Illustration done in Adobe Illustrator CS2, using Aaron Sacco's "Imitating A Scanner Darkly" tutorial (via Photojojo). Not perfect, but fair enough considering I've never touched Illustrator before! I think this technique could end up being quite a bit of fun. :)

This is Dune:


He looks nice, but look! He attacks the toys of innocent children!


Therefore, he doesn't get to go on night photography field trips:


Tough love, my friends. Tough love.

Me and my valentine:


Christopher and I decided to give Jonathan and Linda the night off and spend time with our favourite 5-month-old jolly-jumper addict. :)

I walk by this building on the way to and from work, and sometimes the effect is really nice:


This was the day after the huge snowstorm, and the skies had finally cleared and the sun was starting to set and make everything a warm orange. That's got to be my favourite time of day.

Everything's still up in the air at work (when is it not?) and thus my life is in limbo. Have I mentioned how much I love that feeling? Oh, that's right. That's because it drives me crazy.

In other news, Metro has somehow gotten the impression that he's people:


Birthday Week countdown: 8 more sleeps!

In the last couple of weeks, so many people have found my profile on Facebook. People from high school. People from bible college. People from elementary school. People who I last saw in grade 8 and who now look so much like adults. It's making me feel old. So many of my friends have babies!

I don't ever feel like an adult. I usually refer to myself (aloud or in my head) as a 'girl', rather than as a 'woman', and to Christopher as a 'boy' rather than as a 'man', because he is the boy I love. I catch myself referring to my friends' husbands as their boyfriends*. I still feel too young to be interested in 'men' because I think of men as males who are older than me, more around my father's age. And yet we own a condo together and sometimes discuss procreation and marriage (or the lack thereof), and those are certainly adult things.

When my friends and I talk about our dating lives, we talk about 'a new boy on the scene' and if he is appropriate, we say he is a 'nice boy', and if not, we decide that 'boys' suck. When I think of a 'nice man', I think of a doctor or an elderly man, not a potential dating partner.

My Language and Gender professor was very surprised by this. She expected any female over 16 (18?) to consider herself a 'woman' and to be insulted by a phrase like 'the girl in the next office'. She thought that male office workers were referred to as 'men' and female office workers were referred to as 'girls' and this was a sign of disrespect (infantilization). I think the analog to 'girl' in that situation is 'guy', and thus there isn't any disrespect. I would be rather surprised to be referred to as 'the woman in the next office', simply because I expect that person to be women like my professors (older than me, possessing PhDs), not women like myself.

*This slip-up may have more to do with the fact that my relationship with Christopher doesn't function all that differently than my friends' relationships with their husbands, so if he's my boyfriend, their partners are functionally equivalent, and I mess up the terms.

• Random conversation of the week:
  
  heatherann: Boo, socialists.
  christopher: What, are you a huge capitalist now?
  heatherann: No, I hate capitalism too.
  christopher: So, a communist?
  heatherann: Nah. I'm a pessimist.
  
  
• #1 Reason Why We Won't Be Vegetarians Anytime Soon:
  The melt-in-your-mouth goodness of pork roast. $1.99 a pound! Makes the whole house smell delicious! And so easy!
  
  Current recipe (3 lb. pork roast):
  Mix 1 tablespoon of olive oil, one tablespoon of oregano, one teaspoon of salt, 1/4 teaspoon of pepper. Rub mixture all over the pork roast. Cover pork roast in flour. Brown outside of roast in a pan, in butter or fat (we've been using left-over bacon fat). Place roast in roasting pan in the oven at 350° for 1.5 hours. Add chopped vegetables (onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, etc.), continue to cook for 30–45 minutes. Try not to eat it directly out of the pan.
  
  We're going to get a meat thermometer at some point to make sure everything's completely done. Right now we're just leaving it in a bit longer and making sure nothing's pink.
  
  
• Recent addictions: roasted chickpeas, roasted & salted green peas. I also like roasted wasabi green peas, but I'm struggling to find a place that sells them with a good wasabi-pea ratio. I'm thinking 10-90 here, not 50-50.
  
  
• Listening to over and over: Of Montreal – Wraith Pinned to the Mist & Other Games (The Sunlandic Twins)
  Maybe I'll never die
  I'll just keep growing younger with you
  And you'll grow younger too
  No, it seems too lovely to be true
  But I know the best things always do
  
  Let's pretend we don't exist
  Let's pretend we're in Antarctica
  
  
• Work is:
  
  1. good.
     
  2. inspiring me to learn JavaScript, which I am starting to succeed with.
     
  3. getting my hopes up.
     
  4. reminding me how satisfying it is to use my brain on big projects.
     
  
  
• Washington Initiative Requires Proof of Procreation From Married Couples: You barred same-sex marriage based on the fact that they can't bear children? Fine, let's apply that logic to everyone. No one has any reasonable objections to that, right? [via MeFi]