i’ve moved!

http://blog.esthernam.com

Filed under: best thing, personal

the opposite of insomnia

Dogsitting has disrupted my sleep schedule considerably. Working for a media organization (ie., artists) means I can slide into work as late as 11am, so I’ve managed to maintain waking hours more typical of a college student til recently.

But having to wake up to answer the morning wake-up call of nature early every morning (and I found it really amusing how the dogs make this call: they crawl out from underneath the blanket and hop around or otherwise shake the bed to rouse me awake, and then when I’m looking at them, they lift their hind leg to mimic peeing), meant I began to go to bed early so as not to miss out on those precious few hours of the dreamless.

Which is annoying, because I recently learned that the most creative time of the day is around 10pm (the least creative time is 4pm – those siesta-practicing cultures knew what they were on about!). So that means I have to cram in as much productivity as I can into the hours between, say, 9pm – midnight, as opposed to before, when I had all the hours before around 2am sprawled before me.

Hmm. This is probably not making much sense, because it’s almost midnight and I am beat.

Filed under: personal , sleep

thoughts on moving out, part 1

i found an M&M in a drawer i was cleaning out. then i remembered i’d stowed a bag of dark chocolate M&Ms in there, about 5 months ago. this one must’ve escaped, and stayed neatly hidden under sheafs of bills and recipes.

i debated eating it for about 3 minutes. but finally i threw it out, because i am not liz lemon!

more about "greenzo clip", posted with vodpod

Filed under: personal

quickies

1. I hate Windows Vista.

2. What am I doing with all this leftover loan money, besides take whirlwind trips to SF? I am…going to start  paying off my loans early! I know that’s like the nerdiest thing to do, but it feels good! Somehow, 35k seems a lot smaller and more manageable than 40k. Maybe because I can see myself making 35k a year, while 40k seems a bit of a reach.

3. I know, I know, incredibly lame.

4. But I still have a car to pay off as well, so that’s why I’m trying to be sensible.

5. I’ve made more money over this past year than I thought I would, thanks to internships that have actually paid me real money. I hadn’t expected that. That’s why I had so much loan money left over.

6. The funniest thing about Twitter is that, even when its service has been horrible, people haven’t been jumping ship as they have done when other websites suffer from heavy downtime and outages (cf. Friendster, circa 2001). Instead, people offer to try to help the engineering team out to save this now-indispensable service! I just find that hilarious.

7. And completely understandable. I love Twitter, and I’m no longer ashamed to admit it.

8. I met Mags’ baby today! He is ADORABLE. After holding him I was seriously all like, I want babies! Until Mags told me about the episiotomy she had to go through, and the 2 weeks of… let’s just call it fluid loss, plus the 4 more weeks of, shall we say, fluid leakage…and suddenly I felt like I could probably stand to wait  another couple decades or so.

9. Also, Baby is a poop machine! An adorable poop machine, sure, but yeah.

10. Also, he was wearing this hilarious sleeper that said “Surrender the b00bie!”

Filed under: personal

oh dear

My sister just informed me that my mom is miffed because i don’t want to continue living with my parents after i move out of westwood. “She just wants to live her own life,” my mom was quoted as saying.

umm…YEAH?

Really, if anything, I’m doing them a huge favor. It’s not like I’d be helping out around the house or paying rent if I moved back in.  I feel like a guest there now as it is.

Also, I’m about 98% certain that moving back in with them would drive the entire household batty in a fortnight.

So I definitely need a job. And a new apartment. But the job has to come first.

Job!!

Filed under: personal

quickies

1. this sounds like an awesome weekend project. it’s almost enough to make me go to SF! (because super happydevhouse and bay to breakers just aren’t enough)

2. i got a de facto extension on my midterm. i couldn’t handle both that and my portfolio presentation being due the same day. i say de facto because i simply forgot to finish it in time. the instructors couldn’t be cooler about it, just telling me to email it when i was done.

3. i kicked ass on the portfolio. don’t know why i worried about it so much. i think they were blinded by the great photos I used on my Keynote slides (most of them are in my flickr faves). the program director, normally a crabby old coot, was actually cordial, which is like, majorly unusual by his standards.

4. okay, actually, this midterm thing is bugging me. it’s haunting me like helen thomas haunted stephen colbert in that white house correspondents dinner video. i need to finish it, but i…just…can’t!

5. according to the iPod death clock estimator, my iPod mini is due to die on Memorial Day weekend. That is the worst possible time, because I have to work all freaking weekend (network switching party, gah!). on the bright side, if it were to die, i could try a project i’ve always wanted to try, and score major bonus points on the scale of g33kitude – turn the 3rd gen mini into a flash mini!!

Filed under: computer, personal, school, work

Discardia

Did some spring cleaning in my room and the common areas, after having woefully neglected household chores for the past few months. That’s right, *months.*

The entire apartment needed vacuuming, badly. As in, I’m amazed I didn’t break the old Eureka.

Now I just have the kitchen to do, which will be pretty manageable, as it’s the only area we’ve been cleaning regularly.

But man! That living room was downright foul, and I don’t know how we were able to tolerate it for so long.

Hopefully I will keep up household chores more regularly from now on. I’ve never enjoyed wallowing in filth, but last quarter my roomates and I kind of let everything descend into madness. After this, I’m realizing it’s better to spend some minutes every week tidying, than to do it all at once. Because it gets to be pretty foul.

Also: never move into a large apartment. Unless you can afford professional service.

Filed under: personal

more finals madness!

Seriously. Two projects due in three days means four times as much surfing and facebooking and blogging. Six times less sleep. Seven times more work to do in 8th the amount of time. Or something.

A few notes:

1. I was going to meet up with my family in downtown LA today so I asked my mom to bring a little bit of laundry detergent because I’d run out and I really needed to launder. She brought me some, all right…..in an old GARLIC CONTAINER.

2. Something near or under (or above?) my apartment complex makes this really loud, deep, repetitive, rumbling noise. It sounds like a ginormous fan is turning, and the vibration is really strong. The sound frequency is so low that I mostly just feel it in the back of my neck, and it’s super duper annoying, especially when it’s only most noticeable at night when I’m trying to sleep.

3. I am SO glad I kept a running journal of the internship I did this quarter. It is amazing how quickly I forget things these days.

4. On a related note, I lost access to the Web somehow for about an hour this evening. I could still IM people and check mail, but anything http:// -ish was out. It was so annoying! Because without Google, I don’t know anything anymore.

5. Beard Papa’s is fiendishly expensive. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten my mom hooked on their cream puffs. Fortunately, another one’s going to open in Cerritos so maybe I won’t have to buy it for her anymore.

Filed under: personal, school

Christmas Wishlist

1. A car.

Just kidding! I already have one! Woohoo!

2. A carton of Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream from Ben & Jerry’s, which I still have not found in any grocery store I’ve visited. Why not, Westwood Whole Foods, why ever not?
3. End to the writer’s strike so we can have TV again.
4. As long as we are thinking big: Stephen Colbert.
5. The long-rumored, possibly imminent, small-form MacBook Pro.
6. A guinea pig (because I have no room to keep a pony).

Filed under: personal

prose ode

I was gonna send this to the Cool Tools blog but my nerve quailed. Also, I don’t think this thing can be bought anywhere anymore (Made in USA and all that).

But I’m not going to let that 15 minutes I just spent writing go to waste!

So here it is:

I love my backpack! It’s an Eastpak. I bought it at Sam’s Club (or was it Costco?) right before I started college, just for carrying books and doing normal, student-y things. After 7 years of heavy, almost daily use, including on trips around Europe/Asia, this bag is still in nearly perfect condition.

Most other backpacks I’ve used have had the zipper break after a few years, or gotten holes in them, especially near the bottom. This backpack has none of those problems, and has almost no signs of wear, apart from slight discoloration on the bottom (which is covered with suede on the outside). The undersides of the straps are made of some grippy material that makes them slip-proof. Even the loop at the top of the bag (the one you may use to hang on a hook, or grab to pick the bag up off the floor) is as good as it was the day I bought the backpack. There’s not a single stitch undone or out of place.

What’s more, the front pouch holds a surprisingly large quantity of stuff, and while the design of the inside pockets could’ve been better (I don’t carry as many pencils as there are holders, and would rather have more wide pockets), even when I’ve forgotten to close the zipper, and flung my backpack around, I’ve never had anything fall out of the front pouch part (I have been pocket-picked from it, though =P).

There are a few shortcomings: the bag is not very waterproof — if it’s raining, my stuff inside does get a little damp sometimes. Also, the zipper tabs, while nice because they’re bigger than normal, make a lot of noise, and that makes me self-conscious when I’m walking through a library.

But for what’s a rather small, medium-sized backpack, it holds a ton, and holds it well! I’ve had stuff happen to things I carry inside the bag (ie water damage from not closing a bottle tightly enough or whatever), but the bag itself has taken a lot of punishment, and been none the worse off. I fully expect it to last another good 7 years, which is pretty good considering it originally cost less than $20!

The end.

Filed under: personal