if you don't use it, i'll never know anyway.

So, I've been thinking about opening a little Cafe Press store. Think lauraslens.com journals, calendars, etc. I'm not sure I'll do it though. Anyway, I was playing around with a picture I took in Nice so I could try out the customization. While I was at it, I made this nifty wallpaper for your desktop:


(click me!)

It's pretty loud. But it's also just pretty. But maybe that's just me...the girl with the purple car.

politics of an internet-friendly couple.

For anyone who has checked out my archives or comments, you may have noticed that most of the pictures from my blog have vanished. Why? Oh. Well, you see, when I moved to this domain name, I left a folder of images traveling on the back of John's website so that I wouldn't have to change all the code for every single picture. Apparently I didn't tell John. And he deleted that file.

So tonight John hooked up my old desktop to his monitor and I burned off a few pictures. There are still several pics missing, but I at least fixed half of them. And changed the picture in the comment window.

Speaking of John, he has a personal blog on amoeba. And he mentions me in almost every post. Which I don't particularly like. Mainly because I disagree with what he says about me. Like the other day when he said he thought I liked King Arthur.

Today at work it came up that I have a website. What for? Umm...I just have a blog. Do you talk about Bush, then? Well, yeah, sometimes.... Why? Isn't that what all blogs are about? No.

But just for that:

Barbara Boxer rocks.

dude! i got hacked!

Did you see this?



I got freakin' hacked! So did John and Jim, since we're all on the same server. If you checked the site earlier today (or if you check out Jim's site before he fixes it) this is the loverly image that would've greeted you. Along with a bunch of jibberish in some other language.

I'm so oddly excited about this. I mean, this should've been a relatively bad thing, right?

It's so sad. I got so psyched earlier today because I got a catalog from JCPenney addressed to me, which obviously means I'm a mature adult, yes? And then that joy is immediately eclipsed by something as stupid and trivial as my website (that I've been really bad about updating lately) getting hacked.

I just don't appreciate rites of passage anymore.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here in shock because Full House is now on Nick at Nite.

And man, is it bad.

yay!

I have my laptop back!

anniversaries.

John and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary on Monday. (Pictures of the wedding can be found in the photos section.) To celebrate, we spent the day at Disneyland, including dinner at the Blue Bayou.

When we came home, we followed tradition and ate the top of our wedding cake. Which tasted like cardboard. So, we had about two bites each and threw the rest away.

What a weird tradition. And kind of gross, really.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of my grandfather's death. He died while I was in Florida on my honeymoon.

I remember sitting in the MGM Studios park, eating lunch in the section that looks like Hollywood in the 40's. There are fake ads around for Kodak film that are supposed to look "vintage". So they're paintings. Somehow Norman Rockwell type paintings were supposed to sell film. Anyway, by the time we were leaving Florida, the big story was that Kodak was laying off about 15,000 people. Because they were going to go digital.

And my grandfather was dead, I found out, just before the fireworks started on our night in the Magic Kingdom. Will they advertise digital photography with strange, nostalgic images of film cans and people with jobs?

When I sat there by palm trees and stucco, with the sounds of Glen Miller being piped out of rock-shaped speakers, I pictured my grandfather working in his in LA or standing in his WWII Coast Guard Uniform on the beach somewhere in Hawaii...somewhere where there are green plants with large, broad leaves. He's still, watching the water, but tapping his foot to some new big band song.

He was already dead when I was thinking that, but I didn't know until the following night.

because we like you.

There's a guy at work who's even more into Disneyland than my family and I are. We talked Disney yesterday and he told me about a couple of neat websites about the park and people who are crazy into preserving it.

And it's weird for me to talk about Eisner. John being John, I know Disney has been having problems. Like, for example, when we were on our honeymoon in Walt Disney World and we toured what was then the recently defunct Florida animation studio. It is no longer "recently" defunct. Now it's just gone. Like the money they spent making Treasure Planet and Brother Bear.

But I still think of Michael Eisner as the guy with the red and black Mickey ties who did the spots after commercial breaks on "The Wonderful World of Disney."

He seemed like such a nice guy. A bad actor, but a nice guy. And now that I'm older, I find out that he's really shady and a capitalist nightmare.

Which is basically the same realization I came to about Ronald Reagan, who, when I was six, seemed dignified and righteous.

computer trouble.

I'm using John's computer because my laptop is going through a problem. It won't recognize the power chord, so the battery won't charge. Not cool. Dell sent me a new power chord because we figured the old one had just been wadded up too many times to work anymore. It came today. That did not solve my problem.

Dell is now going to send me a box so I can ship my laptop to them and they can fix it. They request, however, that before I send it I should "remove the hard drive."

I am a little freaked out about that. But that will prevent any scratching, right?

Anyway, I'm using John's computer with what feels like (after using a laptop for so long) the world's largest keyboard.

My desktop, meanwhile, is sitting on our bedroom floor. It hasn't been connected and running since May, before we moved out of our apartment in Atlanta.

And I had every intention of getting it up and running today. I didn't though. Partly because I ended up working half of yesterday (Monday being my other day off) to fill in for someone. And partly because I really don't know where I'd put it anyway.

i am the arrow.

While John has been watching Godzilla 2000, I've been reading the new edition of Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Here are some wonderful lines from the foreward, which was written by Frieda Hughes (daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes).

"I think my mother was extraordinary in her work, and valiant in her efforts to fight the depression that dogged her throughout her life. She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress; she wasted nothing of what she felt, and when in control of those tumultuous feelings she was able to focus and direct her incredible poetic energy to great effect. And here was Ariel, her extraordinary achievement, poised as she was between her volatile emotional state and the edge of the precipice. The art was not to fall."

Regardless of whether or not her defense of Ted Hughes is deserved (a subject I will not even pretend to be smart or educated enough to comment on), the whole foreward seems to come from this strange place--in between art and reality, legend and consequences, molded by images pasted together from half-memories and childhood stories and an inevitable (perhaps even inborn) yet obviously well-studied appreciation of the art--that fascinates me.

I'm soon to be on the hunt for an essay I wrote the semester I studied Plath... I feel the need to be reminded.

the only way i'm like goldie hawn.

We're watching Huff with the fancy-pants "on demand" feature that somehow managed to come bundled in with our cable plan. Which means that I'm more than a little distracted as I write this. I've always had a thing for Hank Azaria, but the show would still be awesome even if he wasn't in it.

I'm going through some sort of weird phase. All anxious and...like I need a good, long stretch.

I blame school.

For (how many?) years, I went along getting a good dose of work, then break, then different work, then break again. And. As stupid as this sounds, I can pretty much break up my life since graduation into semesters...all of which correspond with a major U.S. city: Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles. Only, this latest semester has lasted since September. And what is the second week of January if it isn't the beginning of a new semester?

I'll tell you what it is...

It's freaky.

There's something about my life lately that's eerily similar to swimming. Well, swimming like I do it...which basically amounts to flailing around in the water and not moving forward (nor backward) one damn inch. My sister once told me she'd never seen anyone swim so hard and not move.

When did this website turn into a diary? Was it ever anything else?

three posts for the price of one!

Another year and I'm already slacking off.

Well, that's not entirely true. We took my sister-in-law to the airport this morning. We did not, however, do anything else I planned on doing. In fact, I've been pretty much wiped out since Christmas.

I need some rejuvenation. I guess that's an appropriate statement for New Year's Day.

******

I've started reading Toast, the book John gave me for Christmas. So far, I really like it.

******

There's been a commercial on TV lately for Resident Evil: Apocalypse, a movie (that I've never seen and don't want to) about zombies, that is using the tagline, "Go ask Alice." My question to you is: Huh?

Isn't that a young adult novel about an adolescent girl addicted to LSD? Does that association make you want to see a zombie movie starring Milla Jovovich? Or any movie at all, for that matter, that isn't based on the book?

******

So, hopefully, any creative impulse I ever had will return again at some future date and I won't write like the "news blurbs" section of a high school newspaper forever. In the meantime, Happy New Year.