The Aerie
Well another year is here, and we're now a full day past the midpoint of this miserable decade. I'd say it's all downhill from here, except that it feels like it's been all downhill until now anyway.
We spent a very nice New Year's Eve with our friends Terry and Kathy - although I was a bit sad because my daughter spent her first New Year's Eve away from her family, seeing fireworks with her friends.
The rest of us started the evening by watching "The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra," a very very silly movie that can only be faulted for trying a little too hard at times.
Afterwards we played "Fictionary," a parlor game (i.e. not in a box) which involves picking odd words out of their huge unabridged dictionary and making up definitions for them. I got "ogak," and helped my youngest boy with "bayardly."
Eventually midnight rolled around and all the teenagers partying in the basement (Terry's son is a college freshman) emerged briefly to toast the New Year, and then escaped before they could catch any old-person cooties off us.
Today we visited my mother's for our family Christmas. It was very nice, and everyone really liked the family portrait. My sister knew that our mother wanted a new portrait, so she invited everyone to the Northtown Pro-ex a few weeks ago for a sitting. Unfortunately the sitting was abysmally shot by some overworked high school girl, leaving us with an expensive set of proofs, none good enough to use for a portrait.
So I spent a day last weekend scanning and piecing together a portrait from the best pics of each of the eleven of us in the shoot. The result is a really excellent portrait that never existed. I moved people around, swapped bad expressions for good ones, increased the lighting, and cleaned up a lot of teenaged zits.
Finally I took the finished 24 Megabyte image around to several places. Stupidly, I tried the Kinko's in Stadim Village. I know, I know - "what was I thinking?" - well, it was nearby. Sixteen dollars of wasted computer time later, I emerged having re-learned the lesson that Kinko's is where people work who aren't nerdly enough to get hired at Radio Shack. I tried a lot of other places, too, including a Ritz Camera, another Kinko's, and even another Pro-ex. All of them blinked stupidly at me when I described the outrageous concept of printing a photo-quality image off of a CD.
I was on the verge of purchasing my own photo-quality printer when I walked into a Pro-ex in the Minneapolis Skyway and without batting an eye was assisted to print my photos. Apparently a few intelligent people DO get hired by Pro-ex, you just have to find them.
So the pictures went over well, as did Family Christmas.
Now it's 2005. We'll see what the year brings. Last year I hoped for some things and planned for others. This year, I'm ready to take what comes...
Posted by Albatross at January 2, 2005 12:42 AM