Not about barbells or barnacles

Wow.  So yesterday I got home at about 9 and sat down to write a blog post that Maddie and I had discussed, involving her mishearing “Barnes and Nobles” as “barbells” or perhaps “barnacles.”  But then I got distracted by the stack of the books I had bought recently.

First of all, I’m kind of a nerd.  You could infer that from The Colossal Book of Mathematics by Martin Gardner (one word: SQUEE!), but if you can read the bottom title, that’s actually the nerdier book by a long shot.  That’s the book that makes you spontaneously decide to learn new programming languages.

Second of all, since about half of those are from the Friends of the Library Book Sale and the rest were bought with gift cards, I spent a lot less on them than you might expect.  Oops, I lie; I paid full price for Freakonomics (in the Amherst bookstore too).  But seriously… so many Barnes and Nobles gift cards!  I got $60 of books today (er, yesterday) and just started handing gift card after gift card over to the cashier.  It was rather amusing for both of us.

Third of all, the color scheme is striking.

But not as striking in photos as in real life.  I tried to quickly correct that in iPhoto by fiddling with the temperature/tint sliders before writing the blog post that I was TOTALLY just about to write, in just a second… but then I discovered that iPhoto will actually do the heavy lifting for you, if you’ll only tell it what’s a neutral color in the photo.  I can’t believe it took me so long to figure this out, because it is actually magic.  Observe the improvement:

Finally, Smetana Hall in my photos can achieve a little more of the grandeur it displays in reality.  (As can Ryan.  Teehee.)

THEN I was further distracted by the adorable graffiti I saw today (gah! yesterday!), while walking from breakfast at CTB to the library foundation, where yes, I do still volunteer.  I am a huge fan of cute graffiti (similarly smart or insightful graffiti), because it is cuteness where you are not expecting cuteness, and that is a wonderful thing.

I felt inspired to replicate it.  The original is better though, if only for the setting.

I thought he might be a nice character to put into a blog header– because I seriously need a new blog header, ja?– so I spent far more time than necessary making potential blog headers.  And looking at old potential blog headers that I made in similar fits of creativity and that never saw the light of day.

And then it was midnight.

Which is far too late to be blogging, except it’s really not, but I didn’t feel like blogging anymore.  But I did feel like staying up till 3 AM doing nothing in particular.  I definitely get what Jiyoung was saying when she told me about staying up all night just because you’re not tired.  At all.  I went to bed more out of a sense of obligation than any physical desire to sleep.

Then I slept till noon.

SO.  This is a long and elaborate way of telling Maddie, “Sorry for not spicing up your late-night cello-practicing break with a blog post about our 2.5 hour rehearsal that was mostly spent eating blueberries, reading incomprehensible Chinese books, and sightreading songs by Kermit the Frog.  I’ll make it up to you someday.”

Tags: blogging, books, gift cards, graffiti, Kermit the Frog, nerdiness, rehearsal, white balance