Soda? Cola? Pop? What do you say? Any other regional words that set you apart?
Question submitted by Gladys.

One bottl'a pop, two bottlesa pop, three bottlesa pop, four! Actually, it's a context thing. When I'm offering people a drink, I used to ask them if they'd like a Coke - the appropriate response was "Sure, what do you have?" and then I'd list off the types of soda in the fridge. This was definitely a Californiaism which has very slowly faded from my vocabulary, so now I just say soda.

What's your favorite drink or cocktail? What's in it?

Port, muscat, icewine, sauternes, some rieslings - all those lovely, incredibly sweet wines and cordials. I can't have more than about a half-pour of any of them anymore, but they're liquid bliss on my tongue.

What's the most extreme weather you've been in? A memorable storm? Heat wave? Or something else?

Well, two winters ago we got four feet of snow in Cambridge. It was vastly amusing watching the people who'd gotten cabin fever after the first 12 hours of the eventual three snowdays wading down the street, pushing through chest-deep snow, all to get to the White Hen for some snacks.

My senior year in high school, right after my birthday, classes were cancelled for three days for the first time EVER because of extreme flooding - with the hilliness of the roads surrounding campus, day students couldn't get to and from school, and at some point the power went out and the cafeteria was running entirely on generator power. Now, this wouldn't have been an issue for me, except that I came down with some severe bug, and was completely out of it for the entire unexpected holiday, though, granted, I was also right in the middle of college apps at the time ... So I missed games and ghost stories by the fireplace in the common room, and I also missed out on all the evacuation planning - had the waters not started to recede when they did, they were preparing for an unprecedented evacuation, including sending myself and another kid to the hospital.

There was also the firestorm of '91, where we almost had to evacuate, but got lucky. That was weird weather, too - warm. Too warm. And the sky turning grey from smoke and smelling awful.

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What's the oldest digital camera photo you have on your computer? When is it from? Let's see it!

First image evar

To the left, these are the summer flowers outside my apartment in the Fenway. I'd just picked up the camera from Pedro and had no idea how to adjust the settings; it had an 8 meg CF card and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

Me, July 2006

In contrast, here's the most recent digital image I've got - a self-portrait of me in the bathroom mirror from Monday night, and yes, that'd be a new haircut. It's short and slightly ticklish and I keep shaking my head back and forth to play with the layers. Hee.

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Yes, really, that sums up most of what I've been doing since the last update. Not sure there isn't a body system that wasn't affected, but thank god there was no chucking of the up. I go to great lengths to avoid putting myself in situations where that might occur, because to me, that's one of the worst feelings in the world.

Of course, I was also being stubborn, which probably prolonged the general coughing sneezing sniffling aching stuffy head fever crap for the duration it did - but for good reason! Saturday, Hyoun and I went out to Western Mass to my friend Scott's barbecue. Hadn't seen him in over a year - the last time was at Ben and Emily's wedding, pretty much right before Hyoun and I started dating. Good to see him and catch up.

And then yesterday, we went to hear Wil Wheaton do a reading at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. He's funny and personable; his onstage personality comes across as a bit more brash and loud than his one-on-one interactions. At one point, he stated, "All actors want to be rock stars," and of course I shouted out, "Play Guitar Hero!" and that got him started on an aside about being at a bar in Boston last night and hearing "More Than A Feeling" played, and in his head, going, "Green, Green Green, Red Red, Yellow, Yellow Yellow, Red Red ..." and then also being an utter geek: "Dude! I'm listening to Boston! In Boston!"

(Also, his wife left his camera in the cab. So he wants a new digital camera for his birthday in three weeks.)

Since Hyoun has Monday off, we were thinking about getting out of town, but I'm still a little on the weak and wobbly side, this being the first morning I've woken up without a fever since Wednesday. Plus, we have an invitation to a POOL PARTY tomorrow, and as a California girl who hasn't been swimming in an outdoor pool in years, this has me very excited. (Outdoor pools that dont cost $$$ and/or have little kids peeing in them and/or are dedicated entirely to lap swimmers are insanely hard to find in New England.) However, since my swimsuit top decided to snap on a kayaking trip last summer, I need to go buy a swimsuit. So we're gonna hit the mall, I'm going to hope like hell I can find some UltraSwim, because my hair is the longest it's been in years, and I plan to stay in that pool until I wrinkle like raisins. After that, we're probably going to go see Superman at the IMAX, then dinner at Oga's since we're out that far already. :)

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Nobody thinks I resemble anybody famous. Therefore, I present a recent picture of me and Hyoun to all y'all, so that you can tell me who I look like. :) (I'm on the left.)

Me and Hyoun

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If moving to Boston didn't do it, what would? I run into people I know at least 3-4x/week without prior planning!

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I'm going to sound like an echo chamber if I say "Firefly," aren't I? But 13 episodes. So much potential that others have worded far better than I will.

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*peers curiously at new interface for new blog*

It's been years since I actually started a new one of these, and I'm not entirely sure what I'll end up doing with this. But it looks like there's room for quite a bit.

an apple in mel's hand

Now that's nifty! It just plugged right in and found my Flickr (well, after remembering what addy I'd used to sign up with Flickr; it'd be neat if they could search simply based on Flickr username, though I understand the potential copyright violations that could come of that very easily). I'm curious, since I said "make this photo public," whether this implies that there is a photo gallery that has now been uploaded to Vox or what, that people can browse through, or if I had said "make the photo friends-only," while making this post public, would it simply show the post while failing to display the picture?

And it's wrapping very nicely, too. :)

I'm still totally in the LiveJournal habit of plaintext and double-returns, so I keep having to remind myself every time I press return to only do it once. Heh.

Tigana

Anyway, I do like how nicely everything's wrapping automagically. I'm going right now with using Amazon for book pictures and all, and "My Books" looks like it decides to store the information once you've added it to an entry.

And I spy something about mobile phone posting. Granted, I'm hardly what you'd call a power mobile user - when a word comes along that isn't in my phone's limited dictionary, it's getting left as the weirdly mistyped word, and good luck to the poor person on the other end trying to figure out what I'm talking about. Then again, my phone gets my boyfriend's name right without issue, and it's not a very popular name at all.

Mr. Brightside

I'm clicking on Audio and hoping this doesn't mean it's going to insert music directly into the post. Okay, so "center" doesn't mean that it's going to automatically align your talking both left and right around a given image. And nope, it's just Amazon. Though it says something about uploading ... anyway, this song has been on constant repeat for the last couple of weeks or so.

Okay, nifty, so you can separately align things.

I assume Videos is going to do the same thing as Books and Audio, so not going to bother clicking on that. I suppose it's on to Collections .... and wow, okay, also time to switch out of Right-Align. That's a funky wrap, though it's just doing what it's told. :)

Hrm, now it seems to be telling me that it's both right and left-aligned, because both of those are highlighted at the top right now, but the typing is coming out as if it's right-aligned. Let's fix that. Had to click on center-align, then left-align, to fix that.

ursamajor dot vox

I'm not sure what a collection is. I'm not 100% sure what the most efficient way to insert an object is, if it's to select the paragraph it's supposed to be aligned with or if I should insert object first, then type my text. It looks like it's the latter, and I'm still not entirely sure what a "Collection" is, but I guess I'll find out when I post. Also, is it a sign that I'm old-school when I thought the A with the colored disk must be the "link" button, because of a href? Heh.

Oh well. And there's spellcheck! I wonder if it will be confused by words like LiveJournal and Vox (well, okay, less likely that since it's part of pre-existing phrases and turns of speech) and Flickr. *tests* It was fine with Flickr but not LiveJournal, heh, automagically, everything's (for everything is), plaintext, and a few hyphenated words. Still, I like its use of AJAX so that there's not the risk of losing the entry just to do a spellcheck.

Also, I just looked at my "Currents" in context, and they all go together in colors rather similarly. Hee.

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