Visit the kelpforest....

Ooh, this is neat!

I've seen similar things for taking notes, but most of them required special notebooks or paper - which I'd still be interested in because I take a lot of notes at meetings. This one is for drawing - although I wish it used pencil instead of ballpoint, as I'm not that comfortable drawing in ink, although I have before. Sure, mistakes could be corrected later once you upload things, but I just like being able to erase things. I have a Wacom tablet, but drawing on paper is always more comfortable for me (and if I just use regular paper and pencil, I can always scan it, so this is pretty low on the priority of the gadget tree). It'd be nice if you could still use it for notes, too. Hmm, one more thing for the wishlist. I'm sure Amazon's wish is that I'd actually buy something off mine. $200 for just doodling is probably a little much right now...

Out for a walk around the neighborhood again. Sackboy decides to climb my favorite pepper tree.

Just... a little bit... higher....

Lake Park
Huntington Beach CA
Canon EOS 1000D
22 June 2010

( Farmer's market day... )

I have such great friends at work. VT, DP and ML have all informed me that since it's my birthday Monday, they're kidnapping me on Saturday to go shopping at the outlets in Cabezon (out towards Palm Springs). They are all of the opinion I need more girl clothes, especially stuff that John won't wear and get all stretched out (we both wear a lot of T-shirts and polo shirts); they're quite right, I do need some nice clothes now that I'm on this management team, and it would be nice to have something new for the talk I have to give in a couple of weeks. The last new outfit I got was the last time I gave a presentation on the shark tagging program for an American Fisheries Society conference in Ventura, and Gareth was still a baby then. The last time I pulled out my khaki pants (the only non-jeans I own) I found they had gotten permanent stains on them, so I can't wear them to work any more. I probably tend to look more threadbare at work than I should.

And everyone wants to get started Christmas shopping. Between all the car repairs and still owing for John's dental bills and a lot of other crap, I'm not going to be able to get much, but it'll be a fun trip anyway. I haven't gotten the chance to even do much window shopping lately, so that'll be nice.

Paid off all the credit cards and bills, and with what we have left over (still a nice piece of change) John wanted a new TV. The one we bought when we first got married, was dying - everything has been green for the last 4 months. So off we went to Fry's to look at TVs. We stopped at Best Buy to see if we could get my digital camera fixed first. The guy there said they would have to send it out even to see if it could be fixed and recommended taking it to a nearby Mom & Pop place, where they could at least tell me if it was fixable with a free estimate. Pretty nice of him.

Then we went Fry's and after searching a bit for each other after I went to the restroom - I thought we were meeting back near the entrance and he went straight to the TVs - he pointed out all the ones he liked that fit his parameters: flat screen, a headphone jack, more than 2 video feeds, at least 20" screen. We finally decided with the more expensive one with a couple more features he liked - I guess we can afford it this month.

While he wrangled with the sales person, the news came on; every TV in the store tuned to the same station. 50 TVs all showing the Columbia breaking up. I had avoided it up to that point. I rooted in front of the floor sample of the model we chose, with tears running down my face. No one else seemed to notice- the sales people all busy earning their commissions and it was dark besides. All the other customers must have been inured to it already. John came up behind me, noticed my face, put an arm around my shoulders and gently steered me off to the digital cameras. Sure, new toys will always distract me. :p

I dispiritedly looked through the cameras. There were probably two dozen people there all elbowing each other, and only one salesperson to help them all. At Fry's, you had better damn well know what you want, because their sales staff is useless and their customer service sucks. What they do have is selection. I did find a Sharp VE-CG30 for $199 - which is the same as we paid for my old HP 318, which was pretty much point and shoot. This one has 3.2 megapixel resolution, and is more like a regular SLR camera - you can manually set the f-stop and shutter speed, as well as setting it to completely automatic. However, it uses smart digital cards instead of Compact Flash, so we'll have to get all new cards for it. Oh, well more to use for mp3s. It was too good a deal to pass up. John figured I needed something else to think about. I still want to get the old one fixed, if possible. Angus was taking some pretty good pictures before it got broken.

I also grabbed a couple of DVDs - Cowboy Bebop-Best Sessions and Fushuigi Yugi, which is one I've heard about but haven't seen before; it looked interesting. Unfortunately, it seems to be a section near the end of the series, and when I picked it up, I thought it was a stand alone movie. So I hope I can pick up what's going on without seeing anything previous. It certainly looks pretty, and came with a set of pretty plastic pencil boards with pictures of the characters on both sides. Are these things supposed to have a use, other than mini-posters?