch. pitch black, foggy clouds, pouring rain, intense white flashes--it was pretty impressive. took about five minutes before we both spooked ourselves and left. *cough* vivid imaginations, you know. to much science fiction during our formative years.

in other news, there are currently two horrendously ill-conceived bills headed for congress. if they pass (which they won't, but hypothetically speaking), i will renounce my us citizenship and become a drifter.

the squirrels are crawling up my roof again, i hate it when they do that.