Thursday, June 01, 2006

Trivial Pursuits





I made one of my patented mix CD's yesterday. This one is called "Baroque Pop" and it's pretty great if I do say so m'self. Got some Kinks, some Zombies, and some Beach Boys on there, as well as some more contemporary stuff like Belle & Sebastian, Dungen, and the Shins. I even snuck a little Neuseiland on there. It's a very pleasant mix.

I've been using my Spirograph set too, as you can see. It's just as much fun as I remember it, but unfortunately it didn't come with any pens. I only have black ones, so the house is full of black geometric squiggles. "You can have any colour Spirograph design you want, as long as it's black," to paraphrase Henry Ford. I'll have to pick up some ballpoint pens at the dollar store.

We're the official residents of our new apartment now. The other guys moved everything out yesterday and now we start the long process of crap transference. The new backyard is looking beautiful — flowers and blooming trees everywhere. I'm a little concerned that we're going to ruin it, not knowing anything about gardening. But I'm excited to learn. It's such a nice view out the large sunroom window.

Did I tell you that I got hit really hard in the shin with a softball last Sunday? I think I did. I got to see just how gory and ugly it looks last night when I played some tennis with Meg and therefore wore a pair of shorts. Ugh. Actually, we didn't really play tennis, as such. The courts were all in use, so we found a place to hit balls against a wall, which is probably what we need more anyway. It took a really long time to find a place, though. It seems like they build schools these days in weird convoluted shapes, probably to prevent exactly what we were trying to do. So by the time we started it was already quite dark, but we got in a good forty minutes or so anyway.

I'm quite proud of this one. I moved the ring around one of the wheels as I drew it. I want to get into more like this, using the oblong pieces, but the pins we have are too wide to fit in the holes. Another dollar store purchase, I guess. I'd kind of forgotten how this was my favourite toy as a kid. As Charles always says, in imitation of his friend Lonny, "It's a clyaassic, myaan!"

- Andrew

6 comments:

St. Louis Family said...

How did that diamond shaped one happen?
Dana

Andrew said...

It was easy. I just did a two pointed one using a few different holes in the same wheel, then did the same thing over top of it with the starting point at a 90 degree angle.

-Andrew

Anonymous said...

Send pictures of the new digs. I can't wait to see them. Soon we'll see it live.

Mum

St. Louis Family said...

andrew...what file size do you leave your pics when you put them on the blog? Jason

Andrew said...

I usually make them RGB JPEG's, 72 dpi at 6" (for the longer dimension) by whatever. I'm not sure how you guys post your pictures, but Dana once said something about only being allowed five per post. I've never had that problem. I don't use Flickr or anything; I just post them by clicking on the photo icon through Blogger. Then I navigate to each photo file on my computer, choose a size (small, medium, or large) and a text-relative alignment (left, right, or centre). I think to do this you have to have "float alignment" enabled in your formatting settings. The spirograph ones were small, so if you click on them they appear at full size.

- Andrew

EJ said...

I had a spirotot as a kid. I don't remember what the difference was, just that it was simpler for wee ones.