Ommigod Ommigod Ommigod.... I got my birthday present today. My Love and my friend Rand gave me the money to pick out what new digital camera I wanted. ! ! ! We ran all over today so I could get my grubby little paws on different models to see what I liked, what size things were, ect. I really wanted to handle a few that were in the top of my list before deciding. I got to see the Canon PowerShot A80 (everywhere), the Nikon 3200 (many places) but I couldn't find the Nikon 3700 anywhere. Until the very last place we checked - the Ritz Camera in the mall. Oh. My. Goddess. I fell in love. It's so cute and little (think a more rectangular (but just as small) elph s400). Well, there's a $100 Nikon rebate on it. It lists for $399, BUT...I found it - shipped, no tax! - for $282. So with the $100 rebate, it's half off retail. Hell yeah! $182 for a $400 camera. It's sweeet.
Anyway, I'm so unbelievably hyped and excited. Holy shit. I mean holy shit! I've only been wanting a new dig cam for like a year or two so....wow. Just wow.
We're heading off to Disney tomorrow (the only thing that SUCKS about getting it online is I can't take it with me immediately. Darn!) and staying over. So I'll be out for two days. (A stay-over! Weeee!) It'll be cool. (Despite the fact we couldn't book where we wanted to at the Wilderness Lodge on Disney property, we got a room right near Downtown Disney at a good rate.) It's nice to be out and away for two days instead of just one. And to not have to drive home and such. Anyway, I'm excited.
So I'm hyped and hyper and thrilled. And shocked. Did I mention shocked? 'Cause wow. Anyway, had to babble a bit because I can't get over how excited I am. I can't wait to get it. (Should be next week) Have an excellent weekend everyone, I'm out having fun and enjoying my birthday!
edit I almost forgot. Two things. One, I have to thank sphinxgoddess for being an amazing dear - she got me the moldavite pendulum I've been wanting for a year now. It's my very first pendulum ever. I'm really thrilled about it and can't wait to start using it.
Two, Luka installed MT for me. At the moment you can see it's bare-bones here. I don't have time this weekend, but I'll be playing with it and getting to know it. See how I like it and whatnot; what I can do with it and what it can do. Bad timing apparently since they're new version is terribly restrictive AND you have to pay for it and everyone's jumping ship. Figures that as soon as I catch up, I'm behind the curve already! I still have the 2.6 version though so it should work out just fine regardless of their new version issues.
Anyway, now everyone have a GREAT weekend! I've got to pack some clothes for tomorrow. Ta!
Construction Pics Since they're not out there today I snapped a couple shots just to show you what I mean. It's WAY worse when they're here because it's like being in the middle of a contractor war zone - I kid you not! Nails, wood, slivers of wood, wires, equiptment, ladders, etc. EVERYWHERE. Not to mention the guys all look a little too happy when I walk out there to check my mail. I guess I'm better to look at then rotting wood. *chuckles*
Small pics, but you get the idea.
My newly replaced balcony - some people's entire balcony including the "floor" are being replaced. Mine was just the railing.
Part of an entire wall replaced along the side of the building. There's new planks like this everywhere along the building, some in large sections.
Like this... See how much they had to replace? That's the ground floor apartments right below us. I took this looking down from my landing next to my door.
Anyway, makes me worry over what else is wrong and what caused the fire under their asses to do this. I have never seen such a large-scale project being done like this at an apartment before. I have a sneaking suspicion that they failed an inspection or something. They might have been told they'll be condemed or something if they don't get this in order in x number of days. Because they've just been going at it. It's actually odd not to see them here today. That's how busy they've been. Somedays they're working on two buildings at once. Just odd.
Catch-up I'm so far behind. So here's a short-version catch-up of several topics over the last couple days.
The Cup We got there a little after 6pm. It was there from 4pm-8pm. Good thing we got there when we did because about ten or fifteen minutes after we arrived, they closed the line to new people. We waited almost two hours but it really didn't feel like it. Everyone was nice, friendly, excited about being there and easy to converse with. It was my Love, my friend Rand, myself and our friend Tommy showed up to hang out with us. We all got our pictures taken and all really agreed it was a great time.
The Weekend Saturday we went with our friend Rand out to WDW. He has a couple more days on his Play 4 Days Pass that has to be used before June 4th. This time we wanted to hit MGM as he had never been there before. In the end, we hit MGM until about 6:30ish, then went over to Epcot until about 9:15pm (took some pics of the cool Flower and Garden Festival which I'll have some photos put up soon) and then finished our night out at Magic Kingdom (which was open until 11pm). We got to see the Wishes fireworks show in MK at 10pm (amazing every time I see it) and caught Haunted Mansion and Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin. Not bad. Three parks in one day. We were beat but we had a really good time. The only disappointing thing was the "backlot tour" thing at MGM which was just dumb. I got to take Pal Mickey to MGM and Epcot for the first time (he worked perfect and knew just where he was) but forgot to take pics. Though I DID get my pic taken with Mike and Sulley from Monster's Inc. at MGM so that was cool. :)
Sunday my poor Love had to get up early to meet his folks for breakfast. It was too early for me - especially after having been up late the night before. (We didn't even get home until like 1:30am) My own mom was sick with a cold so I just called her.
Monday Got two very lovely birthday cards in the mail. One from Dawna and one from felinevamp. How sweet of them! Dawna's had an adorable mermaid on it. Felinevamp's had flowers and she even included some giftcards so my Love and I can have dinner and a movie out! What a dear! Thank you!
How lovely!
Work started on my building. So things got noisy and stayed that way. What a awful thing to be stuck in a building that they're doing not only construction, but demolition on!
Tuesday Started off with a bang. Literally. From a sledgehammer. Ugh. The noise went from bad to worse. I didn't know things could be that miserable. So, when you're exhausted and your head it killing you from the constant pounding, what do you do? Oh, I know. You come across a bottle of a temp hair color and decide to use it. It's one of those month things - not perm so I thought, eh, no harm. It's definately redder but it's darker then it was, more reddish plum or something. It's ok, but I'm glad it's not permanent. I don't like it that much. I'd rather it be a lighter, brighter shade of red then this. Like I said though, no biggie either way since it'll wash out. Here's what it looks like:
before
after
Wednesday Ah, beautiful peace and quiet. The workers aren't on property at all today so I slept blissfully in until almost 11am. Ah.... I so needed that. I'm working on some domain stuff right now - updates and what not. I'm trying to better organize (or at least track) where things are so people can find them. I made a subdomain specifically for my ever-growing collection of Disney related pages so it can function as a one-stop gateway. www.disney.giveneyestosee.com. That way people can find my Disney photo galleries, my 20K Leagues Tribute, my Pin pages, my Pal Mickey pics, etc. all from one page. Makes sense to me.
And on the lovely birthday news, dear Luka has offered to install and configure MT for me as a birthday present! *grins* Very cool. Many of you know I've just been terrified of doing it myself for, oh...about a year now. I know she knows her stuff because she also does design work with templates and such for MT. (You guys should go have her make a layout for you! She's got some lovely stuff plus she can make skins and all that for you as well!) It's also her birthday as well this month - just one day after mine. Anyway, Luka, thank you! I can't wait to figure out how to use it and getting everything all fixed up. Most likely, I'll change the journal to a subdomain though this link will always work (no one will get lost!) with a redirect or such. I'll keep you guys apprised of the changes. :)
Hrm....what else....
The rest of the week & weekend Well, tomorrow we're going to go have dinner (fire up the grill!) and watch some playoff hockey at our friend Rand's house (which will be nice since he has a widescreen HDTV). Before that though, I'll be having lunch with my Mom and my Nanny (my grandmother - mom's mom - though no one calls her that) for my birthday. Saturday and Sunday we're going to head out to WDW and stay over Saturday night to make a weekend out of it. We couldn't get any rooms on-property (all the FL resident specials were booked leaving the rooms in the $230+ a night catagory - no thank you!) but I think I found a really nice one only about a mile or two away for about $77. Not bad at all and it's worth it to have a get-away out of it since we're not really doing anything else for my birthday. It should be fun. I've only ever stayed over there like once (back in Aug 03 we stayed at the Wilderness Lodge with one of the resident specials that we couldn't get this weekend) and that was really cool so this should be cool too. We might meander down to Downtown Disney and/or Pleasure Island as well to give ourselves something else different to do that night. I'm looking forward to it either way though.
Well, I think that's it for now. I've pretty much been rambling so I think I caught up on what I wanted to write about. *chuckles* I'm sure I'll think of something else eventually, but we'll call it done for now. Take care everyone!
The sound of destruction in the morning.... So nothing like waking up to the walls shaking, the cat freaking out and the loudest bangs and thuds. Seems that the work that was being done on the building yesterday has moved to my actual apartment. Or, more specifically, my balcony. I, who couldn't get to sleep last night and didn't get to bed until like 4am, was very rudely awakened by a guy with a crowbar and then a big, fucking sledgehammer going to town at the railings on my balcony.
My master bedroom backs up (on the outside) against the balcony. It provides the side "wall" for the structure. Needless to say then, when my bed is also eased against the self-same wall(s), the entire bed shakes if there's demolition on your balcony. This is something I didn't really know. Well, to be more specific, hadn't ever thought of.
Turns out it's REALLY FUCKING LOUD as well when they're doing first demolition and then construction on your building and most especially on your own apartment. Yeah, hadn't had the joy of experiencing this yet either. I thought it was annoying yesterday as they ripped apart communial building walls and replaced them, but oh no....this is FAR worse.
All I want is a little bit of sleep. Is that so much to ask? Damn apartment complex for suddenly deciding they didn't want rotting wood all over the place. Sheesh. What about us getting some rest? I mean really. *chuckles*
Tried yesterday to figure out the comments thingy but boy it just didn't work. I need to look at someone's code that includes it. Problem is that they've changed the perm link code, added a new type of code you need to enter and BOTH of those need to be in the right place before the comment tags work. And that's where I'm running into my problem. The help files really aren't that helpful. Put tag in your blogger tag.... well yeah, but WHERE? And in what type of order? Give me a damned sample blog I can read it's full code and see how to intergrate it! Bah. I'm sure I'm just doing something stupid and wrong, but today being day two of waking up to construction, I doubt I'll have the brainpower to figure it out yet.
A Whole New Blogger Um, wow. This is all different. Hrm. Seems they've gone and done all kinds of things since the last time I posted the other day. There's new design, new way of interacting with the journal, new comment system they've added, etc. I'm going to need to futz around with it and see what I can come up with. In the meantime, I just wanted to show off the pic I got of me and the Stanley Cup. They took a pic for you and then in 24 hours you could download it off the web. I cropped it because my Love didn't want to be in it on my journal, so it's just me but still, it's pretty damned cool. I have way more pics (one of us with the Cup that my friend Rand got with his camera as well and a ton from Disney) to post but that will have to come later. Right now, here's my pic and I'm going to fiddle around with the settings and see if I can't turn on blogger's comment system instead.
Cool, hu? :)
Ok, they're working on repairing the buildings here (replacing wood and balconies and stuff) and they're on my building so hopefully I can concentrate through the pounding on my walls enough to figure out the new blogger. Stay tuned.
