Connecticut, Mystic Arts Fest, and a little red Ford Focus

Tamika and I rented a car and drove to Connecticut last weekend.

We rented a car, because the AC in our poor Saturn hasn’t been working. Fortunately, we get up crazy early in the morning and leave work late in the afternoon, so normally the temperature isn’t so bad… but for a trip to Connecticut in the middle of the day… we decided that no AC and Nya wouldn’t mix very well.

So, with the help of Tamika’s mom, we rented a little red Ford Focus, cranked up the AC, and headed north… and nearly froze. It was about 50ºF going through New York, and it rained cats and dogs.

Tamika felt really bad about getting the car, but it proved it’s worth on the way back when temperatures went back up.

We spent most of the weekend with my parents and my sister at the Mystic Arts Festival. My mom had a Pottery and Quilting booth on Cottrell St., (which was all crafts) and my sister Beth had a booth on West Main St. where she had her drawings, paintings, and prints for sale.
I’m not sure how much they sold (they weren’t doing very well when we left on Sunday), but it was fun to just sit and relax and talk with them.

Tamika and I also went to visit Babchi & Jaju (my grandparents). Jaju was in a pretty good mood. I accidentally startled him when we came in; he had been dozing in his office among the canisters of beads that littered the his desk. He makes rosary necklaces for people at his church, stringing them one by one, bead by bead. Babchi was as lively as ever. She was disappointed that she wasn’t able to go to the Arts Festival though, because it was too hot for Jaju. She gave us some blueberries from her garden to take home with us (though not many survived our hungry stomachs on the way home!)

My brother Nick had to work at a public pool all weekend, so he wasn’t able to come to the Arts Festival much, but we did go with him to see Bourne Ultimatum. It was a great movie. Much better than I expected. There are trilogies out there, but very few of them I would consider successful. Most sequels tend to loose steam and storyline. The 3rd Bourne movie stayed true to the first, and once again wowed not only with storyline, but with technical ability and (rare among action films) very good acting.
I also got to hang out Nick with him in the evenings playing video games. He just bought himself a brand new computer with money he had saved up, and bought a bunch of games. One of the games, Supreme Commander, was a spin off of an older game called Total Annihilation, which is the only computer game I play (I limit myself ’cause otherwise I’d waste too much time!) He showed me the ropes and let me play for a while. Another reason to get a better computer…

Speaking of which, one of my computers died last night. We’ve got several computers in the house, but arguably one of the most important ones (the one which I do most of my graphic design work on) was the one that died, unfortunately. Luckily, I had set up another computer a couple months ago that I had pulled out a trash pile as a server, so it keeps most of the files backed up on there. Still frustrating though. Soon enough, I’ll be able to purchase a Mac Pro and hopefully my technical problems will be solved for a while.

Been hanging out with Paul and his family a bit more, we went over and watch Wedding Crashers with them the other night. It’s hilarious, but pretty vulgar. I’d give it 2.5 stars out of 5 on the Benjamovie Scale. We might join them to watch a Black Belt exam at Kim Studio this weekend.

Had a meeting with a talented designer today; Diana Flores contacted me after seeing my link welcoming people to join Zerflin. Tamika and I met her at Chipotle and she showed me her work. She’s very talented, and I hope to be posting soon with some projects we’ll have collaborated on.

Thank goodness for RSS! Both MySpace and Facebook have finally gotten on the bandwagon and published their user’s blogs to RSS.
If you’re new to RSS, it’s basically a system that pulls all of the text and images out of a page and plugs it into a Reader. So, for example, if you subscribe to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Onion‘s RSS feeds in Google Reader, every time they post a new article, it shows up in your reader.
This is helpful, because it means you only have to go to one site (Google Reader’s) to read your news, instead of 3.
This is great for me, because now I can keep up with all my friends who post blogs in all the different social networking sites, no matter what site they’re on.
And besides, I miss you all. 🙂

Incidentally, this journal ALSO has RSS, which you can see by the little orange icon up in the address bar.

I’ve got a couple projects that are wrapping up, and so I’ll be posting them soon.

Peace!