crazy white girl with a keyboard

Have started golf lessons and bought clubs.

Assimilation of golf fashion has begun. Visiting Lacoste store tomorrow.

The car has arrived! No official name yet, but accepting suggestions.

Paint job is new; it’s sparkly yellow mica paint and is lovely.

The car is a 1993 RX-7 (left hand drive) and came from California. It’s now street legal, so we can go for bubble tea runs and late night drives all we like.

Weather has been typically Albertan lately. Out-of-nowhere downpourhailbeatdowns turn into…

Evaporative early morning mist type scenes.

Learning to drive the ‘Rex is a nerve wracking ordeal. We drove around the Oliver Safeway lot for a good 3/4 of an hour, as I practiced shifting and stopped squealing when I revved too quickly. The car’s got a lot of pep.

Self satisfied after my lesson.

Not as sure of my new fringe hairdo.

Every year the town of Rimbey has a 100-foot shootout drag race. All classes of cars are welcome to enter, and the races are, well, 100 feet. We drove out the hour to get there.

The smell of canola was pretty overwhelming at times.

But it complemented the paint job of the ‘Rex nicely.

Rimbey is, well, a small town in Alberta.

Note gun rack on side.

$10 too much to pay for an event in your front yard? Ain’t nothing a lawn chair and some Pil from the fridge won’t solve.

In addition to this ridiculous souped up Suzuki Sidekick (which won it’s first heat then was DQ’d embarassingly by a Z28) there was also a front wheel drive Astro van and a wood paneled station wagon.

This guy made it to the finals. Originally, from the stands, I thought it was a chihuaha. Closer inspection showed something even better! Good driving buddy, IMO.

Sick Corvette Stingray.

Parental units on front step. Yes, that is my father’s tongue sticking out.

We had a rack of lamb for dinner. Here, Mike is showing proper searing technique.

Later, I almost had to get a fan going the smoke from the berbere rub was so bad.

The lamb was pretty good though.

When I saw the ad for my current job, it was like a bolt out of the blue. Home Depot was trying to woo me back and it was early January 2007, just after a trip to Hawaii. My mom was reading the paper in her room, and as I talked to her I casually flipped open whatever section was infront of me and saw a mid-sized ad (still have the clipping!) for what I knew was my dream job; working at a photo desk. I make a practice of constantly looking for jobs, even when happy and secure at one, but I really wasn’t looking for anything at the time, which was the odd thing.

Being the wiz I am, I reworked my resume and sent in my application that same day, although I hadn’t planned on working for the next year.  Of course, I also said I wasn’t going to get the job. However, within a month, the job was mine, and I was flying high. It was, and is, my dream job. I still get a thrill when I press the elevator button to go up to the newsroom, and seriously cherish my job. Somebody pinch me!

However, I did something curious today, and I don’t know what will happen. I’m torn over it, and truth be told, I almost wimped out on the follow through.

One of my guilty pleasures is reading celebrity gossip blogs. It’s my downfall. I used to have a horrid collection of links to scroll through, but I’ve since pared back to the most garish and well written (names withheld). My aunt used to have National Enquirers stashed around her house and I would live to read them when I visited her, so I blame her for my secret addiction.

In any case, I kind of love/hate paparazzo and celebrity driven media. It sickens me, and yet fascinates me. We subscribe to the Reuters newsfeed at work, and they have expanded their ‘entertainment’ sector recently, so it can’t be all evil, can it?

But I digress. I saw a photo credited to a certain media provider today and like a bucket falling from the sky onto my head, I thought “I wonder if they’re hiring.” They were! And so, I applied for a job at a bureau of one of the biggest entertainment photo wire services in the world. It’s pretty much the same job as what I do now. It also has the same random, scant shifts a few days a week, making me pick what scraps I can from the sick or vacation pile, working odd hours on weekends (or as they advertise “unsocial hours”). But it’s in a cool city and it’s for an interesting company.

I think if I really felt married to the idea of working for them, I probably would not have posted for fear of humiliation. However, as it stands, I’m all about risks and new opportunities, so here goes nothing. I love my job now…but there is nowhere to go but up.

I was able to get a few shots this past week from work. But it’s hard to do when you work with naturally curious people, and so I missed some things. Plus, I actually had to work, and this weekend was a bit busy.

I have quite a few photos, so I’ll probably split this post up into a few. Today, the old cop room and photo desk, mostly.

The cop reporters used to be in a room at the back of the news room, mostly because their police scanners are quite loud. They’ve moved into the centre of the room now, but a lot of their old notes and things hang in the old room (which is becoming our recording room). Here, a tracking list of the fatalities in the city, and numbers to call for info. Reporters spend a lot of time on the phone.

Again, an old map showing victims from murders. Sadly, a lot of murdered prostitutes are found in and around the city. During the years this was happening, they were keeping track with pushpins and a map.

Yeah, always on the phone. These are yellow pages from last couple decades, hanging around. Some from Edmonton, but some from other parts of the province, too.

My desk! We get the Sunday Times, so I was reading that and having a tea.

I hadn’t actually been inside the old photo studio and processing lab before.

Photographers keep all their concert passes and stick them on our supply cabinet.

Most of the time, if you see a shot of a product in the paper (for a contest or giveaway) this is where it was shot. I’ve been meaning to replace that shabby paper for some time now.

We have our own negative library, and everything from 1985 on is kept in here. I can’t remember exactly when we switched to digital, but it was a slow process over a few years. We archive our stuff on discs now.

We go through a lot of batteries. There are three bins for batteries. Reporters use them for recorders and digital cameras, and photogs for their flashes and camera bodies.

Wordpress, the software I used to blog with, released a new version a few months back. I’ve been having fun with the blog tracking stats tool, something I hadn’t really paid attention to before. It lists popular search terms used to find the site and the entries that get the most reads.

My most popular posts/pages are the Photos page, and also my post on the Tokyo food scene. Among the mysteries are why my archives got 287 hits last week (best day ever for traffic!), but more inexplicably, a post titled zzzzzzzzzzz (from 2005!) keeps coming up. Time and time again;  “ZZZZzzzzzzz” is one of the most used terms used to  find this site. For the life of me, I could not figure out why.

Then, last week, this comment on the post:

“my 9 month old son just used google for the first time and your sight is what he found”

An infinite amount of infants on the internet…

I haven’t been posting lately as I am trying to gather enough photos for a post on the newsroom here at work. It’s an oddly fascinating place, but I feel somewhat self conscious snapping photos as everyone works. So I will probably return at a less busy time and get the remaining photos.
For now, an introduction to the snappy, witty personalities I work with. A message on the soda machine at work:

Hopefully I’ll have a photo package ready to go next week.

I haven’t been feeling top notch lately (mentally that is. Physically: I strong. Like bull.) I feel like I owe a blog after so feverishly blogging for days on end in the past few weeks.

So here is the splash screen for my cupcake blog, which has been a long time in the works. I designed it myself in Illustrator so I’m kind of pleased with it because it’s been something I’ve wanted to learn for a while. But at the same time totally horrified because I felt like a three year old doing it. Room to improve, basically.

Also, I’m not sure exactly how mustachioed cupcakes, stars and the colors work together, but I like all the individual elements. I’m not sure if they are cohesive enough though.

I’ll throw up a link when the blog is ready to be seen by eyes. Til then, here’s a sneak peek from an actual post.

I hung out with friends Amy and Matt last night. I took some photos as the night progressed, going around South Edmonton Common from Fatburger to Home Outfitters (I know, we’re crazy awesome, right?) then to a movie.

Going through the photos today I realized there were some pretty distinct categories of Matt shots.

There’s Matt drinking.

There’s Matt sitting on things in stores.

There is Matt making obscene gestures and playing with funny things. (which, I guess I’m partially at fault for because I kept pointing out opportunities, but it was just too easy to do at Home Outfitters.)

It should be noted, perhaps, that Matt came up with the idea of defiling the Hulk all on his own.

Anyhow, then Matt and Amy recreated the poster for the movie we saw, Baby Mama.

Okay so no one that lives outside of Edmonton is actually going to give a shit about this, but a new grocery store opened downtown in Edmonton, to much fanfare; atleast around the newsroom (as I’m sure was the case in every office downtown today.) It’s something the Sobeys chain is trying: “Urban Fresh” concept. Other places have tried this in Edmonton and failed, miserably. Edmontonians are just more into Moxies than they are delicious ingredients for home cooked meals, I fear.

I was concerned it was all hype, but then some photos from a secret ‘behind the scenes’ tour trickled in, then some columns were written about it by some journalists and then finally tonight I couldn’t stand it anymore, I HAD TO GO. (I had promised myself I would wait until atleast this weekend when things settled down a bit, but I could not do it.)

The place is amazing. There are cheeses the Italian Centre does not have. FOURTEEN kinds of dried mushrooms. Preprepared and uncooked meats and veggies of every kind, including some purple carrots I bought. Delicious bakery with breads by the slice (!). A gorgeous floral area. A salsa bar!!! A sushi bar!!!!! A cozy coffee bar curling around a fireplace, with roll up doors to Jasper Avenue and an licensed oyster bar next to that.

They really are catering to the downtown execs there for lunch or who don’t want to cook at night, with lots of preprepared meals, though. Normally I’d turn my nose up at these, but they actually looked edible and will be great in a pinch on a ‘I forgot lunch today’ day.

Add to that the downtown farmer’s market on Saturdays, and I nearly cried a tear of joy tonight. It is almost like we have our own little mini Whole Foods. *sigh*

late summer 2001, minneapolis, mn.

Who’d a thought that two of these dudes would be married (in arranged marriages no less) and the other would be engaged, seven years on?

Well, I guess everyone thought that. That’s what happens when you get growed up.

For whatever reason (spring? thinking of the future? the past?) I spent a lot of this evening reviewing my online record tonight. Probably mostly due to procrastination, actually.

I was looking up old friends I’ve lost (Brian M Masters aka turnipmambo from Baton Rouge, Lousiana / LSU with a former girlfriend named Liz if you are out there and Googling this, EMAIL ME) and looking at the long since dead webpages of old friends. (There are so many dead blogs! I’m sad so many have long since dropped off the face of the earth or have been taken up by other people like a hermit crab’s shell) I’ve been on the internet since a fateful snowy day back in 1997 and haven’t looking back since. That’s a long time!

Anyhow, I’m not into that Facebook thing and I know I could find a lot of people that way, but sometimes just remembering things in an optimized, biased, sweet way is so much better. It’s also so much more fun to speculate about what has happened to people. I feel like everyone else is getting older and maturing, but I’m just the same old KAZ I once was. Do you think other people have been Googling me? I hope so.

In two years I’ll be 30, and I’m not really sure what will happen between then and now. I don’t think I’m scared to be 30, but mostly am just curious to see where my life goes. There are so many wonderful things that may happen…but then again, I could always become that crazy bag lady you see on Jasper Ave all the time.

A.D. means a lot of things. When I was a kid I used to think it was “after death”. Then later I found out that it could also mean Anno Domini. Now, it just makes me mourn the loss of Arrested Development. Even my mom is into this show. How did it not survive?

Sigh.
Anyhow, I made two things tonight that made me laugh and cry. RIP, AD, RIP. Hopefully you, gentle reader, are a fan.

It suuuuuure is.