Saturday I went to the Golden Dragon parade celebrating Chinese New Year with some friends, and my pictures are up.

I’m really happy with how these came out, since this is the first time I went shooting with my giant (70-300mm) lens and did manual focus the entire time.

I will say, this is the first parade I’ve been to in a while, and I’d forgotten how incredibly repetitive parades are: Dragon, dragon, float, marching band, dragon, marching band, Kung Fu school, dragon, dragon, marching band, dragon….

A few of the highlights (click to go to each photo’s Flickr page:

A few New Year’s Resolutions, because if I post them somewhere, maybe I’ll actually live up to them:

1. Continue to lose weight. Have lost: 33 lbs (net; had lost 35 but gained back 2 lbs stuffing my face with Waffle House and other assorted goodies over the holidays). To lose: 47 lbs. Mark my words, it will be done by the end of 2008.

2. Relegate Mr. Cranky Ankle to his former status as My Left Ankle. I’ve been sick of this shit long enough, this is the year that my weight loss and continued diligence with my foot exercises finally pays off.

3. Get a good job. Getting a job is part one of this, since I kind of need to, you know, eat. But I want to get another job that I’ll be proud of, and not simply something that will get me through the duration of the strike.

4. Record songs I’ve written since last album. Once upon a time, I was a songwriter, and a half-decent one at that. Maybe I should at least put some tracks down to see if I can turn them into anything good.

5. Get out of the goddamn house. Between the entire Foot Fiasco of ’07 that prevented me from leaving the house for 2 months, and the ongoing foot issues that left me extremely reluctant to for most of the rest of the year because of the pain, I feel like I’ve turned into a complete hermit/crazy cat lady. I promise that, once I have a job to pay for it, I am going to go out and be a social person, dammit! Just as soon as I finish this disc of Battlestar Galactica that just came in from Netflix…

6. Finish Redesigning my website. Not the blog, this is certainly sufficient for me at the moment (who knows what I’ll think if I can’t find a job for a couple of months and get REALLY bored). But as several people have pointed out to me, the main site could use a little update. Probably best to try and make it less than five years old.

And those are really the major ones. I considered adding in “get a girlfriend,” as I suspect several people are awfully tired of hearing me whine about not having one, but I fear if I officially add it to the list, I’ll just jinx myself, and I’ve had enough bad luck in that department as is.

Anyway, Happy 2008! Enjoy yourselves, and for the love of god, don’t drink and drive. Unless you’re just drinking water. Then, I think you’re okay.

I don’t know what makes me laugh more, the cat’s sour look or the hand holding on the sad little Santa hat.

…that going to Best Buy at 3pm on a Tuesday, it would be at least a little calmer than it generally is around the holidays.

You would apparently be wrong, as evidenced by the HUGE line there when I stopped by to pick up gifts for my cousins this afternoon.

You would also think that since I only moved downstairs in September, a thorough cleaning of my apartment wouldn’t take me two days.

You’d be right in one sense: It’s going to take a third day. Seriously, where the fuck did all this damn dirt and cat hair come from? Chaplin sheds like I live in the jungles of Belize with no air conditioning.

You’d finally think that it would at least be nice to relax a bit when you’re unemployed.

I think you’d be right about that, but between the cleaning and the errands and meeting people for lunch and the other nonsense I have to take care of, I really couldn’t tell you for sure.

Happy Halloween!

I got the following in my personal email inbox a few hours ago, and I’m a bit confused:

The points of confusion, all around the “Why on earth would they send this now?” question:

1. It’s August 15th.

2. I would have understood getting this in my work email as I do a lot of work with gifting. My personal email? Makes no sense.

3. It’s fucking August 15th.

4. When I’ve gotten quotes about turnaround time for numbers of engraved iPods in the hundreds, they’ve quoted me three weeks, even near Christmas.

5. IT’S FUCKING AUGUST GODDAMN 15th.

They even beat the absurdly-early-last-year L.L. Bean Christmas Catalog by almost a full month. What. The. Fuck?

All around my neighborhood, people are heeding a piece of advice given by a non-Apu convenience store clerk on The Simpsons:

“Celebrate the independence of your nation by blowing up a small part of it!”

Between them and the cat repeatedly pouncing on me (a delightful new habit that’s cropped up since I returned to work), I don’t think I’m going to get much sleep tonight.

I think I’m the only person who’s glad the Fourth of July falls on a Wednesday this year. I could use the rest.

Apparently, whoever sets off the Fourth of July fireworks in the big public park near where I live decided that since the Fourth was on a Wednesday this year, they wanted to do the fireworks on a more convenient day.

So they’re doing them right now. They’ve been booming away for about the last 20 minutes. It’s not even the first of July yet. Am I the only one who finds that really, really bizarre?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go peel Chaplin off the ceiling.

I joked after what happened last year on my birthday that for my 26th birthday I was going to spend the entire day hiding inside, not doing anything.

Turns out I wasn’t kidding. Luckily, I’ve made it through the day so far without hurting anything new, so I’m hoping this is a good sign of things to come.