Legos are popular

This is my flickr all-time top 10 viewed photos. Note: Some links won’t work for anyone but me, and I’m too lazy to remove them. Of note is that the flying spaghetti monster has taken the top ten by storm. (He’s also number 11, BTW)

Seriously, it’s amazing how many people search “lego titanic”, “titanic lego”, etc.

			Views yesterday	this week	all time
1		Lego Titanic	14	49	1,279	2	0
2		Lego Titanic	12	34	820	1	0
3		Far Side cartoons, in lego	1	9	784	1	0
4		Lego Titanic	10	36	725	1	0
5		Fremont Solstice Parade	3	9	477	0	0
6		So that’s what they did on the Titanic…	4	7	472	2	1
7		Pirate ships	1	6	337	0	0
8		Pirate ships	2	9	312	0	1
9		Skeleton army and… Pluto	5	8	247	0	0
10		The ladies and our home made poodle skirts	0	0	235	0	1

It’s 3am… or really 3:30.

I’m sleeping. I hear my cell phone ringing. In confusion, I ponder what day it is, who I am, if I overslept, etc. I see light coming through the cracks in my cave wall. I check the time, almost 3:30am. WTF? I assume wrong number, but still realize there is nowhere in the nation right now that is an acceptable time to call nearly anyone. A minute or so after it stops ringing, I hear the new voice mail tone. OMG! Someone must be in the hospital or something. OMG! Someone is probably dead! Crap! I hop out of bed, grab the phone, look at the missed call log. “Unknown”. They must be calling from the hospital or something, I assume. I call to check the voicemail, cursing myself for not charging the phone last night in favor of charging at work tomorrow, but I still have a charge. I’m worried about what I will hear and then…

“Hi Kim, it’s Claude from the casino.” What the heck is this? I say my freakin’ name in the voicemail message. He then proceeds to mention something about an upcoming tournament. He has an accent I don’t recognize, and consider giving the benefit of the doubt that he’s calling internationally and isn’t bright enough to do the math on the time change. Benefit of doubt not worthy. “I figure you probably keep the same hours I do. I usually go to bed around 6am (chuckle). It’s 3:30am now. (pause) You’re probably in the shower or something.” He then rambles some more. “I’ll try back later,” he repeats a couple times. What the hell?

So, after my panic, I didn’t calm down well. I replayed it in my head several times and mentally wrote this entry. My mind wouldn’t let me fall asleep even after the porch light went out causing my cave to go back to pitch black. So, now a couple hours after that annoying call, I’m still awake, and I give up. I only had about 3.5 hours sleep. Maybe a bit more. Yay!

33.333333333333333333333333333…

That’s right, today is my 33 and 1/3 birthday. I wish I could say I came up with some grand way to celebrate today, but mostly it was a day to get caught up with chores (well, some) and nap and make some too-salty baked mac & cheese and that’s probably about it. Tomorrow I celebrate, but nothing particularly commemorative about being a third of a century.

So, this is also my first post directly on wordpress. All others before this were originally elsewhere and have now been imported to their new home. I like the site overall pretty well. I looked at a few other hosting sites as well, but this was the winner from my brief search. Hopefully I’ll continue to feel that way as I figure out my way through all this.

So, what have I been up to lately? Well, a number of things. For one, I’ve realized I’m reliving 1988. OK, not really, but a couple things are coming together that make me think twice anyway. Back in the summer of ‘88, I took my first flight to California. It was also my first solo flight. A little traumatic for me as well since when I got off the plane at LAX, my brother was not there to greet me. I didn’t know which way to go, I didn’t have his phone number or any way to contact him, etc. I started walking slowly but with little confidence of my path. Before long (though it seemed like an eternity) I saw my brother booking it through the terminal toward me looking terrified. I’ve never let him forget it. That was also the first and only time I’d been to Disneyland until this year. In June of this year, 20 years later, I went again and had a great time. I honestly think I enjoyed it more this time.

The second 1988 flashback harkens back to an activity I performed on a certain road trip to a great place. That year, I rode up to Washington from Houston with my mom and my aunt. We took a leisurly path, stopping at various attractions along the way. It was a really fun trip and the only real road trip I’ve ever been on. On the trip, they started my license plate obsession. I had a little note pad and we’d keep track of every state license plate we saw on the trip. During the course of the trip, we saw 48 states and DC. I know we didn’t see Vermont, but I don’t remember the other one we didn’t get. I know it wasn’t something obvious like Hawaii or Rhode Island. We had those. Well, this year I randomly decided to keep track again. I started on July 1st. I never really turned off the whole paying attention to license plates thing that started in 1988, so I recognize many states very quickly and don’t have to work very hard on it. No, the tricky part these days is remembering which ones I’ve seen long enough to remember to check my list and mark them off at the next stoplight or the end of my trip. So far, I’ve been really surprised at how many I’ve gotten, and how quickly, in particular with all the gas prices and economic issues, plus I’m staying in Western Washington. So far, I’ve seen 45 states, 3 Canadian provinces, government plates, a US military plate from either Germany, Italy, or Spain, and a Puerto Rico plate. My remaining states are Kentucky, South Carolina (which I’m nearly positive I’ve seen but haven’t marked off yet), New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Delaware. It’s been almost a week now since I’ve marked off a new one. Ah, well, I’ll get there.

Yep, this is how I entertain myself. I live a life on the edge.

Recently I spent about a week being broken. Clearly a sign of getting old when I can somehow manage to injure myself through the act of driving home from work as nomal. My shoulder and neck started hurting. It just kept getting worse each day and I’d wake up from the pain as the ibuprofen would ware off over night. Not fun. Well, I eventually went to the doctor, thanks to snarky kat for driving me there. They gave me some meds that made me feel sick when I took them together. (Turns out the muscle relaxer says to not take narcotic analgesics with it… um…) But, I think taking the muscle relaxer for long enough helped me a *lot*. I improved pretty quickly after that.

So, I’m feeling better, and actually have a day today with no plans or other obligations. I have energy even. So, I’m using it to start making up for all the time spent not doing my chores. Luckily it’s even seemed fun today. That doesn’t happen very often.

When I set my mind on something…

This week I participated in a little scavenger hunt over on wiinintendo.net. That’s the site run by the guy who did the Wii Sports Experiment (lost 9 pounds) and recently the Wii Fit Experiment (lost 15 pounds). They had one a few months ago that I participated in through about day three of five. You see, it gets progressively harder as it continues, lulling you into a false sense of security. It starts out with clues hidden like this. I can’t even describe the hoops I had to jump through near the end. The google cache ended up coming in handy as an aid. The very end was a password protected article that required finding said password. I had two days worth of clues to still work through when I got home last night. The final clues had already been up for over four hours.

Well, long story short, you can see who got to that article first.

Ummm, Amazon?

Borrowed this screencap from a friend. Because, I know when I may think I want a necklace, I really want a no-crank outdoor sink.

FSM nod

Well, kinda. I feel famous again. Two of my flickr photos from the solstice parade got linked from the official Flying Spaghetti Monster site. They had an entry about the “float” in the parade. My pics are #’s 4 and 5 in the “bunch”. They’ve had 61 click throughs from the site so far. I’m still disappointed in myself for not getting up to be touched by his noodly appendage

Wii Fit Day 1

I acquired a Wii Fit today. I had been looking around, signed up for some alerts, etc. to no avail. I gave in and spoke to my contact (who shall remain nameless) and learned he could get one to me next week. (I had asked a bit late in the day and didn’t want him to go out of his way.) Well, to my surprise, it was sitting in my chair when I arrived at work this morning. Woo-hoo!

I kind of wanted to just grab it, turn around, and go home to try it out, but I stayed like a good little worker bee. When I got home (after picking Kipper up from his day at the vet with 3 new prescriptions even though his urinalysis results were normal… don’t get me started… sigh), I fired it up.

Everything set up very quickly, had to sync up the new balance board. I discovered that it tucks perfectly under my coffee table. Bonus! I then logged in, told it which Mii to use, and began my tests. My BMI came in at exactly 24.00 which made my Mii jump up and down with joy for being normal (even though it’s on the high side of normal). I set a target of 22.99 (It’s very specific, but only shifts in certain increments) in, I believe 2 months. (maybe 3 months?)Unlikely, but it’s something to target for. That means a loss of 6.8 pounds. I’ve lost about that in the last few months, but those pounds I’ve lost are mostly in the range of my normal fluctuation. The next pounds are *much* harder, and I have very low expectation of losing them, at least in a timely manner. I’ll try, but I won’t be disappointed if it doesn’t happen.

Anyway, I learned my center of balance is a bit to the right and quite a bit far back, so more of my weight is on my heels than should be. I did the test at the beginning and at the end of the workout, with nearly identical results. Interesting.

Because it was my new toy, I wanted to try everything. I did all of the games that are unlocked to start. During the process I unlocked at least three other games, but I resisted temptation.

Yoga

I’m a good deep breather, apparently. That’s what the first one was, and I got 4 stars (the most). Woo! (I have no idea what they measure for that.) I got 3 stars and some fairly high scores on the other 3 yoga poses. I think I did surprisingly well on them. Only one of them was of the challenging variety.

Balance

On a few of these I didn’t “get” everything I was supposed to, so I decided to repeat them once I realized whatever it was I missed. For example in the ski slalom, I was doing fine with left and right through the flags, but i didn’t realize I should have been leaning forward as well to speed up until I was nearly done. Second try, much better, but still a bit meh. Overall fun, but I’ll have to practice these a bit to get them to work correctly. This was definitely where I was weakest.

Aerobics

This part was extra fun because your other Mii’s show up in here, so it’s a little like working out with others. The step aerobics type game had, I think, all of them lined up along side me. In the jogging, I was jogging along and, hey, there’s Paul waving at me. Oh, there’s a stormtrooper running along side me. Oh, hey, it’s Willow and Xander. Oops, looks like Heather tripped up ahead. Then a crowd welcomed me at the finish line. Pretty cool. It also was nice, because it forced me to pace myself. I was supposed to stay behind the Mii I was following. I think that’s been part of my problem with running. My ingrained pace is the pace I used to be able to do. Now that pace makes my heart want to leap out of my chest. Slower is good, but hard. It was just a quick 3 minute jog too, but I didn’t want to die.

Strength

I did surprisingly well here. I got 4 stars on at least 2 of the 4 exercises. I suspect this also has to do with however they measure it. I really don’t understand how the push up/side plank, which was not good, but I got the max points. shrug.

Overall it was a lot of fun. It also kept track of the total time exercising and cheered when I passed 30 minutes. Total was 33 minutes on the day. I love the idea of making exercise a game. Some of you might have noticed I’m a wee bit competitive. This thing is perfect for me, assuming I keep it up consistently. It was actually a pretty good workout.

Dancing, one last time

Matt’s new video came out early this morning. I’ve watched it more times than I’d like to admit. I seem to catch something new each time. You can also go directly to YouTube and click on “watch in high quality” below the video for vast improvement.

Some favorites (yes, I realize this is most of the video)
Christmas Island crabs, Iceland, Guy falling down in Paris, Istanbul, Solomon Islands crack up, Yemen, DMZ Korea, Tokyo girls, Papua New Guinea, Tonga waves, Gurgaon India dancers, Seoul (12 days before arsonists burned down the ancient gate), NY/Tokyo similarities, Tonga whales (hard fought clip), Montreal, Zero G (also problematic), and of course Seattle.

And here’s a handy guide to finding my few pixels:

ETA: I just noticed this video as a response. It’s a documentary about the gasworks filming day and is surprisingly good. Also, I appear in the background a *lot*.

Update: Dancing

Matt Harding updated his blog with info about the dancing thing on Saturday. His is much more entertaining than mine, though he used half the pictures I posted on flickr (with my permission).

Read it!!! I command you!

Where the hell is Kelly?

I took a little break from reality today to go down to Gasworks Park so I could be a tiny spec in an upcoming video. I first saw Matt Harding’s second video shortly after it came out. My oldest brother sent it to me and said I’d like the last location in the video. I loved the video. After running across it several more times, I looked into it further. That’s when I found out that was the *second* video. The first video was made without sponsorship awhile before.

Most interesting to me was probably the three part lecture series he did in Vermont. I highly recommend it if you have an hour+ to kill. He has a very dry sense of humor and provides interesting insight into places he’s been, how the videos came to be, and talks about certain clips in the video.

He also released an amusing outtakes video last year and announced his plans to travel around again and this time to include others in the video. I signed up right away to be notified. It felt a little weird. He lives in Seattle. He’s here a lot. Still I assumed he’d want to continue his tradition of including a Seattle clip. The first clip had him dancing with his oldest niece at Pike Place Market. The second had his then two nieces at the Troll.

Well, he just wrapped up traveling around this big blue marble once more. He got back into town from South America yesterday and had invited everyone down to Gasworks to film the last clip to close out the next video. As usual I took pictures. While there, I met one woman up from Olympia wearing a Mutant Enemy t-shirt who had gone down to help picket during the writers strike. She marvelled at walking the picket line with Joss Whedon, Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, etc. Then she asked if I could direct her to the Wayward since she was up this way anyway. I also spoke with another young woman who has done a lot of travelling herself. She’s been to all seven continents and has spent a lot of time on several of them with the peace corps, teaching English, etc. She was very impressed that I brought up the Macedonian naming controversy when she mentioned having worked there. Sometimes it does pay to be up on current events in far flung places of the world.

But the main purpose of the event was to dance with Matt. I showed up about 5 minutes before he did. When I first got there, I saw a big group, all in costume. I wondered if I’d missed the memo about dressing funny. I quickly surmised these were cosplayers. Apparently they were there for their June photoshoot. I made my way to the place marked with an arrow in the email. Some people were milling about, but it was hard to tell who was there for what purpose. When Matt, his girlfriend Melissa, and a few others connected to them came around the corner it became clearer. He came over to each person, “Are you here to dance?” “Absolutely.” I introduced myself to Matt and Melissa and then let them get set up. There were various other family members and friends of both of them scattered about as well. They started registering each of us. Release form, picture, wrist band. KING and KOMO were both there as well. The cosplayers all went to set up for a shoot on the hill. Afterwards, many came over to see what was up and ended up registering. So, it’s going to look like Seattle is full of people in costumes… Hmmm…

Sadly, Waldo did not opt to be in the video.

Matt’s newest niece made it into the world just in time for the third video. She’s 6 weeks old. So, all three of them will be specs in this one.

He said he thinks this is the most people to come out from anywhere he’s been in the world. (I have to wonder if that would have been true if not for the cosplayers…) We were told the boundaries of the shoot and spread out to fill up the shot. I was pretty close to the middle. Sure enough, when Matt and his family types moved in, they took over the spot I had inhabited. Instead, I stood between his mom and the cosplayers. Interesting.

We did a few dancing clips and then broke up. He said he’d stay around for pictures and stuff and also reiterated not to hesitate to ask him to dance. So, I did. I think I was the last of the day.

Edit: WordPress apparently doesn’t like flickr video and stripped it out during the migration. Here is the link to the video of dancing.

Plus a plain old picture too.

The next video is due out June 21st, though it may come out a day earlier.

He mentioned plans to go back to the South Pacific. Looks like he’s off to get the rest of the Afunakwa story. I’m so relieved!