Since the end of May, I have been working on The Paper. The Paper is a paper over the project I did with feeding pigs milk from transgenic goats. My results were pretty good and worthy of becoming the subject of my first published paper (and a chapter in my thesis). I’ve stressed, worried, and nearly torn my hair out multiple times over the past months. Finally, it’s almost ready to go. I just have a few more changes to make, finish sorting out my references, write the acknowledgements, and get it formatted to be submitted. Just a few more hours work to go, and I’m finally free. My life will be my own again instead of being controlled by a Microsoft Word document.

I just need to stop procrastinating and get it done… Just a few more hours and I can resume fun things like making graphics, updating website layouts, and writing fanfic for fun…

The three subjects I typically complain about the most are how the writers ruined the television show Las Vegas, President Bush and what he’s managed to do to this country, and the price of gas. I pass a gas station on my way to school/lab everyday, so I pretty much get to watch the daily, and sometimes less than daily, changes in price. I can distinctly remember this day about 4 years ago when I passed and was horrified to see that gas had gone past 2 dollars per gallon. I ranted for quite awhile about gas being 2.04 a gallon, recalling my freshman year of college at the University of Kentucky when gas was less than a dollar a gallon at times. Over the next 3 years, I would watch the price of gas creeping higher and higher. It passed 3 dollars a gallon, and I once again ranted and raved. Then, late last summer, I watched it soar to 3.40 a gallon. (This happened to coincide when I was doing my pig feeding project and had to drive clear over to the other side of town and about 2 miles beyond twice a day.) It dropped again, but back in February, it started skyrocketing. The price had been falling a few cents at a time lately, hovering just above 3 dollars. Today on my way home though, regular gas was priced at 2.99 a gallon!

I was ecstatic. It seems so cheap for it to be less than three dollars a gallon. And, to think, back in fall of 2001 I was horrified when gas went to 1.35/gallon in Lexington once. If 2.99/gallon seems cheap now, I think if by some miracle it ever went to 1.35/gallon again, I’d feel like I was stealing.

You know tv is in a sad state when I’m looking more forward to the premiere of the virtual season 7 of Crossing Jordan than I am for any show that will be airing new eps.

After a long, largely very dry spell, I’ve finally started getting back into Photoshop and designing websites again. Last fall, my inspiration and desire mysteriously disappeared. Between October and now, I’ve only made one thing–a perfectly non-functional Danny/Mary piece that’s posted below. Lately, the interest has been returning though. I’ve been rescreencapping the early part of season 2 of Las Vegas from DVD, and I’ve been helping a friend to get her website up and running. I also bought a new web design/coding book (Codin’ for the Web by Charles Wyke-Smith). Between those three things, I’m all fired up to get back into this. I’m thinking maybe a new batch of 100×100 Dary icons is on the near horizon. I’m planning new layouts and gearing up to make more codes for most of my fanlistings. Maybe I’ll make some new wallpapers too–the requisite Danny/Mary ones along with Josh and Donna from TWW and Derek and Meredith from Grey’s Anatomy.

Tonight, I decided to get started with my first project back–a new layout for my Mary (from Las Vegas) fanlisting. I went through some of the new season 2 screencaps and picked out some I thought were really cute. I fired up Photoshop. I got out the graphics tablet. I started trying to blend, and that’s where it all seemed to fall apart. I had picked out 4 caps to use, and they will not blend together right. Granted, upon looking at them again, some of them were not the best choice at all for blending in that they seemed to have other people’s shoulders, etc. in them. The shots were different widths, making Mary different-sized in all of them. Usually, I can figure out a way to get those kinds of caps to go together–rearranging them or resizing them. No such luck tonight.

I seem to be out of practice when it comes to this stuff. I apparently did not forget how to code a web page, but my blending skills seem to have disappeared. I eventually gave up, for tonight, out of frustration. I’m going to try picking new pictures tomorrow night and trying again.

I just deleted 350 spam comments that were in the moderate comments list. That is indeed a lot, and I really need to look into the plug-in that’s supposed to help stop part of that…