synthaetic synapse

and so, we are guests in our own home, now. we put it on the market yesterday. we placed an offer on a house in town on Friday and it was accepted, contingent upon the sale of our house, on Saturday. nothing like working things backwards and living from behind the eight ball.

concurrent with all this, we got a new computer system in, and i have yet to get this old 21″ NEC MultiSync monitor calibrated on it. i’m about ready to give up: i can’t process photos on it right now because the color’s off and it’s way low-contrast even after several iterations of the half-hour long calibration routine. bah. it’s just one of those things, i guess, but i’ve been fighting it for two days and not getting any real work done, other than getting some print orders out, and those had to be done off the old machine with the new monitor. bah. computers suck. it’ll piss of #1 Son, but i think i’m going to swap monitors back and put the new one on here. there’s a point wherein the clients do have to come first.

obviously, the imminent move (presuming someone doesn’t out-bid us on that house with a non-contingent offer) weighs heavily on all of us. an interesting side-benefit is watching the kids actively seeking to gain parental favor by virtue of picking up after themselves. but of course, the weather has been crap, so no one’s seen these ultra-clean guest quarters we continue to call “home” other than ourselves and our realtor. winter’s a stupid time to be trying to sell a house out here, but we really had no control over the Spouse Unit getting laid off. and the timing with my not having any contracted client work from January through April was just one of those coinkydinks where you roll your eyes, sigh, say “Go fucking figure”, and sigh again.

other than that, we’re all doing fairly well. the Spouse Unit has accepted a job with a former employer out of California that is going to pay her decently without expecting us to move out there, so that part of our futures is looking bright. it’ll also suffice to see us through in case we have to leave this house on the market through the spring. sorry if that was redundant to a previous post. i’ve been so busy with trying to serve client orders, getting the house ready to show, and getting the new system configured, calibrated, and all the software installed, that i’ve become too damn lazy to go read any previous posts. forgive me. i’ve gotten very adept at not allowing some emotions to show to my fellow family members, for what it’s worth, so i suppose it’s only natural that i bitch and moan a bit on my blogs.

as i was taking photos of the house for the realtor on Monday, i couldn’t help but to think about all the photos that were taken from or of this property. so, i made a compilation of the ones that had been previously published on synthaetica.com.

bah.

a truly anomalous event occurred here over the past couple of days. the snow was not unique, but the snow-without-wind most certainly was. usually, the wind is blowing strong enough when we get snow that i rarely have to shovel off the back porch and only parts of the driveway. but this time, we had a nice, gentle blanket of snow on everything. one might even say it was quite picturesque.

but did i manage to haul my stupid ass outside with a camera and take pictures of it before the wind started picking up early this morning?

hell, no.

did i even manage to have a camera in the car this morning, when the clear sky and the early-morning frozen fog would have been so picturesque, even with the slight wind clearing the snow off the evergreens, fences, other other surfaces.

no, i’m apparently WAY too intelligent for that. gah.

so, in potential partial recompense for my stupidity, here are a couple of things:

Thing 1: guess who has the cover of this month’s issue of Toy Trucker Magazine? The cover story is on the collection of Paul Westhoff, who is a friend and the owner of Hard Tops of Sioux Falls. I do their business cards, too. Look ‘em up and call ‘em and ask ‘em why they don’t have a website of their own! (i kid, i kid…)

Thing 2: ~from our recent trip up to Big Stone Lake for Thanksgiving. i have several plans for this photo, so this is kind of a sneak preview of an original that will probably never be released itself. in the background, you can see the point of land which is the subject of Big Stone Autumn. several of the trees back there were severely damaged by an ice storm last winter, so my plan to do a seasonal round of that point from the same vantage point were made moot. which was kind of okay, because the marks i made for the tripod didn’t last….and my father-in-law’s dock is a seasonal thing anyway. it’s not like it goes into the lake at literally/exactly the same place each year. so, i’ll be picking another place, or places, along the shore for that endeavor.

which reminds me. i need a sugar-daddy to buy me a GPS that’ll work with the cameras. i’m WAY too cheap to buy one myself, you know….