busy weekend

Had kind of a crazy weekend: first Friday night, I got together with Lisa and Shayne to watch Ivanhoe. Which was a great movie which I will be writing up as soon as I get caught up on movies. We also had dinner, including this amazing spinach and cheese casserole thing Lisa made. Yum!

Saturday I spent all day working on a friend's website. I'm converting the site to MT so it will work more or less like my photolog. It will be a hundred times easier to maintain but it's kind of a pain now, to have to enter all those images into the new format. I had planned to write a perl script to enter them all at once, but then I realized that because of the information I have to look up about each image, that would be more work than just entering each one by hand.

I finished working just in time to get a shower and get dinner before Christa's birthday party Saturday night, which was a total blast. I was having so much fun that I lost track of time and stayed hours later than I had intended to. We didn't get home until almost 2 am! Nothing wrong with that, except that I overslept Sunday morning and was rushed getting ready for the Stoneline photo shoot for which they had asked me to provide on-site tech support. I was a little irked about having to miss a gallery opening that I had wanted to attend, but the photo shoot was fun and interesting so I can't complain.

I had just enough time to do the research I needed and head to Stoneline. The shoot was at their factory in Hillsborough, which I had never been to before. I planned to stop at Wendy's and get an iced tea (why is it that every fast food place in the world sells vile and undrinkable iced tea, except Wendy's whose tea is pretty good?), but the drive-in had a huge line that I didn't want to wait in just for a tea. So I ended up getting there early, which gave me a chance to walk around and check out the interesting old building they're in, and the extra materials stacked up outside.

Unfortunately I didn't get to take photos of the inside of the factory, which was a really interesting place crammed full of work samples, materials, and all kinds of things. Because when Monte got there to let me in, we got right to work. I did get this sign posted on the door to the room containing the photo studio. I think it means "keep door closed if a/c or heat is on, or if any smelly solvents or stains are being used in the workshop."

Setting up for the photo shoot meant moving the new computer to the factory. Which meant that, after we were done, I had to head to their home office in Chapel Hill and transfer their business email back to the old computer. (Which is a G4 tower and now has system X too, so it hardly seems fair to call it "the old computer.) That only took a few minutes and then finally I got home around 5:30. Lay on the couch watching the America's Next Top Model marathon -- yes I am a sucker, I watched most of it even though it was the most recent season -- until it was time for the Oscars.

We watch the Oscars every year, but we do it in a low-key way. Which means, we only watch for the clothes and to see if anyone says anything stupid. We fast-forward all the songs and commercials and we don't make any effort to see the films nominated for Best Picture. In fact, Georg and I kept track and we had only seen three movies that were nominated for anything this time: House of Flying Daggers, Harry Potter and the Prisoner and Azkaban, and Supersize Me. Georg commented that we had hardly seen anything last year. I retorted that I had seen over 200 movies last year, to which he replied that I knew what he meant. And I did.

Slate had an article bemoaning the boring lack of fashion mishaps in the Oscars these days. I have to admit they have a point. As Slate points out, Oscar gowns have become like menswear: the basic style is the same -- always a floor-length 30's-ish sheath dress -- and the only variety is in the details. In fact, Georg and I noticed that the men were more adventurous than the women last night: that Chinese-style shirt on Jeremy Irons, Johnny Depp's blue tux, and who was it who wore a bow tie under a regular collar? I forget but it was really weird looking. Another guy looked like he was wearing a black velvet tux with satin piping. It was hard to tell, but the fabric looked thick and rumpled like velvet.

Now I'm off and running -- just found out that I have a client meeting at Denovo at 10 which they forgot to tell me about. I haven't had a shower yet and I look like death warmed over because I was up late watching the Oscars. Blegh.