Way too much time on your hands....

I want to start this post by saying that although comments made by Hannah (my partner in my massage office) were the motivation for this post, I do not believe that she is an uncreative person or wastes large portions of her time with some of the things that I will make reference to later.

The other day I told Hannah that I was making a nativity scene out of sculpey. For anyone who does not know what sculpey is, it is craft clay that you can bake in the oven. You can get it in bright colors or plain clay that you can sand and paint after it is baked. I was explaining that I have had a bunch of sculpey for some time and have not done anything with it and that I used to make little animals and stuff out of it for fun and give them to friends. She found this all very amusing and was laughing at me about it.

Anyway, while her laughing at me about it was not at all mean-spirited, it made me think about a little while ago when she told me about the Harry Potter Puppet Pals on YouTube, which I am sure many of you have watched as I sent out an e-mail with a link. She was the one who told me about them. She obviously found them to be very funny, but one of the comments she made was something along the lines of “How bored do you have to be to do something like that?” My reply to this was, that’s just how some people have fun…

…It is actually how me and my friend Elisabeth often had fun in our high school/early college days. Because they were the days before people had digital video recorders and easy video editing on computers, not to mention that there really wasn’t anywhere to post such video on the internet, these videos remain safely on miniature video cassette, probably somewhere in her parent’s house. These small films featured titles such as “When beanie-babies attack,” and me in characters such as “Captain Anna Boat”

So, one of the final things we did along these lines was a song for the answering machine in my dorm room my sophomore year (I had a single). It went like this – I’m sure you can figure out what tune it is sung to:

Why do you call my up
Buttercup baby
When I’m not at home
And can’t answer the phone?
And then worst of all
I can’t return your call babe,
Cause you don’t leave your name.
Oh what a shame!
I need you
To leave your name and number darling
So that I can call you back.
Or you can try again
Maybe I’ll be in
Eating a snack.

I had this message on my machine all year. Sometimes people would get a wrong number….always a student trying to call another student (as all the on campus numbers are similar). I would get random messages telling me things like, “Dude, you have way too much time on your hands…”

So here is my beef: That doing creative, totally silly, I admit, but creative, things is seen as “having too much time on your hands” or as something that could only be the product of being totally bored, while people waste SO MUCH TIME doing things like getting drunk, or spending hours upon hours watching TV. Anyway, it just occurred to me as really sad that in our society, using your own brain to entertain yourself is a last resort, something you would only do if there is no entertainment to consume or brain altering chemicals to be had. That’s all I have to say.

Rob's Celebrity Morph

I didn't have time to do Rob the other day, so I just did. I don't think they really had anyone that really looks like him, this is the best they could do....


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My Celebrity Morph

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So, I haven't blogged in a long time, but when I saw the celebrity morphs on Jeremy and Darcy's page, I had to spend my precious time doing the same thing. I don't even know who this person is.

Walking in Mission Park

I went walking in the Mission Park a few times this week, which I hadn't done in a while...Yesterday I took my camera:

The butterflies are out a lot right now.

I practically threw my cell phone in the water in my enthusiasm to take a picture of this snapping turtle.

Dang

So, I was going to compose a post with pictures and some commentary about Julie's party last weekend, but unfortunately after the storm that came through Thursday evening, our desktop computer will not boot. Of course, ALL of my picture files are on our desktop... I have thought to myself before, I should get one of those large backup drives and put all my pictures on it, but have I done this...no. A good number of my pictures do exist on the servers of shutterfly and imagekind, however, this does my no good when I want to put them in my blog, and there were several that I had not gotten around to uploading yet.

Hopefully the whole computer is not completely fried and we will be able to get the information off of the hard drives...if not, well then that's just not fun at all.

Anyway, it doesn't seem like any good to me to talk about the party without the pictures, the whole thing that was spuring me to do it was that I was viewing the pictures on shutterfly and wanted to make comments on them, which you can actually do a little bit on shutterfly, but I think it works better in blog form.

Oh wait, after seeing Darcy's new post I just realized I can save the pictures when viewing them on shutterfly. I'M ON IT!

Giant Tree Painting

After about 3 months of work, it is done, my giant tree painting....

OK, so I don't know that it looks all that impressive in the picture, I stood beside it to try to convey the scale, it's 48 x 60, which I'm not sure warrants the title "giant" compared with all things that have ever been painted, but it's the biggest thing I've ever painted. I think I started working on it in May, so it took almost 3 months to complete and it is now proudly displayed on the wall behind our table, so you can come over and marvel at it's glory.

Speaking of art and stuff, I paid for the super platinum status on imagekind.com so that I could put all (well not all, but a good number of) my pictures on there with the idea that maybe random people who peruse the internet for art might want to buy prints... it could happen, although it hasn't yet. Random people have looked at them though, and if you would also care to have a look go to http://annaeisenberg.imagekind.com/

I don't have the big tree on there yet because I tried taking good pictures of it hanging on the wall, but the light isn't good enough to get the details, so I'm going to have to set it up outside somehow, which is going to be more of a problem than I had with my other paintings, seeing how it's so big. I also need a title, I don't think I want to call it "big tree"

Vacation

We went vacationing last week to Apalachicola and Atlanta...

Day 1: Apalachicola - we arrived, found that google maps gave me bad directions (not super bad, got me to the right street, just too far down...it was pretty easy to figure out) to the place we were staying. We stayed in the luxury loft at the House of Tartts, which I recommend, although you do have to lug your bags up a spiral staircase. Ate lunch, walked around downtown. Found an art gallery with nice paintings where a man said that we should go to dead lake and gave us directions. Turns out dead lake was 1 hour away (I was expecting maybe 1/2 hour) and it took us a while to actually find it once we were in the area. It was pretty cool though. Lots of cypress tree stumps. It makes you wonder what happened to them all. Here's one live cypress:

Day 2: St George Island- We went to the beach, where I was very proud of Rob for getting in the water and trying to enjoy it (he's not very fond of the swimming). Then we went across the street to the other side of the island and walked along a little trail and looked out on the side that was marshy.

Day 3: Return to Tally - not very much intersting

Day 4: Drive to Atlanta - again, not very much interesting

Day 5: Chillaxing at Rob's sitster's - not very intersing either

Day 6: Greek cooking class and Georgia Aquarium. In the cooking class we made: 2 different lamb chops, Greek salad, fried zucchini, Tzaziki sauce, cheese pastries, fried doughballs. All very tasty. Apparently our GA Aquarium time overlapped that of the Mitchells and Bennages. We didn't see them, but ran into a group from Northwoods...here's some pics from there

I don't know what this is, but it was pretty cool

This grouper was staring at us

Crazy Japanese crab that can get as big as a car

The Beluga whale was my friend - he's smiling at me

Pretty Jellyfish

Awww...we love each other!